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Lately there are more and more natural disasters occurring throughout the world. Peru Earthquake and Hurricane Dean being the latest ones. As the Global Warming continues to have a negative effect on the mother nature, we can only expect more such disasters to occur in the future.

During these catastrophic times, human beings (who normally claim to own the earth and thinks he is independent and all-powerful) becomes helpless. The only objective becomes - how to survive the disaster!

While one can’t do much during these times, knowing these 5 basic techniques can make a difference:

1. Fire
   How to create and maintain a fire.
2. Shelter
   What clothes to wear and how to build a simple shelter.
3. Signaling
   How to make contact with people who can rescue you.
4. Food and Water
   How to survive without food and water for several days.
5. First Aid
   How to think and plan in an emergency situation. STOP: Sit, Think, Observe, Plan.

You can read the whole article here.

Note: This was a community service announcement from AdesBlog to keep blogger species alive ;)

One of my digital images has been published in the Off The EDGE Magazine, Issue 31. Off The Edge is a magazine about the luxury of reading and the time to take in the world at leisure. Here is the image that has been published on page 36 of the magazine.

It’s always encouraging to see your works in the press. It can make your day, or at least can make you smile when you look at it.

I had a great holiday going backhome - Kyrgyzstan. I was there for about 25 days. Actually I planned to go there for about 2 months, till August 27th. I had bought tickets that is valid for 3 months. However my son who is almost 2 years old, didn’t really like the climate change. He was having diarrhea and flu since the time we arrived there. We were hoping he would get better, but he got better temporarily and fell sick again, and again… And because of that we had to cut short our trip and return back earlier than planned.

These are some of the pics from Kyrgyzstan. Sad thing is, I forgot my charger for my digital camera here in Malaysia. And when I wanted to buy new one in Kyrgyzstan, they told me that it would cost me about USD50 and I had to wait for 3 days for it. So I said “No thanks!” and had to be contented with what I had shot. (more pics after the jump)

Bishkek Philharmonic Read more »

weirdoux has an interesting post at his blog. He raises concern for probloggers and bloggers who are earning considerable amount of money from blogging, whether they have a backup plan if (God forbid) they die?

How about you? Do you have any such backup plans? This question did cross my mind before, but I didn’t really think about it seriously. Let alone come up with a plan. We all do that, aren’t we? We expect to live at least 60-70 years. We think it (early death) won’t happen to us. That’s the nature of a human being. But the fact is, death can come unexpected.

It would be interesting to know if Darren Rowse or JohnChow has any plans for that. Life insurance maybe? (covering the blog earnings).

Update: Darren notified me that, he had blogged about this here.

At the moment, I am working on few personal projects. As you already know, one of them is my color picker tool - AdesClrPicker. It’s new version will be released soon. Some of the new features include:

• Option to export picked color codes in the library as an image (jpg, gif and png), sometimes you want to see how the color looks too.
• Ability to change the size and the zoom depth of the “preview pane”
• Compact “floating menu” window with frequently used buttons on top

Free Update: All previous buyers will get a free upgrade. So watch for an email from me!

Guestbook Script
I am also planning to release a new version of the guestbook soon, that is by the end of this month Insha’Allah. New features will include:

• RSS feature for posts
• And post moderation. At the moment, all posts are published automatically once submitted.

AdesIcons.com
One of my new exciting projects is AdesIcons.com. It will be a website that will provide high quality icons for Web-Applications Interface. At the moment icons are being designed, here is a sneak peak of what you might expect to see!

Pricing will be very very affordable. I wish I could make them free, but it takes tremendous effort and time to make these icons. Maybe when the project is profitable, I will make some of the packs free.

Other Projects
I am working on other projects as well, but it’s too early to mention them. Some are in the development stage and some are still in idea stage - waiting to be realized. When the time comes, I will surely give more info about them.

If I had 9-5pm job, I couldn’t work on these projects of mine. Even now, I feel sometimes that the time is not enough ;)

Where is the days when 1 USD was 3.80 Malaysian Ringgit. Now 1 USD is about 3.40 ringgit. For full time bloggers and those who rely on internet business, weaker dollar is a disadvantage. Because you get fewer local currency when you exchange the dollar to local money.

If that is not enough, the book that I was reading “Dollar Crisis” predicts that it’s a matter of time before dollar collapses totally. It says that people are loosing confidence in US dollar, and therefore more and more people are turning their wealth into gold, silver and other precious metals. If you notice, the price of gold has been shooting up lately. That’s because all those millionaires are buying gold and as a result demand for gold is increasing, and that demand consequently increasing the gold price.

Above is the price of gold from 2000 - 2005. So it was trading at around $500/ounce in January 2006. Now after a year and five months, it’s trading at $660/ounce. That’s more than 30% increase in just 1.5 years. That makes the gold one of the best investment options.

