about Sanjaya, the voting system and democracy

To be honest, I love Sanjaya the first time I saw him at the American Idol audition. I loved him even more when he showed his love for his sister as soon as he knew his sister didn't made it to the next round at Hollywood audition.

If you read the forum at the American Idol website, you knew he was the most popular guy until Antonella Barba case was exposed. Barba didn't lasted long in the show but Sanjaya fame continues to rise not because of his talent but his personality and hairdo.

The rating of the show continues to fall but I don't think anyone should blame Sanjaya. The show is bland: Melinda Doolittle and Lakisha Jones are flawless even Simon didn't know what to comment anymore, Ryan Seacrest and Simon and their homophobic jokes, Randy Jackson and his same ol' "It was a little bit too pitchy for me" comment and Paula, I don't even want to talk about her.

The American Idol show is now depending on Sanjaya for publicity. I don't watch the show as regularly as I did before. I just tune in because I want to see if he performs really bad that week and I don't want to miss the moment if he's voted off. But hey, there are other contestants like Phil Stacey and Haley Scarnato who are far worse than Sanjaya who should be voted off first but they continue to stay on.

Going into my main point, people like Gina Glocksen, Chris Sligh and my favourite Stephanie Edwards are the victims of the voting system. I have long disagree with this so-called democratic approach to find a talented singer. We didn't make a mistake the first time when we decided that Jaclyn Victor is the well-deserved winner of Malaysian Idol. But look at what happened to Malaysian Idol in season 2.

Another significant weakness of the voting system was shown in Akademi Fantasia. Mawi is not my favourite contestant in AF3 but this man deserves to win because he's really popular. But what happened to other contestants in the same batch with him? The huge gap between Mawi and his fellow friends was very demotivating because you know you did your best and received applause from judges but you will never be able to match the popularity of Mawi even though he made mistakes like forgetting lyrics, sang out of tune or received bad reviews from the judges.

Once I heard that some contestants from Blast Off spent thousands of ringgit to ensure they will go far in the competition. Another contestant in Astro Talent Quest not only won the competition through the voting system but also represented Malaysia in a TVB8 singing contest and won the most sms votes despite his lack of popularity and losing in the singing contest judged by Hong Kong celebrities.

To me the voting system is a total rip off of viewers money because for each vote, you are paying like 50 sen or 65 sen. And now Akademi Fantasia is introducing Afundi Sakan whereby viewers can place 3 or 5 votes with each call. What is so democratic about the system?

The moral of the story: the voting system in reality shows is the symbol of the democratic world we live in. Look at the suffering world around us. The influential and rich will always win or have better advantage than those who doesn't. But since we accepted the system, we made decisions on who becoming our leaders (whether you vote them or not) and hence we will have to bear the consequences of our own action.

custom domain name with a Blogger account

Currently I'm using a custom domain (hcfoo.com) but my blog is still hosted by Blogger. After purchased the domain name at GoDaddy, I tried to configure the settings but failed many times because both Blogger help site and GoDaddy support team gave me different information.

How do I use a custom domain name on my blog?
How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

In the end Blogger help site is correct but what I did wrong was I typed hcfoo.com instead of www.hcfoo.com in my Blogger setting (under Publishing).

By the way, GoDaddy provides FREE host and email (I set mine as blogger@hcfoo.com) but I decided to just keep the free host since I'm using Blogger as my host.

Updates: After a couple of hours my blog failed again. I reported the matter and received an instruction from GoDaddy support teamto rectify the problem.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. You can forward your domain directly to an IP address by modifying the A record for your domain. Please follow the directions below to accomplish this:

First, log into your customer account:

. Go to the Go Daddy Account Login Page
. Log in using your account username (which may be the same as your customer number) and password

If you have trouble logging in, our password reset form may help you. You can find this form through the following link:
Account Retrieval Page

Once logged in, follow these steps:

. Select 'Manage Domains' from the 'Domain Names' menu at the top of the page
. Click on the domain you wish to Forward (Setup an A-Record) for
. Click the '+' next to "Total DNS Control" from the menu. (This option will only be available for domains Parked or Hosted on our servers)
. Click the 'Total DNS Control And MX Records' link
. Enter the IP address for the '@' Zone Record Value and click 'Save'

Please allow 1 hour for the Zone File to be updated with this new information. Your domain will then physically point to the IP address entered.

Sincerely,
Online Support
Technician

It worked. Hence it shows that the instruction in Blogger is incomplete and user needs to enter and divert to Google's IP address which is 72.14.207.121 in the A(Host) in Total DNS Control.

habits or little known facts about me

Vhanded tagged me!

Here are the 10 weird things or habits or little known facts about me:

1. I'm 30 years old (no, I'm not afraid to let you guys know my age) but security guards at Genting casino still asked for my MyKad. It happened so many times I'm not sure if I should take it as a compliment or an insult.
2. Speaking about Genting, I'm one of those people who chose to sleep in the car at the parking lot in the open air.
3. I'm obsess with mint. From mint chocolate ice cream to tiger balm, I can't live without them.
4. I can't swim and I'm afraid of the water.
5. I have phobia over snakes. It's pretty serious because if I flipped through a magazine and unexpectedly come across a snake picture, I'll jumped up.
6. I've written fan letters and send sketches to New Kids On The Block, Toni Braxton and Wilson Phillips when I was in secondary school.
7. I used to have 5 piercings on my left ears.
8. I'm very particular about toilets. I would rather tahan until I go home. And I appreciate clean public toilet like the one at Mobil Bandar Utama.
9. I'm easily touched when watching movies. It doesn't have to be a romance movie. As long as the movie has a touching line, I'm moved.
   
10. I still keep a journal of all the sajak I've written since secondary school.

I think I still feel normal after disclose my secret habits and facts. Now I get to tagged another 6 people. They are:

1. flsam
2. che-cheh
3. aziya
4. papajoneh
5. julie
   
6. princess shin

Donald Trump won @ Wrestlemania 23 and got 'stunned'

As expected Donald Trump won the Battle of the Billionaires and Vince McMahon had to go home bald.

After the shave, while celebrating Donald Trump's win, Steve Austin a.k.a Stone Cold gave Trump an unexpected Stunner! However, the Stunner was totally off. Either Trump did not practice enough or chicken out in the last minute.



This is the impact on Donald Trump after the Stunner.