Justin from kcyap.com has organised a really interesting web template design competition for wordpress 2.0, with prizes ranging from a 60GB iPod, PSP, iPod nano to a webcam, the win will be very sweet indeed!

Competition starts from 15th January till 28th February 2006 and is open to the whole wide world!

With about 2 months to go, there’s plenty of time to come up with the killer design! So what are you waiting for?

Link
Rules
Prizes

Technorati Tags: malaysia, psp, wordpress, template design, ipod

Translated “10 killer posts ideas” from perfomancing as a reference for those who is not good in english.

是否曾经遇到过写作障碍呢？（写作障碍在这里是说写东西写一段时间后，缺乏点子）当然你会遇到这个问题，除了你，我们所有人都有这个问题。你是否以为你张 贴一个很棒的文章，可是却无人问津呢？我们都有贴过没人问津以及被人践踏的烂作，我知道我也有。这里有十个法则可以让你拥有超级的创新力以及为你带来非常 多的浏览人数。

To read more:

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Good article by _earth about Malaysia’s state of environmental affairs in 2005:

Topping my list is definitely the haze that covered Malaysia, no thanks to weak Indonesian enforcement and possibly irresponsible Malaysian firms. With Malaysians breathing smog, the term “fog you” started to gain currency…Mark my word - the haze will return.

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Technorati Tags: malaysia, environment, save the rainforests

It’s been quite an eventful year since I started blogging (Blogspot, Blorc) some time in June and this is what I rank as the top 10 best blogging stories of 2005.

Here’s my list (starting from #10):

10. Fireangel

Somehow a Fireangle day was created which included a blog dedicated to her plus a dozen or so posts flooding PPS in just a few hours and it was all a result of someone pimping someone and yeah…that’s what it is…don’t ask me why.

She’s not bad looking though. =)

(more…)

There’s hope for mankind. The AIDS drugs are kinda working:

AIDS has ripped through sub-Saharan Africa, killing 2.4 million people this year alone, according to U.N. figures. In Botswana, life expectancy has plunged to 39 years, AIDS patients overwhelm hospital wards and funeral homes offer 24-hour service.

Medicines that have turned the disease into a manageable chronic condition in wealthier nations remain out of reach for most in Africa, home to more than 60 percent of the estimated 40 million people globally infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The cost is prohibitive and few countries have the infrastructure to dispense them on a large scale.

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..and a better understanding of the malaria parasite!

The world’s deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, sneaks past the human immune system with the help of a wardrobe of invisibility cloaks. If a person’s immune cells learn to recognize one of the parasite’s many camouflage proteins, the surviving invaders can swap disguises and slip away again to cause more damage. Malaria kills an estimated 2.7 million people annually worldwide, 75 percent of them children in Africa.

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Happy New Year guys!

Technorati Tags: disease, aids, malaria

Have you forgotten about it? Well, skthew’s here to remind us and he also mentioned some of the other bloggers who dedicated a post to it:

MackZul dedicated a blog entry to those who have lost and pray that those who live on, are living better lives and even though Chan Lilian can still feel the pain, she decided to put up her recycled post of her experiences in Penang during the tsunami. Lucia Lai, also from Penang, recalled the event and felt glad that she was part of the NGOs who attended to the victims, while another blogger prayed in silence to the dead and the living.

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Technorati Tags: tsunami, malaysia

Something interesting to read about the student population in popular courses and what the future holds in Australia:

Particularly of interest to me was this statement by him: “Look at the annual HSC results - the consequence of which is that Oz is creating a new heavily Asian managerial-professional, ruling class that will feel no hesitation … in promoting the narrow interests of their co-ethnics at the expense of white Australians.

Link

Technorati Tags: asia, australia, oz

Something thoughtful by xpyred about moralities of war:

It’s like what they say about debates and arguments: they remain debates and arguments with no hope of one side convincing the other till the first punch is thrown. That’s conflict, for you: it ends in force or acquiescence. And I suppose it happens all the faster when neither side acts in good faith - both know the realities of escalating their verbal conflicts, so they dispense with words and arm themselves first.

Is either side wrong? I don’t know how this question can be asked of either side, as Dr. Mahathir wishes us to do - why else label perpetrators of war criminal? How, really, are we to judge the ‘moral worth’ of the interests of one party against the other? Perhaps he meant ‘legal’, so therefore, we are to believe that state actors will submit themselves to adjudication by an objective third party.

Quite well written I must say..and certainly thought-provoking =)

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Seems that the history book writers in Malaysia are literally trying to change history by telling a big lie to our students:

Recently, I flipped through the pages of Tamadun Islam by Mahayudin Yahaya (revised edition, published in 2005), which targets STPM students, undergraduates, teachers and lecturers.

To my shock, the book claims that China’s Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was an Islamic dynasty and that its founder Chu Yuan Chang was a Muslim.

Check this post by Tony from “Education in Malaysia”

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Another good post about the Malaysian mentality in higher education compared to our neighbours down south:

Similarly, when Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak set a Top 50 benchmark for Universiti Malaya, NUS (ranked 22nd in 2005) was given the ardous task to be “the top 10 in the world” by Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, Dr Tony Tan.

The President of NUS, Professor Shih Choon Fong concurred with his DPM, and set out to become the first Asian university in the Top 10. “Being in the top 10 in the world is something worthy to strive for. This is not an ego trip. As a Top 10 university, NUS can help propel Singapore’s development as a dynamic global city in a knowledge-based, innovation-driven world economy”.

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