The NOVICE MASTER|Welcome to Uncle Che’s NOVICE MASTER. This blog is all about Science and Technology, Business and Economy, Home and Family, Personality and Self Improvement as well as personal opinions, reviews and lifestream

January 1st is general. It is the new year according to the Christian Calendar. That is the day when you are supposed to take a break and reflect on your successes and failures recorded for the fading year while preparing to start another year with greater dreams and hopes.

I believe a new year at the personal level can also be your date of birth. That is the day mother earth first welcomed you to the planet and that obviously is the day your personal year starts.

I was born on February 29th 1980. That’s a leap year and that particular day is one that I can’t see till after three years. Ha ha ha. That sounds like fun, but is actually no fun when you are thinking about throwing up a small celebration. When do I celebrate? Today 28th February or tomorrow 1st March.

According to my lovely Baby Noela, 28th is more appropriate since it is in the same month. “How can you be born in Feb and you decide to celebrate in Marc”? Well, I guess she has a point there. On the other hand, however, the 30th is logical since it is the day after the 28th. I am supposed to celebrate on the 29th and that is the day after the 28th.

Oh! Keeping aside all the logic, I will be 29 years old very soon.
I guess I am already getting too old. I should be married by now.

It is not everything you can do that you should do. It is not everything that you know works that you should try. Many a times, trust your instincts and believe in the wise words of the elders, especially those in the Holy book of God.

Is life all about making big sums of money? No! There is more to life than just the money. In the quest for an easy life, many people are just survibving and not actually living. Yeah! What does it mean to live if your life is not based on any law, moral, ethical or religious principle. What type of life are we actually talking about if you have sold your conscience and traded your dignity for earthly things like money.

I see the wicked “prospering” on other people’s mights and they are happy about it. There are young people I know who try to throw some slangs at me and tell me I could be rich and have whatever I want if I wasn’t pretending to be just and straight forward. Have everything I want? What exactly do they understand by everything? There are billions of things that money will never be qualified to buy.

Many money is good if done the clean and genuine way

At times, I think I am very tough, so tough that I feel it is very strange for a man of my height, built and age (29 come Feb 29, 2009). Recently, I developed some cracks on the right side of my upper lip. I really didn’t care what it was, except calling it a crack, but many people referred to it as signs of night fever. Oh come on! What the heck is night fever? Fever that attacks only at night? Ok you Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Folks. I haven’t been really sick for quite some time now and I really don’t except I will be sick until I turn 200.

Many people complained I was sick but hiding it. Why would I be sick and don’t want you all to know, is the question I always asked. “You want to act tough”, some will tell me, while others will calmly say, “you don’t ant us to be worried about you”. Well, maybe it’s true, but this is the very first experience I am having about this. Even Noela believes I am sick, and I am like “what!”, “Noela, even you”? I have been spending some of the nights recently with you and you really see me sick?

She explains that night fever isn’t really like the other type of fever I am thinking of. It manifests itself only in the form of tiredness, fatigue, and some body pains which I might not feel since I am deeply sleeping like a kid. Ha ha ha. “What makes you get so tired even very early in the morning”, was her question that set me guessing.

I know I am a little bit very careless with my health but since almost every friend I have is complaining, I guess I will have to go for consultation tomorrow and get some drugs.

I really don’t thing being sick is my portion, Ha ha ha

Certainly, the answer is NO. It is “impossible” to please everyone. However, the word impossible at times is subjective. Many people don’t even want to have them in their vocabulary.

No categorization system can tell the different types of people on our planet but looking at things the very simple way, I can talk about the friendly and unfriendly. Some people live a “self-sufficient” life and avoid getting involved with as many people as possible. They do believe the have all and that anyone stepping into their life has nothing to offer, but may be a source of some of their belongings leaking out. They feel they need nobody. They don’t reflect on their actions and don’t care about how they impact others. Most people hate them. Surprisingly enough, though, they still have their own friends who may be like or unlike.

Some people on the other hand are very friendly, helpful, caring and loving. They love others and treat them as they will be done by. They try to do things the way that will please everyone. I guess that’s the problem I have. Can I really please everybody?

No action, no matter how good it is can be pleasing to everyone. At times, even the people who benefit from such actions still grumble and talk negative behind your back. Most of the time, they will take advantage of you because of your kind and tender heart, but letting a few spoil the show is not worth it.

Always try to do right. I know I can’t please everyone at once but I do my best to ask God for the right decisions and choices.

I really don’t want to put it this way, but it seems Google couldn’t build the type of browser they ranted about for so long. For some reason, it seems they are not even promoting it. Remember the type of promotion they did for Firefox? If they could do same for Chrome, I am sure in less than a year 80% of the web will be Chromized.

