Looks like I’ll be getting my own domain in a jiff. No more blogspot, wordpress and such.

It’s like after many years of deliberation and such, I’ve finally decided to jump onto the bandwagon and do it.

Setup an account at dreamhost.com. Picked dreamhost.com because I liked its cutesy interface and design. Compared to the other available ones, didn’t feel that dreamhost is too scammish

Thought it was quite good because it had unlimited domain and bandwidth. Which means I can setup different websites and shift all my company websites to the same host.

Currently I’m paying like $100 per year per domain and I have like 3 domains. Super expensive. And now, when I consolidate everything into one, I get to save like 60% of my costs cause dreamhost costs like $9.95usd / month.

Heh and the best part of it all, I discovered the best dreamhost coupon for myself: DH50PLUS3

This one gives $50 Usd off for first year and 3 free lifetime domains. In other words, when I sign up of dreamhost, instead of paying $119.40 ($9.95 * 12), I pay only $69.40 and I get 3 domain names free. Super huge savings. Of course I’m high heh.

And since the US dollar is dropping against the Singapore dollar, I’m paying say only around $100 sgd for the first year. (And all these for UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH AND STUFF). After the first year, I pay only around SGD$14 / month. Thank God I didn’t sign up for clever.com.sg’s plan (yes I got interested in it cause of its name) as SGD$14 only gives me LIMITED bandwidth and I can only host 2 websites on it.

If you’re like me, and you’re looking for a good, reliable host for your website. You can try dreamhost.com and please remember to use the coupon to get your discounts: DH50PLUS3

Till my next update!

Being da boss means:

• Having the ability to use people.
• Being able to learn things faster than people.
• Having stronger will power than the rest.
• Being able to hold your own integrity while you enforce it on the rest.
• Being clairvoyant and see the future.

Just some insights that I got out today when the company got into some problems with the equipment and the only person who could learn to solve it fast enough, who was resourceful to think of the solution fast enough was da boss.

Aye guys, I’m offering a 30 free prints for the first 50

sign ups. Check it out here!

Been trying out the different modes of marketing to see which one works best for the nature of the business. Come come join us!

Printeet.com gone live!

We are in business.

It is these few days that I started to realise that I have a relentless list of to-dos that continuously exists to bug me. I just had a realisation that everything I do, everything I need to do, everything I want to do and everything that I might have to do all constitutes to this huge to-do list in my life.

Dry cleaning the clothes, updating the blog, exercising, preparing for meetings, doing posters, going to see the dentist, cutting my hair, going out with friends, planning for cambodia trip, getting in touch with the photo printing pple.. yada yada yada.

What I really need is a good to-do management system where I can immediately jot down the to-do when it pops into my mind and then make sure that I have a system that can help me follow up on these to-dos.Right now, I’m relegating it to many post-its stuck onto my office wall, scribblings in my organiser, post-its for home to-do’s stuck on the door of my walk in closet and  for those really impromptu to-dos, I put it as a reminder on my handphone. Other than that, I’ll open web browsers and windows, keeping them open and I’ll attend to them when I’m free (and they automatically get ignored when my comp crashes ). There’s simply just to many to-dos to remember and kill that I get lost in them sometimes.

For TDM, we manage our to-dos by putting it in a to-do list such as basecamp. But ultimately, people get lazy updating these to-dos. In human psychology, in order to entice or encourage a person to do a certain task, that task has to be as fuss free as possible, with clear instructions and tangible next step. These are the great kinds of to-dos that people love and will kill effectively.

A web2.0 webapp idea – anyone, feel free to take and develop it. If you’re done with it, let me know, I’ll be your first user:

1. To-Do list with deadlines.
2. Allowing the consumer to rank with a 2 axis comparison. Important, urgent, non urgent, non important. We can drag a task here and there in the chart to re-rank the priority of the task.
3. Teach the consumer how to differentiate between a good task to do and a bad task to do.
4. SMS updates to the to-do list. Cause when to-dos pop up, we might not always be with a computer.
5. SMS reminders for important deadlines of to-dos. Perhaps it could be chargeable system, ie we can set the service to sms us our to-dos if we haven’t finished the to-do with the deadlines. And each sms is charged at 10cents each. This will be a great incentive for us to kill our to-dos before the sms is sent out.
6. Printable To-do list of what we have entered on the system. IE, nicely formatted todo list that we can use a traditional pen to tick off the list.
7. Shared To-Do lists! IE, a certain To-do can be shared amongst your friends and that To-Do can be killed the moment any of the stakeholders have done it! For eg. sending the clothes to the dry cleaner is a shared to-do between my boyfriend and I. If he does send the clothes to the cleaner and checks the shared to-do, my to-do is immediately killed! (And of course I get to track it)
8. A tracking and report of the efficiency and efficacy in killing to-dos. Ie, how far apart from the deadline set did you kill the to-do. Is the to-do important, or unimportant etc.
9. A repository of suggestions of to-do categories for users to choose from. Something like an inflated tagging system.
10. Last but not the least, downloadable and syncable with calendar programs and handheld devices.

