Here is what I wished to achieve for year 2009 (I wrote this on 2008) :

1 year later (read: 2009)

- I will be in Singapore with the boyfriend. Had a minimalist princess room with Ikea furniture. I’ll separate half for the prince room.

- I will be working at a medium size advertising agency or design studio in Singapore. Maintaining blogs at the same time and probably checking on EcoQuest International profile online.

- Good bye LDR.

- I will have a Sony Ericsson phone with mp3, camera, and most importantly able to online. No more flip phone is fine.

- I will own a 19? iMac. Save place than owning a 19? desktop.

- Still black hair with a shoulder length. Or maybe a curly one.

The fact is:

- I still stay with my family in my hometown, Medan, and fly to KL once in two months or so. The dream of working in Singapore, as a way to end LDR, has vanished.

- I stepped into web design world, work as a freelancer at home, and never look back. As the result, I developed dark eye circles due to long hour work sometimes, but income is pretty sweet and I have my time in my hands.

- Still in LDR. Good news, we will tie the knot end of this year. Can’t wait to say goodbye to LDR!

- My love towards pink stuffs continues. I am a proud owner of pink LG Ice Cream KF350. The best mobile phone I ever bought. Too bad it doesn’t have wifi thing.

- Still using Dell desktop. No longer have interest in the fragile Mac.

- Still black hair. But it’s curly instead of straight hair. No more bob style as I’ve started to grow it.

What-I-achieve-now is totally different from what-I-wanted-to-achieve-back-then. Well, no regret so far. I’m glad to be who I am today and have what I have today.

You see, when I have the determination and the mood to do something, I’m so gonna finish it on that day too, if not ASAP. Or else, I can’t have a good sleep like something is burdening me on my shoulder.

The triangle shape in yellow creamy color is supposed to be a wafer but the end product looks quite awful. Oh well, it’s been years since I last sew this kind of handmade from felt cloth, so pardon my sewing skill, can?

Comparing the cake’s picture on the box and the real product. Ain’t they look about the same? except that you can see the thread clearer in the real product. What to do, the thread (included in the set) is quite huge compare to the normal thread that we use to sew buttons, etc.

Let me present you the not-so-ordinary-cake which is made with love (Does you arm’s hair stand yet? ).

Happy Monday!

I can’t believe that she is a Mum now. I feel like it was yesterday only when we graduated from high school.

If you cannot decipher anything, then try pulling the corner of your eyes as if you were Chinese.

How about now?

I know la, this is oh-so-last-year joke. But I just got it from a forwarded email.

- After graduated, I didn’t manage to get myself a job at KL hence I came back to Medan on earlier May. This is the last choice that I wanted to go for.

- I started to work as a packaging designer on June. I ranted about the colleagues, the Boss, the driver who drove like an F1 racer, the cheapo catering (lunch), etc.

- Long Distance Relationship was so hard for me. I kept on counting days to meet him again.

- I owned a simple Samsung phone. I changed my mobile operator from Simpati to XL cause sms within XL numbers were free.

- I still used my Acer travelmate laptop. I changed from NusaNet dial-up to Speedy broadband – hourly package (384kbps) from Telkom. The connection ran so fast and smooth at that time.

- I had a black bob hair style.

Now

- I am still in Medan. The previous attempt of job hunting at KL failed.

- I work at home; freelance designer and blogger. It never come accross my mind that I will earn through writing. Optimizing the blog to generate more income is fun. I rant about the black out.

- So fast it is 1 year of LDR already. I have get used to not having him by my side. Good way to be more independent. But I still counting days to meet him.

- I still owned the Samsung phone and additional Nokia phone. Both are very simple with color screen and basic menu, that’s all. I have changed back to Simpati because XL line has getting worse. The other phone is for my ‘Happy’ (from Digi) number.

- I passed my 3 years old laptop to my brother. Currently using desktop – Dell Inspiron 530. The connection of Speedy has getting worse. Sigh.

- Still black bob hair.

1 year later

- I will be in Singapore with the boyfriend. Had a minimalist princess room with Ikea furniture. I’ll separate half for the prince room.

- I will be working at a medium size advertising agency or design studio in Singapore. Maintaining blogs at the same time and probably checking on EcoQuest International profile online.

- Good bye LDR.

- I will have a Sony Ericsson phone with mp3, camera, and most importantly able to online. No more flip phone is fine.

- I will own a 19″ iMac. Save place than owning a 19″ desktop.

- Still black hair with a shoulder length. Or maybe a curly one.

I will get back to this entry one year later, to see whether my dreams come true or not.

