Just a quick update. Went fishing again last week with the boys at Kirkplace :D

Caught a stingray!

Bait I used? Live worms. Yep, I actually cut up the worms while it was still squirming around and threaded it through my hook. It was weird though. We were about to move our spot on the boat when I just decided to reel my line in, thinking I didn’t catch anything since I didn’t feel any bites.

While reeling it in, it just felt heavy. I thought I caught onto some rocks or something. Suddenly my rod bent downwards like crazy and I was like “Whoa!”. Lucky I brought my net otherwise I would’ve lost it as my line wouldn’t have managed that weight.

First time I’ve ever caught a stingray and I didn’t know what to do with it – no idea how to cook stingray. Would be awesome if I knew how to cook it Malaysian style. So I just cut the line and let it go, for it to live to see another day.

Was a crazy day. My friend Steve reeled in a crab using a fishing rod (what the?). Haha, too bad we didn’t get the net out in time and it let go of the bait.

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Beautiful weather on the Saturday. Bright sunny day with blue skies. Perfect conditions for relaxing. Caught a whole bunch of fishes: silver bream, snapper, flat head, tailor and a mulloway (pictured). Funny that I caught a variety.

Bait? Good ol’ prawns. Can’t go wrong with them!

Ah if life was only like this everyday.

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Just spent $230 yesterday at Supercheap Auto buying floor mats, car cover, turtle wax shampoo, lamb wool mittens, microfiber polishing cloth, meguire’s clay bar, meguire’s quick detailer and meguire’s wax. So yeah, I’m quite broke now! I’ve still yet to transfer the registration and pay the stamp duty! :(

So yeah, been pretty engrossed in it. Have washed and vacuumed my car yesterday and spent some time washing under the hood and applying some tyre shine to my tyres. Will need to find some time doing the clay bar thingy and waxing it. Is gonna be slick looking!

But yeah, some pictures below :)

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It’s green in colour with gold pearls and has a black bonnet. Good paint work, fresh tyres and uses Royal Purple engine oil. Car is mechanically great as well as good looking exterior and interior. Had my friends take a look under the car and lucky the seller is a mechanic himself so I would know he’s taken good care of the car.

So now I’ve got to arrange bank cheques tomorrow and take a train all the way to Gosford to get the car and do the paper work. Going to be  a long night tomorrow and hopefully a car owner!

Man it’s been a hectic 2 weeks ever since I started looking for a car. Non-stop searching cars online and on forums. It’s pretty time consuming since I’ve pretty much used most of my spare time available looking for cars, doing research and contacting people for a car inspection.

Finally I can have a life again.

I’ll post up some tips and guides later to buying used car from private sellers. Very valuable information I’ve attained over the past short but intense 2 weeks. Hopefully you guys will find it helpful.

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Anyways, I was playing basketball during my free time when one of the guys was charging towards the ring and stepped on my toe at an angle. It felt as though my toe nail was lifted up, but lucky it didn’t fortunately.

Here’s a picture of it slightly bluish after the game.

Here’s a picture of it 2 weeks later.

This is not the fist time I’ve injured my toe. I remember when I was around 12 or 13, my sister placed a 5kg dumbbell on a chair, and rolled off and onto my toe. Newton’s 2nd law (F=ma) kicked in with mass = 5kg and a = 9.8m/s/s which equates to around 50 Newtons.

So gone was my toe nail. But then another tragedy happened. As my toe nail grew, it grew into my flesh. Great. I had a ingrown toe nail. Had to get minor surgery to get the flesh on top to cut away the ingrown section.

Now you have the history of my toe :)

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Public transport takes me a good 1 hour to get into the city during the weekdays and probably close to 1.5 hours on weekends.

I really try to avoid taking public transport on the weekend after spending 10 hours on it already during the weekdays. Unfortunately I don’t live near a train station so I can’t just walk to the nearest one. Nearest one is an hours walk. I’ve tried it before.

So…

I’m on a quest to get myself an awesome car under $10,000 and under 100,000km, drive away no more to pay unless it’s an extremely good deal.

Cars in the pipeline:

• Honda Civic Vtec
• Honda Integra Vti-R
• Nissan 180sx
• Nissan Silvia

If you’re an Asian, you may ask, “Why not a Toyota?”. Well, I’ve pretty much spent more than half of my life growing up with a Toyota Camry. Yes, my family has 3 Toyota Camry’s. Yes, they’re very reliable and retain good resale value. But yeah, I’m bored of it. That’s all. Time for a change.

Hey, I’m still sticking with Japanese right? Honda. Nissan?