What is wrong with Chrome? First of all, I get mixed up by “it is a new browser” and “it is built from Firefox”. Either way, it is supposed to be a very good browser if well done. If it was built from scratch, then several components not available on the web today may have been incorporated into it. If it was built from Firefox, Firefox is a good browser so Chrome should be better.

I can’t find any statistical data but I still hold grounds that if Chrome was what they said it is, then somehow one can tell it is popular. I haven’t seen any review that puts it as the best browser, yet.

You may not really understand what it means by “buying over someone’s case” until you really find yourself analyzing the way someone is being treated unfairly.

I knew a certain couple her and I thought they were really in love but yesterday I got the shock of my life. The young girl has put to birth a bouncing baby boy, whom I guess should be about 6 months old. The guy heartlessly threw her own of the marital home and asked her never to come back.

Why that? I have always heard rumors about that man’s taste for young girls and how he keeps chasing them around. But his wife is young and cute too. Well, that doesn’t always count, I guess. Some men are so lusty that they always want to have “varieties”. Why then will a man take the step of leaving with one woman if he is not yet satisfied of all the women out there?

Why is Africa like this? Don’t women here have any rights? This situation if even bearable, different from many others. In most cases, I hear of women being seriously battered by their husbands before being thrown out of the house. I hope the International Women’s Day theme this year will have something to do about this.

Most of my friends think I am a techy and they always believe I can solve all of their Internet and PC related problems. I wish they knew better. What gives them that impression about me is the simple reason that I like adventuring into the unknown and never accept defeat as an outcome.

A friend of mine confronted me today and asked or help.  He was creating two documents in Microsoft Word; one had to serve as the table of content and the other had to bear the actual content itself. He wanted to create links on the table of content that point to specific portions in the content itself. He did so, but each time the links are clicked, the content document opens but doesn’t scroll down to the desire portion in it. Can I help him do some auto scrolling so that when he clicks on any chapter, say chapter 9 in the table of contents, it opens the content document and automatically scrolls down to chapter 9?

Immediately, I knew auto scrolling was not the answer. Microsoft Word 2003 is still primitive for such functions. However, I knew hyper linking and bookmarking would do just exactly what he wants. I created bookmarks in the content and links in the table of content but didn’t know exactly how to create a relationship between the two.

That’s when I gave up testing my intellect and turned to Google for an answer. I found this tutorial that says everything about creating hyperlinks in Microsoft Word.

Happy Happy!!!

Very often, I refuse to listen to or believe stories about petit thieves and the type of crimes they commit, but I end up being forced to, due to the number of sources I hear such stories from.

One of the greatest fun about crimes is that criminals no longer wait for the night. Most thieves steal in broad daylight and get away with it. In big cities like the economic capital, Douala, stealing has become so rampant that some thieves have turned into bullies, harassing people and collecting from them even in the midst of hundreds of people and no one says a thing.

The hit and run thieves look for the slightest opportunity to snatch what you have and then disappear into the crowd. What they mostly snatch are purses and mobile phones, and at times money if hand held. Some specialize in using blades to cut open people’s pockets or cut of ropes of handbags and purses. Some pretend they want to use a commercial phone and once they are in possession of the phone, they just flee into the bush. This happened even here in Buea. One well dressed gentleman took a phone from a lady running and phone booth and pretended he wanted to call. As soon as he held the phone, he started running and although the crowd chased, they couldn’t get him. I laughed out very loud when I heard about this.

Now, let’s get back to the bullies. Stealing in broad daylight and getting away slowly and freely? Yes. The men are fun of collecting mobile phones from ladies this way. Just imagine a man walks up to a young lady, seize her phone and launches a few slaps against her face. He wil then pretend to be very upset with her and accuse her of leaving the house without letting people know her destination, or better still, accuse her of cheating and claim that he has just been told that she is from seeing her ex-boyfriend.

Passers-by will not understand the lady is being robbed and will just ignore the situation since the couple can better handle it themselves. Oh! What frustration!

My PC’s specs are good.
Pentium 4 with a 2GHZ processor and 512MB RAM.
I am using Windows XP service pack two and I have Firefox 3.

I really can’t understand why my PC is so slow lately. Since the original hard drive that came with it crash, my buddy has never been the same. Could it be my hard drive is not good? I have replaced my hard drive several times and each time I do so, my PC works very well for about a week and starts diminishing in performance. Does this entails I only go for bad hard drives?

I am considering buying a new hard drive again and reinstalling my computer at the start of next week.

Now, what’s the problem with my internet connection. Doesn’t anything around here work well anymore? At times, my internet connection goes so slow that I can’t sign into my Google Account or navigate to the Write Page of my wordpress blogs.

