Yahoo! Answers Blog Malaysia

It’s the school holidays, what are some of the activities you do with your family? I know that some families take a short holiday trip (or longer if they can afford it). Some, like my cousin, just stays at home and surfs the internet or helps out at another cousin’s flower shop. Well if you’re out of ideas, here’s a few IT/internet projects you can consider doing with your family and friends!

(Photo thanks to Roslan Tangah (aka Rasso))

1) Compile all your Multimedia stash into one box! I’m sure we have lots of DVDs and VCDs all over the place, and every time we want to watch something, we’ll have to hunt high and low for it. So how about copying all those movies and tv series into one storage device? All you need is: (a) a hard drive multimedia player which can be connected to your tv set (b) install a freeware so that you can copy your DVD into your computer (c) just copy all the files from your VCD to your computer. The final step is to copy all these files from your computer to the multimedia hard drive, hook it up to your tv and there you go! Shows on demand.

(Photos thanks to Andres Rueda)

2) Building your own computer. Assembling a computer is actually much cheaper than if you buy a “ready-made” computer in the shops out there. The main parts to pay attention to are: (a) a good processor (b) a decent-sized hard disk – either 500GB or even a 1TB one! Woohoo! (c) nice and big LCD monitor so that you can watch movies from your computer (d) a suitable graphics card – if nobody in the family plays games, then you can go for a cheaper one (e) proper casing for your CPU (f) and even a webcam (which are quite affordable now) to keep in touch with friends and family members overseas!

So there you go, some fun IT projects you can do with your whole family. If you have any other school holiday ideas, do share! Enjoy your week!

We are happy to announce that Answers is back after undergoing essential maintenance! But you have not seen the last of it. There is another planned outage tomorrow, Thursday 20th November around the same time, from 4.30pm to 8.30pm (roughly ok?). And we promise that’s it for the immediate future!

We do apologise for having had to take the site down yesterday and tomorrow. But we had to do it in order to make Answers stronger and healthier from now on

(Photo thanks to Amsk)

Regular Check-Ups Makes the Product Stronger!

*Update 18 Nov, 10am*

Sorry guys for the last minute notice, but the scheduled maintenance will be from 4.30pm – 8pm approximately today!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi folks,

Our engineers will be performing regular maintenance on Yahoo! Answers on Wednesday (12 Nov) and Thursday (13 Nov), at 4.30pm.

We expect the work to last about 3.5 hours and Yahoo! Answers will be totally inaccessible during this time, except for the blog of course.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused! We’ll keep you posted if there are any changes to the schedule.

If you are looking for something else to do during this time, why not check out some of our sites such as:

• Flickr (now with video)
• Groups – Connect with people who share the same passion
• Avatars – Play around with your avatars and give him/her a new outfit

…. or maybe you can check out what is showing in the cinemas near you!

All the news today (The Star, Yahoo! Malaysia etc.) are splattered with pictures of Barack Obama, heralding his recent win at the US Presidential Elections yesterday.

(Photo thanks to jmtimages)

Many people have commented that this event is historical as it is the first time in America’s history that an African-American has been chosen as their President. He has promised to bring “change” to America, but what does that mean for us here in South East Asia, or rather, Malaysia?

I never used to pay much attention to politics, either on home ground or overseas. But if we really think about it and look around, the world has become smaller. Smaller in the sense that we’ve become more globalised (MacDonalds, KFC and StarBucks are everywhere!). And when we become a globalised country, things happening in other countries will definitely affect us too. The best example would be the current financial crisis: the whole mess started in America, and then the whole world’s economy started to fall like dominoes. So scary!

Thus how do you think Malaysia will be affected the next 4 years when Obama takes over from Bush in January 2009? Or do you think that there won’t be any impact on Malaysia at all? How do you feel about Obama’s win?