Ping.sg is Now A Gaming Platform

Ping.sg has decided to concentrate on making the Singapore bloggers happy by changing our focus from a community meta blog to a community gaming platform for bloggers.

After working almost non-stop from 1:00AM to now, I’m proud to announce the first Ping.sg game since the change of direction of the site - “Whose Ping Is It Anyway?”

Try out the game now.

Related: Ping.sg Press Release

Felix Geisendörfer Meet

Just came back from one of the most interesting meetings in a while. I’ve just came back from meeting Felix Geisendörfer, one of the core contributors to CakePHP.

I’ve been following Felix’ blog for years now I think (since CakePHP beta days) and his blog is one of the most interesting blogs that I’ve followed. I confessed I’ve learned a lot of things from reading his blog. I learned that he was coming to Singapore a few weeks ago and I contacted him to schedule a meet up.

The meet up was really interesting and inspiring. Thanks to Michael Cheng, for inviting the Singapore PHP User Groups members over as well.

After the dinner session and a lot of chats with him and other attendees, Felix presented one of his projects, Posttask and demonstrated some of features of jQuery. I haven’t been checking out stuffs much these days due to my work (I guess I will need to reduce my workload, or learn to procrastinate less. Much less.) and in his brief introduction, I’ve decided to pick up jQuery and probably switch from Prototype (picked up during early CakePHP days) to jQuery soon.

Interesting stuff, like Felix today, I better get working on Widgeous soon so that it can be shown to Felix this coming Friday.

Thanks also to Michael Lim, who has shared a lot of interesting stuffs with me, especially Adobe Flex and Capistrano.

uzyn.com Relaunched: Goodbye Wordpress, Hello Chyrp

uzyn.com is back. After quite a long hiatus.

I’ve been wanting to ditch Wordpress for quite awhile, for its bloat and its complicatedness but haven’t been able to find something simple but does not lack in essential blogging requirements/features. At a point in time, I even wanted to write my own blog engine, a simple one, but considering my current workload, that is definitely out of the question.

Until a few days ago, I discovered Chyrp. Chyrp is lightweight, yet very extensible and complete. The bare installation does not even have a commenting system, which makes a lot of sense because some blogs do not require commenting system at all. The goodness of Chyrp comes mainly in this extension - Tumblr Pack - with the installation of the feather, now you get to post not just usual blog but other types of content similar to a Tumblelog. There are more extensions available and I have yet to explore them all.

I will also be playing around with Chyrp over the next couple of days and further customize this blog. But so far, I would say Chyrp is the right blogging platform for me for now simply because of its lightweight.

Simple is right.

Clear The Webs

This blog hasn’t been updated for months. It’s a shame.

Time to clear away the webs (spider-, not WW-) and give this blog a facelift.

I’ve decided to relaunch this blog in about a week. With the new design, I’m sure that I will get back to frequent blogging again.

Overwhelmed - Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Realized that I haven’t been blogging much about myself for awhile now. The main culprit would be microblog (twitter). Ever since I started microblogging, I have been putting my thoughts on things at the moment directly to my Twitter and would not have kept it to blog when I have the time.

Another reason for my lack of blogging would also due to my work. Yes, I am busy, so are a lot of us. But more than busy, I am getting rather overwhelmed with my work and to-be-made decisions. If you have been emailing me about freelance work, you would know that I have stopped accepting freelance projects for a few months now at least for the time being as I am currently involved in a few long-term projects and also managing my startups.

Everyday, there are more tasks that I insert, or pull from yesterday’s, onto my to-do list than I can complete them. There are just too much work for me to handle everyday, and that’s also after I have totally taken out hobby (poker) from my routine. I have stopped playing poker for more than a month now, online or otherwise.

Besides tasks and work, recently I have also been thinking a lot about decisions that I have to make for my startups. Should I take on this expansion path, should the business be taking on this marketing plan, should I consider taking in investments, should I spend my limited coding time to implement this. There are simply too many decisions to be made recently and with my easily-worried attitude, I get overwhelmed sometimes trying to organize my thoughts.

Recently, more often than not, I find myself starting on a task, working on it, only to be switched over to another task about 3 minutes into the earlier one. The same would happen on the 2nd task as well, and so on.

Maybe I am involved in too many things now, maybe I am not. I know a lot of people are involved in more things than I am and yet they can still remain pretty organized.

Anyway, I will be taking a month of non-pay leave from one of my jobs to catch up on things, especially for those on my businesses. Most importantly, in that one month, with one-less commitment, I hope I am also able to think more clearly and make good crucial decisions and plans.

I have been really lucky to have really understanding bosses. They have not only been extremely understanding of my situation and my involvement in my startups, they have also been lending helping hands as much as they could to aid me. I would also like to thank them for being so nice and understanding.