Game Plan..

Raya Festive Season is coming to an end. It means that my LPPKN treatment is commencing once more. As usual, at the first sign of monthly Aunt Flo, I am supposed to call LPPKN to get an appointment to see my doctor. But seeing that there's too much going on currently with my sister being in confinement, my mother trying to help my sister in confinement, four little tyrants shouting, crying and screeching all at once plus a small baby on the side, we had been running to and fro giving our hand in helping as best we could. I'm not complaining but it is quite tiring with having to go to the office, run errands during lunch time and after office hours.

So, after we talked it over, we decided that we need to take a breather from treatment for this year. We practically kept on being postponed all year long anyways so we might as well be postponed without being told to. Seeing that it is near the end of the year, we might as well wait for next year to continue with all the jabbing, prodding, hoping and being disappointed again. So, that's our current game plan.. Let's hope for the best! \( ^_ ^ )/

Tough Business..

I just started to do an online/word of mouth business recently just to humour myself (since project baby is not going too well, I'd might as well find some kind of activity to distract myself). I found a great indie company based in the US producing vegan and all natural lip balms and lip colours. The products are all made of natural ingredients and they 85% of them are organic. These lip products are moisturizing and they are also animal cruelty free.

So I ventured into this business head on without thinking too much about it. Heck! I didn't even get much profit out of it either. It is just a hobby for me to do since I do like these products and wear them, so I thought, why not share them with whoever's interested? To promote my small non quite profitable business, I engaged some of my dear friends to spread the word about them. I do have good faith in my friends that they are helping me out of the goodness of their hearts.

I guess trying to sell an idea and the actual product itself is kind of difficult (especially when you are a shy person). But in my heart, I feel that a wonderful product will sell itself one day. But not at the moment though. So, for the first week of trying to sell, I encountered the answer to why online sellers DO NOT accept nor entertain requests for exchange. The reason being is that a customer may want to change a product she/he had bought because she/he didn't like it or it didn't meet up to her/his expectations. BUT, in giving in to requests to exchange bought products, the seller may received an opened/used product in return.

For example, a seller just sold a tube of lipstick in a certain shade to a customer via her good friend. The lipstick is unopened and safely sealed. Suddenly, the customer who bought the lipstick decided that she didn't like the shade she had chosen and requested for an exchange of another shade more to her liking. The seller asked whether the tube of the original order had been opened or not? The customer said no, it hasn't been opened. So the seller, not wanting to disappoint her customer agreed. The exchange took place. The seller just put the returned tube aside to attend to other matters. Later on when she wanted to put back the returned and supposedly unopened tube inside her stock carton, she found that the tube indeed had been opened because the seal is no longer intact!

Now the seller is left with the dilema of telling her good friend to tell his friend who bought the product that the safety seal on the dang thing is broken and cannot be sold anymore to any other customers. So, in the end after a loooong battle with herself, she decided to tell her friend about the whole fiasco and hoped that her friend could understand her dilema. What about the opened lip color? Well, since it had been opened, it can no longer be sold to anyone anymore. So it has become a loss to the seller. Tough business.. I sooo pity her.

So there.. I learned the lesson of why "Goods sold are not returnable!" is an important policy for online/small time business owners especially when the products they are selling involves cosmetic, innerwear, and food (plus other stuff I can't think of at the moment).

Hmm.. let's see what I can get my hands on next to sell in a small scale..

Not Again!!

I seem to have a bad luck streak when it comes to IT stuff lately. Just last month I had a panic attack when my external hardisk crashed, then suddenly out of nowhere my PC at my office blinked and died! I tried to reboot the dang thing but all I got was a blank black screen with some error message that a ntoskrnl.exe is missing. Wha?? How did that happen?!

Since it is an official asset, I had to call up a technician to come and take a look with high hopes that my suddenly banged up PC could be restored. She tried to do some recovery with Windows Boot CD but that didn't work. She had to take my PC away to get some diagnostic things done to it. Fine. I'll just hang around doing nothing since I don't have my source of work tool anymore.

