*Yawn* As I predicted since the announcement of the AF teaching faculty, ALL the students’ vocals were mediocre, and Cikgu Syafi has YET to DO ANYTHING with expanding their vocal talents. Someone just give her a slap on the head and GET HER TO DO WHAT SHE’S SUPPOSE TO DO! OK, I’ll just hold that thought for a while and go through my comments starting with:

EBI: It breaks my heart to say this to a fellow Sabahan, but his facial mimic was all wrong for this song, and his voice and performance were pathetic. Ebi gave us a sample of his vocal prowess (or rather, lack thereof) in Diari AF week 1, but I still kept my fingers crossed hoping I was just hearing wrong. As soon as he started singing Sudirman’s “Milik Siapakah Gadis Ini” though, I right away wished that he would be the first person voted out of AF. And I was almost on the spot, if not for the fact that Diya screwed up her performance, and Zana pulled out at the last minute. (more…)

(Original post: 9-Mar-2007, Updated: 13-Mar-2007)

Until today, I’m still asked by random people how this prize can be claimed. This is a hoax, people! A scam! If you don’t understand English, I advise you to look in the dictionary for the word “hoax” or “scam”, or ask your friends who do understand English. You will NOT get any money from this, not a cent. They will be the ones cheating the money out of you.

Aren’t you curious at all on how scammers of such e-mails operate? I am. Hence, for the first time in my life, I decided to actually reply to this e-mail (see sample below) out of curiosity, to experience first hand how these idiots work. I’ve read stories of some poor people being duped because they were greedy enough to fall for these offers. So let’s just call my attempt an experiment, and I plan on bumping this post up as soon as I have anything to update.

(more…)

If HitTail suggests that you blog a certain word, you’d better do so! Since the initial review of my HitTail stats, there hasn’t been any changes in the Suggestions section other than Harry Potter’s “little friend” and Akademi Fantasia. I decided to ignore the former suggestion, and added the latter to my To-Do list. Took me almost a month to finally blog on this topic, and I took into account Mike Levin’s comment when posting my two latest AF posts.

Whaddyaknow….

(more…)

There wasn’t really anything exciting to see in Tirai Akademi Fantasia apart from the usual student introductories. Here are my thoughts so far:

• Overall, I was a little surprised initially that AF planned to televise the same time as American Idol. But just as I suspected, AF 5 will run an extra month, thus allowing AF a week or more after Idol ends. Also, from this I predict that there’ll be one round where 2-people elimination will take place.
• The pranks where lame, apart from Ebi’s mildly interesting pocong scare. Surprising Noni and Candy at Center Point (on separate occasions of course), and a fake robbery at Farha’s house, made me go “nyeh”.
• Make-up does wonders to a person. Without one, Candy looks just like any other sumandaks, and Noni doesn’t look like Syafinaz at all, although she’s still very pretty. Farha is one photogenic guy (which means he’s not as cute as you expect), and Ebi actually looked less intimidating than his photos; his photos made him look like a samseng (gangster), if you ask me.

(more…)

This has got to be the most Sabahans ever to be selected in Akademi Fantasia — if you’re considering Ekin of AF3 to be a Sabahan, get your geography right… even the people of Labuan don’t consider themselves as Sabahans, alright? I lived there during AF 3, I know. Our Sarawakian counterparts weeren’t so lucky — only one guy was selected. In any case, let’s hope their quality is any better than AF3 (no offense to Velvet and Lotter of AF4, but Marsha and Felix were waaaayyyy better).

But wait, did I count right? 16 total participants, instead of the usual 12? It’s interesting enough that Astro decided to premier AF three months early. I’m guessing that Akademi Fantasia will run a bit longer than its usual 2-month period, which means that our mobile and phone bills will be suffering for a while longer, hah!

Grabbed from Sultan Muzaffar’s site, here are the Sabahans selected for this season — Candy, Kadazan-Dusun from Tambunan; Ebi, Malay from KK; Farha, Bajau from KK; and Noni, Sino-Malay from KK. Is it just me, or doesn’t Noni in the picture look a bit like the AF guest judge and One In A Million judge Syafinaz? Candy, in the meantime, reminds me of Nikki from Malaysian Idol, but I could be wrong ’cause I don’t watch Malaysian Idol much. Coincidentally, these two hails from the same hometown.

and…

I’m gonna check with my little sister Laura later, and see if she knows any of them.

Trivia: My uncle’s niece is Marsha AF3, who is a cousin of Linda AF2. Rich AF3 is a former classmate of my sister Laura, and Velvet AF4 is my relative (his dad came by my mom’s batik shop in Tuaran during AF4 to buy some stuff… and to lobby for Velvet, indirectly of course, hahah!). You know, when you’re a Dusun living in Sabah, you have relatives everywhere.

You will NOT find ANYTHING ELSE remotely as interesting as the picture I added in my previous post. He’s barely 17, so please, if you’re looking for naughty pictures of him, I suggest you don’t.

Shoo!

(For the one or two frequent visitors to my site, the HitTail snapshot on the left should explain it)

(updated 12-Mar-2007)

Download WordPress Accessibility Widget v.0.9

YES! Oh yeah, oh yeah.

I did say I would make my own widget if I couldn’t find it, and here it is, the long-lost Accessibility Widget originally written by Tane of Digital Spaghetti and revived by yours truly. I’ve been getting hits from people who are looking for this widget since I posted my desire to get one on my site. I’m currently waiting for Tane to respond to my request. There must be a reason why he stopped sharing it in the first place, so till then, I’ll hold on to the download link until he gives me an OK sign.

In the meantime, take a look at the top of my sidebar and get crazy. It’s decent, but I tell you, it’s not 100% perfect. I certainly do not have the original codes that Tane developed and I’m sure he did more customization on it that I’ve yet to know of. It’s fun, though. When I’m done with properly widgetizing the Top Commentators plugin, I’ll move on to improving this one.

(Update 12-Mar-07) The widget is now available for download, since I’ve received several e-mail requests for it. No customization can be done with it as of yet, but I’ll start to tinker it next month when I’m done with the Top Commentators Widget. I plan to match all the things that can be done with the previous Accessibility Widget, with the original Readme file as my reference.

Sorry, Tane, but I can’t wait for your reply, but thanks again for creating this widget.

Making your site more accessible with a simple widget, just like the domain name registration sites do with language selection options. Never alienate your readers again by using a simple to use, easy to integrate into any web design: accessibility widget. Take in more hits and boost traffic enough to think about ordering dedicated servers from one of those cheap web hosting providers.