Unlocking Your Potential Workshop At Avillion Village Resort, Port Dickson

I attended this company workshop called ''Unlocking Your Potential'' back in Jan 08 at Avillion Village Resort, Port Dickson and sadly to say, I walked away with nothing from the workshop. It was simply a waste of time but at the very least, it was a nice break-away for me from the office and I did enjoy myself over there as well.

Since there is nothing much to talk about the workshop (mind you, I call that workshop 'Unlocking Your Boredom') I shall talk about the resort then. For those of you who want to visit Port Dickson one day, this is really a good place to stay! The pictures below will definitely do some justice.

Avillion Village Resort

Beautifully designed room

Too HUGE for one person *evil grin*


The balcony that allows you to see the beautiful sea...

This is how each hotel room looks like.. very big!

Bathroom.. I mean HUGE bathroom as well...

Oh well, the hotel room was very nice - no doubts about it after viewing the pictures? I had fun swimming when I was there as well as the swimming pool was very nice! Just in case you are wondering how the food was in the hotel restaurant, I'd say not bad but you can get bored very easily if you plan to stay there for more than 2 days - not too many choices for dinner and breakfast.

Personally, I'd not go to Port Dickson as the beach is not attractive to me at all. However, for those of you who want to go there still, this hotel seems to be a very good choice!

Till my next post. =)

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Connie Talbot - More Than An Ordinary 6-year-old Girl!

Who is this little cutie?? To those who are from the United Kingdom, this pretty little girl is not a stranger to them!

Her name is Connie Talbot, a very talented child singer that rose to fame because of the television talent show called 'Britain's Got Talent' in 2007. It is a show that searches for Britain's next best amateur talent act, featuring singers, dancers, comedians, variety acts, and other talents of all ages. The winner of the show would receive £100,000 and had the chance to perform at the Royal Variety Performance in front of the Queen and members of the Royal Family at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool.

Connie made it through until the final stage of the competition and unfortunately, she didn't emerge as the winner. Nevertheless, she's become so popular that she was supposingly to be signed by SONY BMG to release her first album. The label, however, pulled out of the deal eventually due to her age.

How well can she sing? To be quite honest, she can really.. really sing and her voice is just so beautiful and lovely that it can touch your heart everytime you listen to her singing. It gave me goosebumps when I was first watching her video and listening to her singing.

Now, watch the video of her singing in finale of 'Britain's Got Talent' and let me know what you think of this amazing little girl!


Song: Somewhere Over The Rainbow

If you are not convinced yet about her beautiful voice and fantastic singing skills, listen to another song by her.


Song: I Will Always Love You

QUICK FACTS

1. She is only 6 years old and has already earned her first first million! **At the moment of writing, I was a bit depressed trying to think what I was doing at the age of six? Whatever it is, I was definitely not earning money at that age - not the mention one million pound!**

2. Despite of the turn down of the recording deal from Simon Cowell who was also one of the judges from the show, her dreams of singing stardom have been rekindled after landing a contract with the Rainbow Recording Company.

3. Her first debut album, Over The Rainbow, has been released on 26 November 07 in the UK featuring 12 all-time favourite songs such as Over The Rainbow, White Christmas, I Have A Dream, etc.

4. You can get her album from her official website, http://www.connietalbot.com The album is selling at the price of £11.75 or £15.25 for an autographed photo together with the album.

She's undoubtedly very talented, especially given the fact that she's only 6 years old (how many children at six can sing as well as she does!) and I believe she'll go very far. Go... Connie!!

Now, I just want to know when we are going to have ''Malaysia's Got Talent''. I'd better start to prepare myself for the talent show too! *ahem* Believe me, I can hear you when you say I have got no talents to show off!

Watch out for me next time if there's really this talent show called ''Malaysia's Got Talent''.

Cheerio.

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Nokia 6500 Slide Phone Review

Just in case you haven't got a clue how Nokia 6500 Slide looks like, here we go...

Looks like a pretty decent and solid phone - I know ;)

Ah well, I have just purchased this phone not too long ago (on 31st December 2007 as a new year gift to myself) and decided to write a review about it in order to further 'enlighten' those who intend to buy this phone as well.

QUESTION: Have I been happy and satisfied with this phone? Not really! Do read on to find out why.

Let's first have a look at its specifications:-

NOKIA 6500 SLIDE AT A GLANCE...

