Archive for the ‘musings’ Category
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The True Story of How David Archuleta Came to Sri KDU
[subtitle: Confessions of a Hero/Villain]
-mid-2009 or so-
David Archuleta came to Sri KDU. THE David Archuleta (DA), the winner of American Idol (halfway round the world), came to a small (ok, maybe not so small) school in the middle of the country right above Singapore.
How did this happen? It’s a long story. But I can say, it was probably my fault.
First off, some organisers paid good money to Archuleta’s agents to come over to Malaysia. Then these organisers sold rights to many companies to give away exclusive tickets to people in exchange for promotions which bring in lots and lots and lots of money and publicity for the companies. Ka-ching, $_$ and all that. One of these companies was hitz.fm.
Hitz.fm had a great idea! Why not send DA to a school? Run a contest to see which school wins, and free publicity rolls in! Nice idea!
They made a webpage for it. The contest was quite simple:
- Register for an account
- Choose your school from a list
- Answer 10 questions about DA correctly
- Your school gets 1 entry!
- Repeat for further success!
Mrs. Chan, our principal, was/is a devout fan of DA. She called up an assembly to tell every student in school to vote for DA to come to Sri KDU. To rephrase, our principal told every student to go online to win a contest so that a celebrity singer would come to our school. Somehow, she had also managed to print out about, say, 200-300 small slips of paper with all the answers to the 10 questions to help us students answer correctly.
I was quite bemused, but hey, it’s worth a shot to get a celebrity to come over right? Especially since I can now brag, forever, that David Archuleta came to my school. So I went online, registered an account and voted. Nothing special.
But what really caught my eye was that there was absolutely no protection from automated voting.
Chanced are, if you’ve been around the Internet long enough, you’ve seen one of those little images where there are letters which are bent strangely and distorted like mad. These are called CAPTCHAs. Basically they make sure you’re not a robot so that you don’t make 1000 accounts or do something 1000 times unless you’re actually doing it manually.
Without any Captchas, the voting is ridiculously easy to automate. Using iMacro, I set up a macro. A macro is a recording of actions, for example, this macro’s instructions was to:
- Go to the website.
- Choose the correct school from the list.
- Click on the 10 correct answers.
- Click vote.
All this is really, really easy. You just have to click record, do the actions manually yourself, then click stop.
Now, if you hit the play button, it goes through the list and votes. If you fill the “Repeat” box with a number, say, 100, then it repeats it 100 times.
I was triumphant when I voted 100 times in about 2 minutes.
And that was that. I could so easily destroy this contest. If I set the repeat to one million times, I could leave it overnight and pretty much ensure that Sri KDU wins. But my conscience tugged at me. How could I deprive the other schools of getting DA to their school? It’s not fair, right? Maybe some other true fans of DA were voting right now, every hour, slaving away to get a chance to meet DA?
Well screw them, why didn’t they think of this?
But there was another problem which prevented me from voting a million times. I was worried that if hitz.fm saw a million votes for Sri KDU they’d be so surprised that they would just disqualify KDU from the contest. That would suck, every DA fan in school would hate me, and Mrs. Chan would probably… well let’s not go into detail about that.
I finally decided not to bother voting. Instead I told a friend about this method, then I showed him the exact steps involved. There’s nothing worse that a secret unshared. (The friend was SY. I don’t know if I should involve his name or not, so let’s leave it at that for now.)
SY told CF about this, and together they made 20,000 votes. When they told me I was something like:
:O
o.O
Well, the day finally arrived. DA came to our school. The entire event should be summarised in another post, but here’s a quick reminder of the concert:
In total, there were 65,700 votes. From a school of about 1200 students, and that’s including primary and secondary. I heard that the method spread to a few other students and some people in the IT department as well. In any case, I read somewhere that there were about 100,000 votes total, which means that we voted almost twice as much as every other school combined. Haha.
Why post this almost half a year after he left Malaysia? I’m only posting this because of ego. It’s quite likely that my experimentation caused David Archuleta to come to my school. Wooo. That’s a story I can tell my grandchildren.
To Sri KDU-ens: Thank you, thank you. You’re welcome.
To hitz.fm: Please, perhaps you might want to look into some ways of stopping automated voting? Also, don’t you find that 65,000 votes just a little suspicious?
To other schools out there: Sore luck. Be smarter next time. :P
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New Old Blog
Well! Some people tend to change their blogs now and then, some change theirs every month, some change it so often that I get sick of following them. Of course, there are some who just stick to one blog forever, and to those people I’m so grateful. You make my life easier.
But… I’m changing my blog! For a really long time I’ve been using Blogger, because it’s just so easy and simple to use. Plus I think I was 12/13 (?) when I started my first blog a long time ago. I don;t even remember what that was about.
A little history about the blog. The major blog I’ve been updating for the past year (or two? Three? I don’t remember) was hosted on Blogger. I think everyone knows Blogger. Most people opened their first blogs there. It’s simple, it’s free, and it was something like “OMGWTF I get to have jiannmeng.blogspot.com which has my name in it! So cool!” So that’s what I used, and that’s what I liked for a really long time.
As time passed though, a few things really become annoying to me. I nitpicked about certain small details. For example, Blogger only gives you 1GB of space for pictures. Seems like quite a lot, but that’s only if you automatically resize the photos you upload. Doing so you could hold lots and lots of pictures, but I’m always thinking, “What if I ran out of space? Do I have to delete old photos?” Probably the answer is yes, and I cannot bear deleting historical stuff. If you look at my harddrive, I try to save every photo I take, no matter how irrelevant. I don’t know why, it’s just one of my idiosyncrasies.
