Moel's Blog

April Fools' Day or also known as All Fools' Day, although not a holiday in its own right, is a day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbors, or sending them on a fool's errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible (weird tradition isn't it ?)Traditionally, in some countries, the jokes only last until noon: like UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, someone who plays a trick after noon is called an "April Fool". Elsewhere, such as in Ireland, France, and the USA, the jokes last all day.

Any how the quest of origin and the date from which the day is being celebrated is still haunting to many today. The origin of April Fools' Day is obscure. One likely theory is that the modern holiday was first celebrated soon after the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; the term referred to someone still adhering to the Julian Calendar which it replaced. In many pre-Christian cultures May Day (May 1) was celebrated as the first day of summer, and signalled the start of the spring planting season. An April Fool was someone who did this prematurely.

April Fool’s Day has all the characteristics of a renewal festival. For one day forms of behavior that are normally not allowed (lying, deception, and playing pranks) become acceptable, and yet the disorder is bounded within a strict timeframe. Traditionally, no pranks are supposed to be played after 12 o’clock noon of the first. Social hierarchies and tensions are exposed, but hostility is defused with laughter.

For as long as people have been speculating about April Fool’s Day, they have noticed the similarities between it and other springtime “renewal” festivals. Many historians have theorized that April Fool’s Day evolved directly out of some such festival practiced in ancient times. A direct connection between April Fool’s Day and any of the Roman-era festivals seems unlikely, though it is quite possible that the tradition evolved out of a medieval festival held around the time of the Vernal equinox (such as the New Year’s festivals at the end of March, as discussed above). Nevertheless, there is no agreement about which festival the tradition of April Foolery developed out of. Below is a list of some of the festivals that have most frequently been suggested as its forerunners.

The most popular theory about the origin of April fool’s Day involves the French calendar reform of the sixteenth century. The theory goes like this :

• French calendar reform
  In 1564 France reformed its calendar, moving the start of the year from the end of March to January 1. Those who failed to keep up with the change, who stubbornly clung to the old calendar system and continued to celebrate the New Year during the week that fell between March 25th and April 1st, had jokes played on them. Pranksters would surreptitiously stick paper fish to their backs. The victims of this prank were thus called Poisson d’Avril, or April Fish—which, to this day, remains the French term for April Fools—and so the tradition was born.
  The calendar-change hypothesis seems, on the surface, like a logical explanation for the origin of April Fools. However, the hypothesis becomes less plausible if we examine the history of calendar reform in more detail.
• The Julian calendar
  The Julian Calendar, established by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, made January 1 the first day of the year. But as Christianity spread throughout Europe, efforts were made to christianize the calendar by moving New Year’s Day to dates of greater theological significance, such as Christmas or Easter. Some countries continued to use January 1, justifying this as the date of Christ’s circumcision. As a consequence, by the 1500s the European calendar system was a mess. Not only had errors in the Julian calendar caused the solar year to diverge from the calendar year, but also countries were beginning the year on different dates.
  Moreover, the French used Easter as the start of the year primarily for legal and administrative purposes. January 1, following the Roman custom, was widely regarded as the traditional start of the year, and it was the day when people exchanged gifts.
• Sixteenth-Century Reform
  The practice of starting the year on Easter Day caused enormous practical inconvenience, so around 1500 many people in France began to use January 1 as the start of the calendar year. For instance, in early sixteenth-century French books, it is common to see both forms of dating listed side-by-side (for titles published in January, February, or March). By the mid-sixteenth century, a calendar system beginning on January 1 was in wide use in France. In 1563 King Charles IX decreed January 1 to be the first day of the year, thus aligning legal convention with what had become the popular practice. His edict was passed into law by the French Parliament on Dec. 22, 1564.
  Eighteen years later, in 1582, Pope Gregory issued a papal bull decreeing sweeping calendar reform. The Gregorian reform included moving the start of the year to January 1, as well as creating a leap-year system and eliminating ten days from the month of October 1582 in order to correct the drift of the calendar. The Pope had no formal power to make governments accept this reform, but he urged Christian nations to do so. France immediately accepted the reform, although it had already changed the start of the year in 1564. (Many histories of April Fool’s Day mistakenly suggest that France only moved the start of the year in 1582 when it accepted the Gregorian calendar reform in its entirety.)