The problem with hunting for used cars is always the impending fear that you’ve bought a dodgy car, as private sellers don’t offer warranty, nor are they legally obligated to. The other problem are the dealerships, who are renowned for their con jobs and shifty deals.

Then there’s the dilemma of odometer tampering, cars used racing activities (higher probability of car problem) and so on.

So that means you really got to do your research like you’re writing a Nobel Prize winning paper and make sure you don’t get short changed when purchasing a car. I know I don’t like getting conned. Perhaps that’s the Asian factor.

Not only do you have to do your car research, you also have to do your insurance research. Since the cars I’m looking at are sports cars and I’m under 25, insurance is going to smack me across the face with a large trout. I think so far ‘Just Car Insurance’ offers the best quote.

Anyways, wish me luck. Some torturous days ahead.

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Haha, what luck. Didn’t even get to spend it on myself. Oh well, I’m sure that “stimulated” the economy.

Remember guys, as long as you are eligible, your payment should come by the 16th of May either via cheque or direct deposit, depending on how you received your tax return payment last financial year.

If you used a tax agent to lodge your tax return last financial year, you should check with your tax agent whether the payment is with your tax agent. Also make sure your bank details and address are up to date with the ATO.

If you still haven’t received payment by the 16th of May, you should call 1300 686 636 and the ATO may be able to help you if you are eligible.

It’d be interesting to find out how you spent your tax bonus payment.

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Two years ago on April the 6th, I remember flying down to Melbourne and I was supposed to meet up with her that night for dinner. Unfortunately my auntie (mum’s friend) ran into car problems which meant I was late getting picked up and I was staying with my auntie out in the suburbs. Hong Yi was staying at La Trobe street then.

It was only the next day that I got the chance to finally meeting her after not seeing her for almost 3 months and that very night we made it official. So yeah…two years later.

Our relationship is an interesting one. We started long distance and have been long distance ever since. I do get a lot of questions about how I manage to sustain a long distance relationship. Let me tell you this: distance makes the heart grow fonder. There are pros & cons but I guess we usually don’t take each other for granted when we meet up.

Anyways, not here to talk about the relationship. So here are some photos of what we did!

Fish Markets

Hong Yi has been been quite upset at me for not taking her to the fish markets despite her visiting Sydney several times already. If you don’t already know, she’s a fan of food. So is her mum, a food-blogger!

So after many verbal beatings from her, we finally made our trip to the fish markets!

Fish markets is famous for seafood, for obvious reasons. You can get really fresh fishes, oysters, lobsters and much more at affordable price. Hong Yi said her family would’ve loved the fish markets!

I would recommend getting there first thing in the morning as the stuff is the freshest then. Parking is not cheap over there so I wouldn’t recommend staying for more than 2 hours.

One of the must foods you must try over there is the fresh raw salmon, tuna, swordfish and oysters. The oysters are brought in fresh from the morning’s catch and you can see people cutting open the shell and washing it. When we squeezed lemon juice onto it, it even squirmed around a little! I think Hong Yi was grossed out by it so she let me eat most of the oysters hehe. We also had half a lobster with chips and salad.

If you’re having your meal outside, be very wary of the seagulls. I remember I was having my salmon and tuna outside last time and there were 2 big pieces of tuna. When I was looking away, a seagull dived down and snatched one of the tuna pieces which got me really angry at the bird as there were only 2 pieces and I love raw tuna!

Coffee & Modeling at the Strand

Yes, one of the highlights was having coffee and modeling at the Strand Arcade. Hong Yi swears that her chai latte was the best she’s ever had. Even better than Melbourne!

We had our coffees at the Strand Espresso. This was the exact place we had coffee a year ago when Hong Yi was in Sydney. It’s a nice little cafe in the Strand Arcade so make sure you check it out when you’re there!

When the cafe was closing up, the arcade was quite empty. That was when Hong Yi decided to test out her photography skills with her prized Nikon D90.

First assignment was to pose with my new watch. Oh yeah, I bought a new watch. Man, it has been years since I last wore a watch. I wasn’t planning on buying one but that’s the danger when you go window shopping with your girlfriend.

As we were walking around Myer, I spotted a nice diesel watch that had 25% discount. To me, it meant I still had to spend 75% but to Hong Yi, that meant you’re saving 25%. Anyways, I usually don’t splurge on myself so I decided to give myself a treat :)

We then proceeded to doing modeling poses which some of them turned out quite nicely. It was funny when passer-bys looked at Hong Yi and I posing as though we were professionals hehe.

