After checking more from the bill detail, i find out that there is actually 3 kinds of energy rate: Off peak, Shoulder, and Peak time rate.

So here is simple tips to save your electricity bill by understanding how EnergyAustralia charge us: Try to reduce your energy usage from peak time because the rate is very expensive.

You can see from the electricity cost table above, the rate for peak time is around 3 times more expensive than shoulder rate and 5 times more expensive than the of peak time. So if  you can reduce your electricity appliances during this peak time, for sure you can expect lot of reduction in your next electricity bill.

ACA also featuring the Best site for freebies and vouchers : Bargain sniper . I knew this site is just launch, and i think they are very lucky to get featured in current affair show. After i  watched that show, i tried to access the Bargainsniper website, but here is what i got:  “This site have been suspended by our web host due to high traffic tonight“. So if u guys reckon your site gonna get feature in australia current affair one day,  get ready and make sure you got enough bandwidht, otherwise its gonna be useless.

By the way,  here is the top Australia Online Deals website , based on recommendation from ACA:

Best daily deals
Daily deals

Best deals on electronics and appliances
Dick Smith Electronics

Best deals on big brand cosmetics
Strawberrynet

Best deals on the perfect gift
Red Balloon Days

Best site for freebies and vouchers
Bargain sniper

But the reason i’m writing this topic is because of security reason. For some reason , when i visit the site i was logged in as registered user with user id=’ulzana’. It’s surprise me because i never register with them and i didn’t try to hack their site either. Please notice that i didn’t change anything or do anything harmful to their site. The reason why i wrote about this is because i wanna know if the problem is from oscommerce bug or other reason . I notice that they are using the free oscommerce as the ecommerce script, so this might be a bug from oscommerce. Anybody know about this problem from oscommerce?

And for the owner of http://www.kutukutubuku.com/, you guys need to put more effort to secure your site, because for ecommerce website, this is very crucial to make customer confidence and wanna buy from your site.

I was walking around in some art shops, and i found this cute wood japanese dolls. Apparently its called Kokeshi dolls. Because its very cute, my wife decided to buy one of them, so we can put it in our living room. Curious about the kokeshi dolls, i did some googling, and find some history about japan kokeshi doll.

History of Kokeshi

Traditional Japanese Kokeshi began to be made approximately two hundred years ago sometime in the middle of the Edo period(1603-1867). The kokeshi dolls emerged out of local life and culture and were first produced in the north east area of Japan known as the Tohoku region. It is commonly thought that woodwork artisans of the time know as Kijiya, (which means woodworker in Japanese) originally specialized in wooden household utensils such as trays and bowls. Then they began to make small dolls in the winter to sell to the tourists who came to bathe in the many onsens (hot springs) near their villages. The few people who could afford the luxury of such a pastime bought the Kokeshi dolls as a souvenir and took the dolls back to their own areas where they were often passed on to the children. This, they thought, would promise a good harvest, as it was believed that it would create a positive impression on the gods if children played with the dolls.

There are 11 Type of traditional kokeshi dolls. Traditional dolls made today can be classified under eleven types : Tsuchiyu, Togatta, Yajiro, Naruko, Sakunami, Yamagata, Kijiyama, Nanbu, Tsugaru, Zao takayu, and Hijioro.

The kokeshi dolls now is sitting besides my TV in my living room, and it looks very charming. I think i might get another one because its so unique and cute.

The fears of a US recession sparked a contagion that spread from Europe to Asia, causing the australian share market to drop again for a 12th straight trading day. The Australian Federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, told investors to calm down, DON’T PANIC. But the thing is when you hold a lot of stocks which dropped up to 25%, will you be not panic? I would like to hear from you guys, what you gonna do on this stage? do nothing, sell every stocks you got or even buy more stocks?

I tried to find out how to get the channel 10 HD TV program. It is just not really clear for me the instruction given by channel Ten regarding how to get this HD program. At the beginning I thought that if i got HD TV , i will just be able to watch the program directly, but apparently there gonna be another channel 10 HD. So basically, you will get 2 different channel. One is for normal channel 10 , and the other one is channel 10 HD program.To be able to view TEN HD program, You must have either a HD capable integrated digital TV or a HD capable set top box. And You may need to retune your integrated digital TV or set-top-box to receive TEN HD.

