Christmas is upon us again, and I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all my family and friends the merriment of the holiday season! Have yourself a Merry Christmas! Like Charlie Brown, I may not have the most things to offer, nor am I the cheeriest of people during this time. But like good ol’ Charlie Brown, my wishes for you and yours are the most sincere and true from the bottom of my heart.

To me, it doesn’t matter what religion you practice or what your beliefs are. I hope everyone can agree that this is a time for “peace on earth, and good will to all men (and women)”!

Before the year ends, I hope to write a review of how 2006 has been for me! That’s when you might hear me complain, good grief!

I can strike one thing off my karma to-do list. On Wednesday night, I popped into the Irish Embassy where the Mesh Meetup was held and offered my personal apology to ProBlogger Darren Rowse. What most impressed me was Darren’s approachable personality and humble demeanor. I’ve read all about those qualities before, but to experience it is definitely a worthy learning experience to improve myself.

There were many others in attendance and I got to shoot the breeze with a few of the B5 Media founders, the Mesh conference founders, fellow bloggers (I met Tony Hung and will be reading his blogs more often!) and Web 2.0 enthusiasts. I fully intend to make the 2007 Mesh Conference to extend my involvement in the community. This little frog needs to climb out of its well once in a while and realize the sky is not just a small circle!

Well, I guess this would be the appropriate time to also announce that I’ve become a four-figure blogger in 2006. It’s really not that much and most of the pie were due to my investment blogging on Continue reading →

Earlier this month, I was approached by AOL Weblogsinc associate producer Sarah Gilbert to blog on BloggingStocks. BloggingStocks is a blog that obsessively follows the eight most followed stocks in the U.S. market. Now that the contracts are signed and my first post is up, I thought I’d share the good news with you!

How Did It Happen?
I discovered AOL’s new blogging venture early during its launch and wrote a post on my investment blog. Since Investorial (my investment editorial blog) was about investing / financial media information, I decided to keep tab on what I believe to be an emerging force for the industry. I answered a Craigslist ad in May — a call for investment bloggers by AOL. I applied and got a second look, submitted a few sample posts but the experience did not bear any fruitful results.

I kept reading BloggingStocks articles and being my very opinionated self, I wasn’t agreeing with how that they were delivering investment information. In particular, I had issues with one of their bloggers Sheldon Liber. But while I was giving my “harsh” constructive criticisms through the many comments on his posts, Sheldon contacted me numerous times for rebuttals. I stood by my assertions everytime but made sure I backed them up further. From those interactions, I knew that Sheldon is a really intelligent person and may have chosen his own way to express the information.

In retrospect, I believe Sheldon had a lot to do with my inclusion into the BloggingStocks roster! I am currently in the same team with him. And his writings have steadily improved while gaining popularity since our paths crossed. So I want to publicly thank Sheldon and Sarah for giving me a voice, and an opportunity to interact with fellow investors and blog readers out there! Continue reading →

Wow, I’ve gone two months without a post on this blog. My last one was dated May 29th, 2006. Lots of things have been happening so this is a catch-up post. Hopefully I’ll build up a new rhythm to incorporate into the new routine in my life, that allows for more frequent writing!

I’ve added a few new photo albums so be sure to check them out. Most of them were from my vacation back home (Timmins, Ontario) during the first week of July. Imagine when you meet your parents after a while and the first thing they say to you, is “Son, you’ve grown fat!”. How would that make you feel?”

Of course it doesn’t feel good, but it’s definitely the wake-up call that I needed. I tried to deny it, “But it’s only been 6 months since you last saw me!”. The reply was simple and brutal, “Yeah, but 6 months ago, you weren’t fat!”

It’s true! I hate to admit it but my tiny 5 foot 6 inches frame loves gravity to the tune of 178 pounds! I was self-conscious through-out my entire vacation and made sure that the first thing I did when I got back was to weigh myself! I’ve taken steps and set a goal to get back down to 155 pounds by the end of this year. That’s why I’ve signed up a membership with a near-by YMCA and making regular Continue reading →

I received the invitation from Dennis a month ago but was still fashionably late when the Saturday came around. It must be in my asian genes! The group was already drinking, eating Mary’s delicious appetiziers and chatting away when I showed up, but thankfully I wasn’t the last person!

The weather was simply magnificent. I wished all the summer days could have been like that – warm and bright with a gentle breeze. The food came and more were on the grill, and everybody was digging in to their heart’s content. I bet even retirement is not this good everyday.

The Main Event
Finally, we got down to the purpose of our gathering. Everybody had been trash talking and it was time to show your skills! Sheila had her poker hardcard (written on the back of a chewing gum package), and everybody was ready to ante up and start the poker tournament.

