It amuses me to no end to observe how low some are willing to go to villify Sarah Palin!  I hope their PDS will come back to bite them in their liberal butt.  The sweetest backlash will be the election of John McCain as the next President of the USA in November.

At 50, Madonna is no doubt a very fit woman, but no matter what you do to your body you cannot hide the wrinkles, the saggy muscles, and wearing sexy clothes can even amplify the fact that you are no longer a spring chicken!

Just look at those arms and thighs!  Ewwwwwww!

From all accounts her concert tour, Sticky and Sweet, is off to a smashing start and her fans are eager to see more of her.  I can believe that she is an inspiration to those in her age group and those aspiring to at least still have that kind of looks and fitness when they reach her age.

Go, Madonna, go!

One of the things that I really enjoy when I am invited to an 8-course Chinese dinner especially at a wedding reception is the cold dish, the appetizer, before the other heavier dishes are served.

This particular cold dish was served at a blogger friend’s wedding in Sibu early this month. I had never seen siew mai among the stuff on a cold dish before. I guessed that is what they do in Sibu!

All in all it wasn’t a bad dish, but I have had better!

The a cappella ring tone features a professional singer chanting the word condom more than 50 times, a playful approach that public health activists hope will spark discussion and make condoms more socially acceptable.

“We’ve made a conscious effort to move the concept of the condom away from negative association, like HIV and sex work,” said Yvonne MacPherson, country director of BBC World Service Trust India. “Condoms are actually health products and if you have a condom and you use it, you are seen to be smart and responsible.”

Full story here.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I will be downloading this ring tone even if it becomes available here!

If this public service ring tone helps and encourages people to use the condom more which in turn helps reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS, I am not complaining! Download and use this ring tone by all means!

I don’t know if the first time I read about a man flying off into the air on his lawn chair tied large balloons was this man, Kent Couch, or not. But I sure was amused when I read about it!

Doug told me that that was one of his dreams when he was a kid. Taking off into the air powered by balloons! I guess he had no idea where to get that many helium-filled balloons at that time, eh! I don’t doubt he would have gone on that flight if he had known where and had the money to get them!

I was certainly glad when a friend told me that advertisers did indeed pay to have bloggers write reviews about their products, company or services. I have made some money, not a lot, but more than I ever imagined could be made by writing reviews for advertisers! I am hoping that soon advertisers would want to pay me to have their discreet banners placed on my blogs.

The company that I signed up with first is called IZEA. They are the leader in social media marketing especially through their blog marketing site SocialSpark and their paid blogging site PayPerPost.

The idea behind both marketing sites is to bring together advertisers and bloggers to one common place where they can be matched to mutually benefit each other. Bloggers earn from writing reviews for the advertisers and advertisers benefit from the buzz created by the bloggers and the traffic generated to their site through such a buzz.

Advertisers can also send product samples to the bloggers where they will later give their feedback about the product via their blog posts. I admit that receiving product samples has been one of my favorite things about working for IZEA.

Harnessing the energy and the buzz created by thousands of bloggers work, because there are many advertisers who are repeat customers of IZEA’s Socialspark and Payperpost. I know they work because the products or services that I have written about for advertisers appear on search engine results.

Why not join hundreds of advertisers at IZEA today and see your brand name, products and services spread and grow through the power of social media marketing?

I decided to upload more pictures today so I can build another slide show and post it on one of my blogs. The recent trip my family made to the longhouse to celebrate the Gawai festival should be an interesting slide show.

One of the latest things with Flickr is that you can now upload and share your videos on Flickr. I already have a YouTube and Google Video accounts, and I am not sure if I want to bother with uploading my videos to Flickr. It would not be such a big deal if I had a super high speed internet connection! But I don’t!

And oh, before I share the slide show of the longhouse trip, I need to upload a few more photos so it will be a nice slide show.

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. ~ Samuel Adams

America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact - the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality. ~Adlai Stevenson

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. ~ William Faulkner

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make good use of it! ~ John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, April 26, 1777

Happy birthday, America. May God continue to bless you and may you remain that shining light on the hill.

I subsequently found a cheap aluminium strainer and used that instead of the earlier version. The strength of the signal it picks up is about the same as the earlier version. It can go up another 2% which is quite negligible. But the best thing about the new version is that the signal strength remains at “very good” for most of the time.

This version certainly looks a lot better than the previous one!

I find that the current location, which is on the balcony outside my old bedroom, is where it picks up the strongest signal from the city’s free wifi service. I’ve tried the downstairs patio and the signal at best is only at 30% strength.

So I’ll leave my wifi booster where it is right now. I do, however, take my wifi adapter off when I am done surfing the web. I do not want the only wifi adapter that I have to be exposed to the elements!

When it comes to my vision, I am resigned to the fact that as I grow older, I will need stronger and stronger reading glasses. I have not heard of any real natural solution for improving hyperopia (long-sightedness), that is, until I read the positive testimonials of people of have tried wearing pinhole glasses to improve their eyesight.

What’s that, you ask? My thoughts exactly when I first heard about the pinhole glasses! I mean, I have heard about eye exercises for strained eyes and even some exercises that are supposed to improve your vision problem but I have never heard of eyeglasses that do not even have glass lenses that can help improve your vision!

The way pinhole eyeglasses work is that they prevent light rays that come at extreme angles from reaching the pupil. That means only direct light rays reach the eyes thus minimizing distortions in the images that the eyes perceive and resulting in better definition and clarity of the objects that we see.

However, there are limitations to the pinhole glasses. You can’t wear them while driving because they severely restrict your peripheral vision, and while doing activities that require movements. They are also not suitable for people with refraction disorder of 6 diopters.

But they are great for stationary activities like watching TV, at the movie theaters, reading the blackboard in the classroom, and for working in front of the computer.

If the pinhole eyeglasses work as well as claimed by the people of have used them, I think I should try them for myself too. I hate the idea of having to rely on stronger reading glasses as the years go by!