• The 1946 April Fools' Day tsunami in Hilo, Hawaii. The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people in Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system (specifically the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre), established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean countries. The tsunami in question is known in Hawaii as the "April Fools' Day Tsunami" due to people drowning because of the assumptions that the warnings were an April Fools' prank.
• The death of King George II of Greece on April 1, 1947.
• The AMC Gremlin was first introduced on April 1, 1970.
• On April 1, 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. Originally, people assumed that it was a fake news story, especially considering the bizarre aspect of the father being the murderer.
• On April 1, 1993, NASCAR Winston Cup Series Champion Alan Kulwicki was killed in a plane crash involving Hooters of America executives in Blountville, Tennessee near the Tri-Cities Airport. The party was traveling to the Food City 500 qualifying scheduled for the next day.
• The merger of Square and its rival company, Enix, took place on April 1, 2003, and was originally thought to be a joke.
• Leslie Cheung, one of Hong Kong's well-known singer and actor, committed suicide in 2003 due to severe depression.
• Gmail's April 2004 launch was widely believed to be a prank, as Google traditionally perpetrates April Fools' Day hoaxes each April 1 (see Google's hoaxes.) Another Google-related event that turned out not to be a hoax occurred on April 1, 2007, when employees at Google's New York City office were alerted that a ball python kept in an engineer's cubicle had escaped and was on the loose. An internal e-mail acknowledged that "the timing…could not be more awkward" but that the snake's escape was in fact an actual occurrence and not a prank.
• The 2005 death of comedian Mitch Hedberg was originally dismissed as an April Fools' joke. The comedian's March 29, 2005 death was announced on March 31, but many newspapers didn't carry the story until April 1, 2005.
• On April 1, 2008, it was reported that UEFA would require the Swedish fast food chain Max to close their restaurant at the Borås Arena during the European Under-21 Football Championship due to a conflict with official sponsor McDonalds and a requirement that only official sponsors may operate around the arena. The arena was later replaced as a tournament site.
• On April 1, 2008, Christian Persch announced that the GNOME desktop web browser Epiphany would be switched from Mozilla's Gecko engine to the WebKit engine used by Safari and KDE's equivalent application Konqueror
• On 1 April 2009, Alan Shearer becomes caretaker manager of Newcastle United.
  Also on April 1st, 2009, CBS announced the cancelation of the daytime drama Guiding Light after 57 years with the final episode scheduled to air September 18, 2009.

1. The first thing you can do is give someone a fake scratch off lotto ticket. Regardless if the person plays the lotto or not, this will be the perfect prank. To pull it off, all you need is a fake lotto ticket. Make up an excuse as to why you're giving it to them.
   After they scratch off the lotto ticket, it'll reveal that they've won $25,000. The expression on their face will be priceless.
2. Another one of the best April Fools day pranks you can pull is to use a fart spray. You can use this at work, in a class, or anywhere. Or if you really want to get someone on April Fools day, you can spray their clothing with it. They'll stink all day long.
3. The third prank you can do is to give away some trick candy. There are a lot of candies that you can use. Some will make someone's breath smell like fart or garlic. Or it'll turn their mouth blue or red. There are lots of things trick candies can do.

As immensely enjoyable as it is to be online the price we pay has gone up, way up, for that pleasure. For the ease of information, instant gratification, for the all knowing personal shopper, researcher, translator and match maker, we figured the transmission of our email address or ip address was a small token to pay. But the small token has grown bigger. And it is a bit scary to me. The current name of that scary is Spyware! Recently I started having major problems with my computer. I would be online doing the usual things like checking email or reading the news, then links I click on would take a long time to load. Eventually my computer screen would get the slow and choppy disease. You know: the blue loading line is barely moving in the address bar, the page is totally white because it is in between links and the mouse isn’t moving and you pray it doesn’t crash. Then it just crashes. I would go through that cycle 10 times a day. I ran my disk repair program but it wasn’t a hardware problem. Then I realized that in the midst of all that transmitting and downloading, my computer may have been compromised by spyware. I thought about what was being done to my computer, what information had been compromised. I felt that something was sucking the life off my hard drive, had copied all my files and was monitoring my online movements. I finally found the removal program and ran it on my computer. There were numerous spyware detected and removed from my system and the problems stopped. I learned my lesson. I decided that ‘they’ was really ‘me’. I knew about spyware but didn'’t guard against it even though I was online a lot. I was aware of the risk and ignored it then but not now. I guard my information and I run my spyware detection and remover program frequently. You should too.