Even worse, I really like uploading high-resolution stuff. Even when resized reasonably, that’s about 1MB per picture, in total about 1000 pictures only. I can’t really live with that.
So I decided to use Photobucket. I think everyone knows that too. Unlimited storage! But that leads to different problems. Stuff like having to copy the link of every picture and manually setting a fixed size so that it wouldn’t overstretch the layout, stuff like that. It’s really, really annoying for some reason.
So, what to do? I wasn’t sure, but then Raina told me about Tumblr, which looked pretty awesome. But a short while later I realised it wasn’t for blogging, it’s more like Twitter. The layouts were nice, but you really couldn’t customise your post too well. Stuff like adding pictures to posts and editing the HTML of the post was just plain annoying. So, what next?
I was looking at WordPress. Probably the best of all, but if I took their free service I’d again be limited by storage space and all that stuff. But you can download WordPress (it’s open source) and use it on your own website, making it truely your own blog. I liked that.
Which means, how would I host my own website? What hosting company should I use? Above everything, it needs to be cheap. I’d be spending my dad’s money if I wanted to host my own website. Shopping around, the cheapest I could find was something like USD4.99 a month. RM200 a year.
*gasp*
It’s actually not a lot if you think about it, for a whole year. But still, I’m quite reluctant to dish out TWO HUNDRED BUCKS a year, especially if it’s not my own money. Find something cheaper…
Nearlyfreespeech.net. Interesting. It’s pay as you use, so the more you use, the more you pay, but also the less you use the less you pay. I like it :O
So how much would it cost? Looking at the pricing structure, I think it’s about 30-40 US a year. That’s on average RM100 a year. I think I can convince my dad to approve of that. After all, this is more like a hobby to me. We all spend some money on our hobbies… I think mine is pretty cheap for a hobby.
Last night, I signed up, deposited some money and promptly spent close to two hours trying to make sense of what a MsSQL database is. This morning, I uploaded all the WordPress files into the server, and a few minutes later, voila, it works!
Of course, I think the definite coolest part about the whole thing is this:
(Yes, it’s centered because it’s awesome)
I have a website! A fully functioning website I can call my own. That is made of plain awesome.
So, what does this mean now? A few things. My Blogger and Tumblr accounts will now be updated anymore. Almost more than likely if you’re seeing this on my old blogs, it’s the second-to-last post I’ll be putting up. Update your links accordingly, please :)
If you’re reading this from the new link, this is a pretty detailed first post, isn’t it?
I also imported all the old posts into WordPress. I’m not starting anew, I’m just making a New Old Blog.
Another thing. The new blog will be under construction for a long, long time. I really want to customise the blog, but it’s SPM season now. That means I’ve wasted close to 4 hours on something relatively useless. If I have free time (and I’m not playing a game, (TF2 is really fun)), I’ll be tinkering around with themes, plugins and stuff. The site might go down without warning since it’s based on a prepaid system and I didn’t credit it with that much money yet. The layout might change everytime you visit, or not at all. I don’t know what will happen.
It’s an interesting new journey from here on.
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Maintaining an extremely positive outlook
Due to much persuasion and encouragement (and um… teachers T.T) I joined Yellow House’s March Past. I resolve to be optimistic in this post instead of deeply depressing.
First I would like to point out Yellow House’s chance of winning something this year. A quick summary of results : in the Ujiantara (sort of a fitness test) Yellow was in 4th place with a 24 point gap to Blue in 3rd place, 29 points from Green/Red ( I forget) and another 30 points from Red/Green.
After today’s running events : 19 (!!!!) points from B, 29 points from G/R and 30 from R/G.
As you can evidently see, we have caught up by 5 points to Blue! Obviously this is a great improvement from previous years, as we NORMALLY just widen the gap between ourselves and 3rd place exponentially as time goes on. This shows that this year, Yellow has a large good decent small chance of overthrowing the crown! No really! It’s almost like the Opposition getting a two-thirds majority!
Next point in question : our MP team has less people than any other MP team. Like, possibly 60% the size of any other MP team. In fact, we probably have less people than in the cheerleading team. Obviously this is good. It shows that, um, we can, um, it shines the spotlight on each individual and shows our ability to overcome any deficit and face every challenge right on without fear or worry! Yes, that sounds good. In fact, we will probably get bonus marks for not reaching the requirement of 48 students.
Also, our leaders are obviously acting. It is quite impossible for one person to be good at leadership, but poor at thinking, one person to be good at thinking, but poor at leadership, and one person who sits near the team, watches us march, and skip class. It’s like from an anime show, except it all seems so real and everyone in the team feels it’s true (except me of course, I ain’t so fooled). Obviously they are acting. Right?
Let us “create the history”!
This message paid for and approved by Y House.
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Strange Things I Noticed
The best time to meet the people in your neighbourhood is during a blackout. I am not the only person in KL with a DS and Mario Kart. Also, when Tenaga Nasional says power will be restored in 3 hours, it usually takes longer. Ours came back in 2.
Both KDU and Cempaka are celebrating their 25th year this year! KDU college first opened in 1983, and if I’m not mistaken has I think 2
schoolsinstitutions of learning in Malaysia and one in China. Cempaka opened their first school in 1983 also, and now has 4. (I think)Not having Powerpoint sucks when you’re supposed to do a presentation via .ppt. Why are people so insistent about using Powerpoint anyways when its not really that good of a visual tool in learning? Oh, and OpenOffice, while free, is still pretty sucky.
Studying history in Malay makes even the Punic Wars feel like studying… um- Sejarah. Sigh.
I have about 10 minutes to complete my Moral homework before class starts tomorrow. Once again, I left the textbook in school.