10 things to do when you see a Milo truck on campus

1. SMS all the people in your phone book - even those back in Pakistan - or where-ever you are from, telling them they can get free Milo at the Central Library forum.

2. Try Milo from each container - it might taste different.

3. If there are two trucks, try both.

4. Each time you refill, tell the person next to you it's your first drink and you hope it's good.

5. Get a booth from the NUS students' union, and make people sign up for a Milo SMS community.

6. Ask people how many drinks they have had. Accuse them of having had more if they say one.

7. Fill your thermos with Milo. If someone questions you, tell them you need to heat it in the microwave because you prefer to have hot Milo.

8. When all the containers are "Closed", ask the Milo truck-driver if he has more.

9. If he says he doesn't, accuse him of stealing precious free Milo for his kids.

10. Wear a green shirt and green pants, stand by the Milo truck and ask people to pay you 20 cents for every cup of Milo because you're the Milo-man.

Get money for completing survey

A group of students from NTU's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information are doing a survey on blogging habits and people's relationship with their blog readers. You can access previous studies done here.

To qualify for participation in this study, you must be a blogger who regularly maintains a personal blog (i.e. updates a blog that is primarily about you at least once a month).

Your participation in this study is voluntary and you may withdraw from the survey at any point. However, your participation is very important to the study and they hope you will complete the survey. They also hope you can help them publicise this in your blog and get your friends to participate as well [which is basically what I'm doing here].

As a token of appreciation for your time, they will be giving away US$50 each to 3 lucky respondents. However, only completed surveys are entitled to enter the lucky draw. Winners will be notified via email and the money will be delivered through PayPal.

I have to make a PayPal account? And only three LUCKY respondents? So everyone won't receive a token of appreciation, eh? That's what I thought. Hell, I've never been that lucky. Once I was in this lucky draw with only three entries out of which one was going to win 500 hours of Internet from an ISP in Pakistan. The second prize was 100 hours. I got neither.

But in order to help research and development, I'll still take the survey when I've got some extra time. There should be some things in life one doesn't only do for money [but rather, to kill time!]

Click here to take the survey.

The nuisance that is laun-der-ee

It has officially been more than 24 hours ever since I began doing my laundry! Some forty tees, twenty dress-shirts, two towels, two bed sheets, two pillow-covers, a pillow, and various jeans and trousers. I divided the load among four washing machines, which took two hours to find, because one of the vending machines that accepted coins for 5-6 machines was full. I called the resident assistant but he told me the management can't empty it before Monday morning. All the other washing machines were occupied.

I separated the dark-coloured clothes that I thought might have the potential to colour all my clothes, but none of them did. Some blue piece of clothing in one of the other washers, however, did colour all the clothes I had in that particular machine. So now I have a collection of white-turned-blue shirts as well as socks etc. Not to mention my favourite pair of brown-coloured Dockers that looks like blue paint was spattered all over it.

One of the washing machines didn't drain the water properly, so I had to squeeze the water out one cloth at a time.

Out of the eight dryers, only six were working, and all of them were occupied. One unsaid laundry rule is that if a washer/dryer is done washing/drying and the person hasn't collected it, you can take the clothes out and put yours in. But what if you can see women's undergarments inside? It would just be weird to take them out yourself. I considered asking one of the girls to do that for me, but I realised that would be even more weird. So I just hung around and hoped someone will come and collect their laundry.

Another unsaid rule for PGP dryers in particular, since they suck so bad, is to divide one washing machine's load between two dryers to esnure drying. For this laundry session, it would mean using all eight dryers.

I went back to the Residence 3 laundry room a few hours later around 4 am and finally found four machines that were free. I should mention, by now I had spent $2 on washing. I filled the dryers as much as I could, because I was running out of 20-cent coins, and an hour later when I checked back, they were all still wet. So I gave them all another round.

By this time I was sleepy as hell, so I just dosed off. I checked the laundry room first thing after waking up and getting a chocolate-cheese waffle, and the load from three dryers was done. One load was still wet [the one from the washer that didn't drain the water]. So I restarted its cycle and added the remaining load to two other dryers. I haven't checked back ever since because I feel sick, but it's about to be 2 am now and I hope when I go to check my clothes they are all dry. Otherwise they will have to wait until early morning when I can get hold of 20-cent coins.

If you have read this post all up to this point, I praise you for having nothing better to do in life. Or maybe you are frustrated by doing your laundry as well and can relate to my experience. I have spent $7 by now and I need wishes and prayers from people for the next time I do my laundry. Laundry sucks.

How come they haven't invented stay-clean-forever clothes by now? Scientists work on the most useless of inventions [like cloning] but when it comes to "real-world issues" such as this, they digress.

Life for sale at more than US$ 24,000?