The only reason why I obsessed with it is because of the numbers. I like to see improvement and how the numbers goes up and up. The higher, the better. Higher traffic, higher alexa rank, higher income, etc. The only thing that I don’t like to see it getting higher is fuel price and daily things’ price.

Get back to Alexa rank. I have done a trial to increase it. No strategy for international taxes knowledge is needed. Just simple steps of installing Alexa toolbar on my firefox & set my blog as the homepage and put up Alexa widget on my blog. It worked. Previously it was at 3.626.533. On May 10th, the rank has increased to 1.924.930.

It was said that Alexa has changed the calculation system. My Alexa rank stayed at 1.924.930 for the past 2 weeks until yesterday I noticed the increment again. It is at 1.769.104. Not a tremendous increment like last time, but still it’s a good thing for moving from 1.9 million to 1.7 million rank.

I will start mind mapping all over again. Let’s see, my purpose of creating the niche blog is to share and to earn. In a nut shell, if I want to monetize my blog, I gotta pick a topic that has readers and able to gain traffic. Besides that, the topic should be something that I am passionate about or at least have an interest in it. Else, how do I write and share something that I have no idea at all?

Now, instead of sorting out my interest, I will start from the topic that can make $money$ but too bad I have no interest/no knowledge/no idea about:

1. Foods
I don’t cook. I ever thought of translating my mum’s recipes but the ingredients names are too complicated. Review on the eating places is impossible too because I seldom go out eat and the price has raise nowadays.

2. Blogging and making money
I don’t earn more than $1000 per month and I have no 1k unique visitors per day. Full stop.

3. Technology & gadget
Ask me what is the latest model from Nokia, I don’t know. I know how to use computer, that’s all.

4. Photography
I have no mumbo jumbo DSLR. I snap pictures with my old Canon Digicam in auto mode. What with shutter speed, wide lens, etc?

5. Home & gardening
My house has no garden but a small plant pot. I don’t do what so ever fabulous decoration to my house. I don’t spend time googling about interior and furniture although I adore IKEA products.

6. Traveling
I love travel~! But my financial isn’t good enough to support me traveling. Going to KL once in a few months time ain’t a travel for me. It’s the same old destination.

7. Fashion and beauty
I love make up and dress up. Too bad, no $$$ to indulge myself more. I have very little knowledge about it too. Not the right person to talk about maternity clothes.

Flowers at Arya Duta Hotel.

Next, what I like to do that could be the profitable niche topic:

1. I like watching Asian drama (especially Taiwan and Singapore) since few years ago. I will googling about the drama info, the actors and actresses, the lyrics, everything related to the drama.

2. I’m a freelance designer. I research about design stuff, the vector pack, the brush, the tutorial, and so on.

3. I watch E! entertainment channel a lot. It has fashion do and don’t, celebrity news, reality show, true hollywood story. A lot to dig from here.

4. I like digging about relationship issue. Break up, problem with the ex, brownies relationship (read: younger boyfriend), friendship issue, etc. Been there, done that, have an interest in it.

Well, I have the image in my mind already. I’ll continue with the niche blogs once I finish with my blog design. The 4 hours black out has deduct my working hours. -__-”

These people are weird. When I told them I was working in a company as a designer with such a low salary, they didn’t mind. But when I told them I work at home as a freelance designer, they seems to be mind. As if freelance is not a real work or not for long term. Which bring me to the thought, is it the job title that matters?

Hey, a job title is just a name that determines somebody’s position in the company. Someone, whose job is offering illegal unsecured loans at high interest rates to individuals, is called a loan shark a.k.a Ah Long. In a better words, loan shark can also be called as Finance Manager. (refer to the dialogs in Like Father Like Daughter – Singapore drama). But the job scope is just the same.

Ah whatever la. I’m happy with my WAH (Work At Home) status.

3 years later which is 3 weeks ago, I bought Dell PC (inspiron 530) from one of the Dell dealer in Medan. It came in a complete set; keyboard, mouse, mouse pad, and speaker. Then, here come NIX’08 – National IT Expo 2008, from 6 – 11 May, at Sun Plaza. -__-”

Why the PC Fair always comes after I bought the computer? Better don’t go and check the price, else I might faint down if it is cheaper than what I paid. Or maybe there is free gifts for buying computer; i.e. printers or flash disk or free RAM.

All the while Grand Angkasa Hotel is the one and only 5 stars hotel in Medan. Not until last year when The Aryaduta Hotel and JW Marriott came to this town.

JW Marriott. Nov 2007. Taken from Pisa Cafe, 2nd floor of Capital Building.

JW Marriott. April 2008.

Well, I used have the dream to own and manage a hotel. Perhaps it was an influence from Hotelier (Korean drama). Not interested in DeWalt tools but managing the place seems to be pretty interesting.