Due to its awareness, many people know about the dangers that exist from malicious software. Today alone, 80 percent of people have their computers infected and their information compromised by spyware. Only 5 percent of the 80 percent know they have the dangerous software installed on the their system. This is, without a doubt, troubling numbers. No wonder people are seeking solutions against the spyware by using anti-spyware tools.There are two ways to stop spyware from doing significant harm and damage to your computer: prevention and solution.

• Prevention : Remember that the best way to keep spyware out is to keep an anti-spyware installed on your computer. This can be done several ways. Some of the anti-spyware software can scan through every bit of data that enters your computer. It then checks the data against the known spyware database. Due to this database, if a spyware that is on the list tries to invade your computer, it is prevented from doing so. This is only effective so long as the database is kept current. Another way anti-spyware helps to prevent spyware from getting installed is to limit certain program's activities that are known to distribute spyware. One such known program is Active X. What is Active X you ask? It is a technological tool that allows content to get sent from the web to a person's computer. When an anti-spyware software limits the program capabilities, it lessens the chance that any spyware will be installed onto your computer.
• Solution : For some reason, if any spyware does exist on your system, the anti-spyware tool will run a scan of your entire hard drive and system and get rid of them. A regular scanning should be done...typically on a daily basis. The program, once it is has found the culprit, will delete it to be sure no traces remain of the program to cause harm to your computer. Typically, most programmers found this way to incorporate the anti-spyware software easier than if preventive measures were taken. Creators of spyware know that certain programs cannot run without the daily operations of the computer. They introduce spyware into these computers, knowing this loophole. For example: Many websites use Flash to make web surfing entertaining. Creators want to use Flash to infect your system with spyware. To keep the system running smoothly on the website, Flash is an integrate part of web entertainment. Yet, users know they cannot uninstall Flash without causing hiccups. Here, anti-spyware companies are faced with big odds to get rid of spyware but keep the person's computer running smoothly and without major issues. Alternatives to Anti-Spyware Software while these next spyware anti-spyware solutions are not always viable, they can rather prove impractical. First off, a person can limit their computer from contacting others by limiting their time on the Internet. This may not work because people have become very dependent on the Internet for many of his needs. Try to rid the Spyware yourself. In doing this, it could cause irreparable harm and is not a wise idea. Never mess with spyware on your own. Using an anti-spyware against spyware is the ideal thing you can do to decipher your computer problems.

There are many free spyware erasers available on the internet, to get them easily, just go online and search for them in any of the search egines. Once this is done a list of all the anti-spyware companies that offer free spyware removing software programs will appear and you can choose the one that suits you most. We have the Spybot Search and Destroy, it is an excellent spyware remover that immediately combats all available spyware in the computer, it will search through the whole system to locate the spyware no matter where it is hiding. Once the spyware is found, the SpyBot software eliminates it at once without any kind of difficulty at all. It is a free Spyware remover. Another one is the Spyware Blaster, this offers a complete protection from all spyware and adware in the computer. It operates by eliminating any existing spyware from the system and blocking the system so that no spyware can gain entrance again. Microsoft also offers a free spyware remover that is very active when it comes to attacking the spyware in the system. It will do the job perfectly, leaving your computer perfectly whole and protected from any futuristic attack. You should know that, when searching for a spyware remover, make sure you pick the one that has firewalls as a protection. The firewall bulids a wall around your computer even when you are browsing, this hinders the spyware from getting into your system again.

Related article : Antivirus

Motorcycles tires have functions that are important because your safety and comfort in the driving condition is determined mainly by motorcycle tires. Therefore I'll give you following tips for choosing the right motorcycle tires :

1. Choose the size or width of motorcycle tires that fits your needs. Using tires with a wide but small size can cause less friction with the road. This will make the energy of a motorcycle does not run out because of the friction against each road. But this can make a motorcycle have a greater risk to slip or skid. Instead bigger size of a motorcycle tire width will tend to be more stable, although many of the energy is lost because the friction of the tire with the road.
2. Note the type of tire. This is done for your safety while driving. There are two options for the type of tire, the dry and wet tire. If weather conditions are raining or often rains You can choose to use wet tires. Using dry tires while raining will make the tire perform less than its maximum performance. Conversely, if you use wet tires when the road condition is dry is not a good option too. Hal ini dikarenakan bidang ban yang menapak ke jalanan lebih kecil karena banyak alur untuk “membuang”air. This is because the tire have smaller fraction that have contact with the road, because there are many small "flows" to "remove" the water. However, the use of wet tires during dry road conditions is far more secure than the use of dry tires when it rains.
3. A Good motorcycle tire is a tire that is not easily worn out. For security reason, the "worn out" level of your motorcycles tire should be monitored carefully. Using worn out tires will cause the motorcycle to lose balance when riding in slippery roads. Agar ban tetap awet pilihlah jalur berkendara yang kondisinya baik (tidak berlubang, terjal atau licin). To maintain your tire durability, choose routes that have good roads condition (not hollow, steep or slippery).

