I’ve been slowly saving up for a new PC, and ordering the parts one by one, mostly from bulk sellers on Lowyat forums.

Nowadays the greatest proportion of the money you spend on the computer is ideally the monitor. Prices have been slowly going down, but the average screen size has gone up - 22″ LCD monitors are basically today what 17″ CRTs were 10 years back.

So you can imagine that I’ve been doing a lot of price and product comparison before shelling out my cash.

One of the manufacturers that I’ve been considering is Dell - they make practical, affordable monitors.

What’s confusing though is how they come up with their online discount schemes. It’s worse than the stock market, the way their prices change.

Something is seriously fishy about their new product line though, specifically their new 22″, the SP2208WFP.

I was checking out the site today because I’d heard of their new 24″ model. I noticed that the SP2208WFP was marked as “RM440 off”.

Sounds like an incredible deal for a new model, right?

The thing is that I’ve been visiting Dell’s site regularly, so the prices have stuck in my mind. I distinctly remember that the price when it was first introduced was also RM1,159.

I tried looking to Google Cache for an old copy of the page, but couldn’t find it at first. After much digging however I found a cached copy of the Singapore Dell page.

Firstly, what the SG Dell site looked like then (the cache retrieval date is 1st November ):

This is what it looks like now (advertising “$70 off” on the unit):

Something’s wrong here… I hope they don’t have a dartboard they use to decide the “discount” on their units.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Yesterday’s Star, “A dye that can kill you“:

Food operators are still using a cancer-causing dye in the preparation of belacan (shrimp paste) and several popular Chinese buns and kuih, according to the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP).

The dye was banned more than 50 years ago but food operators are still using it due to lax enforcement, said its president S. M. Mohd Idris.

A lot of Chinese kuih, as well as belacan - yes, belacan - are affected. The dye being used is the same thing they use for clothes and feather dusters!

They also ran a picture with examples:

OMG! You see the pink kuih in the middle?! I (used to) love it. And, of course, belacan is in everything. Damn you greedy Chinese foodmakers.

From now on, I’m only eating stuff that is white. Oh wait - those are probably bleached. I’ll eat only stuff that is transparent then.

Maybe it’d have been better if humans were all born colourblind…

Popularity: 15% [?]

You may know I hate spam. The practice of selling emails is very common, and while definitely unethical, the number of verdicts actually being passed are few and far between - what more in Malaysia!

Which is why this auction from Lelong.com is disgusting:

Here are few smart reasons to purchase the Email Marketing CD from us today:

1. Our database is of over 50,000 Malaysian emails and growing daily!!!
2. You can run your own email marketing campaign - as frequent as you can - change your email content for different products / services - just relax, the software will send email automatically when setting is done - manual included in this CD
3. Our email list - 50, 000 active email list, user check their email daily - Malaysian email (email from all over Malaysia) - targetted group: Managing Director, General Manager, CEO, Executive…
4. Our bulk mail sender software - delivers emails at 50 times faster than the conventional SMTP server - filters out duplicate & invalid email - generates a report of successful delivery & undelivered mail - supports HTML format email
5. Pricing - RM399 per CD - you are allowed to resell to gain back your RM399 - we will never know if 2 or 3 or even 10 person sharing to buy this RM399 CD for 10 person use
6. SPECIAL BONUS: Additional 10, 000 email is giving away for FREE!!! for the order made within 7 days from today!

Popularity: 34% [?]