Are you being plagiarised?

In this day and age, almost all forms of content are available online and it's easy for plagiarism to run amok.

Copyscape provides an interesting proposition. Simply enter your website or page URL and it'll search through the web for similar content and matches.

Essentially, you will be shown a list (if any) of webpages that have a high number of matching content and text to your site.

Progressive breaks

I find myself listening to a lot of be progressive breaks recently on Proton Radio. Somehow, the *dum tsk dum tsk* helps me focus better at work.

Friday night hangout

Made a couple of friends playing ball at the Southern Playground at Wan Chai. One of them, Karl, an American-born Chinese from L.A brought me to Swindlers on friday night. The place is a small little pub by Lockhart Road on the *ahem* slightly dodgy end of Wan Chai.

It was one of the few pubs in Wan Chai with a live band and boy, were they were amazing. It's not so surprising that they were Filipinos, Hong Kong is after all, swimming with them (pun intended). The music was a mix of heavy rock and some mainstream stuff. Crowd was mainly Caucasian with some locals and the food and beer were great and pretty decently priced.

Definitely a place to go again just to kick back and chill.

Typhoon Shelter Crab

I never used to like crabs that much. My girlfriend loves them. But after trying the spicy crab at Causeway Bay (Place is called Under Bridge Spicy Crab - Canal/Lockhart Road), I am a convert. Served dry with a mountain-load of garlic, my mouth is watering just thinking about it.

The essentials

Some of the things keeping me sane in Hong Kong:

1. Playstation Portable - Playing NBA Live 09 and Winning Eleven

2. iPhone - It's first generation but it works great. Other than for calls and texting, I use it for music, games and watching shows on the MTR. Current playing Futurama Season 3 (I'm a big TV fan)

3. iMAC - I use it download stuff and watch shows. I'm currently watching 30 Rock. Tina Fey is simply brilliant and Alex Baldwin is at his best. Also all the big NBA games (Anything with the Lakers, Cavs or Heat).

4. Gym - It's great that my apartment has a gym available. I'm too lazy to actually have to travel to one. There's also a pool and I'm looking forward to using it come Summer.

5. Basketball - There's a huge basketball court (its actually 4 full courts) at the Southern playground in Wan Chai about 5 mins walk from my apartment. I've made a couple of friends playing there already. Downside is that it's always packed.

6. Church - Went to a nice church last week called Community Church Hong Kong. Will be trying out another church tomorrow and decide which one I want to attend regularly.

Panic button on Gmail

Ever sent a message on Gmail and then immediately wished you didn't? Or forgot to include the attachment?

Gmail just launched their new Undo Send function under Google Labs.

Magnificient

My favourite song from the new U2 album - No Line on the Horizon. U2 performing Magnificient on the Late Show with David Letterman.

This sums it all up

Ensuring Financial Success and Security

In this current economic climate, someone with good financial skillsets could potentially grow infinitely wealthly from all the possibly undervalued equities out there. Gone are the fundenmentals such as P/E ratio and book value. Market sentiment and greed/panic now drives our once (not so long ago) flourishing global economy.

If you however are not the next Warren Buffet or George Soros in the making, you can (and still) need to make the correct decisions to ensure financial success and security. That's where investments and insurance come in. Investments are primarily for wealth appreciation and staying ahead of inflation as the value of your savings get eroded over time. It is also important to look at it for milestones such as your retirement and children's education.

Insurance on the other hand, should be mainly viewed for protection purposes. To ensure that your family and loved ones will be well taken care off should anything (touch wood) unfortunate happen. You also need to look at general insurance such as medical, accident and hospitalization to help take care of the financial burdens that come with these negativities.

Still clueless? Check out HSBC's new guide to Investments and Insurance.

Amex Open Forum - Resource for small business owners

I was researching social media efforts by banks and financial institutions when I stumbled upon (pun intended) the Open Forum site by Amex.

A great resource for small business owners. I especially like the insightful article (comes complete with a pdf download and worksheet!) about how to better pitch your business to prospects and generally anyone you meet while networking.

Life in the fragrant harbour

It's been a month and a half since my move to Hong Kong. And I have decided to start making time to blog regularly again.

I'm writing this down so that I will stick to it. As opposed to 1 month ago when I pretty much made the same resolution. Or 3 months ago for the matter.

Heard an inspiring podcast by the hillsongs ministry about desires and decisions. Essentially, it's the decisions you make that bring you closer to your desires. To your goals.

And making a decision to lay on the couch with my remote won't bring me any closer to my goals for sure. Time to get up and get moving!

Crazy Japanese Game Shows

No one can outdo the Japanese (the Taiwanese are coming close) when it comes to crazy games shows which have contestants doing silly and usually hilarious stuff. Trust a Japanese automobile maker to incorporate it as a part of a marketing campaign.

Participants stand a chance to win a full year's use of a Mitsubishi Colt.

Check it out here

Love Should

There are many sappy love songs out there but none quite like this one. I sincerely believe its the most beautiful love song ever.

Here's a live version of Moby's Love Should:

Get $100 for free

I never thought I would even consider getting a credit card from Maybank but I guess some offers can be too tempting. No matter how shoddy the brand perception of the bank may be.

From now till 31 December 2008, simply apply for any Maybank Platinum Credit Card and you will get a S$100 cash credit to your card upon your first card spend within one month of receiving it. In addition, they are also throwing in a 10 year annual fee waiver just for good measure.

