Well, I was a bit busy recently. I even find it difficult to update my blogs regularly. To summerize my activity during these days, the following is a brief.
- Just coming back from Chaing Mai. Stayed in a very nice hotel for four nights (with the expense of WHO and CDC). Attending a training conducted by WHO. Hope I did not get H1N1.
- My sister and my father are visiting me in Thailand. I was busy sending them to all the places in Bangkok (either shopping centers or restaurants). My sis got fever while she was in Thailand, and went back to Singapore with fever. She was really scared that she got H1N1 (not because she is afraid of that swine flu, but afraid of being quarantined). I gave her a few tablets of paracetamol to take while on the plane. Fortunately, she passed the Singapore immigration and health check undetected. Now, Singapore has at least one unreported H1N1.
- Back to a small town in Thailand. Back to rat race.
- Bought a new Olympus binocular. Hope it will be very useful next time I visited Myanmar (Burma) especially near Kandawgyi Park and Inya Lake.
- Bought a new Nokia Music Express 5800. Bought is just because it was cool, but found it very useful as I can now check my gmail, access the GPS map and see my blog statistics on the go.
- Bought a new Acer Netbook. Very small, very light, but the battery last incredible 6 hours! Now, I bring it everywhere I go.
- Set up a broad band internet at home (another house). They said broadband, but it seems like running at the same speed as the internet cafes in Myanmar. Sometimes very slow. It is from TT&T. Don’t use it if you can.
- I am now planning to buy a new video camera (camcorder). Like the Cannon camcorder with SD card.
Will update you of my life later. Now, will go to bed. (Have to work tomorrow).
Jude Williams has asked me information on getting married to a Burmese man. Apparently, she found it difficult to find information on getting married to a Burmese. There are no information available on marriage to a Burmese (guy or girl). I think it is time to give you some information on this issue for those Burmese guys and girls who found difficulty getting married to a foreigner, and those foreign men and ladies want to get married to a Burmese.
- Burmese law allows Myanmar citizens to get married to a foreigner. In the past, it used to be easy to get it done. Just head to a local judge and he will marry you. However, since about 10 years ago, local judges refused to do it on the ground that it is difficult to distinguish between real marriage and the human trafficking. Today, no judge or local court would marry a Burmese and a foreigner.
- Even after you get married, your marriage certificate (actually a marriage contract in Burma) is in Burmese language. It has to be translated into English. You can get a certified notary translation of your marriage certificate into English but the Foreign Office will refuse to certify that notary. You can still use it if your embassy accepts the notary without a certification by the Foreign Office, but some embassies would not.
- The best way to get your marriage done is to do it in a foreign country. You can do it either in Thailand or in Singapore. If you are doing it is Thailand, you will need an affidavit of freedom to get married. This has to be endorsed by your embassy. For a Burmese, he can get an affidavit in a court in Myanmar, get it translated into English by a notary public, and then get a certification from the Foreign Office in Myanmar. This can then be endorsed by the Thai Embassy in Yangon or endorsed by the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok. Both of you will need this affidavit. Then, go to a nearest amphur (local district administrative office) and get your marriage done. However, please check with the district office you intend to get married before you do anything as the requirements by the office may vary from one office to another.
- Easier one is to get married in Singapore. This is what I have done after I cannot do it either in Myanmar or in Thailand. All you need is a valid passport. You can file your marriage application online. However, the applicant (either you or your fiancé) has to be in Singapore at the time of filing for at least 15 days. After the filing, you can leave Singapore as there is 21 days waiting period. You will need two witnesses (either Singaporean or foreigner of at least 21 years of age). You can choose get married at the ROM (Registry of Marriage) or with a solemnizer in a hotel. However, getting a solemnizer is sometimes difficult. You can get the complete information at Registry of Marriage website.
The above information is true to my knowledge at the time of writing this article. Hope it will be useful to you.
It has been a long time since I last updated this blog. To admit the truth, I was quite busy recently. My work consumes most of my energy, and what is left of my energy is consumed by editing articles on Myanmar Today. Believe me. Editing articles written in non-standard English is not a preasurable experience. I admit that I am not a very good English writer, but editing something into a readable article is not alwasy easy. Many a times, I ended up rewriting the whole article. Thankfully, all of the contributors to Myanmar Today are my friends so they are more than happy for my editing effort. (They can get away with just the outlines of the article and let the editor do the hard work of writing it into a readable one).
