How To Be Comfortable In Front of Your PC

If you spend a fair amount of time in front of your PC at work or home, most of the time you are not aware of you bad habit. If you don't know what your bad habit is, maybe it is time to take an ergonomic course (click on the image to open up a new browser window and start the course):

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine went to see a doctor because he had this slight numbness on his hand. It was told that he might have carpal tunnel syndrome as he used to sit in front of his PC most his waking time and holds the mouse all the time. Since then, he takes regular break in between jobs.

I'm too also guilty of having a lot of bad posture habits in front of the PC and I'm working on to practice good ergonomics as I spend a lot of time in front of the PC too.

But what about people who are using laptops? I used to work with a laptop and I'm thinking of buying one soon (I had to give the laptop back to company when I changed job). The angles might be different but I guess you will know how figure out yourself though.

My First Google Snail Mail

Last Monday, I got a mail from Google. This was a surprise for me since I had never got any ordinary mail from them before. I only got charged by Google on my mother's credit card for using Adwords 4 years ago. It looks like Google Adsense is sending out Google Adsense Personal Identification Number (PIN) to Adsense publishers. This is to ensure payment for your account.

I don't really consider myself as a publisher yet. I do write on my blogs but most of the stuff I write is kind of informal. I'm trimming down my blogs and for now I only focus on this blog. You can only write so much in the hours you have in your life. Anyway, I have a long way to go before I can ask for a payout from Google Adsense. Still, it is good to know that Google hasn't forgotten the old fashion standard snail mail.

How To Recover Your Wordpress Login

Over the past few weeks, I've been fiddling with a lot of stuff on Wordpress. It seems like the mechanical stuff I've learned really helped me a lot in determining how to fix something. Recently I've stumbled upon a lot of problem regarding the access to the Wordpress login. One of them is the lost and forgotten username and password. If you handle or own a lot of your self hosted Wordpress blogs, you might come across this accessing difficulties once in a while and I have a solution for that.

To be able to recover your Wordpress login, here is two things you need to know before you even attempt to perform this recovering task:

• You must have the master login to your webhosting or at least must be able to access phpMyAdmin.


• You must know how to backup your Wordpress MySQL blog database.

If you don't know how to deal with the above list, try Google them or download WAMP, XAMPP or WOS and fiddle around with them on your Localhost before you proceed on your live blog. Okay, let's move on. Download your Wordpress MySQL database in .sql format (you can download it on whatever format you want but I like to stick with .sql). Use your favourite text editor. I use my Dreamweaver to do the job.

After you open the sql file, don't bother about reading all the mumbo jumbo codes unless you like to. Use your Search and Replace function and search for 'user_login'. This is very useful if your WP SQL file is big. I'll give you a peek of how the codes look like:

As you can see, I've colour coded the values that is involved and how it is related. The code above is an example of a multi-user wordpress blog. If you only have one user, there will be only one user information. Once you know what to edit, get rid of those old password circled in red. Wordpress login uses MD5 to jumble the password so that it is not easily hacked. We now use md5 Hash Generator to get a new code for our new password.

Once we have replaced the new password generated by the md5 Hash Generator, it's now time to upload the database back to it's place. Make sure you have make a back up before you do this or else don't blame me if something goes wrong. Test your Wordpress blog and see if it runs okay or not. After you done that, try and access your Wordpress Admin area and if that doesn't work, maybe you've changed the wrong user login or keep on trying. There are a lot of other stuff you can do if you know how to edit your Wordpress MySQL database. I'll write about it when I'm in the mood. If you need help, place your questions on my comment box below and I'll see what I can help.

Further reading: Wordpress FAQ

My New Workplace

Comparing my old work place/desk and now my new work desk:

I would have to say, I love my new work desk even more. My work computer is a Pentium 4 2GHz with 512MB RAM running on a Windows XP Pro. The keyboard and mouse is cordless and I now have a wide 21 inches LCD monitor and another 14 inches CRT monitor on the side. I used to work with a laptop so I was never used to have a dual monitor. It took a few hours before I get comfortable using 2 monitors in front of me. It does make my tasks easier since I have more space to work.

By the way, Master Yoda on top of the CRT monitor is training me to be a Wordpress Jedi since I've been fiddling around Wordpress themes and plugins for the past 3 weeks already. I hope to become a master very soon..