6 of us played 2 freeze-out sessions that night with Dan winning the first tournament. I dominated the second tournament and won that round. I was the first to bust out in the first round when I tried to catch Richard’s bluff. To my dismay, he showed 2 pairs and I didn’t catch my semi-bluff straight-draw. But redemption was mine in the second session when I knocked out Richard by catching my open-ended straight on the river. The poker gods were smiling on me. Continue reading →

We spent a lovely afternoon yesterday at Mirjana’s downtown condo. Mirjana and Svetlana has a really nice place that was right beside the Rogers Centre. I’ve put up the new photo album so you can see all the fun we had that afternoon!

There were lots of food, fabulous desserts, turkish coffee, and of course many laughs througout the day! It was a great day to just relax and enjoy with friends. Thanks for organizing this, Mirjana! We have to do this again soon!

I must say that I’m shocked at the way things have developed in the last 2 weeks. First, Blue Security gets heavily attacked by a heavyweight Russian spammer. Then, it defiantly restarted operation… until now.

BlueSecurity.com is now documenting its last days on its home page. I’ve re-posted their surrender here for you.

When we founded Blue Security in 2004, we believed that if we automated a way for users to rise up and exercise their rights under the CAN-SPAM Act, we could reduce the amount of spam on the Internet.

Over the past few months we were able to leverage the power of the Blue Community and convince top spammers responsible for sending over 25% of the world’s spam to comply with our users’ opt-out list. We were making real progress in eliminating spam from the lives of our users.

However, several leading spammers viewed this change as a strategic threat to their spam business. The week before last, these spammers launched a series of attacks against us, taking down hundreds of thousands of other websites via a massive Denial-of-Service attack and causing damage to ISPs, website owners and Internet users worldwide. They also began a relentless campaign of email intimidation against many members of the Blue Community.

After recovering from the attack, we determined that once we reactivated the Blue Community, spammers would resume their attacks. We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyber war through our continued operations.

As we cannot build the Blue Security business on the foundation we originally envisioned, we are discontinuing all of our anti-spam activities on your behalf and are exploring other, non spam-related avenues for our technological developments. As much as it saddens us, we believe this is the responsible thing to do.

You need not do anything as a result of this change. We will continue to protect your names and addresses and honor all privacy commitments we made to you.

We have concluded we should not take Blue Security to the full deployment stage we originally planned to achieve, but we are proud of what we have accomplished thus far as a young startup company.

We are extremely proud to have had the chance to work with such a devoted and dedicated community: thank you for the vote of confidence you gave us over the past few months as well as the particularly vocal support you have shown over the last two weeks.

We will be innovating and building our technology in new, other directions and will continue to give back to you, our Community.

Thank you for your support,

The Blue Security Team.

Has the Blue Security homepage been hacked? If not, then it may explain why my BlueFrog software has not been able to connect the past few days. When did they offically give up? I’m truly dissappointed that a good idea did not gain more traction. I want to add that I did not condone the methods that they employed to combat the spammer’s DOS attacks. Every war, even those on the internet, must have its casaulties and unfortunately, email users will still have to put up with spammers. That’s where I don’t like the message to end up being.

Update: Wired News seems to be the first of the major internet publications to write about this story too. They broke the news 4 hours before I made my surprised visit to Blue Security.

Update 2: As far as I can tell, Guardian Unlimited was the next one with their copy. I’m glad to feel that blogs can break stories with the best of them!

Sometimes I get the feeling that popular blog, Thought Mechanics, has more Canadian readers than Americans! Of course, this can be attributable to one of its bloggers, the famous musician Matthew Good. Matthew’s latest post is provoking some thoughts in my head, but not having received my census invitation yet, I don’t have a chance to apply some of the goofy, funny and ingenious ways to “minimally co-operate” with the mandatory 2006 Canadian census. More information and details can be found at CountMeOut.ca!

I believe that a census can be of use to the nation, but I can appreciate the sentiments of those who wish to protest in their own harmless way towards the outsourcing of the census data processing by US defense giant Lockheed Martin. If you received your census invitation, what would you do?

This is the first meme that I am featuring on this blog. A meme is an idea that is spread quickly among media and people alike. On some level, it resembles a chain letter (if the meme asks for you to pass the idea to someone else).

I chose this movie meme as it is non-intrusive, and engages people in a topic where I enjoy discussion. According to movie critic Roger Ebert, this are the 102 films you need to see before you can be considered “movie literate”. I also crossed out the movies I’ve seen!

1. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
2. “The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
3. “8 1/2? (1963) Federico Fellini
4. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
5. “Alien” (1979) Ridley Scott
6. “All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
7. “Annie Hall” (1977) Woody Allen
8. “Apocalypse Now” (1979) Francis Ford Coppola
9. “Bambi” (1942) Disney
10. “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
11. “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
12. “The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
13. “The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
14. “The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
15. “Blade Runner” (1982) Ridley Scott
16. “Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
17. “Blue Velvet” (1986) David Lynch
18. “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
19. “Breathless” (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
20. “Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
21. “Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
22. “Casablanca” (1942) Michael Curtiz
23. “Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
24. “Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
25. “Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
26. “Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
27. “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
28. “The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
29. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) Robert Wise
30. “Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
31. “Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
32. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
33. “Do the Right Thing” (1989) Spike Lee
34. “La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
35. “Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
36. “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
37. “Duck Soup” (1933) Leo McCarey
38. “E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) Steven Spielberg
39. “Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
40. “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) Irvin Kershner
41. “The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
42. “Fargo” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
43. “Fight Club” (1999) David Fincher
44. “Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
45. “The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
46. “The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
47. “Gone With the Wind” (1939) Victor Fleming
48. “GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
49. “The Graduate” (1967) Mike Nichols
50. “Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
51. “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
52. “Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
53. “It’s a Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
54. “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) Frank Capra
55. “Jaws” (1975) Steven Spielberg
56. “The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
57. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) David Lean
58. “M” (1931) Fritz Lang
59. “Mad Max 2? / “The Road Warrior” (1981) George Miller
60. “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) John Huston
61. “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
62. “Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
63. “Modern Times” (1936) Charles Chaplin
64. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
65. “Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
66. “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
67. “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
68. “North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
69. “Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
70. “On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
71. “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
72. “Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
73. “Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
74. “Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
75. “Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
76. “Pulp Fiction” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
77. “Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
78. “Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
79. “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) Nicholas Ray
80. “Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
81. “Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
82. “The Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
83. “Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
84. “The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
85. “Schindler’s List” (1993) Steven Spielberg
86. “The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
87. “The Seven Samurai” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
88. “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
89. “Some Like It Hot” (1959) Billy Wilder
90. “A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
91. “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
92. “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
93. “Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
94. “The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
95. “Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
96. “Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
97. “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) John Huston
98. “Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
99. “Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
100. “West Side Story” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
101. “The Wild Bunch” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
102. “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) Victor Fleming

My current movie literacy score is only 26/102. This will give me an excuse and a homework list to watch those other movies that I’m missing! However, I need to comment about the cultural bias that this list exhibits. Yes, the are works of Akira Kurosawa, but what about the early works of Ang Lee that are not represented at all? I will keep updating this list with any new developments. Would you like to share your movie literacy score base on this list?

BlueSecurity is an innovative way to give spammers a taste of their own medicine. I joined the network in hopes of reducing my spam one day. Many people have been critical about the idea; indicting BlueSecurity’s tactics as vigilante actions that border the edge of ethical practices. However, after reading a thorough intelligent evaluation of BlueSecurity, I was more convinced than ever that the movement will work.

BlueSecurity’s sevice can be summed up in three stages:

• creating a Do-Not-Email list through member participation
• finding and giving initial warning to spamming offenders that have spammed members
• sending one complaint for every subsequent re-offence (in my opinion, a fair response for a re-offence)

BlueSecurity is also making progress. They documented on their blog whenever a major spamming network that have agreed to comply with the Do-Not-Email list. However, other spammers are not as quick to admit defeat, or respect our wishes to be emailed. I received several emails today threatening to take agressive action against BlueSecurity. BlueSecurity identified that one major spammer was taking on a vendetta to discourage the anti-spam community. Here’s the email I received:

Hey,

You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com).

You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.

How do you make it stop?

Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity’s database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again.

We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result.

By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this.

Why are we doing this?

Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails.

It is hard not to sense the desperation in this spammer’s response.

BlueSecurity is hoping to do more than just deter spammers by letting them know that we won’t read their emails. In addition, Blue Security reports stock and securities-related junk E-mails to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and also reports sites that sell counterfeit software to the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

As of this writing, BlueSecurity.com is unaccessible. I guess this particular spammer is launching massive denial-of-service attacks on the site. I should also disclose that I have not seen a significant decrease to my spam level yet. Nobody said that this would be an easy war, but I hope more people can see through the short-term pain for the long-term gain.

Update: Just discovered that this incident was SlashDotted! Woot! Looks like I blogged the story before SlashDot!

More Update: BlueSecurity.com is back up and details the exploits of one desperate spammer’s (PharmaMaster) attempts to discourage the community.