The new year premiered with accompanying rain and freezing cold temperature the whole day. Just when I thought the rainy season is finally gone, today’s continuous rain made me think otherwise. It felt so nice to sleep under my favourite thick comforter, and leaving the bed was the hardest thing to do. Last year, January kicked off with glaring sun, but this year it’s the total opposite. I could barely do anything without a sweater too. You can say that my tolerance to cold weather sucks.

I didn’t do much today. Slept in, write, read, eat, write, surf, read, slept some more. Visited a number of interesting blogs today. Well, it’s hard to keep up with all the interesting blogs after disappearing from the blogging world for so long. Hope I’ll get the hang of it soon.

The rain made my brain go into what I call the ‘brood-and-muse’ mode. It was on a whim that I wrote the latest entry in Stylish Geeks: Anticipating Malaysian Virtual Scenario in 2008. All that I wrote there was based on my observation and my own experience, coupled with my hopes. There’s one thing I forgot to mention in the entry - local-based online advertising. Last month, I wrote about ‘junk ads’ flooding Cari.com.my and some other sites. I hope 2008 will get people to be more mature. No one is going to believe ads like ‘Fire your own boss’ or ‘Make $10,000/mo without working’. Those ads are absolute eyesores. Like some Japanese people said, ‘there’s no such thing as free lunch‘. We only gain what we deserve.

Malaysian sites developers, especially the Cari.com.my team should monitor the ads being put up in their classifieds directory. I’d say more than 50% of the ads are not at all relevant to category listings.

Also, I’d love to see how local advertisers like Nuffnang, Nufflets, GrabMyAds and Advertlets compete in the growing virtual community and online advertising network. It’s not surprising if more similar companies announce their presence in the near future.

One more thing… I’d like to welcome Adi to the Caramel Toffee family. Hope we can be friends His new blog is not ready yet, but later on, you can always have a look at http://adi.carameltoffee.net.

Laters~

Well, my connection kind of went down for a few minutes today. I wonder if Streamyx is really still kicking as it claimed to. Even better (note the sarcasm, dearest), this whole site went down for about 5 minutes. If more, I would have demanded for a partial refund of my hosting payment.

It feels great to have a personal blog where I can rant about anything I want - again. I used to give up writing many times in the past, but now I should put that habit behind me. Writing is extremely crucial to me now, and extremely beneficial to my course of study. Although some may look down at the fact that what I’ learning is not ‘critical’, I do take my studies seriously. How am I ever going to become a good English teacher if I don’t even know how to write properly?

But I’m not using Caramel Toffee to write about my academic life. This is my life in general. For everything else, there are other blogs I’m currently maintaining.

Anways, I finally got my PB Card PIN number today.It’s kind of odd, really, because Saturday is supposed to be public holiday. I never knew post offices in Kelantan open during weekends too. But I’m happy, all in good time. I can finally register for online banking, and do some serious withdrawal from my PayPal account (I think I’m going to empty it, for precaution). Since the first day of getting this card, I’ve been doing some online shopping extensively. Bye bye Papa’s credit card. Hello my own card! And hello to no-hidden-charge online spending too. I can now close the PayPal account I verified using Papa’s credit card years ago.

p.s/ Are you looking for a host to host your blog or small site? Check out my free hosting page. It’s lonely being alone on a big space.

We go through this phase many times in our lives. There may be times that we feel so insecure about ourselves and many times over, we give up before even trying. If you’ve ever felt this way, don’t worry too much about it. I’ve been in similar situations too in the past, but a little new knowledge and time work wonders on me. The key to defeating the feelings of worthlessness?

Boost your self esteem!

Like it or not, your level of self-esteem defines your personality. A person with good and pleasant personality is a person who always thinks rationally. Thinking positive is good too, but only to a certain extent. The best you can do to help yourself is by rationalising - get in touch with the inner you. Here’s what you can do boost your self-esteem for a better personality and a more pleasant relationship of any kind:

1. Avoid criticising or insulting yourself when you make mistakes. Admit your mistakes, but rationalise with yourself about the nature of the mistakes. Don’t jump to telling yourselves “I can never do anything right!’” or “That’s it, I’m cursed!” or “I’m just plain stupid”. Instead, tell yourselves something like “I’ll do better next time” or “Maybe I was not careful enough. I’ll be more careful next time” or even “I’m a human too, and it’s normal for us humans to make mistakes at some points in our lives!”.

