For reasons beyond my comprehension, our Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has a new and active Twitter account. I don’t know why, but I laughed for a good 2 minutes about it. It just tickled my funny bone.
Then I decided to use my lunch hour to make a quick parody of it.
Click on the image above for a larger version
Welcome to Web 2.0, Datuk Seri 
All in good humour, yah… I don’t like the thoughts of Kamunting.
Nokia sent over a box last week. It was simple but pretty, with a dark brown ribbon and a misspelling of my name plastered on it, heh. But it was very exciting and I loved it, mainly because I seldom receive nicely-packed stuff, unless I bought it from Amazon.com.
Guess the package
Well, it turned out to be an invite to a Nokia event tomorrow at the KL Hilton (which I’ll be going for). They’ve assembled some stuff together and labeled them accordingly as you can see in the photo below. I already know what they will be launching tomorrow, and I thought it was pretty smart of them to come up with this package. A reminder of how things used to be…
Can you fit everything into something?
Well, I kept the invitation card. But I gave the box and everything else in it to Ryan. Except for the compass, which my sister is keeping. Suffice to say, Ryan was pretty much ecstatic over it. I showed him how to work the yo-yo (the best I could) but I don’t think he quite got it. He took the video cassette and asked me, “what is this?” I told him that it’s something he will never learn how to use. Heh. My mom who’s here for a couple of weeks made two square holes and a slit to the box, and Ryan wears the box like how people in handcuffs wear paper bags when they are being led to somewhere. I should take a photo of that soon.
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Sometime last year, Jun-E Tan interviewed me (and a few other bloggers) for her Masters thesis, titled “Blogging and Democratization in Malaysia”. Since then she has graduated with a Masters degree, got a place to study for her Ph.D in Singapore and published her thesis into a book. She’d also successfully hitchhiked from Butterworth to KL with a friend, but that’s another story.
Wahey, congratulations, it’s a book!
We met up a couple of weeks ago with Sharizal and she kindly gave us a copy of her book (personally autographed some more). She’d also acknowledged and quoted us in her book, which I thought was very nice of her to do so 
I tell you, it’s a weird (the good type) sort of thrill to see your name in a book, even if it’s just one or two lines, heh.
Spot my name!
Not sure if it’s already available in bookstores, but you can buy it directly from Jun-E for RM 25.
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Earlier in July, I blogged about not being able to camho properly, what with being stuck in between two professional camwhorers. It was a small photoshoot for TELL magazine for an article that Jesscet wrote about the Malaysian blogging community.
Well it was published in the August ‘08 bumper issue, and I managed to get my grubby hands on it.
Forgive the expression on my face, I woke up not long before this photo was taken
I’d sent Jesscet a bunch of photos of me and friends at assorted events and bloggers’ gatherings, and it looked as if they published them all.
At a Happy event, at a Tuborg event, at the Nuffnang Pirates event, at a Royal Selangor event
At a Heineken event, and a photo of me taken by Syazuan Sulaiman
Heh. Cheers to all.
… for winning not one but TWO awards for The Chicken Rice Mystery at the BMW Shorties!
Thanks to you, I can tell people with a straight face that I was in an award-winning film!
Sometimes I feel like I am losing it. I seem to be stuck in the 90s when things made sense, and the world is moving on without me, and not even blinking half an eye while doing that.
I’ve watched assorted videos by assorted people attempting to do the ‘Crank Dat’ dance by Soulja Boy. I’d seen Soulja Boy and his posse on some chat show doing the dance, showing every move bit by bit so the rickety host could follow. Intrigued by this 21st century ‘Macarena’-esque movement that I’d somehow seemed to have missed, I searched for the original ‘Crank Dat’ video. You know, because in order for the masses to pick up something as to generate the highly imaginative viral marketing success as achieved by ‘Crank Dat’ and Soulja Boy, well… it’s just got to be something damn special lah!
And this was the music video I found…
I still don’t understand.