Recommendation
So if you have extra money in your bank account, you might want to turn it into “gold”. It would be more beneficial for you to keep your money as gold, than keeping it in the bank. Because “the time value of money” (a dollar today buys more than a dollar tomorrow) and inflation will affect on your savings negatively.

I went for a 2-day trip to Cameron Highlands with my family and parents-in-law (you must be saying no wonder this guy was not posting). Yes the last post I left with timestamp, so it was auto-posted.

Cameron Highlands is located 150km north of Kuala Lumpur (capital city of Malaysia). At 1,500 meter above sea level it is the highest area on the peninsula, and enjoys a cool climate. Basically it’s like a Switzerland’s weather in the midst of a tropical country. Imagined that? Good! Let’s continue with the rest of the story.

Cameron Highlands is popular for its strawberry and tea plantations. Everywhere you go you will see strawberries and strawberry related products. In the photo (left), my wife and son in Cameron Tea Valley, the whole valley is covered with tea plantations. The weather was quite cool, we had to wear sweaters most of the time. Most of the Malaysians would describe such weather “very very cold“.

It was a good trip, and we all had a great time. I bought some Cameron Tea on the way back, and now while writing this post I am enjoying this hot-aromatic-strong-cameron-tea ;) nice!

More pictures after the jump. Read more »

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which.

Clarifications:

• It could be that some god gets asked more than one question (and hence that some god is not asked any question at all).
• What the second question is, and to which god it is put, may depend on the answer to the first question. (And of course similarly for the third question.)
• Whether Random speaks truly or not should be thought of as depending on the flip of a coin hidden in his brain: if the coin comes down heads, he speaks truly; if tails, falsely.
• Random will answer ‘da’ or ‘ja’ when asked any yes-no question.

Could you get the answer? I didn’t think so ;) Otherwise it would not be called the hardest puzzle right? Here is the solution.

Kumiko has moved out from blogspot, and has registered her own domain name - www.cashquests.com. That’s a nice domain name, I wonder if it was available? Or she has bought it from someone else?

Initially she started out a blog to see if she can make money online. As you can see from the screenshot, she has made almost $800 already. If you are new to blogging, it’s one of the blogs that you should definitely read. www.cashquests.com

Join AdesBlog Community

If you have not joined my BlogLog Community, please do so. Because after this I will be reviewing some of the members’ blogs that are worth mentioning. There are great blogs among the community members. I am sure you will find it interesting too.

When you are member, it’s easier for me to see and your blogs. If you are not a member, unless I see your icon frequently in the recent visitors log, it’s very difficult to notice. So please join here and be assured that if you have a nice blog, it will be featured on AdesBlog.

MyBlogLog Member Blogs
You might have already visited Nice4Rice from this blog, it’s one of the most original blogs on the net. Founder, Spud Oregon reviews interesting sites and blogs on Nice4Rice and give you (the visitor) a chance to give rice to the reviewed blog. Few weeks ago, he reviewed AdesBlog here, if you have a chance to read it, do give me some rice, will you? Thanks!

Martin Reed of CommunitySpark.com discusses many useful things in his blog. Community Spark contains advices on how to build successful online communities whether they are forums, blogs, chat sites or social networks. www.communityspark.com

The Pisstakers is a multi-faceted humor blog covering web, tech, world news and quirky stories. While I do not like the name of the blog, I should say this is a very interesting blog and worth visiting. Ed (the founder) says about the name of the blog: “The term Pisstaker has nothing to do with urine, but everything to do with Ed’s articles that are somewhat cynical, sarcastic and humorous. For the purists, content is based on genuine events and topics and never strays too far from the truth.”

There are many more interesting blogs in MyBlogLog, once I get to know them better I will post more reviews. For now I think it’s enough. Join MyBlogLog here.

AdesBlog has entered 100K alexa list beginning from current month (May 2007). Yesterday’s traffic rank was 59,034. As you can see from the graph above, the traffic is increasing steadily. Within 3 months it moved up 81,213 ranks.

Alexa Rank is measured by the level of traffic your blog receives from the number of people who visit your blog with the Alexa toolbar installed. So it’s not the exact measurement of your blog’s traffic. Because there are many people who surf the net without Alexa toolbar (including myself). Nevertheless Alexa stats together with Google PageRank system has become the reference for setting advertisement prices, determining the price of the site (for auctions) and simply for exchanging links with others.

Increasing your Alexa Rank
Dosh Dosh has a good article titled “20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank“. He discusses 20 ways to increase your Alexa rank, however be careful some of them are simply unethical. And implementing those tactics might get you in trouble with your publishers programs.

My advice for the new bloggers is that, just make a good website or blog, with a good sticky content. And Alexa Rank together with Google PageRank will come to you themselves.