2. Cope with your problems, don’t ‘mope’ around with your problem. Thinking about problems at hand and not do anything will make it worse. Instead of feeling blue all over because of your problems, remind yourselves that there are other people out there who face more serious, life-threatening problems compared to you.

Keep in mind that the only person who can help us is ourselves. Other people can only help make we feel better, but to overcome it completely is a task we are responsible for. If we love ourselves, we have to start helping ourselves.

“There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues.” - Washington Irving -

I used to think that tears are the ultimate symbol of one’s weakness - his inability to cope with conflicts and troubles at hand which prompted him to cry in helplessness. It took me well over a few years to realise that tears do not make one weak. In fact, the warm drops of water from the well of the eyes have the the power to make us stronger than we were.

Don’t be afraid to cry. When were born, the first thing we did was cry. There’s nothing to be ashamed of even if you were to shed tears in a crowd full of people. To be able to cry is already courage in itself and that is something that you should be proud of. At times when you feel at your lowest, bluest, crying will help you lift some weight off your shoulders.

Take my case for example. Back when I still insisted that tears are disgusting, I could not bring myself to look at the mirror, afraid to see my face marred with helpless tears trickling down my cheeks reddened by anger. I was overcome with self-hate; when I cry, it was always because I could not contain my anger and my feelings. Needless to say, I was extremely ugly everytime I cried back then. And not to mention exceptionally loud too. There was one time that I fell asleep crying.

That one time where I fell asleep made me realise something I never paid attention to before. After crying, I felt a lot better. My head felt lighter, and I could barely remember why I was so upset in the first place. Bundled with self motivation and a little research into the world of self-healing, I found out about the ultimate healing powers in tears.

Tears can lift your mood as they alleviate the veil of darkness we put over ourselves. I have now come to realise that even though crying does not solve anything (as many people like to quote), it does help make us feel better. If we simply keep everything to ourselves, pretending to be overly happy when thetruth is the complete opposite, it would be like driving ourselves to the brink of suicide.

The bottom line is: Do not be ashamed of your tears. Let it all out and when it’s over, you’ll feel better than ever.

Students are very much like pressure cookers - they open the lid and let people put stuff into them. And then, they apply pressure (or rather, ‘they’ are pressured) in order to cook the stuff in a relatively short timeframe. On the other hand,there are students who are similar to slow cookers; they take longer time to cook, but the end result is worth the wait. The effort. The energy and time taken. It makes patience a beautiful thing.

The above paragraph is an abstract from my private journal entry dated June 25, 2007.

I was feeling low and decided to browse through my handwritten journal entries. I almost forgot writing about it. Now that I recall, I was in the middle of a lecture when the idea came to mind. There are many types of learners in this world; they adopt styles that fit them best. Unfortunately, society where I love in does not think this way. Their view of a good, A-class student is a person who is hardworking, consistent, bookworm-ish, and polite and who rigidly plays by the rules: the no-nonsense kind of person.

There was a student who was thought as the type who poked fun at everything and was not serious in his studies. In the teachers’ opinion, he played and joked around all the time. They thought he never revised his lessons as he seemed to appear distracted most of the time in the classroom. Yes, he appeared disinterested but he never disturbed other students during lessons. When he aced in exam, they accused him of cheating.

Now, isn’t that scenario a bit too revolting? Whatever happened to individuality? Whatever happened to the famous statement ‘different person, different styles’? Having a flair for ‘having fun’ does not mean a student is not serious with his or her studies. Teachers (and other students) should not jump straight to conclusions. They should have at least talked to the aforementioned carefree student for information regarding his studies. Sometimes, one learns best on one’s own. In the case of the boy mentioned in above paragraph, he was actually the type of person who study diligently at home from 8pm until 1am every single day. It is only unfortunate that when his effort paid off, no one believed him, not even his teachers who were supposed to be his pillars of support.

In my opinion, a ‘good’ student does not refer to a student who follows everything his teacher said, nor does it refer to a student who follows the rule like a machine and sits somewhere in the corner immersed in a book or other reading materials (if not practice exam questions). A good student is a student who knows his goals -the term refers to a student who knows why he needs education, why he goes to school everyday and how he wants to lead his life in the future. A good student acknowledges what his teachers had done for him when he succeeds. Nowadays, there are many cases where when students ace in exam, they boast about their learning styles and the support they get from their parents. Teachers almost never came first on the list. However when students fail, they immediately put the blame on their subject teachers, accusing the poor teachers of not knowing how to teach properly, etc, etc.

Sad, isn’t it?