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Goodbye Avast, Hello Avira!

Gazing at the clock on the system’s tray, the last digit involuntarily paced to the number eight, while the number three and one preceded it in that order. Remaining static next to it as of now is the abbreviation AM. So what do we get here? Three eighth teen after midnight and blame it on the body clock but not insomnia for heaven’s sake. Go ahead and smile if you’re as crazy as I am or if you find this amusing. Leave as you wish, I bid you farewell and here’s a cookie.

Way before that, the entire process was decelerated by the fact that the Avira antivirus software was running a thorough scan in the background. It felt sluggish as I was having a tough time typing the first sentence in this post and waiting for it to appear complete with the first character converted to uppercase as I hit the spacebar going on with the next word. All this while I was using Avast but somehow something has influenced me today to go ahead and give Avira a shot. At least this spares me some experience.

It all began with my brother who wanted me to put some stuff into his new laptop, in another word for the computer brain, install some applications. My brother in law suggested Avira and so I downloaded the free version and have it installed on my brother’s laptop and later on my system. Along the way, I searched on the Internet for reviews on the top five free antivirus software and it seemed that AVG was the choice of many, not until I came to a review made by PC World. The former reviews were somewhat too general and lacking of the tech geek feel to it. Not implying that PC World was the other way round but the detailed review was excellent and it got me interested.

Long story short, it’s about time for me to go on and forget about Avast’s mp3 player interface. Yes, it was confusing the first time I use it so stop the music and let’s get on with something else shall we? For a moment, I thought it was somewhat creative to have a music player’s interface for antivirus software but apparently, simplicity went the wrong way here. The need for simplicity, ease of use and efficiency rang a louder bell than Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. I know it doesn’t make any sense but you get what I mean.

As of now, the entire virus scan is still progressing at about twenty-one percent; you can imagine the junk that I have loafing in my hard drive. “Hey how’s it going? Running a little slow on that bus huh? You want a pimped ride with NOS let us know yeah?” I could imagine those files laughing at the scanner. Madness aside, I found a post about how to get rid of the annoying pop-up ads since it’s a free version. Not sure if it works for me since I haven’t rebooted my computer for the settings to work. Time will tell, but if you’re interested and of course if you’re using Avira too, head on here to check it out.

All right, it’s four in the morning now. Luke Filewalker, you seriously need more than just a futuristic space ship and a light saber!

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Twitter Tweet Tweet

For no reason or specific intentions, my mind echoed an urge to blog about anything today, and attempting to foster a blend of nonsense into the picture. At least something, that would make sense to me or to anyone who had been ignited to read on even if it is momentarily. Meanwhile, do leave some comments because I know my grammar needs some correction!

As for the most of us, I am pretty sure that you have heard of a social networking tool known as “Twitter”. If you haven’t, then follow this link to go straight to the site.

I remembered the first time I encountered Twitter. Initially, I have no clue of what Twitter was and by looking at its logo and name; it would seemed like a little bird that tweets. The concept is like a bird that goes from one flock to another, as it tweets, talking or communicating in its language to other birds. On Twitter, one needs to “follow” another person in order to “tune in” or to receive that person’s tweets (message). Each tweet is typically short, at about 140 characters or so.

The thing is, as most of us would want to believe that the purpose of Twitter is to update our friends (or stalkers) for instance, on what we are currently doing and where we’re at, to some it’s also somewhat a “hidden” powerful Internet marketing tool. It’s rather simple; just have your followers follow you on Twitter. To get a person to follow you is another task and not necessarily an easy one unless you’re a star or simply because that person is your friend or probably that person just like you.

Instead of just tweeting on what you are doing and where you are, you could actually twist your tweet a bit by including a shortened (usually non self-explanatory) link to a landing page, typically a sales pitch page or a monetized blog post. To make it more appealing or to have the real agenda further hidden, have the landing page occupied with a very interesting or funny video. That might just do the trick.

In my opinion, it feels like a mixture of a few things bogged down into a dichotomy of being public or private as far as tweets are concerned. If you want everyone in the world to know where you are going for lunch and you wouldn’t mind that freaky admirer stalking you, then Twitter fits the purpose perfectly. Even having your tweets published as private would render pointless, as the same stalker would use a different username. All right, so a stalker or stalkers are fine, what about criminals?

There’s nothing interesting going on with me for every minute or hour and for that reason, I don’t use Twitter. I did try for a while and unfortunately, I’d rather pick up the phone and say, “what’s up?” or rather chat online. Twitter is good for Internet marketing nonetheless. Off course, the tweet spamming activity sometimes can be annoying. It’s your choice to “unfollow”.

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Raya and Deathly Hallows

Yea I know that it has been a while since I last blogged about anything so this post ought to be something to catch up with in the saitosphere. The holy month Ramadhan's gone for this year and now Syawal's here. One month of fasting and another for the Eid Fitri festive. But over here it lasted just like a week or so. It seemed to me that the excitement really was during the eve and for the first four days or so where one could actually hear the sound of various firecrackers and fireworks thundering the sky. For a moment, it made me felt as if I was in a world war scenario. Too much video games?

On the other hand, unbelievably I actually read Harry Potter's e-book, "Deathly Hallows". I figured that it will take a while for the movie producers to film the last two sequels for the series. In the beginning suffice to say that I'm not that much of a Harry Potter fan but the compelling storyline about magic has somehow gotten me. In addition, as for the film score, John William's work on the first two or three series were superb. No wonder I felt the sudden turn when the fourth series onwards were unexpectedly morphed into the dark side, as clearly made audible by their film scores and somewhat visible by movie plots. Reading the book is the only way for the mysteries to unfold unless the last two films have something else to offer. We'll just wait and see then.

I hope JK Rowling would make another awesome series or perhaps a different continuation but this time around not with Voldemort who only knows Avada Kedavra in order to kill Harry.

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