Unreasonable Black Out

When I first started my new job last 28 February, my new office had some sort of power failure and all the PC had to be shut down. It was Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) doing their routine job of maintenance. Today, it was my house turn to have those power maintenance. I didn't realize this until my brother sms me and told me the power was out from like 10am. I thought it could be temporary. Unfortunately I was wrong, it was still out when I got home and all my neighbours are getting uncomfortable since it was getting dark.

At 8pm, I had to do something and without electricity, there was nothing I could do except for staring at the candle. It was hot and sleeping wasn't going to do it because without any air flow, I would sweat like crazy and that's not quality sleep. I then decided to go to my aunt's house down in Kota Damansara thus this blog post was type.

I just couldn't believe TNB doesn't give any notice to the neighbourhood affected. I saw a couple of generator trucks but they were for the condominium nearby and not for the terrace house where I live. It was just sucks. I hope this black out would never occur again.

Change To My WP Theme

I hated my previous green coloured wordpress theme. After a few weeks being in the jungle, I think it is time to move on to something else.

Furthermore, The Beast Blog V 2.0 theme requires some additional modification to your Wordpress files and setting and it really messed up my admin dashboard. I had to re-install my Wordpress all over again. Lucky I am now a Wordpress mechanic after a few weeks of wordpress blog modification. My job right now in the company I serve is to modify wordpress theme selected by the client and make it look and fucntion like a normal website. I'll about that later but really, if you don't know much about wordpress technical stuff, I don't recommend you this theme.

For now I'll just stick to the default theme. I'm working on a theme modification at the moment to suite my blog. Hopefully it'll be done a couple of days. By the way, I'm installing a cool plugin called "Lightbox" so that when you click on the image above, it'll expand with a faded background. Awesome stuff on what Wordpress could do! Only if I can get it work somehow.

How I Bought My Domain Name

I just had a chat with my new company's network engineer. Well, for a micro small company, there isn't much engineering brain required but this guy has a Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MSCE) certificate and recently, my superior handed over him to take care of the hundreds domain name the company has bought. It should have been my job managing all those domain names but I was swamped with blog works that the company's client asked to do.

Anyway, the guy confesses that he had never shop online so he had never bought any domains and he has no idea how to do it. So, being a good guy I've always been, hehe..I facilitated him over what is supposed to be done. If you have never bought something online, then things can be pretty scary because you have a fear of screwing things up. Still, the best way to learn is by doing mistakes and that is normal. I've been shopping online for a while but my first time entering my mom's credit card, I can still remember the goosebumps.

So, how do you buy a domain name? It is fairly simple. Let me show you how I did it and I'm not even paying it with any of my own cash. Okay, first step:

Just fill in the form to see if your domain name of choice is available or not. Mine was unique so I'm the owner.

I had Byethost, the webhost that I had use to host a couple of free subdomain wordpress blogs. There are free php hosting that allows you to host your own domain but that's a different topic. The cheapest domain name (unused one of course) that I found was USD8. So, basically Byethost offered a yearly package of USD35.99 with a free domain name registration for a whole year with an extreme amount of features. That is about USD2.99 per month or RM10.50 per month.

So with the PayPal money that I've gotten by writing paid posting from Blogvertise, I bought the domain and the web hosting subscription.

The only thing that is required is that you must have a PayPal account that has a credit card or the right debit card attached to make the transaction or else you can't even get any money into PayPal itself.

That's about it. The transaction is done. Now just wait for the moderator contact you by e-mail. It should take no more than a day unless if the moderator is on holiday. I had to wait for 4 days before my domain and web host got activated.

The conclusion. Don't be afraid to shop online. Need help? Asked a friend who had tried it. Shop till you drop my friends!

My Starbucks Jusco Bukit Raja Experience

I like to take pictures for the thing that I wanted to blog about. I think I should really consider having a camera phone. The reason is because I don't bring my digital camera all along with me. Plus when using camera phone, it doesn't look awkward to most people, don't you think? I am still using a 4 years old Nokia 3100 which only serve a basic purpose of SMS, MMS, WAP and making/receiving calls. It is time to upgrade, at least.