So here is what i do with my samsung Plasma HD TV to get the Ten HD Channel:

1. Set the plug and play setting ON ( not sure this is compulsory or not, because at the first time i didn’t turn it on, and i still can’t find the HD channel)
2. Retune my Samsung plasma TV channel program
3. Once its finish finding the Hd channel and setting up the channel, you will be able to view the HD Program.( If you own samsung plasma TV, you can switch to HD channel by clicking on TV/DTV button on your remote control.

Besides channel Ten HD, i also get the other HD TV program from ABC, Channel nine and Seven as well. I’m not sure if they already testing the HD program as well, but its all there, and the picture quality is better compared to the normal one.

If you need more reference , you can check it out from here: How to get Ten HD TV

For you guys who don’t know what is HDTV, here is some information quoted  from samsung website:

The High Definition Advantage
The first thing you need to know about High Definition TV is that is has a 16:9 aspect ratio, capable of delivering the same high quality you see in a movie theatre, making High definition the best picture available on a television screen. The other big selling point is the resolution. HD comes in three different resolutions: 720p, 1080i and 1080p for picture perfect clarity.
 

Benefits of HDTV

-Better Picture Quality
The most notable benefit of HDTV is the dramatically improved picture quality. The usual resolution a normal TV can display is 525 scan lines with 480 actually being visible. The usual TV can display a resolution of about 210,000 pixels per image. High Definition TV’s can go all the way up to 1920 (horizontal) x 1080 (vertical) pixels, with a total of 2,073,600 pixels per image. That is ten times
the resolution and picture quality of usual TV.

-Better Sound Quality
HDTV’s digital audio sounds better than a standard television’s analogue sound,
just like digital CDs are superior to analogue radio. All HDTV programs use Dolby Digital sound, which is also used on DVDs. This format is used to transmit two to six channels of audio depending on the program. With these soundtracks driving 6 speakers, Dolby Digital creates a home theatre experience rivaling the best cinema sound.

-Future Proofing Your Purchase
With more content becoming available in High Definition and the analogue  signal ceasing in 2010, deciding to purchase a HDTV effectively future proofs your investment.
 

For the Adsl2 internet connection, It took about 2 weeks since i lodged my application.

You can see from above detail which i got from the exetel application status page, it took exactly 15 days.

Once i got the connection, i  actually got a problem to connect it using my adsl old wireless modem ZyXEL P-660HW.  Then i tried to update the firmware to the latest one. It looks like this firmware update fix the problem, and finally i can connect already. The first thing i do once i get connected is to test the speed. There are some website which provide the free tools to test the adsl speed such as zdnet and ozspeedtest. From Zdnet broadband speed test page, my speed is around 9000kbps, which is not too bad i reckon. And from ozspeedtest site,  here is my result:
Mirror: Exetel
Data: 3 MB
Test Time: 3.02 secs
Your line speed is 8.12 Mbps (8122 kbps).
Your download speed is 1015 KB/s (0.99 MB/s).

For you guys who want to know more about how fast is the speed for each adsl connection type, here is the table quoted from ozspeedtest site:
 

Other tool which i reckon is very useful as well is the tool to find out how far is your location from the adsl exchange from adsl to exchange website. Because by knowing how far you are from the adsl exchange , you can know how much speed you can expect. The closer you are, the faster speed you can expect.

How is your guys speed compared to my speed?

the business model of Costco is a bit different with ALDI, coles or woolies, because if customer want to shop there, they will need to pay annual membership fee.

to get more detail about Costcos business mode, i went to their company us website, and here is some information i can grab from there:

• What Is Costco?
  We are a membership warehouse club, dedicated to bringing our members the best possible prices on quality brand-name merchandise. With hundreds of locations worldwide, Costco provides a wide selection of merchandise, plus the convenience of specialty departments and exclusive member services, all designed to make your shopping experience a pleasurable one.

• Types of Membership
  Costco has three types of membership: Executive, Business, and Gold Star. Executive Members earn a 2% Annual Reward on most Costco purchases, and receive additional benefits on our member services.

In Us , The Gold Star Membership is $50 per year, which includes one household card per primary add on. Its a good news if they are coming soon to Australia, because as user, we will get more options to save money.

In Us ,

The good thing about ads which paid by CPM is regardless of whether or not that ad is clicked by the end user you will still get paid, because you get paid based on per impression. This kind of advertising program is suitable for a websites which get a lot of impressions.

You can also setup backup tag code, which is will be used in case adsdaq can’t sell that ad space for you. this might be because you set up your CPM price too high. The admin section including the report section is pretty good in my opinion. But i cant really tell yet how is the ads perform in my website. I will post again once i got the statistics report.