I used to oppose IKEA. I didn’t want my house to look like an IKEA showroom, and to avoid falling for the “IKEA nesting instinct” explained in this scene of The Fight Club, one of my fave movies of all time.
I’ve since gotten over that. I’m not buying IKEA products to define myself after all, I’m buying them because of their great value and business practices. And to make sure my house doesn’t end up looking like an IKEA showroom, I hack my IKEA stuff! (For example, see my DIY IKEA Standing Desk Hack).
Here’s another hack we recently did for our home.
The super affordable SOLSTA PÄLLBO footstool is only RM8.90, but only comes in white and gray. Not really matching with our living room’s color scheme.
You know when you’re asked by an app for permission to do something with your Facebook profile? Maybe it wants to get your Facebook profile picture, or it’s going to automatically Like a page for you — you’re agreeing to these actions, but you probably don’t want to receive emails from the company behind the app right?
Well just do this and you’ll get less spam from Facebook apps. Click the Change link in the popup dialog and change the option to An anonymous email address.
It’s time for another review of the past year! So many awesome things happened, and I want to record them so I can look back to see how far I’ve come.
First, some perspective. 2010 was a great year. Can you believe that 2011 was even greater? God has blessed me so richly. Here are the details.
Family
My family is the most important thing in my life. Everything I do is for little Zack and Pei Chyi.
Pei Chyi and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary in March. This was followed a few weeks later with Zack’s 1st birthday. Zack’s birthday also marks a successful 1st year as parents. This is a Big Deal for me because there is no definitive manual on being a parent. I’m super glad that I didn’t screw this up.
Recently I’ve started using Hover as my main domain registrar, an excellent alternative to the popular GoDaddy which is where many people buy their domain names from. Like many others, I have got tired of GoDaddy’s site and service. Their CEO’s elephant-killing antics didn’t help with their public image too.
Today, we have another reason to ditch GoDaddy – they are a supporter of the Stop Online Piracy Act. While stopping online piracy is a noble cause, this bill being put forward by US lawmakers is really dumb. So dumb that Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, Craigslist and many other internet giants are opposed against the bill. Ars Technica has a great explanation on why SOPA is so bad.
Anyway, back to Hover. Go check out their website and compare them against GoDaddy. They currently have a promotion where transferring domains to Hover only costs USD10.
The master bathroom in our new house comes with a double sink, so we wanted to have a large mirror that is wide enough for both me and Pei Chyi to use at the same time. After looking at countless bathroom accessory shops, getting quotes for custom mirrors we decided that we would settle for the IKEA HOVET mirror.
The HOVET mirror is a beautiful thing with a sleek aluminum frame, and is suitable for use in high-humidity areas like a bathroom. Perfect! At RM349 it was still cheaper than a custom mirror too. So we purchased the mirror and had it delivered.
When it arrived we admired it and were so excited that we were going to have such a big mirror in our bathroom. Because you know, it’s huge!. So big in fact, that it was too wide for our bathroom. Facepalm!
I’m very pleased to announce a giveaway for my friends and followers this Christmas season. The good folks at FlexiRoam have given me some credit vouchers to give away as prizes, and I’m contributing a prize from my own pocket too. Read on to find out more about the prize and how to enter.
Earlier this month I was invited to a behind the scenes tour at IKEA Malaysia. This was part of their blogger program me which I was invited to be part of as well. The picture above was taken at their very cool office. See more on their Facebook page. I also learnt some cool facts – IKEA Malaysia sells 590,000 meatballs and 300,000 curry puffs each month. Mind boggling!
There are a few brands that I would gladly associate myself with without hesitation. The first would be Apple – no surprises there. I also really love WordPress. And the other brand on this very short list would be IKEA.
The first major piece of furniture I bought was from IKEA. Incidentally, this TOMEILILA sofa is still in great shape and is part of our new living room. Try spotting how many IKEA stuff we have in our new home – it’s like an IKEA showroom!
The IKEA Way
IKEA preaches taking responsibility for people and for the environment as a prerequisite for doing good business. From my visit to IKEA I could see that they don’t say this to blow smoke in our face, they are serious about it. All their employees are trained to recycle to the point that they don’t even have trash bins at their desks – they have to pick up and deposit their trash in a common bin. That’s definitely a good habit to inculcate because I regularly see Malaysians chucking trash out their car window.. aiya!
Last Friday (11.11.11) we moved into our new home in Lagoon Villas, Kota Kemuning. It was a great experience, although one that you don’t want to have to go through too often.
I’ve never met you in person, but I feel that I know you. You’ve influenced so many things around me – this MacBook which I’m typing on, my iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Zachary will grow up trying to manipulate objects on every screen he finds because of you.
Some reports say that 86% of people hate the new Facebook design, and I bet it’s the ticker that’s the target of everyone’s ire. I did some investigation and found that it was actually not too difficult to kill the ticker.. if you’re willing to get your hands dirty with CSS.
Background for non-geeks: CSS is a language that controls how a web page looks. Luckily, website users like us can also specify our own CSS to override what websites want to show us. In this case, we’ll be using our own CSS to hide the Facebook ticker.
Download the Stylish browser extension
Stylish is a browser add-on that enables us to use our own CSS for specific websites. It’s available for both Firefox and Google Chrome. Safari users can use the User CSS extension. (I’m a Safari user too, but the majority of the world isn’t. Hence the Firefox examples..)
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I'm David a.k.a. the blogjunkie.
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