In any case, my favourite version was performed by Richard Stallman and a few MIT people…
I admire their bravado. I also hope that they keep their day jobs.
I’ve been telling people about this case I am following (via Google news and various blogs) that I think I might as well blog about it. Saves me from having to re-tell it every time I think about it.
Actually I first got to know about it from The Wilful Sunflower’s post. A 13-year old teenager Megan Meier from Missouri (USA) committed suicide last October. She had been diagnosed with ADD and depression, and like all teens before her, clearly had a self-image problem. Read the rest from Wikipedia.org, or the article that broke the story recently here.
For those who can’t be arsed to read, I summarised the popular perception of what happened:
1) Megan Meier and a friend ended their friendship.
2) Friend’s mother created a MySpace account, pretending to be a good-looking 16-year old boy named ‘Josh Evans’ to find out if Megan Meier had been saying anything about her daughter on-line.
3) Josh Evans befriended Megan Meier, gained her trust and confidence. Megan Meier was thrilled by the attention of an older, good looking boy.
4) One day out of the blue, Josh Evans messaged Megan Meier, “I don’t know if I want to be friends with you anymore because I’ve heard that you are not very nice to your friends.”
5) A series of MySpace bulletins and messages including “The world would be a better place without you” led Megan Meier to freak out. Later she attempted suicide by hanging herself with a belt in her closet. She was pronounced dead the next day.
6) Six weeks later, a single mother told the Meiers that ‘Josh Evans’ never existed, and was in fact Megan’s ex-friend’s mother. This ex-friend’s mother also enlisted the help of one of her employees to maintain Josh Evans’ MySpace account. The single mother found out about it because her daughter had been encouraged to join in the ‘joke’. A few other children who knew Megan were also into it.
7) One year later, Steve Pokin wrote an article on the incident, published on the St. Charles Journal.
The Internet community (if there’s one) was angered by what they viewed as a crime committed by the friend’s mother. Big news everywhere, bla bla bla, a blogger (Sarah Wells) followed trails from Steve Pokin’s article, traced down the family’s information, and revealed the name of the ex-friend’s mother. She was identified as ‘Lori Janine Drew’, and the family was friends with the Meiers (prior to the single mother revealing that Drew was involved in the prank, of course).
9) The Drews knew that Megan Meier took medication for depression as she had went on vacations with them before. So it was not as if the Drews did not know what Megan was suffering from. Their lack of remorse was incredulous; according to a police report published by The Smoking Gun:
Drew state she knew “arguments†had broken out between Megan and others on “my space.” Drew felt this incident contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel “as guilty†because at the funeral she found out “Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”
Another blogger said that outing Lori Drew was the right thing to do, because her behaviour was parallel to that of a typical child predator. The atmosphere is that Lori Drew is right up there as one of the most hated person in America at the moment.
10) After all that heat, city officials where Megan Meier used to live declared this Wednesday that on-line harassment is a crime.
Questions:
a) Is it fair for the Drew family to experience such a massive wrath of Internet mob justice? After their private information was revealed all over the Net, they’d been receiving all sorts of threats, and were victims of a prank call leading to the police rushing to their home thinking that someone was dead.
b) Could it be that Lori Drew had nothing to do with ‘Josh Evans’, but was protecting a loved one (i.e. her young daughter) who was pretending to be Josh Evans? Based on the single mother’s account, it seems unlikely, but you never know.
c) Why can’t MySpace be held accountable, even if so slightly? I once wrote an article about MySpace and crime, and in the course of research, signed up for a MySpace account as a 14-year old girl, the minimum age to be a MySpace member. There was absolutely NO verification process involved, and as 14-year old unverified member, I could EASILY search for other MySpace members to talk to.
Yes, sure that parents need to be responsible for their children’s surfing time as well. The Internet and its various social networking sites are just another means to crime. Somehow I still feel that there are a hell lot more that those sites can do; but in the US, privacy laws seem stricter than ours.
d) Holy fuck what is the world coming to these days?!