Elizabeth Tai's Blog, page 28

10 things I learned from Korean dramas

1. Men do most of their brooding while showering.

2. You can be in a coma for two years, but you’ll be up and walking in a few days.

3. Someone who doesn’t share DNA with you can look exactly like you.

4. A piggyback ride from a guy is as good as a proposal.

5. I may have lived in America since forever but I speak perfect Korean and shite English.

6. If anything major happens – like, you know, you marrying the wrong gal, mum/dad/grandma/grandpa will faint/have heart attack, so you might as w...

Fanfiction: Wacky, Weird, and never boring

Well, that’s not necessarily true, of course. I read fanfiction even if I have money to buy more books! It’s free, it’s there, and it’s utterly fun. Fanfiction.net is a great place to start your fanfic hunt, though there are some sites out there, run by adoring fans, that can be leagues better in story selection.

If you’re a wee bit clueless what fanfiction is, it is fiction based on the characters of a television (usually) show. However, fans have written fanfiction based on certain books as...

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young

Six months ago, my site was flooded with thousands upon thousands of spam comments. Rather than laboriously deleting all 20,000 of them, I’ve decided to republish the posts that were the worst culprits. This post was first published on Oct 24, 2004.

Am currently reading Toby Young’s How to Loose Friends & Alienante People and have decided to put aside Marion Zimmer Bradley’s stories about Darkover for the tale of the fall of a great man (in his head, that is).

In essence, How to Lose Friends...

Scribd: A Review

It’s called the Netflix for books. For just US$8.99 a month, you can read as many books as you can. Is it truly nirvana for readers? I decided to sign up for its 30-day free trial (now reduced to 14 days) to check it out.

The good stuff:

1. Besides ebooks, there are audio and graphic novels too.
Unlike other subscription services like Oyster and Kindle Unlimited, subscribers get to enjoy comics and audio books. I love it. I download my audiobooks via Scribd’s app and listen to them via my s...

The Lord of the Rings – a review and a confession

Among some fantasy readers, I had done something sacrilegious. Most were horrified when they discovered that although I had read almost every fantasy book on the planet, I had not bothered to touch the fantasy tale of all fantasy tales – The Lord of the Rings (LOTR). They would probably be in despair if they had found out that my first brush with LOTR when I was 13 ended with an exclamation of: “Man, this is boring!” And I made that conclusion just after reading the first page.

Then came the...

How to make WordPress more secure

“This page is temporarily unavailable”. These dreaded words were back! This was the fourth time my site has gone down and I was mad.

But it was mostly my fault.

I thought all I needed to do when I got my first self-hosted blog was to write the content and leave it up.

Wrong.

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS (Content Management System) in the world. It’s easy to use, powerful and free. But as a result, it’s a favourite target for hackers.

Due to my lazybones attitude towards website/w...

An (old) interview with Carol Berg

If you’ve noticed, my site had been flooded with thousands upon thousands of spam comments. Rather than laboriously deleting all 20,000 of them, I’ve decided to republish the posts that were the worst culprits.
Carol Berg‘s latest book The Daemon Prism, the third book in The Novels of the Collegia Magica series, is finally out!

To commemorate that, here’s the transcript of an interview I did with her in 2010. (The article that came out of it was World Weaver, which was published in The Star o...

Homeless in Melbourne

Homeless in Boston by juliaf

She was sleeping at the corner of Spencer Street and Flinders Street, her back to the wall of the 7-11. She had curled up in a fetal position under her bright blue sleeping bag. Beside her was a red suitcase. It looked new.

I could see the tear tracks on her pale cheeks. The sign she had with her was nearly covered by her sleeping bag, but I could read the message. In fact, I don’t think I’d be able to forget what she wrote on that piece of cardboard:

“Help. I’m 2...

Should you leave your faith out of your personal brand?

I’ve been thinking about my personal brand lately: the “me” I want to project to the world. The reputation I want to build online.

Should I offer a safe, sanitised version of myself? Or should I tell people: This is who I am, take it or leave it?

In Malaysia, where a wrong word in any medium on social media could result in harsh punishment from the powers that be (whether it be from our bosses or from the government), Malaysians have learned to censor ourselves.

I’ve always believed that this...

What is content strategy? 5 definitions

That’s the million dollar question.

If I were to tell someone in Malaysia that I am content strategist, I’d be met with a blank look. I can’t blame them. Content Strategy is a new and exciting field, so not many know that it even exists. It’s also a field whose practitioners speak in jargon-ese. Ux. Governance. Content Audit. Machine Translation. Huh? Speak English!

Is there any wonder that there’s a website dedicated to the Language of Content Strategy?

Here are five definitions:

1.Planning...