Category: General

Came across this website while I was searching for clues why my shoe laces come undone or loose after 8-ish kilometer of running.
Check out the Ian knot, takes some time to get used to it but now I can save 2 second off my shoe lace routine! since I tie my shoelaces at least twice a day when I do exercise, that’s a whole 4 seconds!

The rest of the site has other information on knots as well, so its not just the Ian knot.

Ok, it was tuesday, not the weekend, but a long weekend holiday here in France nonetheless. So we rented a car and went shotgun all the way down south to Orleans and then proceeded to drive on the banks of the Loire to Tours. The area is famous for wine and castles (chateaus). If there’s another thing they’re famous for, sorry, I didn’t know about it. Its supposed to be famous for pear (as in the fruit) stuff, but other than an overpriced bottle of pear confit, we didn’t see too much of anything else. Continue reading “Weekend in the Loire Valley”

Last month (July) the weather was hot hot hot, and no rain. This month, the temperature has dropped to low 20C and yesterday on Sunday the temperature was hovering about 15-16C during the daytime. That was the time we were supposed to be driving to Fountainbleu for a weekend holiday. And it was raining as well. What’s with the rain? Whenever we drive to the countryside we’re always going to see some dark sky and occasionally rain along the way.
Did a run this morning and the temperature started at about 18C and was 23C when I finished about noon. What a day…

I’ve been planning to put up a GPS subsite a long long time ago, to make use of the 6 years experience of using a GPS in my everyday life. Putting coordinates of interesting location and so on but have been too lazy and I’ve just found out how to integrate Google Maps into MT to make the whole thing look nicer than copying and pasting a picture from Mapsource. Anyways, its up, and the first 2 locations profiled are outlet shopping sites in Paris that I visited all in the same day, today.
http://nangka.org/gps

Another thing… the format of the site has not been “harmonized” with the rest of the site yet. Its a tedious work and I’d like to wait till I have more time to do it all.

Done the update today. Movable Type is making MT3.3 free for personal bloggers, so I suppose I qualify. Want to see if this version is better at blocking SPAM!!!!

Not that it would make too much difference, but I’ve started to close all comments posted on this blogsite. Theres just too much @#$% spam going around and although in this current version of Movable Type you can select which to approve and not, its just too much work to sort out everything. This week its a post for Aphrozolam or some other crappy medicine. Who in their right mind would buy from the spammers? There always seems to be a 0.01% that’s the same bunch of guys that gets conned by the Nigerian scammers.
Anyways, in case you’re smart enough to find this posting if you want to leave comments, you can email it over to adminATnangka.org (obviously replace the ‘AT’ with a real @… My manual anti spambot harvesting technique).

I’m sure many tourists know about this already judging from their numbers on this particular day… Every first sunday of the month is a Free Museum day in Paris… I dont know if it applies outside of Paris, maybe it does. I can’t find a list of museums that participate to this but most of them do. The Louvre and the Orsay for sure.
The queue will be really long especially for the 2 mentioned. As for the Louvre, go early, but there’s no need to go TOO EARLY, 9-10am is alright, the queue will be long but it will move quite fast. I guess one of the best place to queue would be the Carousel du Louvre, which is linked to the metro station.
Continue reading “Free Museum Sunday”

If you use eBay for a while you know how crappy it is to refresh the web interface in the last minute to make sure that someone doesn’t snipe you in the last minute with that 0.50cent higher bid…
I was scouring the internet for a realtime software that will allow me to look at the live current price and allow me to place bids without going into the eBay website.

Came up with JbidWatcher… which is a freeware as far as I remember. Tried it with 2 auctions last night and it works well! The update on the price is not exactly realtime, but the time is, and if you dont have that many items on the watch list it actually updates rather often. I’m having it set to enter my final price 10 seconds before the end of the auction… automatically. Nice software.

JBidWatcher: Java-based auction bidding/sniping and management software

Been almost 3 months since our arrival in Paris. Its also been almost 3 months since I posted anything on this site. What has happened since?
Waited almost 2 months for our triple play service with Free.fr, one of the many internet services over here in Paris. The thing that won them over for me? The free VOIP calls to Singapore. Ok there are a lot of TV channels (though less than in the US of course) but most of them you dont really think about watching at all. There’s no Discovery Channel, and I think even if there’s one its going to be in French anyway.
Continue reading “Update July 2006: Freebox”

Looks I got discovered by a special version of a spambots in the last 1 month. Usually I dont get so many useless comments from people with strange nonexistant emails, but this time I have more than a thousand of them!
That’s it, I’m going to delete them all, and close all comments on the blog. IF you guys are trying to reach me, then you should know my email address. Send it there instead. I’m fed up of the spambots.