Network : UMTS / GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
Display : 2.2-inches 16M colors TFT (240 x 320 pixels)
Primary Camera : 3.2 megapixels (Carl Zeiss optics, auto-focus, video, flash)
Secondary Camera: QCIF (176 x 144) video-call camera
Dimensions : 96.5 x 46.5 x 16.4 mm
Weight : 125 g
External memory : microSD (TransFlash)
Internal memory : 20MB
Battery : Li-Ion (Stand-by time: 310hr, Talk time: 6hr)
Others : 3G, Bluetooth 2.0, microUSB, FM radio with RDS, TV-out
Market price: RM 1600 - RM 1700 ( My observation)

It may look and sound very promising with everything about it but there seems to be a lot of problems with this batch of phone in Malaysia because I have exchanged the phone for 4 times (yes, bloody hell, 4 times!) in a week due to numerous problems that I have encountered with this phone. Guess what, it doesn't stop there and I have to go back to the Nokia Care Centre on Tuesday AGAIN to swap to another model (I am planning to get N95 this time around!), making it 5 times of exchanging the phone at Plaza Berjaya. Before that, may I ask if there are any Nokia N95 users that can tell me what kind of problems to expect for the phone before I make the wrong choice again?

Here are 2 major problems that I have found out whilst using it:-

1. High Pitched Sound From The Phone
Believe me or not, this phone really emits a funny sound all the time (like the annoying sound that is created by a mosquito!) Hold the phone really close to your ears and you will be able to hear the high-pitched sound from the phone. It's relatively soft and not easy to be heard but once it gets in your head, it's very hard to shake it off! Something interesting about this problem is that it only happens (the phone only starts to make this annoying sound) after you connect the handphone to your PC for the file transferring purpose.

INTERESTING FACTS

- The phone is now functioning like a device that is called 'The Mosquito', a product invented to drive away teenagers from no-loitering zones by emitting the ultrasonic sound waves. It does not cause any pain but it will be so irritating that the teenagers will not linger in the areas where they can hear it. The same goes to my beloved new Nokia 6500 Slide now, each time I use it to make a call, I don't even want to spend one more minute on the phone because of the stupid annoying sound that I can hear all the time. Did Nokia purposely make the phone this way so that the users could save their phone bills???????????

- According to Howard Stapleton, the inventor for the''Mosquito device" for Compound Security Systems, the tones produced by the device can only reliably be heard by people younger than 20 and almost never heard by people older than 30. This phenomenon is known as presbycusis - the ability to hear high frequency tones deteriorates with age. Interestingly enough, when I went back to the shop from which I bought the phone from for the first time when I detected the problem, none of them could hear it! Why is this soooo interesting to be mentioned? Because all of them seem to be old farts, *evil grin* which on the other hand makes me feel so good for I can hear it all the time - I am still so young physically!

2. The Blank Screen Problem
The phone will go blank sometimes and it hangs sometimes too. The only way to get it back to normal is take out the battery and restart the phone again. I thought this problem would only occur to some old phones that you have dropped too many times but to my surprise, this happens to a phone that is not even one-week old! It's either I am so ''lucky'' to get a defective phone all the time (Remember I have exchanged the phone for 4 times?) OR this batch of phone really has some serious problems that need to be looked into as soon as possible.

INTERESTING FACTS

- When technicians were told about this particular problem, they actually said it was not surprising at all because all Nokia phones have the same problem. Now the funny part is if the technicians could say something like this, I am sure that this problem should have been acknowledged and known by the producer, NOKIA as well, where the heck is the quality control that should take place in order to ensure this problem will not occur again? Where is their Six-Sigma programme?!?!?!

All in all, the whole process of exchanging the phone and going through all these hassles is driving me up the wall. I am getting so depressed about the phone because 1. I spent quite a bit on it 2. The stupid phone wasted a lot of my time and petrol money to go to the Nokia Care Centre which is so freaking far from my office 3. I bought this new, and yet DEFECTIVE phone in order to substitute my old phone, which unfortunately is a Nokia phone as well and had to be sent for repair.

I had always been a Sony Ericsson phone supporter till my last phone, Nokia 6300. I thought this Nokia 6500 Slide phone would prove that I made a right decision to support Nokia phones from now onwards but obviously I might be wrong afterall. Nokia phones may be stylish (some of them are!), trendy, user-friendly, and beautifully designed, but in terms of durability, agree with me or not, I still think Sony Ericsson phones are much better. =)

Ironically, out of no choice, my next phone that I am going to swap to is N95 and that makes me to continue becoming a Nokia phone. Fingers crossed that this is a good phone and I won't have to go through all this anymore.

Cheers.

DISCLAIMER: Views expressed in this blogpost are the personal views of the author.

