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Today is the last day..

Finally, 2008 will end in a few more hours (GMT+8). Besides its being the end of 2008, today is the last day I’m at the current company.

The last time I have had the same feeling is about 2.5 years ago when I leave Infopro. As usual, the last working day is full of mixed feeling. Happy, relieved, joy, sad and excited of the challenges ahead.

In the past, old friends, ex-colleagues, tend to be forgotten due to the the hectic schedule and the new environment.  But thanks to social media like Facebook, we can always keep in touch virtually. Don’t you think Mark Zuckerberg is a great guy?

Oh yeah, welcome to my colleagues and peers who reached here from the farewell email. Only a handful of them know what I’m doing after working hours. Well, nothing special though. I’m just not feeling comfortable letting everyone know what I am doing. I prefer to stay under the radar.

Besides, this is how I enhance and polish my ‘rusty’ skills ever since I moved away from coding almost 2.5 years ago. The world and our environment remain competitive from day to another. So other than your day work skill, it’s best to acquire other skills that might be useful to you one day. Life is full of uncertainties, you never know what is going on even in the next 24 hours.

Undeniably, I gained a lot of experience within these 2 years. It is something that’s wonderful regardless good or bad. It exposes you to lots of things that you’ll appreciate in the next phase of your life. For instance, in terms of  career, working with a well known company is such a bonus. Use it as a stepping stone to move forward on a corporate ladder. And most importantly, be grateful of it. Avoid bashing attitude once you’re out from there.

New year means a new resolution. I have set mine unofficially, although some of last year’s resolution are still unfulfilled. In case if you’re like me, let’s put that aside. Some of it is no longer relevant nowadays.  Draft a new one that’s most suited to your desire and needs.

Happy new year 2009 and wishing all the best to everyone.

zaki 31 December 2008 personal , , 2 Comments

Beginner SEO guide - Learn from Google & SEO experts for free

Few weeks ago, I finished assisting a friend of mine setting up a new blog running on Wordpess. He was pretty much excited with the new blog. Just like any typical beginner bloggers (including me), he was ambitious to monetize his blog and earn income from there. Well, I said, go ahead.

A week later, he came back asking why he’s not getting a lot of visitors. So I told him the concept of indexing, SEO and webmaster tools such as Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Webmaster. He just nodded his head as usual. I thought it will stop there.

And then he came back again for another help, now he wanted to rank first on Google for certain ‘key phrase’ that his blog is focusing to. Now I almost fainted… lol.. actually  I’m chuckled.

Familiar with this type of people? I bet yes especially if you’re dealing with newbies. Not to turn him away, I ask him to do some homework.

To make the story short, I ask him to read Google’s SEO Started Guide. Sometimes, the best teacher is the inventor himself.

Apart from that,  Aaron Wall’s Blogger’s Guide to SEO is useful too. It’s among the first SEO guides that I read about 2 years ago, so this is a must. At the end of Aaron Wall’s guide above, he has generously put other SEO guide links that’s worth your reading too.

During my early days of doing this stuff, I’ve download a lot of tutorials and free e-book. After sorting out the best (not all),  I had put the collection of SEO tutorials & guides as well as the  keyword tool here, although I seldom use them nowadays.

These tutorials and guides only cover what SEO experts call on-site optimization, which is basically what we (as the website owners or also called webmasters) can control. Off site optimization is much harder (and important too) but that is on another post that I’ll cover for him later.

So before you shop for any SEO tutorials or ebooks, spend sometime googling it. Internet has whole lots of information. Happy SEOing your blog buddy.

zaki 31 December 2008 Internet, SEO & Webmaster , , , , 5 Comments

Shoe-throwing your Facebook’s friends

In case if you’re tired of throwing shoes at Bush, you can now throw it at your friends in Facebook. Although your friends are not ‘accusing’ someone to own weapon mass destruction for ‘evil’ purpose, but hey, it is all for fun.