That's a few tips from me. Hope it helps you guys. And if you are a peson that love to travel along with your family, you can also read my post about travelling with family tips. Thank you.

I think everyone loves dating. For most of us, the holiday period means more time off to spend with friends, family and other loved ones. Under the latter category falls everything from your significant other to the cutie you see at the bus stop every morning. Take the opportunity this holiday to spend some quality seasonal time with your romantic interest. Not only is more time available, it's a special time of year, charged with excitement and mystery, perfect for a romantic adventure.

Because the season is so special and unique, there are all sorts of date options available that you normally don't have during the rest of the year. Take the time to check out the following Holiday Dating tips and idea:

1. Idea : Skating. Skating is a traditional winter past time, and is perfect for budding romance. Tips : There are plenty of opportunities to dazzle your date with your moves, or fall accidentally into your date's arms.
2. Idea : Skiing. Skiing, like skating, is a traditional winter past time.
   Tips : Make use of the ski lift. Unlike skating, it offers the added intimacy and coziness of the ski lift, perfect for cuddling.
3. Idea : Build a Gingerbread House. Studies show that couples who cook together stay together!
   Tips : This delicious activity is a fun and more intimate way to spend the evening together. Not a baker ? Worry not, pre-made and ready-to-go gingerbread houses are now widely available.
4. Idea : Charity Event. There's nothing like doing good deeds for others to get your Christmas buzz going. Sharing quality activities is a great way to really get to know each other in a good light.
   Tips : Conversation is important here. I lose interest in people that fail to stimulate me either do to a small vernacular or any substance to that lexicon as well. Sometimes, conversations are short and sweet, but it's really really nice when you can share more.
5. Idea : Tree decorating. You have to decorate your tree each year anyhow, you might as well make it a romantic affair!
   Tips : Invite your date over to help decorate your tree, and regale each other in tales of ornaments and holidays past.
6. Idea : Seasonal Parties. This is the best time of year for specialty parties and events.
   Tips : Why not try going to see a Christmas choir? Or try a holiday speed dating and singles events?

1. Install the latest Anti Virus Software
2. Turn on Automatic Update so that your anti Virus can get the latest virus data.
3. Turn on firewall
4. Be Carefull when downloading a file or opening an e-mail containing attachments. Make sure they're 100 % clean.
5. Do virus scan immediately after you olug any storage device to your computer.

Hope this little information can you guys a better understanding of what anti virus software is and protect your computer better from viruses. See You in the next article

Related Article : Spyware Everywhere

Article Source : Article Street

Talking about money and investment, there's a lot of option for you to choose. The most common one is investing in bonds and stocks. Beside that, property is one of most enjoyable choice.
What's the different between savings and invesments? The main difference between savings and investments is in it's timeline. Savings usually for a short term purpose and can be withdrawn at any time you like. But investment is for long term effect and have the purpose to increase or double your asset.
In order to make our investment success, there are several tips for you to be considered before you make the decision. The tips are :

1. Make sure you know the purpose of the investment.
   This is the basic thing and will determine what type of investments you'll choose and for how long.
2. Learn and get deep understanding about how the investment works.
   Don't just follow your instinct if you dont fully understand yet. Don't be easily manipulated by high return. Remember, what gives high return usually have a high risk too. (High Risk High Return).
3. Risk profile management.
   For bond and stocks, usually there are financial reports and what the prospects are is given aerlier so you can learn about it first. Don't hesitate to ask your financial advisor about the risk if you take the investment. Savings in banks usually have a very little risk unless the bank is collapsing, and for Indonesia, all the savings is guaranteed by the goverment through LPS with certain terms and condition.
4. Don't be greedy.
   Many people want to get more after he get what he expected to get from the investment. Don't manipulated by greed so you make a decision that you'll regret it later. Focus on the target you've already set earlier and if you wish, make a new target with toughtfull consideration.