Laugh now. Laugh while you can because the Minister of Information, Communications, Culture and Arts will ban Twitter and Facebook tomorrow. Soon, say goodbye to tv, radio and newspapers also. Mobile phones might go too. These are all western inventions – very bad.

All of you who tweeted with the #yorais hashtag will be sent to prison (including those innocently asking “what is #yorais ah?”) and put on the receiving end of hard labour and a few strokes of the cane, one stroke for each tweet. That will teach you to drag Rais’ reputation through the twitter mud.

Wonder if the PM is in on it or is he having a word with Rais about thinking before talking.

One can only wonder if they had a chat or what in the world possessed Rais Yatim to make a statement like this. In any case, welcome to Malaysia. Hope your stay is a pleasant one. If you need room service, please send a smoke signal.

so-just-where-does-all-that-iphone-money-go

Now let’s look closer to home. Malaysians pay Maxis (the only telco offering the iPhone) US$714 for a 32GB iPhone 3Gs with a 1 year contract. Let’s assume Maxis pays Apple the same $550 per unit, Maxis still makes $164 just from selling you the phone and you pay the entire sum upfront, Maxis doesn’t have to subsidize a thing and they’ll make even more money from your voice and data plan. There is nothing to lose and all to gain for Maxis. Brilliant.

Did you say “This is so unfair. To think I’ve stayed with them all these years, through good reception and no reception and I get jack”? Well, if you’re the only player in the market, the rules are yours to dictate.

Want to pay nothing or close to it for a Maxis iPhone? Their corporate customers get the iPhone for free. So if you know anyone who’s a corporate customer, you can buy it off her for cheap or convince her to give it to you. Keep telling her it’s a bitch to type with a touch screen keypad – this is the bain of many new iphone owners in the first week of playing around with the device. With a hint of urgency in your voice, tell her to get rid of it (and give it to you) before technology becomes obsolete and she has to pay people to take it off her. Check ebay and she’ll see how many unsold first generation iphones there are. If she has no patience for touch screen, she won’t search ebay and will just take your word for it. Score! Congratulations and welcome to the iPhone owners club.

I dreamt last night that I discovered a way of coding subliminal messages into typography. When people look at the words using my typography (which looks very similar to the Museo font) they would instantly go into a hypnotic trance, absorbing every binoptic (the cousin of binaural) suggestion coming through their computer screens or TV. It was a brilliant idea that only I could think of.

I was making a killing selling my serif typography to global brands. One of them was a cola brand (no name shall be mentioned) who wanted people to believe that it should replace everyone’s water intake. But the binoptic suggestions in the code will only work through my fonts and in a specific point size which means the cola brand has to ditch their san serif bold typography and change their entire brand identity. Are they about to do it? Let’s see. Times are tough. Brand personality and brand values haven’t brought in the numbers, their foray into social media has landed the brand in hot soda causing global-scale backlash (they wished they could blame the agency but final approval did come from their own offices). The cola generation from ten years ago are now diabetic. And the new diet formula is using an ingredient that isn’t FDA approved (the public doesn’t know this yet). Sales is dropping . So? New typography it is.

Twitter introduced the list feature a few weeks ago and announced it on their blog on October 30. I saw it on my twitter profile some time around October 20 and was adding people to lists I’ve set up until it became tedious. Please excuse me if I have not gotten you into a list. I’ll get around to listing everyone soon.

I like that I can put the people I follow into lists so whenever I needed answers to technical question, I could look up my “geekeratti” list and tweet them, for example.  I would like it even more if I could send @ messages or DMs only to the people on one list. Can’t do it yet but until then, it’s still a good tagging system. If you’re unsure of what lists to create, perhaps I can help. Here’s what I have:

For people I think everyone should follow in October, they are in my @thechannelc/vip-october:

For people who would likely not add me back, I put them into my @thechannelc/follow-back-chance-is-nil:

BTW, Chris B is not on my follow list anymore but the tag I have set up for him is still there. I really don’t care whether he follows me back.

For people who usually don’t reply  tweets, I have them in my @thechannelc/doesnt-reply-tweets:

Lists can be a lot of fun. When you add someone to a list or two, it shows up on their profile. They can also see which of your list/s you’ve put them into:

And did you know you can add yourself to your own list?:

Finally, lists can be set to private and no one but you can see them. This is good if you want to create a private “pain-in-the-ass” or a “jerk” list.  Remember though that if someone who could make your life difficult is on the PITA list, triple check that it’s set to private.

