Wait less. Do more.

Why wait for a traditional hard disk drive to spin up? Unlike traditional hard disk drives, Intel Solid State Drives have no moving parts, resulting in a quiet, cool, highly rugged storage solution that also offers faster system responsiveness. And for laptop PCs, the lower power needs of Intel SSDs translate to longer battery life and lighter notebooks. Higher performance with more durability means you can be truly mobile with confidence.

Max sequential reads: 250MB/s, Max sequential writes: 100MB/s

I bought this for my Christmas presents and I am very impressed with the performance. My old hardisk took 1:20 to boot while the new SSD took only 35 secs. It’s incredible!

Here’s the steps I used to clone my old hard drive to SSD by using Disk Utilities.

1. Start up from the Mac OS X disk that came with your Mac. To do this, insert the CD or DVD into your Mac, and hold down the C key while your Mac restarts.
2. Go ahead select your language. Don’t worry: You’re not installing Mac OS X again – this is just what you have to do to get to Disk Utility. When the menu bar appears, select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
3. When Disk Utility opens, you’ll want to select your source. This is the hard drive you want to clone and/or backup. After you have a source, select the Destination. This is the hard drive you want to save the backup image to.
4. Click Restore and you’ll end up with a perfect copy of your hard drive. Restart your computer and you’re good to go!

This is the first time me and W.yin cooked Hainanese Chicken Rice and we were surprised it ended up very delicious.

Here’s the recipe we followed:

SERVES 4 -6 (change servings and units)

For the rice
* 3 cups long grain rice
* 2 tablespoons chicken fat, with skin (I know..but it makes the rice taste really good)
* 2 tablespoons water
* 2-3 cm ginger, grated
* 3-4 garlic cloves, grated
* 1-2 teaspoon salt (to taste)
* 3 1/2 cups chicken stock, according to rice package instructions (or more, reserved from chicken that you will boil)
* 2 screwpine leaves (optional..it will make the rice more fragrant)

Hainanese chicken
* 1 whole chicken
* water, enough for boiling chicken
* 1 piece thumb sized ginger, smashed
* 4-5 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed slightly
* 1 teaspoon salt

Chilli garlic sauce for dipping
* 10 fresh red chilies
* 2 cm piece ginger
* 4 garlic cloves
* 1/4 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon lime juice
* 2 tablespoons chicken stock (from the boiled chicken. This stock is essential for the chilli sauce)

Ginger sauce for dipping
* 75 g ginger
* 6 garlic cloves
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon lime juice
* 2 tablespoons chicken stock (again stock from the boiled chicken)

Sauce for chicken
* 1 tablespoon garlic oil
* 1 teaspoon sesame oil
* 5 tablespoons light soya sauce
* 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar (to taste)
* 3 tablespoons chicken broth (from boiled chicken)

Garnishing
* fresh coriander leaves
* sliced spring onion
* sliced cucumber

Directions

1. First of all wash the rice then place it on to a tea towel or colander to dry. Then, prepare the chicken.Bring enough water to boil in a large pot.Once boil, add in the salt, ginger,garlic and chicken. Lower the heat and cook chicken for about 20 – 25 minutes, uncovered. It is very important to boil the chicken very slowly over low flame.Turn of flame and cover the pot. Allow the chicken to steep inside for another 20-25 minutes. Remove chicken and immerse it into a basin of cold water for 5-6 minutes.Take chicken out and drain in a colander to drip dry before cutting it into serving pieces.

2. While the chicken is drip drying, prepare the rice.Heat up wok and add in the chicken fat and water.Bring to a low simmering boil until oil is released from the fat. Add in the ginger and garlic and fry well (without burning the garlic) Remove and discard the chicken fat and skin. Add in the rice that has been dried and salt and stir fry briskly about 1 – 2 minutes.Transfer rice into an electric rice cooker or pot. Add in the chicken broth from the boiled chicken together with the screwpine leaves if using.If cooking in a pot, cook over low flame stirring occasionally so as not to let the bottom of the rice burn.Boil until rice is cook.