Waiting around doing nothing is no fun I tell you. So I asked my dear husband to send me my netbook so at least I have something to do while waiting. Later on, another technician came by my office room and told me the bad news. The hardisk on my PC is dead! What??!! Again??!!!! I nearly hyperventilated when I think about all my work data inside that PC! Oh My God!!!! I begged the technician to try and do some recovery data pronto since there are quite a number of classified information involved. He told me that the vendor didn't cater to recovery of data but they did gave him two numbers to contact regarding this problem. The recovery is quite costly because the cheapest is RM400 and it can go up to RM4000 per recovery! I told him just to try anything and ask the treasury whether it is allowed to be financed by the organization since it is their property to begin with. (Hope it works!!!)

Then, at home I had some trouble with my bluetooth mouse not connecting to my netbook! Arrrghhh! It was working fine during the day but suddenly the bluetooth toggle didn't recognize any devices at all! I feel like killing somebody (my netbook maybe?) since there are too many problems associated with IT lately. I looked up loads of information on how to make my netbook detect bluetooth devices but to no avail. I even tried reinstalling the bluetooth's driver this morning but still it would not cooperate! Lastly I resorted to just using a normal wired mouse grudgingly. I am going to have my brother take a look later with hopes that he can do some miracle with this thing!

Reaaalllyyyy not a good time for me! :(

Hardisk Crashed!

My treatment is currently put on hold during this holy month of Ramadhan.. I guess it's a good thing to take time off and relax from all those needles, ultrasounds and poking (really really not a fun experience I tell you). 

Last weekend my husband and I went to Low Yat Plaza to buy IT stuff because we wanted to get good bargains during the PC Fair event. We went there with the intention to buy a printer (the one that can be modified to cater external ink tank), external hardisk casing (my old casing got busted because I dropped in once too many times!), external hardisk for each of us (they are getting cheaper by the month!), bluetooth mouse for my netbook, a cable replacement for our GPS, and a set of speakers (my husband added this item on our shopping list at the last minute!).

So, on a fine Saturday afternoon, we drove there and trotted up and down the aisles of shops to find the most best bargain we could. It was tiring and my feet were killing me. We didn't bring a lot of cash but armed ourselves with plastic cards. The problem with Low Yat retailers is that they do not want to bear the cost of government tax for credit card accessibility and imposed that tax to the customers. That is SO unfair! They have this attitude of 'you don't want to pay? Some other people will come and buy'. This is because throngs of IT-starved people like us do go there and succumb to the greedy merchandiser there just because there's no other place to go for IT parts and merchandise. So, note to all: brings lots of cash when shopping for IT stuff at Low Yat Plaza.

Ok, moving on.. So we went there and bought all the stuff on our list plus a couple of other things as well (impulse buying is not good - but I call it shopping therapy.. hehe!). We brought home along with  the other stuff a cigarette port extension (for the car), a USB port replicator and a very cute portable speaker (for me!).

I had quite a tough time finding a replacement casing for my IDE hardisk because it seems that they are not produced anymore since all the external hardisk sold now is SATA. The salesman that sold me the casing told me this fact. He also has an IDE hardisk and he's praying that his casing won't break or malfunction because it's hard to get a replacement. Even though the casing wasn't at all nice-looking, I had to make to with it. 

Back at home I tried plugging in the newly-cased old hardisk of mine into my laptop and it worked fine. It suddenly struck me that I need to make a backup just in case anything happens to it. So when I unplug the hardisk, and plug it into another laptop, it wasn't recognizable! Suddenly the computer is asking for me to format the hardisk! What?!! Oh no! Backup intuition came too late! I panicked BIG TIME! So i unplug it and tried plugging in into the other computer and the outcome is still the same. I thought it was because of the casing so I changed the hardisk back into the old casing with high hopes that it would all be all right. I was dead wrong! The hardisk was still unreadable.

I called my IT-whiz brother and told him about my predicament. He broke the bad news to me that my hardisk had crashed. It is now officially DEAD. Waaaaa!! All my life is in that hardisk! So now I am on a quest to try to recover all my data from the crashed and burned hardisk. Hope I can find a solution with freewares one of these days.. huhu..