To truly understand the depth of what Obama’s win truly means to Americans and in particular American minorities (i.e. African Americans), this video of Rev. Jesse Jackson, tears streaming, in total awe of God’s mercy, lost for words as he digests Obama’s win sums it up: http://edition.cnn.com/video/ (search for “Jesse Jackson breaks down”).
I rooted for Obama not just because of hope or because I identify with some of the struggles he embodied: of equal rights of which as a feminist I believe in (and in another article I wrote of aligning my feminist ideals with Christianity), of faith, hopes and dreams (and it’s not a coincidence that my church is called the Dream Center either), and his conciliatory approach.
I look forward to Obama finally taking his place in the White House, despite the fact I am not an American.
Not because he’s the first African American president in the White House or that he’s bringing change.
But because he reaffirms me of God’s word, that all things are possible.
I’ve been invited to speak at FOSS.my 2008 which will be held on Nov 8-9 in APIIT. So if you’re a FOSS aficionado, or want to know more about FOSS, or if you’re a FOSSchix like me, do register for the event. I’ll be talking about Macs and/in Open Source.
While I was gone though, (well not really gone), but I’ve been mostly working and also building up MYCocoaHeads. Quite a nice change to see some new faces lately too. Also, MYCocoaHeads now has a new home at mycocoaheads.wordpress.com and also a Twitter account at twitter/mycocoaheads. So if you’re a MYCocoaHeads member, or want to know more about MYCocoaHeads, or if you’re a Mac/iPhone (or iPod touch in Malaysia for political correctness) developer, do feel free to join us and contribute. Have a topic to share? Let me know and I’ll include you in your monthly meetups (which is every 3rd Saturday of the month unless explicitly stated).
You don’t need to be a Cocoa developer to join MYCocoaHeads too — if you’re any sort of programmer doing programming work on the Mac platform, you’re welcome. And if you’re a (any-UNIX-variant)-based programmer or FOSS developer, feel free to join us too! Heck - if you can code, you’re welcome (but note to Windows/.NET developers, we probably won’t be able to help you out on Windows specific things though!)
So drop by both the FOSS.my events and MYCocoaHeads events and give us a shout. See y’all. G’day and Happy Diwali to all Hindu friends and readers out there!
P/S: side note - the downside of working in an international setting is that a public holiday is almost never really a holiday at all, cos someone from another country who’s not on holiday doesn’t know you’re holiday-ing… back to work from home for me.
Recently I had two not so pleasant online purchase encounters, from kikki-K and InformIT respectively.
The good news was, for both cases, the way the problems were resolved blew me away and left me more than impressed! And I think they deserve me waking up from my blogging hibernation to give them a shout-out.
Let’s begin with kikki-K. Kikki-K is an Swedish-inspired Australian stationery store, and happens to also be my favourite stationery store. (Yes I am such a stationery junkie I get my supplies shipped over from Australia instead of purchasing locally). Recently, I purchased my latest errr, “stationery restocking” and had it shipped over again. Alas, it never came. Either Australia Post or Pos Malaysia borked up the shipment.
So I wrote to kikki-K, and a nice lady by the name of Charlotte took up my case and offered to re-ship the items to me, this time with registered and insured mail. She was prompt, apologetic and understanding, and when the shipment finally arrived, I opened the nicely packed package to find this wonderfully beautiful handwritten note in it:
That of course, what with my disappointment already diffused, put a smile on my face for the whole day. Kudos, Charlotte and the folks at kikki-K!
Few days ago I had another unpleasant encounter, this time with InformIT. I wanted to purchase the e-Book version of Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 3rd Ed.
Unfortunately, when I tried to check out, InformIT refused to let me proceed, throwing up a cryptic-sounding error. I duly contacted customer service. To which they replied, “Sorry, we don’t ship to Malaysia”.
I replied back, arguing that I was just simply trying to purchase an e-Book where the shipping method is by digital download, not physical mail by air!
The reply came back as, “Please contact our UK office, they might be able to help you.” Contact UK office as in, land line telephone, international phone call to UK.
Enraged, I made a pretty nasty twitter about InformIT: here, here and here.
The next day, InformIT UK replied the same thing to me, saying they don’t ship to Malaysia, but why don’t I try their subscription-based digital library service called Safari. I was upset, because I didn’t want to pay subscription for a service in which I’m only going to use ONE book, and furthermore, I wanted a local, offline copy which I can search on.
What was unexpectedly pleasant though, was that InformIT had their own twitter page as well. And the person managing the twitter account saw my tweet and immediately sent me a twitter message back, offering to help me obtain the book. I replied back the necessary details, and after a few more email exchanges, I finally got a copy of the ebook with their sincerest apologies.
It was quite a pleasant surprise and a wonderful thing, that a little twitter from a relatively unknown me in the twitter-sphere, managed to catch the attention of InformIT so much so that they were willing to turn my bad experience around into a wonderful one. This is a first time I’ve had customer service over twitter, and most importantly, customer service where someone from the “offending company” went all out to assist me instead of me having to go all out to demand for proper assistance.
Good service calls for good reviews, so I retweeted good things about InformIT this time: here and here 
Thank you, Jamie at InformIT!
This is probably a show of how freakish I can be when it comes to classical music.
Or maybe a show on how observant (or not) I am.
Or maybe how much I can pay to irrelevant details sometimes.
Here is the “genre art” for Classical music, from iTunes 8’s latest feature, the Genre Grid View.
It’s the first two bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata Don’t believe me? Go and Google up sheet music of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
I know I am right for sure. Moonlight Sonata was once my signature song, so to speak.
