Q: How many people it took to change a light bulb?
A: One Electrical Engineer, One Material Engineer, One Computer Engineer, and One Business Developer. *haiz*

There are many ways to save on international calls. The easiest way is of course to pick up your mobile phone and call 001-country code-phone number. But that is suicide on your phone expenses to say the least. The most common way for people I know in Singapore to call back home is to buy calling cards, those $10-value that are sold at $8, from whatever provider there are in Singapore. They are much much cheaper, some going as low as 5¢ per minute for a reasonable quality. I think you can get 2-3¢ per minute, but the sound quality will be bad, there will probably be echo and a certain noticeable delay.

One thing I hate about calling cards are I have to type in a lengthy 20-digit code every time I want to call back home, not to mention you'll have another set of 20-digit code once you've gotten a new calling card. I have been using FutureTel for many years, simply because they offer a post-paid scheme for the same price as their calling cards, which stands at 8.33¢ per minute to Jakarta land line phones. The quality has been very good thus far, and I only need to enter a six-digit PIN that doesn't change every time I call.

Lately, I have been trying out Skype to call back home, simply because it's cheaper, as well as I can sit in front of my computer, multi-tasking while calling back home. As the screen shot above shows, I tend to call home for about an hour every time, about once every one or two weeks, and that's a lot of time spent to hold a phone to my ear. Skype's rate for calling Jakarta land line phones are about 7¢ per minute, depends on how much your credit card bank charges you for EUR (or USD) to SGD conversion rate. The sound quality are as good as what I get with FutureTel, with the added bonus of having a slightly cheaper rate, being able to multi-task, and to use my PC headset (which means I don't need to hold a phone to my ear for an hour)

Anyone else here uses Skype to call back home?

Today I took 502 again from office home, and this time I noticed the exact bus number. The one I'm supposed to take is either 502 or 502B, and not 502A. Apparently yesterday I took 502A.

On a totally unrelated note, bus fare in Singapore will go up between one to two cents from October 1.

Currently listening to: itong maen piano

About 7+pm Singapore time, there was an earthquake in Bengkulu province. I was having my dinner and I didn't feel anything. At 7.46pm, someone sms-ed me telling me there was an earthquake. I checked with my parents, but they said they didn't feel anything. Well, I guess it's good that nothing happened.

They were wary about the possibility of another tsunami, but until now I haven't read any further news on that, so I guess we're safe.

Powerful quake strikes Indonesia (CNN)
Singapore buildings sway after strong quake hits Indonesia (Channel News Asia)
BMG: Kepastian Tsunami Diketahui Pukul 20.00 WIB (Liputan 6)

On a totally unrelated side-post, we are no longer allowed to give money to beggars in Jakarta, or you will be fined between Rp. 10,000 to Rp. 20 million. (about S$1.60 to S$3,232) What do you think about this new regulation?

Currently feeling: confused

I proud myself to be an advanced Windows user (and a dummy in Mac still ), but time and again I found new features in Windows or Office that I never knew. This time round is a feature in PowerPoint called Slide Master. All the years, when I wanted to adjust positions of a textbox in ALL the slides, be it the header or the body, I would have done it manually, dragging the box to the desired place. It'll be easy if I hadn't started typing away texts into those boxes and creating many slides. But more of than not, textbox alignment are desired only after you have lots of texts, and manually adjusting the position and alignments of textboxes in ALL the slides is simply a mundane task, depending on how many slides you have.


How to access Slide Master feature in PowerPoint 2007

To access this feature in PowerPoint 2007, go to View and then click on Slide Master. A new Ribbon tab will be displayed on the left of Home tab, appropriately called Slide Master. Here you can adjust the slide master as you wish, and when you close the Master View, the adjustment you've made will be applied to all the slides using that Master. You can have multiple Master in one PowerPoint slide (caveat: Only PowerPoint 2002 and above). Consider that as having multiple templates in a slide.

Now, let me bring you can a few days back in time on how I found out this "new" feature. I needed to create a PowerPoint slide a couple of days back, and since I was using my Mac at that time, I decided to try out Apple's latest iWork '08. You can download their 30-days trial for free. It came with Pages (similar to Word), Numbers (you guess it, similar to Excel), and Keynote (similar to PowerPoint). The download was blazing over 600KB/sec, so it took me less than 15 minutes for that 470 MB package. After I installed them, I nose dived into Keynote to create my presentation. Now the fun begins. As I was still figuring out how to use Keynote, I had no choice but to randomly click on anything that looks like a button that I can click that has a label resembles what I am trying to do. Hey, that's what you do when you have no idea of a new piece of software, no? This is when I was introduced to this new concept of Masters.


Masters in Keynote

Obviously, when I am back to Windows to refine my presentation (after all, this presentation will be run using a Windows machine, so I have to make sure that it runs fine in Windows. Luckily I did, as many of the fonts I used in Mac was not available in Windows, and my presentation looks awful at best), I looked out for a button that has the word "Master" in it. It was easy to guess, it's a view, so I headed to View tab, and there you go, big button called Slide Master. If only I had known this feature long time ago, it would have saved me countless hours refining my presentation manually, and I hope that you don't have to suffer similar fate if you need to create some presentation in the future

Sometimes we make it harder than it is
We'll take a perfect night
And fill it up with words we don't mean
Dark sides best unseen
And we wonder why we're feeling this way.

Sometimes I wonder if we really feel the same
Why we can be unkind
Questioning the strongest of hearts
That's when we must start
Believing in the one thing that has gotten us this far.

Chorus
That's what love is for
To help us through it
That's what love is for
Nothing else can do it.
Melt our defenses
Bring us back to our senses
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that's what love is for.

Sometimes I see you
And you don't know I am there
And I'm washed away by emotions
I hold deep down inside
Getting stronger with time
It's living through the fire
And holding on we find

Chorus

Believing in the one thing
That has gotten us this far
That's what love is for
To help us through it
That's what love is for
Nothing else can do it.
Round off the edges
Talk us down from the ledges
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that's what love is for

That's what love is for.
That's what love is for
Melt our defenses
Bring us back to our senses
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that's what love is for.
That's what love is for.
That's what love is for.
That's what love is for.

Currently feeling: busy

Just feeling lazy at home over the past couple of days. I do have lots of things to attend to, I have at least five priority-2 tasks to be completed, and one priority-1 task, but I just can't seem to find the mood the past few days to clear them out. Reached back home, just browsing around, read news again, again, and again. Check my email again, again, and again. No, I've not gone that far as to browse each and every single person's profile in Friendster or every videos there are in YouTube like the one besides me often does :p

Tomorrow is Friday, maybe finally I'll get some mood to clear out those never-seem-to-get-done tasks. At least if I can complete one to two of them, that'll be great.

The past few days have also seen me gone to bed half-an-hour earlier, and I hope it's not a coincidence that I don't feel that sleepy anymore in office. Maybe it's not the lunch after all, maybe I just don't have enough sleep during the night.

Currently listening to: Aku makin cinta for the umpteenth times
Currently feeling: lazy