Just a quick top 10 wants for my to-do list.

Just thought that this would make an interesting food for thought entry on the good, bad and ugly of working in a family business.

Good

• You get flexibility in the work timings.
• You get to see your family around you as everyone works as a team to forward the company.
• You get several perks like the car, free lunches and direct interaction with the major clients in the company
• You get to go on business trips aplenty as a representative of the company.

Bad

• Unrealistic expectations from the patriarch and matriarch like how you’re expected to know everything cause you’re the “brilliant kid” in your parent’s eyes.
• Pressure to excel much more than the average John and Jane doe.
• Doing the jobs where no man will venture. IE, if your staff decides to default on the job, you have to come in and play.
• Not having the choice of doing what you really want.

Ugly

• Seriously, you have not much choice in dictating what you really want to do and you get thrown responsibilities at the whims and fancy of the boss.
• Family nuances can too often come into play.
• And you can’t quit.

It’s a love hate relationship and sometimes I do get tired. The above is not indicative of all family businesses but just the one that I am in.

Acknowledge the situation and change it. That’s the advice I have to myself.

I’ve been scouting around for my paper suppliers and I must tell you, it has been a super horrific experience. It almost seemed to me that there are no paper merchants in Singapore as I was only greeted by less than 5 legitimate paper merchants in Google. Not to mention that out of these 5, I am already purchasing from 2 of them.

I need paper! So what did I do? I decided to go the traditional way and source from YellowPages (Singapore). I input the word “Paper”. I was excited cause the teaser header said “200+ results”. However my anticipation was met with a sore disappointment. I was brought to 200+ entries of ….

“Joss Paper”.

The search at Yellow Pages isn’t exactly very intuitive I would say. I couldn’t find the paper I needed. I tried Paper Products, I was brought to toilet rolls and plastic products. I tried Printing Paper and I was brought to printing presses and paper bags. This is getting absurd.

Until I finally figured out the keyword: Paper Distributor

I was extremely happy as there were a sizeable amount of results until…

Yes you guessed it. It was a complete listing of paper distributor companies that didn’t have any more information other than their company name, telephone and fax. Am I going to be going through the whole list just to get what I want? Don’t they have like a website or something that I can easily extract some information? I called one, that was close to my office, up. Really excited cause that office was within walking distance… Only to hear that they sell…

“Waste Paper”

I felt that I have been led through a merry go round chase. Urgh. I continued ploughing through the list and realised that most paper companies don’t even have a simple website! Even those that listed their sites had defunct links. I googled, Yahoo-ed, dog-piled their names only to be appalled by the lack of web representation by these companies.

Oh my god.

It was only in the end, it was by some fluke googling that I found the paper merchants association in Singapore. (now how would one even know that there’s such an association in the first place. We don’t know what we don’t know. I didn’t know that paper distributors are known as paper merchants, it was only after this experience that I found out) I clicked on it and found 1 guy who was relatively near my office and had a website. I visited it. Great! The links are working, albeit the whole website was made up of stitched up Jpeg files. But I found what I needed to find. He stocked the kind of paper I wanted so I made the phone call and am now going to meet the salesperson.

See how one website makes the difference? Especially in this day and time where the younger ones are going to be taking over the business and the older ones are retiring. Really having even a page summarising or stating what you have will help your company a lot!

If you’re a traditional bricks and mortar company, go get a website! You already know how essential it is to stay competitve in today’s world.

If you’re a budding web design firm, come up with packages, cheap ones for these people to take up. Let them put a few pictures, list down their products and location. Get a nice looking email. And fax these packages to them from the emails listed in Yellow Pages. Put these packages in the fax!

Trust me, people read the faxes and the best way to get their attention is to fax such packages to them. Nothing interests my colleagues more than the packages that web design companies send over. Not so much of collaterals that says “Hi, we are a web design company, come look for us.”

Try  it

I do notice that I haven’t blogged at this space for the longest time ever.

Most of it is due to the sheer fact that I was confused on how I could reposition this blog with respect to my blogspot and xanga blogs now that I am done with my technical postings for a little while. Nonetheless, I have decided that I will be focusing my efforts on my entrepreneurship journey here.

What entrepreneurship one may ask? I’m currently developing a mini high-tech product under the umbrella of my family business and I am doing it solo at the moment. My feng shui for the year reads that I should be working alone as the year of the boar is not too conducive for team environments in my case, that’s why I’m going solo.

Yeah right.

There are many reasons, the pros and cons as to why I am doing it this way and I will talk about them in my future postings.

This wordpress will document all my thoughts on starting out this business, working through a product and bringing it live. It will also contain my lessons and the things I learn, both the hard way and soft way into this space. While you’re here, I intend that you will derive as much value as possible from my experience and be able to bring this repository of knowledge with you into your own entrepreneurial endeavours.

