This is a sad day to find out my first and only Amazon account has been closed down due to some silly reasons.

Occasionally, I did some purchase in Amazon US and ship them over to Singapore. I hooked some really good deals as the same items would cost a lot more on the local market and with the top-notch customer support, I always regard the Amazon one of the must-know hacks for online shoppers. Owning a Kindle a few years ago just made me sticks more to the Amazon ecosystem because it is so comfortable operating within the system.

My sweet journey with Amazon has ended due to a silly transaction

So back to a few months back Amazon decided to support the SG market and make the Amazon E-commerce site available here although with a way smaller inventory. I found a great deal on GPU that I couldn’t find it cheaper elsewhere. Proceeded to make the payment after checkout. It was successful, expect the transaction bounced after half an hour. Tried a few more time, no luck.

To make thing worse, Amazon system suspended my account as it suspected some hackers were trying something funny. While it was actually me myself dealing with the stupid system with my own account.

The account remained suspended for a few months

I have had enough as I getting active with my Kindle again and would like to buy more books. Contacted the customer support a few times which requires a logged in status to start with, while my issue was exactly with the login(stupid design, again). By all means, I had to use a secondary account to initiate the chat and contact.

Anyway, the best answer Amazon could give me was to shut down the account and ask me to create another one if I would like to shop again.

So I have to use a new email address to sign up a new account(stupid, again!), my transaction history is gone, and most importantly, my Kindle book collection gone as well. Fortunately, I did not have much invested in the books.

This is exactly the downside of a centralised service. Bad day.

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This picture pretty much sums up what the famous pro-Bitcoin investors have to say about the price prediction at the end of 2018, which is now. The least daring prediction was $20,000 by Pantera Capital and that looks like a moon to us from the dirt viewpoint currently. If we were to achieve half other carefully calculated prediction even it was just for $20k price level, we could halve the world suicide rate. How ridiculous.

Are these famous people stupid and they are too bored to make some bold statement and risk their reputation? Maybe not. Likely they have their own skin in the game while making bullish promises like that will keep the BTC price well supported so they can keep selling off their holdings, or they were really speaking out from the strong faith? There are countless average investors making bullish prediction in the same tone while market starts to correct.

And we know how the thing is going now.

Established bullish investors might be embarrassed by their predictions now and average bullish joes like us are likely trying to forget all the stupid decision we have made in the bear market, probably wishing for a time machine to that they can go back in time and draw a clear line with the stupid Bitcoin.

Suddenly everyone is saying getting rid of Bitcoin is a wiser choice. Just like how everyone was hailing for it last year.

Act along or against the mainstream opinion? Your bet.

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I tried to recall how my mind was acting back in the days that any shitcoins were surging in 2017. The confidence level was so high that if I ever come to the “buy low sell high” trading statement I would ask myself that “what if my favourite crypto falls to all-time low?”, the answer would be 10/10 “definitely buy more!* every time.

And the market started to test my mental in 2018, when Bitcoin was down to 10k USD, like everyone else I thought this was a great chance and I dollar averaged some. The price keeps falling instead of going to the top 20k USD level, I kept buying except with a decreasing fund. Obviously, it reflects the decline of my confidence level with the bear market movement.

We are here a few months later, and crypto is getting nearer to the dirt every day. I haven’t spent a dime in crypto buying for this whole period. Had some tight financial situation in real life being the top reason and like everyone else again, I was hoping the price to be lower.

Here is a dose for those were in the same place as me but would like to pick up the strong faith again and buy low:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcgA-hMAozI

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Since the last sold off of my all DICE holding and some disappointing loses, I rarely visit the site for a few days and it was very surprising to find our the DICE price has once shoot up to 0.0064 EOS/DICE. Zooming out the graph and the chart pattern looks very familiar isn’t it? Looks exactly like the 2017 BTC or the whole crypto market. I’m not implying the DICE price is gonna fall soon but it is really interesting to see how people keep gambling despite how the market is doing.

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Recently, I was in a raging mode clearing up my inbox that full with unread emails which are likely to be remained unread for the rest of my time. Unsubscribing all the promotional or news related emails or pull them into the spam filter if I have to do it for the second time on the same sender. Even nutritious reading feed like Medium and Quora was one of the victims in my clearing list. Too less time while too many to read.

Spotify sent me an email and I naturally open it and start looking for the Unsubscribe button at the bottom, except the striking heading got my attention: Your 2018 in music: find out how you listened. Awesome presentation although some of the stats are not as accurate.

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Do you own a monitor either for home PC or workplace? Do you use them using the factory setting and doesn’t think about the color calibration as long as it shows color?

Think again. Calibrating the monitor color could just make your monitor looks like new again.

I own the Dell U2717D for over a year now and all the while I thought it has a great out-of-box setting for the color management so I did not bother much tuning it. Furthermore, I’m not making graphics content or video editing for a living. Until I stumbled upon the idea of exploring the capability of this monitor and research for the recommended setting for it.

How?

TFT Central is an awesome site focus on testing and reviewing a wide range of monitors on the market. It hosts a database showing the optimal setting for each of the listed monitors and it is a long list. Chances to find yours on the list is pretty high.

The best thing is these configuration tweaks were tested via expensive colorimeter like X-rite i1 Pro and LaCie which the average guy will not have the skill to utilize. Most guys just never heard of it, including me.\

If you are new to screen calibrating, it would be great to read the simple guideline to get the idea of what the site could be of help.

Basically, a user just has to configure the monitor on hardware level by pressing the buttons on the body, and secondly down the ICC profiles from the database with respect to the individual model.

The whole process would not take more than 10 min and it is free.

The result?

Noticeably nicer, way nicer. It’s like peeling off the worn-out, blurry screen protector off the phone display and the old phone pretty much feels like new again. The monitor is now showing the color in a more accurate and natural tone. Simple trick but worth big time to implement it.

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