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Photo Flash Slideshow Presentation

I have discovered a very interesting (and maybe useful) software that I want to share with everyone here. First, do have a look at this flash video as it will give you a very good ''introduction'' to you who I am.

It may not be that impressive (to me, it is quite! =P) but the presentation above was done in less than 5 mins and in 3 easy steps:-


1. ADD PHOTOS


2. CHOOSE YOUR STYLE


3. PUBLISH

For those of you who always like to do photo slide show presentation, allow me to present you this powerful tool, ANVSOFT Flash Slide Show Maker.Slide Show Maker is a Flash album creator to make animated photo slide shows with SWF file as the output format. It transforms your digital photo collection to Macromedia Flash file format (SWF) easily and best part of it, they are providing the free hosting (www.skyalbum.com) to the outputs of your flash so that it's ready to be embedded into your blogs (Blogger.com or Myspace) without having to go through the hassle of hosting the files somewhere else or uploading it to Youtube.

It's free for personal use and is really much faster and easier than using Microsoft Movie Maker (I have only tried using this software to create photo slide show presentation, let me know if there are any softwares out there that are better than this one)

PROS

1. It's FREE- what else can you ask for more?
2. It provides free hosting to the flash outputs created via the software itself
3. The flash outputs are easy to be integrated into the the blogs such as Blogger.com, MySpace, etc.
4. It can be used to build Flash album for website, create image scroller banner, and decorate your photos
5. It supports to generate XML-driven slideshow. This XML driven mode is ideal for website. It doesn't require any XML or coding knowledge.

CONS

1. You can't crop the background music using it. The DVD Photo Slideshow Professional version has this function though . Too bad!
2. You can't generate the slideshow presentation into other formats (The DVD Photo Slideshow professional version supports the MPEG format, Ipod Format, YouTube format, etc)

Despite of the limitations, I still find it very useful when it comes to create a photo slideshow presentation. Trust me, it will definitely save you a lot of time and efforts in doing one - when you have to.

Enough said, perhaps you should download this software now and try it out yourself. Let me know what you think of this software then.

Cheerio.

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A Blogging Virgin or A Virgin In Blogging?

Today marks the day I made the biggest decision in my life!! What is it?? That'd be picking up the habit to blog again!

At this point of writing, there is a question in my mind: Can I be considered to be a virgin in blogging again, after I stopped it for such a long time?? Hmmm.. you may wonder: Is this one of your new year resolutions? Well, that's not really the case. I've decided to pick it up back due to a few, *ahem* interesting reasons:-

1. KIASU-NESS (it means competitiveness, if you don't know what it is!)

I guess this is the main reason why I want to get back to blogging - it may sound a little pathetic but I suppose there's nothing wrong with being competitive at all! (I blame it on the fact that I am a Leo, and typically Leo's are all competitive! Haha) I have quite a number of friends who are very good bloggers and have pretty interesting stories to share with the rest all the time. Seeing their blogs everytime makes me feel like owning a website to myself too, which explains the creation of my own domain - www.jinsiang.com (just in case you've not realised it yet) =P Stay tuned as I will make sure this will be one of the most interesting websites in the near future!

2. IMPROVEMENTS IN WRITING
I have to say that I used to write quite well as people would be quite surprised to read my articles, essays, or even my comments on people's blogs (that was what I was told, anyway). According to some of my friends, they noticed that the way I write is quite different from the way I speak and I reckon that's because I always say what is on my mind all the time without thinking much. I know this is bad and I am working hard on it now. On the other hand, I will spend time thinking about the right words to use, how to structure the sentences, etc when it comes to writing.

Surprisingly though, I realise that I can't write as well as I did anymore when I was in university. This might be because I am no longer required to write any articles, essays, etc for my assignments!I think the main reason is that I have stopped blogging ever since I started working! So now, it's time to start to blog again and it will definitely help me a lot in improving my writing skills again.

3. A PERSONAL DIARY OF MINE
I didn't have the habit of writing a diary back in university but a lot of my friends did! Now when they are reading back the blogs, they bring all the nostalgia in their lives. Asking me what was the biggest event in my 3-year university life now, I can't even answer myself that question! Thus, I think it'd be nice to have a personal blog that will help me remember everything that is interesting in my life, at least from now onwards.

It's 5:07 a.m. now - oh my gawd! and I am supposed to wake up early in the morning!! I am left with no choice but to stay up the whole night then! Is this the price that I have to pay for my kiasu-ness in getting this blog up within today? I guess soooo....

Peace out!

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