Yesterday I went to Shah Alam on a date with my lovely girlfriend. The mission was to spend as little as possible which I apparently failed to do so and to be connected online. After having lunch at my favourite Sup Ani Utara in Section 2 Shah Alam, bringing along my girlfriend's laptop, we went to Secret Recipe at SACC Mall where they have Wi-Fi Internet access under TMNet Hotspots. We also had some nice cheesecake and lattes. The only setback was the place has no plug to plug in the power chord so I had to cut my visit short because the battery could only last for one hour. I pulled up my new Public Bank Visa Electron card but the payment counter said can only accept card charges if you spend more than RM50. I think it ridiculous to turn down a cashless customer. Lucky I got RM20 in my wallet.

We then hunted for another Wi-Fi place in Shah Alam and the best and cheap place was at Butler at Petronas Section 7 which is next to Unisel Shah Alam. The only problem was, the place was packed with people mainly students and all the power sockets were occupied. Our last resort was to search for the nearest Starbucks and that is at Jusco Bukit Raja Klang.

After the Secret Recipe incident, this time I asked the Starbucks Barista whether they accept my PB Visa Electron. The guy answered to me that they accept whatever credit card with no minimum requirement of payment. That was a good thing to hear. So, I happily had a RM10 Signature Hot Chocolate and surfed the internet using the High Speed TimeZome Wi-Fi. My girlfriend was so happy she downloaded some YouTube videos and a lot of Hindustani Indian MP3s. This was actually my first time using my Public Bank Visa Electron. I'll use it again for my next visit to Starbucks ;-)

By the way, there is a Nando's restaurant just next to Starbucks at Jusco Bukit Raja. They are equipped with TM Net Hotpsot. Again, no power sockets so it is so ashame of Wi-Fi places not to have power sockets. I wonder how and where these Wi-Fis is transmitted since I can't see any sign of antennas unlike my home and office wireless router. Maybe our LadyAzurt could explain that on her blog. Any thoughts on that my lady? ;-D

My Web Hosting Account Got Doubled

Yesterday I got an e-mail from the sales department of my web hosting which I've recently purchased to host this blog. The e-mail announcement starts like this:

Dear Valued Customer,
We have increased the capacity of our Premium Hosting accounts by over two times! And we are giving you a unique opportunity to get a Premium Hosting account for FREE!

I was like "What's going on here?". I haven't set up an e-mail account yet. So, I logged into my web host Cpanel and saw this:

As you can see, my disk space is now 5GB. That is 4GB more than what I purchased. Let's make some comparison:

Now, what the hell am I going to do with that amount of storage? Plus, they add more 150GB of traffic monthly bandwidth. This is too much if you ask me. All I wanted was a reliable web host that could host a couple of my other domains and a couple of MySQL databases. Most cheap webhost that I was browse shopping would only give me 1 MySQL database and I don't like that.

Since the free .com domain is part of the package. My ashrufzz.aisyshop.com domain is not registered with my details:

Oh well, I can always transfer it whenever I want. I'm thinking of purchasing a local web hosting plan, well that would be next year I guess. For now, at USD2.99 or RM10.50 per month this web hosting package is providing me more than enough. So now, it's time to utilize it to the max baby!

The Entrepreneur Invite

After Valentines Day, I got a mail from the Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Cooperation Development (MeCD) dated on the 14th February 2007 for an invitation to come for a briefing. The briefing would be on an Entrepreneurial program associated with Takaful Nasional.

The insurance industry is very lucrative. If you are very meticulous about legal mumbo-jumbo or if you are able to explain and present insurance products well enough to a client, then this would be a great career opportunity for you. Imagine for one client policy alone, you can get at least RM70 commision, that is even better than doing telemarketing for a hotel membership product for which I failed at.As always in any business, it's a numbers game. The more client you get, the more commission you make. The better you are at getting more and more clients, the more chances you can get to open up your own insurance agency.

Oh well, where were we? Oh yes, the invitation letter. I get so carried away when writing about business stuff.I don't know how they get my address, maybe they got it from the job searching websites that I've registered while searching for a job online a couple of months ago. It says that I am selected to undergo an intensive training for 6 months. The closing date was 3rd of March so I think I was too late. Let see what else they offer, oh they will pay me an allowance of RM500 per month for six months but accommodation is not included.

