Founder of lesterchan.net, a Singapore tech and gadgets blog running since 2002. An engineering leader by day and a WordPress plugin developer since 2003, with a soft spot for gadgets, smart home, and a good deal.
A thought before bed: have you counted the monitors, televisions and computers in your household? For my family of four in a four-room HDB flat, my room alone holds one LCD TV, two LCD monitors and a desktop.
I'm a sucker for changelogs, documenting almost every change to my WordPress plugins, and I hope to bring that habit to this site too. It's been a month since lesterchan.net 3.0 launched, and along the way I've fixed many things.
I've used Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit for over a month now and I'm quite comfortable with it. Aside from the GUI, there's little change from Windows XP, but it supports DirectX 10. Just one Blue Screen so far.
My June 2008 site traffic stats: 7,080,355 hits, 623,724 pages and 152,955 visits from 102,765 unique sites, with about 23.3 million KBytes transferred over the month. A quieter month, though traffic still comfortably topped seven million hits.
I spoke on Developing Plugins for WordPress at the Singapore PHP User Group's June 2008 meetup on Wednesday, 18th June. It was my second time speaking there, after the December 2007 meetup covering the same topic.
OMFG! Blizzard has finally announced Diablo III. Two decades have passed since the demonic Prime Evils, Diablo, Mephisto and Baal, rampaged across Sanctuary to enslave humanity. For those who faced them directly, the memory of that horror still lingers vividly.
I really don't think this is a good idea. Lawyers and analysts say ICANN's vote to allow any word as a top-level domain will cause URL chaos. Whenever ICANN needs money, they'll launch new TLDs companies must buy.
I caught Wanted at GV VivoCity last night, a 109-minute film. It's pretty good, especially the visual effects, with plenty of bullet time and slow motion that I personally love. There's a nice twist near the end.
The Jason Bourne trilogy is one of the greatest of all time, easily on par with Lord of the Rings, so I can't wait for the fourth film. Producer Marshall told IESB that Bourne 4 will absolutely happen.
Gizmodo visited LEGO and wrote up everything you ever wanted to know. One gem: why are there always leftover pieces after building a castle set? Partly because some pieces are simply too small and light to matter much.
This Friday, 27th June 2008, will be Bill Gates' last day as a full-time Microsoft employee. Afterwards he'll focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's work in health, vaccines and education, though he remains chairman as the largest shareholder.
This article, from four days ago on Nokia Conversations, is worth a read. As they put it, now that it's officially launched, the Nokia E71 takes the crown as the most leaked product they've ever seen at Nokia.
After a month of weekends in my mystery shopper part-time job, it's time to blog and rant about it. Mystery shopping may sound nice, interesting and unique, which I'd have agreed at first, but totally disagree with now.
BBC News interviewed Bill Gates as he prepares to leave full-time work at Microsoft. Most of our competitors were very poorly run, he tells Fiona Bruce for The Money Programme; they didn't understand how to combine business and engineering expertise.
My mom just bought a new Samsung RT58EAMT refrigerator for the house, costing about S$915. Its 580-litre gross capacity dwarfs our previous Sanyo SR-37ZB. Still, no single fridge is ever big enough for all of my mom's baking supplies.
Thanks to WOM World for sending me my very first poster, featuring my nickname gamerz, shipped all the way from the UK by DHL. This will be my first poster to frame and proudly hang up in my room.
I was invited to Nokia Connection 2008, the annual event, this year on 16th and 17th June. The first day was at the Singapore Recreation Club, the second at Mandarin Oriental, with plenty of new Nokia announcements.
While doing our mystery shopper job at Lot 1, Li Xiang and I came across a PC shop and a game shop. I grabbed an old Xbox game, Capcom Fighting Evolution, assuming it'd be backward-compatible with my Xbox 360.
My dad's 10am Singapore Airlines flight to Vietnam departs today; he'll be there six months, returning around 17th December 2008, though he may pop back briefly after three. We reached the airport at 8am to see him off.
It looks exactly like the old iPhone, but it's much cheaper: US$199 for 8GB and US$299 for 16GB, around S$272 and S$408 respectively, though both require a two-year contract. The key difference is the addition of 3G.
Li Xiang bought a S$98 ticket to the Zhang Dong Liang, Nicholas Teo, concert, with a 10% SISTIC discount. Otherwise I think SISTIC ticketing is a rip-off; they've raised their surcharge from S$2 to S$3, on top of handling charges.
I've brought lesterchan.net's launch forward a few days, since I may be busy on the original date of 9th June 2008. After more than four years on the same layout, version 2.0 is finally replaced by version 3.0.