Talk about getting a card for life. More details here.

Tracking your time

Klok is a great time management tool for people working on projects. It allows you to track the number of hours you spend on various projects and is a great way to clock your time so that you know where it goes and how many man hours were actually spent. In a sense, it helps you to discern if your initial time estimations were correct and if a project required much more effort and resources than was initially planned for.

On a personal level, it can probably help students and project managers manage their limited time and resources on various equally challenging and time sensitive tasks.

You will need to first define all your projects/tasks on hand and then choose to either drag it into a calendar view (by week) in one hour blocks or enter in the specific time for each task.

However, I feel the best feature is dragging the project directly onto the top navigation "Currently working on" tab. This activates an actual timer that measures the time spent in real time. After you finish the project, you just click on "Stop" and Klok will record it down.

On a scehduled basis, you can then export your weekly timesheet and it will show on a daily basis, the time you have spend for each project in that particular week.

Download the program here.

Value investing

These are turbulent times in the market. With every possible bad scenario happening, the future of the financial markets look bleak and gloomy. Its at times like these, you really wonder if its even worth investing in the stock market and if you should really just cut your losses and keep your cash in a milo tin underneath your bed.

One of my favourite books (and I would never have thought this would be an enjoying read at all!) is Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor". Warren Buffett describes it as "by far the best book on investing ever written

The gist of the book can be summarize by the analogy of Mr. Market, an obliging fellow who turns up every day at the share holder's door offering to buy or sell his shares at a different price.

Often, the price quoted by Mr. Market seems plausible, but sometimes it is ridiculous. The investor is free to either agree with his quoted price and trade with him, or ignore him completely. Mr. Market doesn't mind this, and will be back the following day to quote another price.

The point of this anecdote is that the investor should not regard the whims of Mr. Market as a determining factor in the value of the shares the investor owns. He should profit from market folly rather than participate in it. The investor is advised to concentrate on the real life performance of his companies and receiving dividends, rather than be too concerned with Mr. Market's often irrational behaviour.

This is the concept of Value Investing. Not trading based on market sentiment but on companies and stocks that hold true value. Graham states certain rules and conditions that a company and stock must fulfill before it can be considered to be included as part of your value investing portfolio.

A definite must read for someone trying to figure out what to do in this current mess.

I heart Threadless

Threadless is possibly the OTHER best example of how community centered collaboration (That honor goes to Wikipedia) at the helm of web 2.0 is sparking new ideas and businesses especially in the E-Commerce front.

Members of the Threadless community (you can register to become a member) submit their t-shirt designs online and these designs are then subjected to a public vote. Designs that are popular (i.e. People like and would possibly buy them) are selected for printing and sold through their online store at www.threadless.com. Creators of the winning designs will receive a prize of cash and store credit. Basically, everyone wins.

A caveat though - The designs are printed in limited quantities (for all sizes) and the popular ones sell out quickly. If that happens, you can vote to have it reprinted and it enough votes are gathered (i.e. Enough people will buy the reprints), then that design will be reprinted.

These are 2 of my favourite Threadless T-shirts. And no, I don't have them yet because the size I want is perpetually sold out.

Fans of the old TV series would relate to this one, aptly titled "What would Macgyver do".



This one's called "The Beginning".

The legendary notebook of Hemingway

I've always wanted a Moleskin notebook. Its the coolest and most frivolous thing ever and extremely pricey for a notebook. Alicia, my partner in crime at work got me a Moleskine Sketchbook as a farewell gift (Yes, I've decided to take a leap of blind faith in these uncertain times). She figured that someone who was venturing into the creative field should look the part. Love it!

Check out the fuss at www.moleskin.com

More TV to watch

2 of my favourite shows are back.

Heroes Season 3 and Entourage Season 5. Time to get busy watching TV. Only its on my Mac. Ah, the perks of the Internet. Not having to wait 3 months for the show to come to Singapore.

How to be a millionaire

Trading common stocks can be a harrowing affair. The other option to grow your wealth is to look at Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). The best ETFs in my opinion are those that track broad based indices like the S&P500. The S&P500 tracks the top 500 large cap companies in the U.S and is generally used to indicate the state of the U.S equity market. If you look at historical returns, the S&P500 has delivered between 8 to 12 % gains annually. Compound this over a period of 20 to 30 years and you've got pretty substantial returns.

The ETF that tracks this is the SPDRS TRUST SERIES 1 (Stock Ticker: SPY) and the investing formula is dollar cost averaging. Because this ETF tracks the entire U.S market, it is essentially neutral and by buying into this ETF at consistent points every year with a fixed amount of cash, you can ride out the ups and the downs. When the market is up, you buy less units. When its down, you buy more. The point is to consistently accumulated units year after year and the earlier you start, the better.



Using the historical market returns of the S&P500 (taking a safe compounding rate of 5%, an initial amount of US$10,000 with a yearly investment growth of 10% (i.e. the same time next year, I will use US$11,000 to purchase more units and US$12,100 the following year), I can look to accumulate US$1,043,003 in 21 years.

The only concern is that your investment is in U.S dollars so there are also foreign exchange risks to consider. There's a local equivalent, the Strait Times Index (STI) and you can look to purchase the STI ETF (Stock ticker: ES3.SI) with the same strategy above.