I’m writing this post using my brand new upgraded Wordpress 2.5 platform. I find it good enough although I do missed the big old dashboard that has all those big fonts. Anyway, last week Thursday night there was another webinar which I’ve forgotten that I’ve already signed up to attend it online. I just realized about it the last minute when I suddenly received a reminder e-mail just before the online webinar was about to start.

Since the webinar was organized by Citrix, the organizer had everybody attending to install their software in order for them to show their presentation slides. Unfortunately, the audio is only accessible by dialing a toll free US number. Again, I used Skype for this purpose. It was interesting despite living in Malaysia, I have the same facility as what my counterpart in the US have. I just love being online on the World Wide Web. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop setup. (For those of you who like to analyze what type of person I am, you can see what application I have on my desktop as well *wink*)-

My Desktop Preview

I love how the Citrix online presentation flow was handled. I’ve been to a lot of presentation from my experience attending talks, seminars and webinars and normally I can spot which presentation can attract my interest. This one, eventhough I can’t see the speaker’s face, the presentation style is quite good plus there wasn’t so much of a hard selling effort. Here’s an interesting slide I’ve taken from my desktop screenshot while hearing to the webinar:

Citrix Online Webcast

Last year in December, I attended an online presentation meeting with a Canada based company. They use Adobe Connect to perform their slideshows and again Skype as the main audio communicator. That was my first time I’ve ever experienced a one to one online sales presentation and it opened my eyes to a whole lot more the usability of the web. I recorded everything using Camtasia software for my keeping.

An interesting perspective here is, not everybody is exposed to this new technique of doing demo presentation live on the internet. It might be useful at some point but there is so many technical aspect to take care of, at least initially. Anyway, the future of doing web conferencing online looks quite promising and I do look forward paying attention to it very closely.

As soon as I stepped into my office last Monday morning, my boss showed up inside my working area and asked for me to arrange to hurry up and get my passport prepared for the trip to Washington. I never had a Malaysian Passport before so I had to apply for one. I tried to applied for my passport last year at Putrajaya Immigration office but they don’t accept application over there. My brother applied for it last 2 years and it was done in a day so I guess this time it would be the same.

I borrowed RM300 (I’m still broke though) and I was on my way to the nearest Immigration Department of Malaysia which is located in Plaza Metro, Kajang. The parking there is just RM1 and I parked my car just outside of the entrance of the office (4th floor). That’s not so bad right? Here’s a photo of the place:

Pejabat Imigresen Kajang

After I bought the application form (RM1), I photocopied my Identity Card and attached my photographs along with my filled application form. The clerk at the counter checked my documents and found out that I didn’t include my birth certificate. I remembered reading that for MyKad holders, that is not necessary so I argued with her. Unfortunately, I found out that I’m not a MyKad holder. I’m just a regular IC holder since I was the early batch back then that has been changed into a new version of the IC.

I had to drive back home to get my original birth certificate, make a photocopy of it and then decided to try the Immigration Department in Kuala Lumpur instead. The office is located at Pusat Bandar Damansara, only 15 minutes drive from where I live.

Jabatan Imigresen Wilayah Persekutuan KL

The only thing I had to bare is the parking fees which is RM2.20 for the first hour and RM1.50 for the next subsequent hour. The place is definitely bigger than the one in Kajang and there’s larger crowd over there.

Instead of writing about my experience, this time I’ll just draw a diagram about it:

How I Got My Passport Process Flow

Application Form and Supporting Documents

Immigration Processing Counter

The whole process took me less than 4 hours and I was back at my office by 3pm. The parking fee that I had to pay was RM6.70 and now I have my first passport ever.

My Passport

My next step would now is to apply for the US Visa. I am now ready to fly anywhere in the world.

Next month, proceeding the pre-training webinar I attended last week, there will be a big event that my company needs to attend to. It will be held at Hyatt Regency Bathesda somewhere in Washington DC. That’s like the other part of the world from where I’m standing. Here’s a view of the place taken from Google Maps:

Hyatt Regency Bethesda

Yesterday I just got myself a passport for me to go out from the country. My last time boarding a flight was 11 years ago and that was just a 45 minutes domestic flight. I’ve heard that to go to Washington would take 27 hours in total of the flight trip. I hope I’ll survive that..hehe..

I’m not really certain of whether or not I’m going for this business trip. It is up to my boss to decide (which I currently an influence over that) but at the moment I’m currently on a standby mode at the moment. I’m currently in the process of applying a US Visa. My brother went to US last year’s November but only got a 3 months validity period for his Visa. Everybody else gotten themselves 10 years which kind of puzzling everybody that time. He’ll be re-applying for his visa together with me since we are going for this trip together.

In my next post, I’ll be writing a post on how I got my Malaysian passport on the same day. I need to get myself prepared as well.

It has been a while since I’ve attended any seminars. The last would be during a conference my company sponsored a table top. But that doesn’t stop me from attending seminars. Nowadays, you can even attend a seminar from the comfort of your own office desk or even your bedroom with the creation of Web Seminar or better known as Webinar.

Armed with only your flash configured browser or special software and a decent broadband internet connection, you can attend or even held a webinar. So on the 5th of March which was last 2 weeks, I attended “MarketingProfs B2B-2.0 EXPO”. Since the webinar was hosted in the US, it was almost midnight from where I live but I was still at my office doing some last minute assignment. Here are some screenshots of the webinar I’ve taken during the webinar:

B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Main Area

Since this webinar is using flash, it requires a little bit of download time and also consumes most of my underpowered Intel Celeron M notebook processor. It does kind of annoy me especially when my so called broadband internet somehow drops in between.

B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Booth

The booth are not the kind of booth you see at normal tradeshows and seminars but at least you can get information easily by just clicking and it automatically insert information inside my virtual briefcase. The only thing that I don’t like is how the sales chat is handled, it was so slow to load.

There’s also some free gift in a form of free PDF information download and stuff. Well, I did download some of them but it’ll just add more collection to my PDF junk inside my laptop. They did follow up by sending me e-mails but I won’t really bother on their offer and stuff since I’m not seriously in need of such services yet. I’m just there to gain a new experience.

Pre-Training Webinar

Last night, I attended another webinar. This webinar is supposed to be done at my office since it’s related to my job but I had the permission to do it at home since the webinar is held after my office hours. Furthermore, I need to make a recording of this webinar to be shared with my team mates so I need a stable internet connection. Apparently, my internet connection at home is much more stable than my office.

I missed 10 minutes of the introduction to the webinar because I misunderstood the instruction which required me to call a toll free number in the US. The webinar was held on Microsoft Live Meeting and I thought the audio would be included. I then remembered that I can use Skype to make phone call to the US and lucky it went through since its toll free anyway. Check out the video below to see the webinar live in action inside of my own bedroom:

I’ll have more events going on the next following weeks so I’m looking forward to that as well.