5th Anniversary

This blog as of today, will be 5 years old. A lot has happened in the past 5 years. Let me tell you a little bit about my blog.

This blog was started as a personal blog. A place for me to jot down all the ups and downs of my life as a medical student. The initial title of this blog was paradigmshift and the initial url was hafiz_238.blogspot.com. I chose paradigm shift to reflect my motivation to be a better person and to be brave to face all of the challenges in the future.

Later, I changed the blog title to 'kembara di bumi Melbourne'. I think I have to change the title of this blog at the end of this year since I won't be living at Melbourne. Not sure which title I should choose.

I used to be blogging frequently. However, in the last few years, especially when I started my clinical years, I haven't been able to blog as frequent as it used to be. Perhaps, life has been busy or I don't have any inspiration to put my mind into writing. Nevertheless, I hope that I would be able to maintain this blog for the next few years.

15 days later

The title refers the number of days this blog last updated. Lots of things has happened in the last two weeks.

1. Swine flu is now officially an epidemic. Malaysia currently has more 90 cases of swine flu and the reaction from the Malaysian newspapers has managed to over exaggerate the severity of the swine flu. In fact, many of my friends who are going back to Malaysia for winter holiday are quite worried that they will be under home quarantine too, since few cases of swine flu in Malaysia originate from here. Go read this; Swine flu's not that bad.
2. Riot in Iran. I wonder what will happen to Iran in the next few months. Hopefully, if there is any chaos in the future, it won't lead to lots of unnecessary killing among the citizens and disrupting the petroleum production. Petrol prices has already been increasing and we don't need another riot to push up the petrol price.
3. New operators for tram and train in Melbourne. Hopefully this will improve the quality of public transport in Melbourne in the future.
   
4. Exams. I have finished two written exams and will be sitting for OSCE next week. Will write more about those written exam later.
5. Firefox has released the third Firefox 3.5 release candidate. I am patiently waiting for the next version of Firefox . Read this; Firefox 3.5 memory usage, Top 10 features in Firefox 3.5

Favourite Firefox extensions

These are my favourite Firefox extensions in Firefox 3.0.

1. Adblock Plus. I certainly recommend my reader to install this popular Firefox add-on. It blocks 95% of website advertisement and this also includes flash ads. It certainly helps me on having faster loading of any websites and have better internet surfing experience.
2. DownThemAll. A useful download manager. It contains download accelerator and help me to organize all my downloads.
3. IE Tab. I used this for any websites that stubbornly have to be displayed using Internet Explorer. This add-on is also useful if you are a web designer.
4. Web Developer. It helps me whenever I'm designing this blog layout. It also help me to gain further understanding on how each website works.
5. Greasemonkey. This allows me to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.There are various JavaScript available to be used with Greasemonkey. It certainly useful if you would like to try various JavaScript available on Greasemonkey
   

Related: My favourite Firefox extensions [2007]

Blog Statistics

Since I don't know what else to write at the moment, I will write the statistics regarding this blog. I have been using Google Analytics since August 2006.

Statistics (August 2006 - March 2009)

Total visit : 19906 (Pretty low and this is expected since I don't write anything that can attract large audience)
Total Pageviews: 28439
New Visitors: 68.16%

Top 10 referring sites

1. blogger-templates.blogspot.com
   
2. images.google.com
   
3. Hayad
   
4. hafiz238.efx2.com
   
5. Reazal Effendy
   
6. Sarah Mohd Shukor
7. gambrine.blogspot.com
   
8. Petaling Street
   
9. Sofie Nur
   
10. Minci
    

Top 10 Keywords

1. kembara di bumi melbourne
2. e-novel malay
3. hafiz238
4. ladybug layouts
5. erti kemerdekaan
6. aurat wanita
7. ladybug layout
8. candid syndrome
9. kembara
10. kelebihan al mathurat

Top 20 weirdest keywords

1. misteri awan cerah bertukar gelap
2. klara causen
3. broken heart layouts
4. gambar mercu tanda di malaysia
5. statistik penggunaan telefon bimbit di malaysia
   
6. kompas cecair
7. perkara perkara pelik di bumi
8. "friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity" with explanation
9. hate medical students
10. 36c titis
11. agaknya bila tarikh aidil fitri
12. contoh panggilan sayang
13. di mana lalat tidur
14. ex-kisas student blog
15. excuses for being late, typical
16. kisah pelik dan benar
17. melapah manusia
18. nama website untuk cari map di google
19. rumah berhantu di england
20. tahun ni korang beraya di mana
    

Top 20 pages (in bracket, number of pageviews)

1. mnemonic for forearm muscles and bone (899)
2. archive July 2005 (758)
3. Interpreting Electrocardiogram [ECG] (757)
4. medical abbreviations (662)
5. useful links for new blogger (500)
6. archive January 2005 (495)
7. another online novel (491)
8. ladybug (363)
9. diencephalon (345)
10. ladybug red theme (279)
11. archive November 2004 (256)
12. 100 tahun meneroka sejarah (209)
13. few blogger hacks (206)
14. archive February 2005 (204)
15. how to migrate from old classic blogger layout to new blogger layout (194)
16. archive March 2007 (191)
    