I don't have time for a serious post but I just had to share this link forwarded to me by my friend 'R'. Apparently this 24-year old Australian guy named Nicael Holt [pronounced "nick-ale"] is giving up his entire life for sale short of legal things like driving license, passport, degrees, future inheritance and legal identity. His name, Nicael, is gender neutral which means both guys and girls can buy his life.

Things like all his possessions [even piercings], social life [more than 150 friends as well as potential lovers], skills [which involve a 4-week training] and life choices [his hair-style and the fact that he's vegetarian] will be passed on to the winning bidder. It's a very serious sale and only serious bidders are counted [non-serious ones are thrown out] - bidding on eBay is legally binding and eBay is personally facilitating this bid/sale.

30% of the winnings will be given away for a mental illnesses charity, and they are also making a documentary out of the process. In the age where we have crimes like "identity theft", the time has finally come when we have "identity sales". It's such an interesting time in the history of the world. It excites me to be present today! Thank you 'R' for accidently sharing this with me.

Click here to see the bidding details and process on eBay. Last time I checked the winning bid was AU$ 30,900. The bidding ends in 3 days.

You can also view Nicael's MySpace page here.

AIESEC in NUS: LC Gathering

What a cool AIESEC gathering! [14th January, '07]

As Welly and I were busy printing posters for the SNRD Information Talk to be held two days later, we arrived 40 minutes late for the LC gathering [January 14th]. A Pakistani ...Read More

Clapton rocks the Nanny without Cocaine

Here we are...

...and there he will be in a while.

And here he is!

Eric Clapton is god.

Oh yeah!

Now for some videos...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W1KUMv_KVM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfqUKy53xII


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUGXF7H4QHw

Eric Clapton in Singapore tonight!

I'm leaving now

Out of this world!

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not crapping crap about new year's and what this year will bring, how fantastic it will be, what resolutions I have made and blah blah blah... It will bring the same old $||it. Another day another dollar. My first post this year is about online services.

If you spend most of your time online, like I do, you really begin to appreciate some features of online networking 'devices'. In the past two years, among other things, I've promoted the following excessively:

1. Extra storage on Hotmail. Before Live was introduced, I would "Close" people's hotmail accounts after changing their location to 'Florida' with zip code '33333'. They would freak out because all their mail would disappear after some serious warnings were displayed on screen. And then I would ask them to sign in and "Activate" their hotmail accounts; and viola! Storage space increased from 2 MB to 250 MB. Back then, such a transition in storage space was big - it doesn't matter much now, as 8 Megapixel cameras make photographs larger than what would fit in a 2 MB mailbox.
   
   
2. Orkut. Being one of the first few people who joined it, I told loads of people about it - I didn't send spam because it's hated, but I talked about it. And everyone used to receive loads of spam from their other friends, so they'd join, sooner or later.
   
   
3. Gmail. I find it amazing how so many people still don't use Gmail. I've promoted Gmail so much that sometimes I'm not even conscious about doing it. It's true, I presume people who don't use Gmail lack intelligence. But with nearly unlimited storage; instant email; "View as HTML" for .doc and .xls files; and most of all, the email grouping called "a conversation"; alongwith the search powers of Google - applied to your inbox, I can't imagine why a person wouldn't WANT to use Gmail. It has to be either ignorance or lack of intelligence. Or absolute insanity.
   
   
4. Facebook. My latest obsession. It's better than Orkut because firstly, it allows an unlimited number of pictures to be uploaded. Secondly, you can start threads on each of these pictures so that your friends can comment on them. Third, it is based on your university network, so you can do things like entering your module/course information and seeing people who take the same courses as you. In the past it didn't allow non-university students to join, such that if a university was not in Facebook's list, you could not join. But recently they changed that. So everyone can join. Another cool feature of Facebook is the 'Profile Badge' that you can see in my blog - in the right column. There are many other cool features too, which you can find out once you join - oh! There I go with my promotion again. You know, these companies should be paying me for all the heavy promotion I do. Hell, I even visit the advertisements!
   

I also promote the idea of blogging. I don't promote Blogger because it is still struggling with a lot of technical issues, although I still appreciate the user-friendly interface.

I promote blogging because it's efficient. It reduces the need to send individual emails to people you care about, and if they care about you, they will read your blog. You can add photographs, links to other websites, and embed videos too. Plus, if you have ANY flair for writing or blabbering [there's a difference but it doesn't matter for promotion purposes], blogging is the thing for you.

Also, I had a tamanna [desire] since forever to make a web site of my own - that enabled me to do the very things I do on my blog. I purchased nubeals.com two years ago for the same reason, and last month I purchased the domain for yet another year. I haven't completed the web site thanks to procrastination, AIESEC work and studies. For now if you go to www.nubeals.com it only redirects to my blog. Some day I will bring my index fingers together like Evie Garland and freeze time so that I can do all the things I want to do. And then I'd just snap my fingers like that to resume time. Out of this world, huh! Now that was one kick-ass show...