This is a blog response to: Where have all the good people gone?

It doesn’t matter what your background is. In fact someone from a different background can bring new ideas or new ways of doing things that can often work out very well. I’ve seen successful engineers in marketing, accountants in HR, lawyers in publishing.

Look at Jeff Bezos who was a banker turned bookstore technopreneur. Closer to home, Tony Fernandes was a bean counter who went into music and then started an airline. Moral of the story, your foundation should be in finance. No I’m kidding. I believe success lies in their ability to see opportunities and have the balls to get out and do it. But don’t get ballsy unless you’re hired for a top job with “Chief” as a prefix. Ballsy junior execs are almost always shown the door. Exceeding expectations don’t work for you when you’re working for someone in your first job after college. That is why Bill Gates took his balls elsewhere and started Microsoft. He would have been sacked at Commodore for sure.

If you don’t have balls, never mind. As long as you’re related (by birth or marriage) to someone with balls or has a lot of money. You know, you’re lucky you’re in Malaysia. Here it’s often who you know, not what you know – if you want things to move fast. But to stay ahead, you will need to know your stuff or have the money to hire people who know their stuff (make sure they don’t have balls so you don’t have to worry about getting stabbed in the back).

OK, Shazali isn’t really an entrepreneur he’s a corporate general. Does the above apply? Hell yeah. Even though he didn’t startup Celcom with this own money, his job is still very challenging, he has to take Celcom forward – which is like steering QE2. You make one mistake, you can take forever and a day to make a u-turn. If there’s an iceberg straight ahead, all the very best to you. So it takes a lot of balls to tell everyone where the boat should be heading.

Change seems to be the buzzword this year. The magic ingredient for progress. I strongly believe the telco industry has to change the way they operate, how they serve their customers and who they hire for the job. If the industry hasn’t made progress or innovated in awhile, does it make sense to continue poaching from within? To me, what’s coming out has been pretty “sei pan”. Time for a change. While we’re at it, time for 4 day work weeks and more transparency in the workplace also. ©

We know everything can be hacked. I know a couple of guys who have got their hands on it.

I interviewed Neo and Morpheus a few years back in some dodgy hole in the wall they call their “setup”. Morpheus talked about how they were trying to make sense of the mess code named ‘The Matrix’. All the dead ends, power surges and a pain in the ass bug that duplicates itself into many forms and scattered all over the place. Rubbing his temple frequently and popping some blue-colored pill he continued, “there was one night Neo thought he had a cold and blew his nose and blood came forth. Neo was over-clocking his mind working on the code and his brain was melting through his nostrils. I made him ‘unplug’ for awhile. There was nothing else we can do but switch the run time routine to a walk time routine.” Fortunately, all was good a few minutes later and the code was hacked on schedule.

When the interview ended, Neo said something I will never forget “everything becomes open source eventually.” We all live in different worlds. My world is not the same as your world, well maybe a bit of it overlaps with yours and everyone else on this earth. So the guys are currently working on the video tutorial which will be up on YouTube soon. In it, you will find simple steps on how to hack the universe for the source code to your world.

©Carolyn

Related article: The End is Near

Robin Bloor is a twitter friend full of witty tweets. Follow @robinbloor for a good time.

Apparently there’s this Rahman Code that guides the selection of Prime Ministers in Malaysia. Nah, it’s just a coincidence. Right? I asked my muslim friends including Amir himself and was met with “What, you haven’t heard of this before?” Well no, seriously, I haven’t. Amir by the way gave a brilliant presentation at the recent Pecha Kucha Night in KL.

Now I’m wondering if there are more “codes” running the country. Enjoy the video, celebrate our filmmakers while they’re still alive (that’s Amir) and long live Najib.

What is Pecha Kucha Night?
Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds

‘Spring Lotus’ is the name of a very exquisite and expensive Imperial Soup. Have you heard of ‘The Buddha Jumps Over The Wall’ soup? The ‘Buddha Jumps..’ is the economy version, spin-offed from Spring Lotus Soup. Spring Lotus Soup takes one week to prepare and only by licensed chef after 20 years of practice. Lately, there’s been a lot of bogus Spring Lotus Soup chefs who claim they possess the original recipe passed down 14 generations ago from a grandmother.