Recently, I was struck down by a severe influenza. It left me debilitated and weak for the whole week. I was dizzy the whole day, with a very severe headache and bodyache. I just lied down the whole day for about three days without even able to lift my head up from the pillow. This was the most serious illness I got since I was a teenager. Ironically, I got influenza after I come back from the Swine Flu Workshop! Thankfully, it was not a swine flu (or at least, that is what I think because I didn’t go and see the doctor).
Hopefully, I believe I would be able to update this blog with a few articles every month. Or at least, I will try my best to update.
I first arrived to Chin State on one cold November evening in 2004. I was taking a jeep, sitting in the back seat, depressed. The road to Mindat from Pakokku was the worst road I have ever traveled in my life. A worn out paved road with so many holes and bumps, and a lot of dirsts. And it took half a day to traveled that 96 miles from Pakokku to Mindat. It is like a nightmare come true to me.
I entered the small Chin town at around 6:00 PM. Everything was dark, dull and gloomy. The whole town was engulfed in a cold darkness. I was more than depressed now. I really wanted to cry. I just want to run away.
Three years later, I left Chin State. It was one November afternoon, in 2007. The weather was sunny and fine. And all my friends there came to say farewell to me. This was my last day in Chin State. I am finally leaving. But I am not happy. I cannot smile. I tried to smile to everybody but my smile was lifeless. Everybody tried to smile, but with tears in my eyes. I nearly cried at that moment. But I didn’t want to show my tears to anybody. I was just pretending that I was happy, but not. It was quite painful to leave a place you have been living for quite a long time (three years in a very remote place is quite a long time). You have many friends and many memories. And these memories will always be with me forever.
One day, I will go back to Chin State and visit the places I have lived and traveled again.
Now is the time for celebration. The whole country of Myanmar (Burma) is celebrating Thingyan or water festival this week. Not only in Myanmar, but also among Burmese communities all over the world are celebrating Thingyan. In case you don’t know what thingyan is, Thingyan is the celebration for the Myanmar New Year. You can read about Myanmar Thingyan in the article I wrote on Today in Myanmar at Myanmar Thingyan.
I have written the most complete guide to Shwedagon Pagoda on Today in Myanmar. The guide starts with the history of Shwedagon pagoda (including the opinion of the archaeologists on the origin of Shwedagon), structures around Shwedagon, Shwedagon stairways, platforms and structures on the Shwedagon. There is also a detailed floor plan/map of the structures on the Shwedagon terrace as well as the detailed description of the Nine Wonders of Shwedagon. I believe this guide is so far the most complete guide of Shwedagon Pagoda available on the Internet. All the articles in the Shwedagon Pagoda Guide can be found at Shwedagon Pagoda Guide | Today in Myanmar.
koreanfilmstars.com
There is a new Korean movie news website for all those fans of Korean stars. The Korean movie news site Koreanfilmstars.com has a collection of news stories, photos, biographies and video about Korean movie stars, film stars, pop stars, Korean entertainment industry. The artucles are updated daily and there are more than 10,000 news stories about Korean stars on this site. This site is written in English and is a must see site for Korean film lovers.
“ေတာ္ေတာ္ၾကာပါၿပီ ရင္ထဲကို ေရာက္ေနခဲ့တဲ့ ကိစၥေလးတစ္ခု။ ေယဘုယ်ကေတာ့
ကိုယ့္ေရးတဲ့ စာကို ႏွစ္သက္ သေဘာက်လို႔ ကူးယူတယ္ တျခား ဘေလာ့ဂ္မွာ၊
ဝဘ္ဆိုဒ္္ေတြမွာ ေဖာ္ျပတယ္ ဆိုတာ ေက်းဇူးတင္ဖို႔ ေကာင္းတဲ့ ကိစၥပါ။”
“သူမ်ားစာကိုကူးယူၿပီး ကိုယ့္နာမည္တပ္ ေဖာ္ျပသည္ မ်ားကိုေတာ့ ဘာမွ မေျပာလိုပါ။
ကိုယ့္သမိုင္း ကိုယ္ေရး သူ႕သမိုင္း သူေရး ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဓိကေျပာခ်င္တာေလး တစ္ခု
က ႀကိဳက္တာ မႀကိဳက္တာ တင္တာ မတင္တာ ေစာ္ကားတာ ခ်ီးက်ဴးတာေတြ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။
အဲဒီလို Duplicate တင္တာေတြဟာ Content ကို ထိခိုက္ေစတယ္ ဆိုတာပါပဲ။ ဒါေလးကို အေလးအနက္ထား ေစခ်င္တာပါပဲ။ ”
Nyi Lynn Seck 18+ Den | Copy & Paste
The above is the excerpt from the post on Nyilynnseck’s Blog. Basically, he complained about the problems faced by many bloggers where their articles and posts were copied and posted without giving credit to the original author.