Notes: Throwing shoes at your friends won’t make you a prisoner (unlike in Iraq). And for Malaysians, don’t worry, it won’t make you end up detained under ISA.. lol

throw_shoes

via

zaki 30 December 2008 socialize & media , , , 4 Comments

I wish I can write about entrepreneurship, open source & start-up

If you notice the surge of posts here lately, it is none other than because of I’ve tendered my resignation beginning early December. Yeah, I quit my job and currently serving 1 month notice (another month is to be compensated by new employer). It is a great relief, although only temporarily. I have more pleasure writing once I’d transitioned my tasks to the new hire and my peers (pity them), other than a more peaceful mind and feeling more energetic.

I’ll kick of 2009 with the new job (hope it’ll last longer) just few blocks away from my current office building. Expecting the fresh but bigger challenge plus new type of ‘headache’ . That’s what I called ‘job’ right?? Alright, but that is not what I want to write here (will be covered here soon hopefully).

During this ‘free time’, besides blogging, I discover a lot of things that I have no chance or being limited by time before. It’s fun. Above all, I’m reading quite a lot of things as the result of my eagerness  of subscribing RSS feed. To date, I’ve subscribed to 499 feeds,  increased drastically from around only 100 the month before. Feed reader is obviously very useful if you want to keep in sight with the websites you like/want to read.

Started from Le Web that I found via TechCrunch, I’m curious to know if we have similar event in Malaysia, although in smaller scale. From there, I came to know about Barcamp, Startup Camp, FOSS, OSCC which is the platform for software developers to get together, share and showcasing their solution which runs on open source. Although I do have a background in IT, but it mainly on enterprise solution runs on proprietary technology,so the me this concept of open source and start up is rather interesting.

Such site is really an eye opener to me when most of the time, I’m writing about giant tech companies which has been covered by most media. This is stack contrast to our own industry where such effort rarely gets the spot light on mainstream media or IT publication. Probably we’re lacking of Techcrunch alike sites covering Malaysian startup version.In case you’re new in this area like me,  Entrepreneurs.my is a good start, but lots more to catch-up.

In my experience of following numbers of local tech bloggers, rarely start-up & open source getting an attention except when there is event going on. Even myself used to missed it. What’s wrong? I admit that I’m not following them closely. And, have you ever read about that in mainstream media/mag??

I’m inspired to dig local start-up community an successful start-up after reading some of their achievement although my writing is far from perfect and lack of killer points.  I bet some of you already heard about Flavert, AIMS or Khailee.

Well, enough for now. So at the mean time, while I’m digging for more info, enjoy viewing this slide - about entrepreneurship and learning.

Employees Suck

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bookmooch magnatune)
Learning to Learn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: learning learn)
zaki 29 December 2008 Malaysia Inc , , 3 Comments

Our first DSLR camera- Canon EOS 1000D

So the ‘hunt‘ is over. We choose Canon EOS 1000D after reading reviews from the net,  gathering opinions from friends, calculate our own budget and also the kindness/helpfulness of the sales person.

Although I favor Nikon D60 over Canon EOS 1000D, but after considering my wife request that she want something that have Live View, so I end up with this. I almost buy Sony a300 if not a bad review by 1 sales person from Fotokem, although at the other hand,  she did provide not too good review about EOS 1000D (she politely asking me to get 450D instead, which is out of our budget)

I bought this camera from Canon Concept Shop at 1-Utama Shopping Mall, after testing kaw-kaw for almost 45 mins. The ‘auntie’ was nice and patiently showing us (who are noob) the features, when at the same time we pretend understand it so as not to look to dumb to her =)

Together with this camera, we got 4GB flash card, Canon EOS sling bag and tripod, which all totaled RM1990 (she said the other items is freebies). I know that this is not the best deal in the market (some more we bought it from Canon Concept shop itself), but since I wanted this badly before heading our hometown for family’s ‘Kenduri Selamat’  tomorrow, few ringgit different does not really matter (not really)

Stay tune for our first scenery photos  (hopefully soon) once I mastered this camera :) This price list should provide you an idea how much your DSLR of your choice is (especially to Topo)

PC270077

zaki 27 December 2008 Digital Photography , , , , , 14 Comments
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