3. While the rice is cooking, you can prepare the chilli garlic sauce. Just add all ingredients into a blender or food processor, and give it a good whizz, until ingredients are well blended. Adjust the seasoning with more salt or sugar to taste.The chili garlic sauce can be kept in the refrigerator for about 2-3 days only.

4. To prepare the ginger sauce is the same.give the ingredients a good whiz in the blender.What gives the extra oomph for the sauces is the stock from the chicken broth — so, do not omit this ingredient.

5. Lastly combine all the ingredients for the chicken sauce and pour it all over the cut up chicken. You can add more soya sauce and chicken broth to the chicken if you prefer. Just adjust the taste of the sauce with soya sauce and chicken broth.If you do not have garlic oil,you can fry a few cloves of garlic in oil for few minutes then take out oil and garlic pour it into a jar, and let the garlic steep inside the oil.

6. Finally, garnish the chicken with the coriander leaves, spring onions and cucumbers.

7. Enjoy meal with the rice and dipping sauces!

So, What’s the problem?

Firstly they don’t send the kit. A lot of people have complained about this. Secondly, they will charge you $72.21 after seven day and you will probably not aware of it. This is the terrible part.

When you sign up for the free kit to mail to your address, you will also be entered into a free seven days trial membership which will charge $72.21 to your credit card after 7 days. The visitors have complained that nothing about the $72.21 membership fee was mentioned during the sign up process.

But in the Google Pro Kit sign up page, they do placed a ‘Term & Conditions’ link at the bottom. The Term & Conditions page has loads of content and in a section of the content, they do have described about the $72.21 membership fee and clearly stated that it is not refundable after charged.

So, this is how they trick people. You wouldn’t know exactly what you are actually signing up for unless only if you click the Term & Conditions link that ‘hide’ at the bottom of the sign up page and carefully read it.

As they are paying so well to the web publishers. Many publishers have widely promoted it, so stay away if you see this Google Pro Kit offer on the Internet.

Here’s another method of how web publishers advertise their Google Kit
They advertise as job wanted in gumtree titled “Full training given, work with our team, don’t miss out”

Here’s the description:

We are Trying to find people to add to the entrepreneurial resources of our company. We are looking for qualities such as enthusiasm, self-motivation and commitment. We are looking for people to bring a certain level of innovation to our team.

It is very difficult to describe the work you will be doing. You will be spending a lot of time on a computer, managing and creating web traffic streams.

No previous experience is required. Good literacy, computational and numeric skills are a plus. Full training will be given.

We have a small office located very close to the town centre and you will be working in a small team of people that will be ready to help and guide you 24/7.

We offer a part time and a full time package.

Full time: Mon – Fri 9am till 5pm minimum hours. Flat rate of £450 a week.

Part time: Spend at least 10 hours a week in the office. Plus the work you take home. £150 a week.

The training you will be given will allow you to progress with your earnings potential. Some member of our team make up to £5000 a day with the things we have taught them. We ask that once your earnings reach £450 per week, we take out 40% of anything over that amount. Everything else you get to take home.

This is a very unique opportunity for more of a partnership rather than employment. So do not miss out. Send in your CV and application by relying to this ad. Good luck.

Eventually I thought it was related to IT as I have experience in SEO and also competent with all Microsoft Office and Adobe applications. I applied for the job and sent my cover letter with CV attached.

After few hours, I received this email from Peter Darlington (darlingtonpeter@employmentmaildirect.com):

Hello

Thank you for taking an interest in our ad.

I have read your application with great interest and I think you would be a perfect candidate for this position.

First thing we will need you to do is to go here and get this kit:
http://www.employmentmaildirect.com/KitForSuccsessfulApplicants.html

We are in no way affiliated with this company but we do recommend it as it teaches you the basics of the things you will be expected to do on this position. It is virtually free if you go through our link.

This should prepare you for our interview. We will contact you with the dates and times once we have looked over and sorted all the applications sent to us.

