Addicted

OMG, I'm addicted. TOTALLY addicted. I was invited by a 'good' friend and accepted cuz he said I only needed to accept the invitation but didn't really have to do anything after that. So, I did!
Man was that a bad move. Now I'm addicted. It took awhile before I tried it but when I did, I immediately got hooked. MAFIA WARS, that's what I'm talking about. Now I can't stop. I was playing some other games on Facebook as well before MW but now all of them are taking a back seat from MW. I used to log in to FB probably once or twice a week now I log in daily. This is not the first time. It was the same with the Blood games (for those who Facebooked since last year you'd know). I'm pretty sure the Blood games led Facebook to make some changes on the rules for game apps on FB (like limiting max 'friends' in game tasks/quests/jobs or whatever they're called in the games). Come to think about it, it may also be the reason that FB lagged so much when the Blood games were so 'hot'.
How far have I got in MW is still nothing much to shout about. I'm 70th in my family and at lvl 38... the top guy in my family is like lvl 300++ how'd he get to that lvl??? Doesn't he have anything else to do? Sadly, this is another reason that's gripping me to the game.
It's almost like an online RPG I guess. In the sense that players help each other out with jobs and collections and stuffs (for the record I'm not and online MPRPG player if that's the right acronym for it :p).
Whoa, a scary thought just came across my mind. The next super power in the world would be in control of the internet... and it may not even be a physical country?!? Something to explore next....

Earth Hour

I wonder if it's too late to be writing a blog on this. Hopefully the last minute boost in promoting this worldwide event will help a little (if there is any :p). What's Earth Hour? Earth Hour 2009 has been made into a global election between Earth and Global warming. How do we vote? With our fingers on our light switches. To vote for Earth, we just need to turn off our lights for one hour. It may not be a big thing to do but imagine millions of people in the world keeping all their lights off for 1 hour. That's a lot of energy saved. To know more about Earth Hour please visit the website : http://www.earthhour.org/home/
It's interesting to note that this year's target is going to be 1 billion. Starting from a humble 2.2million in Australia and now only in the 3rd year, they're targeting to have 1 billion people join this program. I suppose the point in this isn't just switching off the lights for 1 hour and saving that 1 hour of energy. The fact that we're working together to clear the way for a more sustainable future brings everyone together towards one single objective; saving our planet. I wonder if it's viable to expand that hour into an Earth Day, where everyone really goes back to basics and not use any energy besides their own physical strength (not for lighting though). Well, to everyone and anyone reading this, let's all join fingers and switch off our lights this Saturday 28th March 2009 at 830pm for 1 hour.

Recession...

Recession? We've been house hunting for months now and we haven't quite found the house that we like yet. Why "Recession?"? Well, Jenny and I have look at many houses, I didn't keep count but we looked at many. From so many houses that we looked at, we liked 3 houses. All three were taken before we were able to make up our minds. Hence, "recession?". The first one, we sure took our own sweet time to decide. Why wouldn't we? We weren't rushing to move into a new house, plus we're expecting property prices to drop. So anyways, that was a newer house (2 years old) so we thought maybe it's still hot for newer properties. Then we shifted our focus to slightly older houses (about 5 years) as I suppose they're off the radar of most 1st time home buyers, even upgraders. Saw 2 house that we like and wanted to view them again 2 weeks later because both Jenny and I were away. Alas, we were greeted with bad news for both houses. Again, "recession"? If you just look at these incidents, you wouldn't never have thought that Malaysia is experiencing a contracting economy. It's weird to know that jobs have been lost, profits have taken a dive and the share market has kaplunked. But still we weren't able to get the house that we like just because we're being cautious... :-s

House hunting

Jenny and I have been house hunting for quite a while now and still haven't been able to decide. In fact since before the lunar new year (to be politically correct, as one of my 'ol friend said to me before). New launches for the 'standard' 22x75 terrace/link houses are going for 400k and up these days. I'd say these prices are quite ridiculous as this would basically mean an average engineer would have to pay more than half of his salary for the mortgage payments. Don't tell me I have my facts wrong as I've checked the average figures on internet job sites. Why is this ridiculous? Of course it is! As far as I know, the basic loan approval criteria is that the mortgage repayments shouldn't be more than 1/3 of a person's monthly salary. What's the problem with that? you may ask... just get houses which are further away from the city, they're much more affordable. That's true, I won't argue with that. However, with our present state of public transport and highway congestions, how many would want and/or be willing to live so far away from their jobs? Well I do know of people who drive for hours each day just to get to and back from work. Well coming back to my point, I'll prefer getting a house nearer to work even if it means paying more. Sighs.
Add to that, the increasing fear of a looming recession gets my head spinning even more. What happens if I get a pay cut? What happens if either of us lose our jobs? What happens if the value of the house drops right after we buy it? (I guess this last point wouldn't really matter if we're going to live in it, but I'd feel that we've paid a higher price for it than we should have). I suppose in the end, it just depends on whether we like the place and whether we are able to afford it or not. For now, we're praying that we'll be able to make a decision, at the right time.