Just now when I was driving along the Damansara-Puchong Expressway (LDP) on the flyover beside 1 Utama, I was trying to overtake a car hogging on the middle lane on the flyover. When I finally overtook that car, I noticed why the driver is hogging the middle lane at such a slow speed.

And I was shocked to see that he was driving and at the same time, his girl on the front passenger seat laid on his shoulder while he was driving! How can that be? It’s just dangerous to do so when driving, and yet hogging the lane on the busy highway!

“Tidak ada undang-undang di alam siber kecuali undang-undang rimba. Jadi tindakan harus diambil supaya ‘monyet-monyet’ lain takut dan mengambil iktibar daripadanya (There are no laws in the cyberworld except for the law of the jungle. As such, action must be taken so that the ‘monkeys’ behave),” said the son-in-law of the head of the executive, according to a press report by Bernama.

Such a statement from a person who is also a politician in the ruling party is unbecoming, and really show immaturity of him to label bloggers as monkeys!

It is sad to see that after almost 50 years of independence with first class infrastructure, some politicians still exhibit a third world mentality. It was not too long ago when a Deputy Minister labeled 2 opposition MPs like monkeys during a parliamentary debate!

I am wondering why our politicians like to call each other as animals? Something is very wrong!

Save Malaysia!

Do you post your photo online?

Chances are, 8 out of 10 of you will say yes to this question. You can create a personal website and publish anything you want, including your photos like what I do. Or you can publish your photos in a blog. Or there are many social networking websites like Friendster where you can upload your photos into the photo album service provided. In fact, many of us, myself included, have at least one Friendster account. And some of us open new accounts when we almost reach the 1000 friends limit. And most of us with Friendster accounts, post our photos online!

Oh well… this is the year 2007. Doing what is described above is a norm.

However, things were different 10 years ago. Not many of us post our photos online then. There were no digital cameras. There were image scanners, but not many could afford one. Not many of us even scan our photos. There was no Friendster, no blogs, except for free personal home page services provided by GeoCities, Tripod, etc. And well, not many of us even had an Internet connection.

Among the people I know then, I was the first to post my photos online. It all started with experimenting the GeoCities personal home page late night on 11 November 1997, which gave birth to James Ooi’s Home Page, as my site was then known. The result was a simple page, with a brief introduction about myself, and some photographs taken during my Certificate level convocation at TAR College 3 months earlier. The photographs are still available at James Ooi Online > J Gallery > TARC Convocation 1997.

The next thing I did was to inform my collegemates of this site. If you have seen the photographs from the link above, you would have notice that I am not alone in most of them. Many of my friends are in the photos too! And when they knew their face is online, they screamed at me! One of them even “threatened to kill me” (of course he is not going to do that). They could not accept having any photographs with them in it being posted online. It wasn’t a norm. Every now and then, they complained about me posting photographs online, warned me that bad things would happen as in people will use your photo to do weird things, etc, etc, bla bla bla….

And so it went on. I kept on improving and updating my site, posted new photos as and when it became available. I scanned all the photos I took and chose many of them to publish online. Some did not like the idea of posting photo online, some did not mind … and oh! Its’ 2007 now!

Apparently, these friends of mine who complained about me posting photographs taken with them together in my website no longer complained for some years back. Most of them have their Friendster account, together with photographs uploaded to their Friendster photo album. Well, as always, it takes time for people to accept a new idea. While some adopt a new idea early, some takes time to accept it. I may be an early adopter of posting photographs online, however, I do admit, I took longer to adopt another idea - blogging!