Fishing

Unlike Melbourne, Sydney is blessed with beautiful surrounding waters all over. To get to a beach does not take long and fortunate for me, I live next to a bay. So we headed out to my local jetty which was only a 5 minute walk away.

Hong Yi is quite an avid fishing enthusiast. Her kampung roots to KK has equipped her with fishing abilities to use a hand line.

For some reason, all the fishes Hong Yi caught were small puffer fishes. I was trying to get the bigger fishes further out but I think there were a lot of bites from small fishes which was unfortunate. No hook for me but Hong Yi managed to catch two puffer fishes on her hand line until she decided to cheat and use a net instead hehe.

There’s so much more that we did in Sydney but I’m too lazy to go through all of them. You can browse through the gallery below to see all the photos we took.

Man, I’m seriously thinking of getting a DSLR now. Nikon or Canon? Dilemma. Where will the money come from? :S

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I just passed my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test today and scored 94%! Not bad eh? The passing score is 75%. So thought I’d post some tips here while the exam questions are still fresh in my mind.

You have 2 hours to complete the exam (more than enough) and there’s 70 questions that consist of multiple choice, true/false and select all that applies type questions. Basically the trickiest one I found was the select all that applies type questions.

Materials To Go Through – Conversion University

Before you start the GAIQ exam, make sure you go through the materials at Google‘s conversion university – especially the ones that you don’t know much about. I didn’t go through all of them, just the ones I thought would be handy to refresh myself with.

The ones that I think will be handy are:

• Profiles in Google Analytics
• Filters in Google Analytics
• Cookies and Google Analytics
• E-Commerce Tracking
• Domains and Sub-Domains

Knowledge To Learn

In my opinion, these are some of the things you should’ve had some experience implementing before doing the test. If you haven’t, go play around with it!

• E-Commerce Tracking (addTrans, addItem methods)
• Cross Domain / Sub-Domain Tracking (link, linkByPost, setDomainName, setAllowLinker, setAllowHash methods)
• Goal Setup (note: Multiple same goal conversions within a session are unique)
• Profile Setup (note: What are the benefits of creating more than 1 profile? What can/can’t you do with profiles?)
• Filter Setup (predefined, include/exclude, search & replace and custom – advanced)
• Integration with Google Adwords (cost data import, auto-tagging)
• Google Analytics interface (reports, user/filter management)
• Regular Expression (note: You don’t have to be a pro, but it definitely helps)
• Cookies (note: Google uses first-party cookies and you cannot identify an individual through it)

Handy Links

Here are some handy links that you should have open during the test:

• Google (note: don’t think you can ace the exam just by Googling everything. You still need to know your stuff).
• Google Analytics Interface (d’oh) – make sure you’re logged in
• Google Analytics API – you may need this for the e-commerce tracking questions
• IP Address Range Regex Tool
• Cookie Reference

Adwords Information

Google has announced that Adwords advertisers now need to link their Google Analytics together to ensure that Google Analytics will pick up Adwords traffic (google/cpc) or else it will show up as direct (direct/none) traffic. Stupid I know. We’re still having debates in the GAAC forums. [Note: This has been updated. See my post on 'Update to Adwords Cost Data Import'.]

Once linked, you’ll need to go to Analytics’ profile settings and check the apply cost data import check-box to ensure that Google Analytics imports cost data from Adwords (if auto-tagging is enabled).

In the exam, you’ll need to know what’s the purpose of auto-tagging and manual tagging. What happens if you don’t have auto-tagging on and what are the reasons you’d want to go manual tagging instead?

Conclusion

I hope this information helps guide you in preparation for the exam. It isn’t overly difficult so long as you’ve had sufficient experience with Google Analytics and brush up on the things you’re not knowledgable on.

Good luck and let me know how you go :)

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It was a pretty straight forward webinar. Didn’t learn much. Would be good for a novice or an intermediate analytics user.

Basically, what the trivia is about is that Google will ask a question and whoever answers first will win a Google Gears pack. The question I got was “How many goals can a profile have?”. Answer is 4. I was first to answer :)

Here’s a sneak peek into what’s inside the Google Gears pack.

I got a “personalised” letter from Google congratulating me and inviting me to join more Adwords webinars.

Here’s what the Google bag looks like.

Inside the pack. Google notebook, Google Pen and a Google yoyo! I thought the pen looked rather ugly though. Fluorescent pen :S

Oh wait! I forgot to include the Google mouse!

Google mouse up close. It has a floaty thing at the base.

I’m still thinking of what to do with the Google yoyo and Google mouse. Perhaps I could ebay it? Hehe, maybe if I could be bothered.

I wonder if you’ll get the same pack if you win it more than once.

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