This is a step-by-step guide for people who want to manually set up an OLSR Network but do not want to use available firmware such as Freifunk or what-a-mesh.

1) Prepare your router. As usual, you need some kinds of basic configuration for your routers. I followed: Krishna’s AODV guide – Device Configuration:

nvram set lan_ifname=vlan0
nvram unset lan_ifnames
nvram set wifi_ifname=eth1
nvram commit
nvram set wifi_proto=static
nvram set wifi_ipaddr=<adhoc IP address>
nvram set wifi_netmask=<netmask>
nvram set wl0_mode=sta
nvram set wl0_infra=0
nvram set wl0_ssid=<adhoc essid>
nvram commit

The above commands will break the br0 (default bridge that connected the vlan0, vlan1 and eth1). If you don’t break it, you cannot run OLSR, or rather I tried running OLSR with the bridge on, but it doesn’t work.

Remember, your wifi_ipaddr AND your lan_ipaddr has to be on different subnets. (If you’re not sure about subnetting, I would recommend you to google and learn about it first before attempting this OLSR) How to change lan and wifi address the easy way? Open your webbrowser and type in “192.168.1.1″ (assuming that your lan IP address and wifi ipaddress have never been changed before, else just type in one of those addresses)

2) Load your OLSR module.

• Connect your router to the internet
• Go to the webinterface and look for installed software.
• Look for OLSRD. You only need that.
• Click install.

OLSR will automatically install on your router.

3) Configure your OLSR configuration files. The configuration was referenced from the Howto on the openwrt wiki.

1. SSH (telnet or putty in) into the router. If you haven’t changed the user name and pass, they are: Username = root , passwd = admin.
2. Type vi /etc/olsrd.conf to edit the configuration file. Vi is a text editor and quite tricky to use. I suggest that you do available vi tutorials online.
3. Under the olsrd.conf file, look for “Interface”. You can look for this by typing “/Interface” and hit enter. (Assuming you’re using vi). Add in your wireless interface. IE, the interface on your router that refers to the wireless components. For me, it’s eth1. Check your router’s specifications if you’re not sure.
4. Add forwarding rules to your /etc/firewall.user. Forwarding rules refer to rules that allow your router to forward packets from one place to another. You can follow the rules in the howto. I’ve verified that they work.
5. If you have wired hosts connected to your routers, remember to add the network_ip and netmask in to the hna4 field within the olsrd.conf file. For example, my lan network is 192.168.10.1/24 and all my connected clients will get an ipaddr of 192.168.10.x (where x is between 1 and 255, excluding the 1 and 255). Hence I will enter 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0 in my hna4 field.

Save the above settings. (In vi it’s the following key sequence to save: “ESC”, “shift+:”, “x” and then hit enter. Reboot your router (or restart olsrd) and your olsr node is set up!

You will be able to ping from a connected client on one router to another connected client on the other router. For eg, I can ping from wired client  (ip 192.168.1.123) of r1 (r1’s wifi = 192.168.0.1) to wired client (ip 192.168.2.123) of r2 (r2’s wifi = 192.168.0.2). If you can’t ping, make sure that your computers are not running any firewalls and you have set your router’s firewall rules to forward packets.

Tadah. You have your own OLSR mesh. Yummy.

This came quite unexpected as I kind of slacked off in my dream recall exercise since the 2nd dream log. Well what happened was this morning, I fell asleep after I woke up at 8am. I was in a fairly conscious mode. I started to dream of my current home and that it is in its pre-movein state. The rooms were empty and there were no lights. Suddenly a consciousness kicked in and said, “Hey, this can’t be true, I have already moved in!”. I was so bloody happy and suddenly my world started to twirl around me. I knew I was going to wake up, so I did what the dream forums recommended, and that was to open my arms and spin on the spot. I felt myself being drawn back into the dream.

It was great and I kept telling myself, “this is a dream, this is a dream”. Suddenly, Luyee popped by and I decided to explore something with her. There was a “Victoria’s Secret” castle that had play stuff in it. I flew in and then Qiuju popped by. I knew I cannot jump out of the castle because I will definitely wake up. So I decided to walk upside down while holding her hand and that feeling was just amazing!

However, the lucidity was lost soon after as I left the castle. Luyee turned into my mom and it seemed pretty normal to my logical mind that I am awake. I asked myself, so am I awake? My mom prodded me and I felt pain. (didn’t know that the pain test fails for me) And I fell back into my dream state.

The rest of the dreams? I saw a super bloated Frank (da frank) and he was telling me he liked me and kept trying to hug and kiss me. But I was faithful to The Boyfriend and I kicked his ass out of the classroom. Then I told da frank that if it happened before I went to the US, it might have worked out. Then he replied, well, I was much fatter then and he himself was more eligible then. Wow. I just told him to scram off. Then I went back to my classroom and made friends with the Indian girls there.

And then I woke up. This is so exciting. LUCID DREAMING IS FUN!