Yours truly

Peter Darlington

Team Leader
Online Market Force ltd.

Once I click the link above, it’s a SCAM! I didn’t think this is a good way to scam those jobless people especially those who are desperate to look for job. The good part is, you DO NOT require any previous experience. Full experience will be given which is the scam that you going to receive.

I hope those who have applied for this job did not get scam.

Another method og Google Starter Kit Scam

I got this when I tried to download some files from uploading.com and it redirected me to here:

http://news6insider.com/2009/FINANCE/income.opportunity/google/2/?subid=390

Note: I am from Leicester and they tracked my IP address converted the page into like this

Brilliant isn’t it?

Even though your available volumes have more than 100GB?

Your disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.

You DO NOT need to format the disk until you have tried these steps:

1. Try Create Smaller Partition

Let say you are creating a partition volume of 20GB, try make it 15GB; or may be even less the error still occurred.

2. Disk De-fragment

Install iDefrag and make sure you use the Full System scan instead of the Quick System. You will need to boot from CD in order to run the Full System scan. It took around 2-3 hours to run the full defragment depends on your hardisk space.

If none of these work, then you got to back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format the disk as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume.

Please leave a comment if the above methods work for you. Good luck!

Well, I decided to install Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro. If you have error in creating partition with Boot Camp Assistant, please click here. I downloaded my Windows 7 Ultimate x64bit from Warez-BB.org.

First of all, let’s compare the price. Snow Leopard costs just £25 compared with Windows 7 which costs between £80 to £200. After installing Windows 7, my first impression was Windows 7 task bar has borrowed features from Apple and in my opinion, and it works better than Snow Leopard’s Dock.

Apple’s Dock function is to launch favorite applications and what I dislike about it is Apple’s Dock doesn’t have taskbar for desktop icon like what all the Windows have. Of course you can still minimize all your applications by hitting (cmd + alt + click on the application you want to use) or use the Apple’s Expose System which I am pretty use to it and loving it now.

Great thing about Windows 7 taskbar is it designed primarily for managing rather than launching tasks. I was amazed with the snap-up preview boxes as it keep track of multiple Windows. Another great thing about Windows 7 is when you right-click a taskbar icon, you will get a list of files recently used by the related application.

Since I switched to Mac, I love to keep my Desktop clean and simple. I always launch my applications by searching name from Apple’s Spotlight (cmd + spacebar). Sometimes you just need to click one letter, such as ‘j’ and ‘jDownloader’ will appear. For Windows, you still have to go through file or program listings or shortcut icon at Desktop.

What disappoint me was the safe ejection of plug-in storage from Windows 7. For Snow Leopard plug-in storage device will be displayed in desktop and all you need to do is right click and eject it. Unlike for Windows 7, you still need to click Safely Remove Hardware and choose which one to remove. The Safely Removed Hardware icon is barely visible in the taskbar too.

Microsoft offers free Security Essentials which is an anti-malware software for all the Windows 7 users but I am still not sure how effective it can be. Apple’s ads mentioned that Mac is more secured than Windows which I doubt about it. But I still feel more secure using Snow Leopard than Windows 7 due because 90% of the consumers are using Windows and of course Windows will get attacks more often.

Alright, come to backup. Snow Leopard has built in Time Machine which is easy to use, easy to restore, easy to understand and easy to search. I did my backup via my external hardisk and restore it back to my Mac, I can’t believe how easy it is. While for Windows, I used to backup manually all my files to my external hardisk and reinstall a fresh Windows then install all my drivers manually. It involved more steps compared to Time Machine.

Snow Leopard has Exchange support while for Windows 7, you have to buy Microsoft Office to get Exchange support. However, majority of people using Outlook for Windows and Entourage for Mac.

So which one is better? I guess both of them are good. I use both of them frequently and I love both of them. I guess the reason why many people are attracted to Mac is because Mac interface was born graphical and it really attracts consumers attention. I got influenced by that too! :-)