They have a limit of 200 early candidates. From what I heard, the organizer of the program gets more pay (which was cut from the RM500 allowance the Ministry given) if they can get more jobless people to sign up.Wait a minute, I've already gotten a new job. Why would I join the insurance business? Well, I was introduced to the insurance business before. Someone even wanted to sponsor me for all the trainings, exam fees and all that but I refused. I guess my future is to go online most of the time, configuring web-hosting, domains, PHP, Wordpress, CSS, XHTML and soon AJAX. I guess I have more fun doing that. Still, what is more fun than working on a dual monitor in a cozy apartment turned office with a gym and a swimming pool? :-)

Ashrufzz Reality Adventure Just Got Upgraded

I would like to welcome all my readers to my new blog. I have been blogging since 2004 and it has been an incredible journey for me. I can say that blogging has really changed my life a lot.

At the moment, being at a new work place in a new company and doing a new job tasks requires me to further organize myself and getting used to. I do enjoy the stuff I'm doing right now because I think this is what I was meant to do. I'll describe to you more about it as I write more blog posts.

I'm doing some major blog modification for this blog and hopefully it will be done by this weekend. I'll try and keep on posting new blog posts and I'm excited to be on a new and improved blog platform.

Public Announcement

Celebrating my new career as an open source web/blog administrator, I am officially ending my blogging activity on Blogger dot com. I now have a new place to blog, play around with customizations, modifications, plug-ins and all the latest web 2.0 toys at:I don't do graphic design very well but I can modify them anyhow. Still, I'm working on my design and hopefully there are people out there who would appreciate my masterpiece. If you are wondering why I don't just migrate or copy all my previous posts, read this.

Farewell to my old blogger blog. Adios amigos, you have been so kind to me!

To my new blog http://www.ashrufzz.ml

Why You Should Not Migrate Your Blogger Blog Posts To Wordpress

Last week, after I got enough funds on my PayPal account from my sponsored post activities, I went on an online shopping spree. I paid USD35.99 for a web hosting service which gave me my own Ashrufzz.com domain. Click here if you are interested for the full features. So if you are broke and you desperately like to have your own domain name and a shared web-hosting service and willing to do what I do, let me introduce you to Blogvertise.

Nowadays, there are a few paid blogging services and all you need to do to fill up your PayPal account is to register a free blog. Write blog posts based on what the provider has instructed, wait for a month and you will receive the payment through your PayPal. Of course in order for you to receive the money, you need to add a credit or debit card (I'll write a blog post on this) on your PayPal account. If you don't have any, then borrow for someone and pay them or ask your parents.

If you don't want to buy any web hosting or maybe you don't have any idea on what domain you should be buying, then get a free PHP web hosting. One of my successful Wordpress installation that is now being used by a company (A friend of mine who works with the company bribed me with a Pizza Hut free meal voucher just get it set up remotely). Occasionally, the web host is unstable but that is what you get when it is free, right?

I like Wordpress very much but I'm not going to give up on my Blogger Blog yet. So, what do I do? After reading all these blog posts:

• Maintain permalinks moving from Blogger to WordPress
• Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress
• Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices
  
• Migrating all post to wordpress (I really like what she did)
• WordPress vs Blogger - the verdict

I have decided to let my Blogger Blog to be remained and I'll be starting to blog on my brand new Ashrufzz (It will be re-launch as Ash-Ruf-Double Zee dot com) powered by the Wordpress 2.1.1.

Why did I decided not to migrate all my blogger blog posts to wordpress? Well, here a few reason why:

1. I like the fact that I can still see my past creation.
   
2. I believe Blogger would be around for a long time and that would assure me that this blog will be online for the readers to read without me paying for anything.
   
3. I don't want to mess around with the inbound link that is pointing to this blog and also some permalink that is directed within this blog.
4. I don't really mind loosing the PageRank as good, unique and quality blog posts has far more value than a green bar indicator.
   

As far as I appreciate blogger for doing a good job hosting my blog, I don't want to make duplicate copies like what Shannon did. I will however make sure that the product shall remain as it is.

I'll begin the development of my brand Wordpress blog over the weekend. I'm excited to be announcing it soon!