I also experience problems like this. Many times, my posts were published in other blogs and websites. Some give credit while otheres don’t give any credit. Some even posted like these are their posts. It is really annoying, especially as it effects the google ranking and search results. Now, what I do is, I put internal links inside the post back to my other articles and pages from my website. For example, if my post contains a word “Shwedagon” and I have post about Shwedagon Pagoda, I put a link to that post. I usually put around 3 or 4 links in each post. Now, I am using a wordpress plugin that automatically put links to other articles and categories on my website. The idea is, many of those “Cut and Pasters” don’t understand much about html, and many a time, they simply copy and paste without cleaning the html codes. Hopefully, the “copy and paste” post will have links back to your original article, which might not only shows who is the original author, but might also increase the page ranking of the original post and blog. Moreover, because I put links to the tag pages on my blog, it significantly increase the page ranking of these tag pages in my blog. Hopefully, we might be able to take advantage of this problem in our favour.
Just yesterday, I got a few spam messages in my gmail. The message seems authenticated for unobserved eyes. It uses the real email address of the people you know, and the real name of the one you know. The person said in the SPAM mail that he was visiting London, and his money was stolen. Now he said he doesn’t have any money left, not even money to pay for the hotel bills. Moreover, the hotel phone line was also cut off by the robbers (fishy, huh?), so he cannot call his home or his friends. Then he begged me to send him money (1350 pound) via Western Union to his name (REAL NAME) to England! I was very surprised to see this. I know the person and I know he is very rich. I know he travels frequently all over the world. But the eamil does not have my name in the greeting. This one really looks like spam, and my gmail spam filter also catches it as a spam. And the sender email address is also the real email address. It is a Yahoo mail address. I am not sure how the spammers got hold of this information, but I know this is a SPAM. So next time you got a similar urgent email from one of your contact begging for money, be very careful. This might be a spam.
While Blogger is for beginners, Wordpress is for advanced bloggers. Most people started blogging at Blogger, and later when they host their own blog, most of them use wordpress installed on their host. One of the reasons for using wordpress is, there is a large collection of free and easy to use plugins to extend the power of wordpress. Without these plugins, there is not much advantage in using wordpress over blogger. The following are the wordpress plugins I use.
1. Akismet - this is the most essential wordpress plugin for every wordpress blogger, unless you disable the comment and trackbacks in your posts. Once you started blogging in wordpress and starting to get visitors, you will also notice a rise in comments. However, most of them are just spam comments. If you do not install anything to counter these spam comments, you will be in big trouble. Akismet will catch most of these spam comments. This will save you tons of work deleting these spams.
2. Re-Captcha – Not enough with Akismet? Altough Akismet is a very powerful anti-spam tool for wordpress, there are times where Akismet fails to catch spam comments. Re-Captcha is a plugin that will displays a small captcha (the one that you have to read and type into a field when you post a comment in my blog). It is difficult for the machine to read the word and will fail to post a comment. This will eliminate most of the mcahine posted comments in your wordpress blog.
3. Still fail to prevent spam comments? I once received more than one hundred spam comments from the same IP address even though I installed both Akismet and re-Captcha. It was so annoying that finally, I had to use the most lethal and most effective weapon against spammers – IP Banning! Yes, finally, I was so annoyed that I decided to totally ban the ip address that posted humdreds of spam comments a day in my blog. The wordpress plugin WP-Ban will completely ban a single ip address, a range of ip address, or if you want, the whole domain. This one is very effective but should use with caution. This is the final weapon (similar to Weapon of Mass Destruction) against spammers. However, if yo use wp-ban, don’t forget to turn off any caching plugins, as the banned page will be cached and shown to regular visitors. I already faced this problem and finally had to deactivate my wp-cache plugin.