17. archive August 2005 (159)
18. Google Reader shared items hack (151)
19. broken heart syndrome (136)
20. photoshop tutorial pattern 1 (135)
    

Top 10 Commentators (I only started to use Blogger commenting system on 26 May 2007. Previously I used Haloscan. The figure in the bracket represents the number of comments made on Blogger commenting system)

1. Hayad (61)
2. mosh (33) + moshimoshi (23) = 56 [mosh and moshimoshi is the same person. However, the system that I used to count is based on the username.]
3. aria ayumi (27) + diya (25) = 52
   
4. Chem (36)
5. Ummu Layth (34)
6. Sofie Nur (30)
7. arsaili (29)
8. Sarah Mohd Shukor (26)
9. minci (23)
10. farah yusri (15)
    

clearing up alerts

Right now, I am reading all the alerts in my Google Reader. There are thousands of alerts that need to be clear up. This is the result of not accessing my Google Reader in the past two months.

I subscribed to all of my friend's blogs and it was surprising to read what have happened in the past two months. Few of them quit blogging for good and few of them stop temporarily.

It was interesting to see what have happened in the blogging world. Most of the blog that I subscribed to are Malaysian bloggers and it was fun to see how each blogger responds to each issue happening in Malaysia.

Each person is entitled to their own opinion and despite all of their differences, I learn to respect their own opinion. After all, no one is perfect in this world. If we are able to tolerate each other, and spend time to listen to each other problem, we are one step closer in achieving unity and peace

code

This is what I've been doing since yesterday. There are few hundred lines of code that I am modifying currently. At least the code were colourful .

Study leave

I will be taking a short break since my exam is just around the corner. There are lots of things that I haven't covered yet and hopefully, I will be able to get pass through this exam.

This exam is the major exam for medical students in University of Melbourne. This exam covers two semesters and we are expected to know LOTS of stuff since we will be real doctors soon. The mark from this exam will determine the hospital allocation for internship and contributes significant proportion of total mark in the entire medical course.

The paragraph above should explain why I'm pretty nervous now. This will not be easy and the number of posts in the last few weeks represents how stressful I am. I think this is the highest number of blog posts that I have wrote prior to exam period so far.

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The details of my exam...

Wednesday, 25 June: 120 Multiple Choice Questions in 3 hours.
Friday, 27 June: OSCE.
Wednesday, 2 July: Long Case.

Both OSCE and long case are hurdle requirement. That's mean you will fail the entire exam if you fail in either one of those exams.

Good bye for now and I will be back once this exam is over :)

Style Switcher

This entry is related to web-design. It may contain technical terms that might confuse you.

What is style switcher?

• It is a technique where the web visitors are given several options to change the website accordingly. They may be able to change the colour, font size, theme or general layout of the website.
  

Is it useful?

• One of the objectives of this technique is to be user-friendly to web visitors. Anyone will be able to change the website according to their own preference. Hence, everyone will be happy and no more angry web visitors.
• It can be helpful to disabled people. For example, you can provide the options of changing font size or change the colour to more suitable colour range.
• However, some people say by giving too many choices, it will spoil the visitors. Too many versions of the website may not be useful in the long-term. A web designer is supposed to be able to predict the best option for any web visitors.
• Personally, I don't mind of implementing style switcher provided that it won't interfere with the content of this blog. Inappropriate usage of style switcher can cause significant increase in loading time of the website or the changes degrade the usefulness of the content.
  

Related links:

• Style switcher are back: Ideas, Examples and a contest - Smashing Magazine. There are lots of examples in this link. Check it out.
• How to create a CSS style switcher.

Blog List

This is a new addition to Blogger. Blog List is a new page element which is based on RSS feed and display when the link on your blog is last updated. More here.

I think it is better than an ordinary blogroll or link. I might add this page element whenever I change this blog layout to a new one.

Your online identity and Google

I read an interesting discussion at Pro Blogger. It was about searching your online identiy / real name on Google.

How important is your identity on the search engine?

Personally, I believe that it is quite important for your online identity or your real name to be on the first page in any search engine.

If you met someone new, the best way to know the person is to search online. The person who will be searching for your name could be your potential employer, clients or web visitors. If your website is not in the first page, you could be in trouble.

In my case, the potential people who will be looking for my name would be patients. Although I'm not yet a doctor, but this is something that I need to think seriously.

If I was a consultant and the patient could not find my name on Google, I would be losing lots of referrals. If a doctor has lots of negative remarks on the first few pages of Google, I don't think many patients will come to that doctor.

In fact, anything that I wrote on this blog will be scrutinised by anyone on the internet. This can have important effect in my future career.

At the moment, if I'm searching for my real name, the first website that come up on Google is my Facebook account and followed by my fotopage. This blog does not come up in the first page.

If I'm searching for hafiz238, this blog will be on the first page :)