This is so frustrating. I have many projects at hand and I really need to get them done quick. I temporarily suspended CamHood so that I could hurriedly finish Pen 2 Net. I haven’t even looked at Noela‘s project, Bloggress, that I am helping her with. Most of the time I try to do something with Lainy, I feel like slowing her down since things are pretty slow this way. I just started Uncleche.net and….

Oh my God! I really need more help with myself now…

Most employers have used the current situation of high level of unemployment and unavailability of jobs as a reason to exploit jobseekers.

The very first step of this exploitation is the demand for probation. How can you ask someone to work on probation for three months, against a job that pays $60.00 a month? You don’t even get any compensation during such long probation period. Instead, some workers “pay” for probation. Do you imagine looking for a jobs because you are broke and when you have one you are being expected to pay your fare to and fro and at the end of the month get nothing? Nasty!!!

A majority of employers, in order to lure you into accepting their cheap offers, will promise compensation you during the probation period. Since this is just a promise and not an entity in the agreement, you risk getting nothing at all.
What if at the end of the probation period they “decide” you are not the “right” person for the job? Yeah, this may be right. But what if you are actually qualified but the prefer living their entire lives with interns and workers on probation?

Some employers appear to be just but paying their workers at the end of the month is still a problem. Most of the workers won’t quit. They will sit tight hoping against hope. Before your how runs out, you are being owed a three-month salary. Oh, where is the job market heading to?

It is amazing how times flies. Just got up one morning, and heard kids from the Saint Theresa Nursery and Primary School playing loud in the school band. What are they up to? Why are they playing? A friend asked me if I don’t know every school re Hearses for the Youth Day?

Oh! It’s almost 11th Feb here. 11th Feb was always the best day of my life when I was in Primary and Secondary school. Though I hated the march past and all the events preceding it, I always had to bare it because I knew the rest of the day will be gold for me. I really can’t understand why I loved the youth day celebrations so much. I guess it was because on that day, I always get to see kids from other schools dressed in various outfits. Since it usually takes me a long time to save some cash for that day, it was always certain that it would meet me as a wealthy kid

I lost all the fun in Youth Day celebration when I completed Secondary School. Maybe I started feeling too big for it.

A friend of mine introduced me to a website for employers and freelancers. After registering on the site and writing a few tests, I checked out the marketplace. The jobs there were very interesting and tempting. Found many jobs on article writing, proofreading, copywriting, blog maintenance etc, but for some reason, I was not as thrilled as I thought I would.

I am a Blogger, so normally I must be interested in such deals, why was I not? For some reason, I prefer being paid to write content for my own blog than to do some freelancing and get a few dollars from it and conceal the deal. My blog is mine, and I will certainly write on it more passionately than anywhere else. Secondly, most of these companies that will ay you to blog form them already have a reputation and an agreement that enables more understanding as opposed to some harsh conditions that will be imposed to you by some individuals of one-man companies.

Averagely, a Blogger who has some pagerank and traffic will be paid higher per post, than a freelance poster is paid per hour but the truth is that the poster may get many hours of work and may end up being paid more. There is a lot of limitation on bloggers since they are required to keep a strict portion of paid to unpaid posts.

However, I won’t give up on Odesk. I do believe if I after filling up my profile and adding some experiences / skills, I may meet up with the requirements of most employers and potentially earn far more than what I earn blogging.

I have been too busy lately, but still being able to work on Pen2Net for an average of one hour per day. I love this project very much. Through Pen2Net, I want to make blogging as easy as possible even for a caveman.

Pen2Net normally is a project that should take less than a week to complete but I am trying to give it more than I initially planned. I am done with the basic stuffs and I can call what I have now as the Beta Version. I have included a forum and a corporate blog. I will post a complete review of Pen2NET on AZ Blogging when I am done with this beta version.

I once hear a friend talk to me about Meebo. He explained that Meebo is an online system that offers several chat clients on one web page. That means instant of using your standard installed chat clients like msn messenger and yahoo messenger, you can just go to Meebo and used any of the messengers by just inputting your user name and password on the against your desired messenger.

I really don’t like chatting with friends during working hours because it is a very obvious means of self distraction. However, Lainy is an exception to this rule

I like the service, no doubt. It saved me today since I couldn’t install yahoo messenger on my PC. It is however beyond reasonable doubts that being a web application, it is very basic and doesn’t provide much of the sneak features you will expect from the standalone chat clients.

Hmmm. I like this Chinese proverb

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back

However, I am a little skeptical about exactly what it means. At fisrt glance, the meaning is very direct. You can decide it means you have to ask those coming back since the have been there and must certainly know the road.

On a second thought, it may still mean you should ask those coming back whether there is even a road at the first place. Maybe they went and found no road and that’s why they are coming back.

On a third thought, it may mean you should confirm from those coming back that it is impossible to know the road ahead. They couldn’t find it, that’s why they are coming back…