Telstra announces free calls to Burma

While the Burmese government is not doing enough to help the cyclone victims, Telstra has offered free calls to Burma from your land line.

Australians can use their home phone to contact friends and family in Burma without charge from Saturday until midnight (AEST) on Monday, May 19.

The free period started at midnight, meaning calls made on Saturday morning would also be free.

If any caller was inadvertently billed during the free period they should contact Telstra for a refund.

I wish all victims can recover soon.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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Moment Of Truth

Today I watched "Moment of Truth", a reality TV show from Fox, for the first time. The idea is that the contestant has to go through a polygraph test with a set of questions including very personal ones, to win a maximum prize of $500,000 if he/she can answer all questions truthfully. The contestant Lauren Cleri was asked very personal questions that could break her marriages such as:

• if she had sex with another man after marriage;
  
• if she would leave her husband for her ex-boyfriend, etc.

See the clip here.

I initially thought that it would be entertaining. But later on, I realised it is more than likely to be a set up.

1. Are they real people or being told to answer the way producers want?

2. They had been polygraphed before they went to the show to be asked the same questions. So the producers already know which answers are the truths and which are the lies. What if they ask all personal questions that she answered honestly first and when she has accumulated a lot, they ask the question she answered wrongly? She might answer the same way again (as to be consistent with the pre-show polygraph), and they got her!!!

3. How can you pass the polygraph test when you're asked opinion-like questions? What if you're 50/50 about that? Eg. Do you think the current government is better than the previous one?

So I think all the contestants are going to lose by all means, ending up being embarassed and geting no money. What a rip off!!!

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Magic Eyes in Text

This magic eye is fantastic. I've never seen any such 3D effects in text, only in graphics such as this. I love it.

Tip: Watch it with crossed eyes and adjust your eyes a bit until it becomes two layers.

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Ashley Alexandra Dupré

The call girl at the center of the prostitution scandal engulfing New York's governor Eliot Spitzer has been identified as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a 22 year old aspiring musician. Her profile in MySpace plays one of her songs called "What We Want". I had a listen to it today, and I guess not bad at all. Her profile has got so many hits since her identity came out; her song has been played 1.2 million times just for today alone. Who knows she might become a popular singer soon? May be she's totally right in saying "what destroys me, strengthens me". I hope she can recover from this very soon.


















More of her songs available here.

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Avoid credit card fees legally

Would you believe that it's easier to open a credit card account than to close one?

I heard stories from some of my friends complaining about the banks questioning them whenever they wanted to close a credit card account. But I didn't experience it until last weekend. I have an extra credit card that I got last year just to take advantage of 0% balance transfer offer from a bank I don't want to name. I want to close it now because it has been nearly a year and they are going charge me annual fees. Also the balance transfer was finished months ago. I hardly used that card.

So I went to the bank on weekend to close the account. I was asked why I wanted to close it. After that, the lady tried to ring a department in charge of credit cards, I suppose. Later I was told that the department was closed on weekends and I needed to come back on weekdays.

I went there this morning again. I got questioned again by another teller. After that, she rang to that department and I was told that someone wanted to talk to me. The lady on the phone asked me why I wanted to close it. I said I hardly used it and I didn't want to pay the annual fees for a card I wouldn't need. She said I could close it if I wanted to but if I wanted to stay on with them, they would waive the annual fees for another year. Well, how could I refuse it? Although I wouldn't need it, I will still keep it for one more year for free!!!

I learnt a few things from this experience.

1. Banks want you to keep in debt especially via credit cards because they carry high interests. They wouldn't be that eager if I were closing a saving account (I don't have millions).


2. You can and should negotiate with banks if you have loans with them. You'll be quite surprised how much you can save by negotiating.

Note: I do pay back anything I owe on time, so they are not earning interests from me either.

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Beautiful wallpapers of best cars

Yesterday I was looking for some wallpapers of fast cars and I found these two sites with high resolution and high quality pictures.

Dieselstation.com
Desktopmachine.com

Here are my two favourite pictures of Bugatti Veyron. They look so dynamic and moving while you watch. View them in full screen. Fantastic!!!

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Disable Windows Error Reporting

While you're working with your computer, Windows crushed and you get the following message to choose whether to report the error to Microsoft or not.

Microsoft Office Program has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost.

Restart Office Program

For more information about this error, click here.

Although it may be useful for Microsoft to fix the bugs, I personally don't like it because :

• it is annoying to see the message pops up all the time; and


• I don't know what kind of personal data it will send to Microsoft.

You can choose to disable error reporting totally. Here are the steps to do that.

1. Go to "Start" then "Control Panel".


2. Open "System" then choose "Advanced" tab.


3. Click "Error Reporting" as shown in the follwing picture.





4. Check "Disable error reporting" as shown below and click "OK".

Now you're ready to go!!!

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Error message for meta tag in Blogger Beta Template

Layout in the Beta Blogger is quite a complicated process. It's very different from the old layout and your previous knowledge of HTML too.

This morning I wanted to add a meta tag in the new Beta. I generated the meta tag with Any Browser. But whenever I inserted the tags to the new template, it showed an error message saying "Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The element type "meta" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "" .

After trying for many times, I found out that I needed "/>" instead of ">". Who would have thought that it was necessary? I wonder if it is part of XML, the area which is new to me.

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