In A Perfect World

Let me try defining the perfect world, for today's post.In a perfect world, a day would last forever. In a perfect world, your loved ones will never die. In a perfect world, you have no enemies. In a perfect world, you will live forever. In a perfect world, you can play all day and never work. In a perfect world, nobody tells lies. In a perfect world, everyone is always happy. Now, that sounds like paradise for most people, right?

Now, I'm wondering what a world would be like, if it fulfilled all those attributes. Let's talk in term of planets: we would have to have a planet surrounded by roughly 3 suns, and only one human being. Thinking sensibly, you would be alone, thus you would have no loved ones to die, and no enemies to hate. You will technically live forever, because it doesn't matter if you die or not. You could play all day because you are supply and demand. You don't need to work, because the planet should be full of plants you could eat and never exhaust. Nobody tells lies because you can't exactly lie to yourself without knowing it. What about everyone being happy? Well, we could say that the flowers on that planet drug you into some dream, where you couldn't care less.

What a perfect world we live in. ;)

Plans for 9th Jan 2005

I have nice plans today. I intend to go to LowYat Plaza and collect stuff that I have left there under deposit for what must have been more than a month now. Then, I intend to write about it. The problem is that I don't have much in the way of a camera. However, I intend to try something new. What if I collect all the lists and make a schedule of best bargain list prices?

Life is Food, Friendship and Fun

I know what your first impressions from the title are. It ain't true. I'm going to have to agree that there is more to life than just food, friendship and fun. But why are you continuing to live? Do you have any reason to live at all if it weren't for one of these factors? Even if none of this were one of the factors tha you continue to live, let's put work aside, what do you think about the truth of my statement?

Who's Telling the Truth?

We usually come up to a point in our lives when we find out someone we trust is lying to us. It's nearly impossible to live without knowing at least one such person (it could even be you). We have all seen such disasters happen in movies, but I think you know what it feels like in real life. It feels like pure betrayal of the worst kind. Sometimes a blatant lie is better than exaggeration. I remember a friend who had the bad habit of overexaggerating matters, keeping the rest of us in the team thinking that there was a political problem. I was also one person who would do the same. Work/Office politics is unavoidable at any point in your life. You know it's going to happen. If you're lucky enough to not have much problems in your work life, you'd probably seen it happening in school if you were active in activities. People would be plotting extravagant schemes to keep this person out of this, try to do this to that and trying to keep things together etc. You might even find yourself in the battle you weren't involved in at any time, but you were convinced you were. This changes when something happens later in your life.

I'm 18 now. I've seen about four occurences of bad occurences of work politics. I remember when I tried to create a wall between parties that start splitting up, and eventually gave up when neither side would take the proper side of the wall. I remember thinking I was on one side of a political war when I found out that there was no war, it was just an exaggeration by one of my colleagues who wanted to fight a war that didn't exist! Then, I remember there was a problem later in my life, but this one was the only one that didn't turn ugly. It worked out fine, and we all realised how stupid we were to be fighting over such trvial things. Then, I started working at IT Planet, and I didn't know I'd gotten on the bad side of some people until the time I was about to leave and didn't care anymore. *sweats* Heck, nobody told me, not even the manager (or anyone that was supposedly on my side of the politics)! Everybody knew about this problem except me, which was kinda funny for me (apparently, I was disturbing their work at some points in time, which nobody told me off, which they should have *sweats more*. Of course, I think it might have been just another exaggerated thing anyway, because I think that not everyone believed that person completely. :D

Finding out who's telling the truth is usually a lot harder than it seems. Thankfully, it hasn't been such a problem. While I was disappointed about IT Planet, I found out that the division was actually between old-timers and new workers. The old-timers were prejudiced against new hires, and weren't very receptive when it came to new people. They weren't friendly, and refused to help with our training, despite the fact that they were told to, and when I decided that learning would need to take a new turn, they began to not like me! :D

Now, let's clarify: who's telling the truth? Usually you won't know until you actually look on the other side of the fence. I needed to see the other side of the fence every time a problem came up. People you don't trust fully are usually more reliable sources of information than people on your side of the fence. They show you the other side of the story and usually help you to figure out which side of the fence you want to be on. It can help you settle arguments easily, as well as make you the power figure in the battle, being able to see both sides of the problem, you can usually try to solve it without too much fuss.

How Many Browsers Do You Use?

Just as the topic title states:How many browsers do you use? I use three: Internet Explorer, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox.

It's interesting to see what has happened over the years. I remember vividly the first time I used Netscape. I connected to the Internet using Winsock, and it blabbered information I could not comprehend (at the time). I ran Netscape, and it brought me to a beautiful front page, Netscape.com. There was only one problem with all of this: Where do I go from there? I was absolutely clueless. It was like: what's the point of the Internet? The next day, when my dad realised we didn't know a thing about what to do, he was introduced to a site, probably the best search engine at the time: Yahoo! :D It was vague understanding why we had to type ridiculous things like www and com just get to a specific site. Later, I learnt what a home page was., wrote my own login script to try out, and so on.

Then came the age of Internet Explorer. It came with one of the Windows 95 updates, which heralded the much hated MSN Bar on my desktop. It came with channels I didn't want, and being as clueless as I was, I didn't know how to get rid of it. Months later, I got rid of it anyway after finding out. Internet Explorer was less cluttered than Netscape, and definitely ran faster. It was the browser of the moment. This lasted a long time, up till the time my new computer came.

One fine day, I read about a browser. Apparently, it was small , fast and had a built in mail client. It seemed like it was worth a try. I installed a copy form a CD that came with a magazine from New Zealand. (Hey, don't ask me, but mags there are pretty fun to read!) I installed Opera, and it changed the way I browsed the Internet. It was the first tabbed browser I'd ever used, and it didn't crash when you had about 6 to 7 websites open. Of course, dialup was still hell to live with. It came with this handy Google Search textbox which really saved me a lot of time (loading Google wasn't slow, but hey, who won't want a small speed boost). I used it all the way till now, which is version 7.54u1. :D

Then, I decided that I should get Mozilla and try it out. It was there I found Firefox. It was something like version 0.7. Oh well, I was going to try something funky anyway, so why not? Being an advocate of open source, I thought it was the right thing to do. It was faster than Opera, supported tabbed browsing, and could have some pretty funky plugins too! I loved it, as it had less web site compatibility problems than Opera did. It was the best browser ever, but some how, couldn't replace Opera completely. Opera still had the stranglehold on part of me, in my opinion. Firefox isn't customizable enough. When it becomes customizable enough (as in features and settings), it'll probably become the browser of choice for many.

But for now, let me give you some advice. Get Firefox. Rediscover the web. :D