What happened was that a bunch of my old classmates and I (with some of our family) met at 1 Utama mall in Bandar Utama. We then proceeded to the open air Rainforest location of the new wing of 1 Utama, cobbled together 4 of the little round tables (and 1 square table) Burger King had scattered in their area and ordered some Burger King value meals for lunch, except for Teik Sing who had a heavy brunch, yo. Here follows a photographic account of the events that transpired today. I should have taken more pictures, but I was chasing Irfan all over the play area and out of the drizzle. Laksh’s daughter Priya and Irfan getting their Uncle Teik Sing to play Hot Wheels with them, while Chiew Kian looks on amused. Laksh, Yu Hoe, Wendy & Ah Bau. In the foreground is Chiew Kian’s cute daughter. Group photo […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: August 2005
Best Wife Ever
I woke up this morning with a headache and a painful cough. There was a sharp pain in my throat at every cough, and there’s no way for me to wilfully stop coughing if my throat itched itself into coughing spasms. So there was nothing for me to do early in the morning, after subuh prayers, except curl myself into a ball under the sheets as Ain got ready for work and took Irfan to daycare. Immediately after she kissed me goodbye, I fell asleep. I don’t remember her leaving the house, but I did remember that she was going to prepare something for me. When I woke up again, maybe 10 – 15 minutes after she left (I couldn’t be too sure) there was a warm pot of lemon tea on the dinner table. It was the best pot of lemon tea I’ve tasted. Now the tea’s finished, my […]
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A Raging Sea
Here’s something I cooked up rough and fast using Artrage: a digital oil painting of a boat not remotely having the best of days.
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Illustration Friday: Dreams
One of my dreams as a child was to be an astronaut and explore the solar system. For Illustration Friday, for the topic “Dreams” I wondered what an astronaut, during a high-stress space walk, would dream about. Here’s something I came up in the last hour. Click on the thumbnail below to view a larger sized version of the image. Media: OpenCanvas, augmented by PhotoShop.
Continue readingHelp Needed For Roving Red Eye
This person needs your help. Click on the image below to see who, and then you’ll understand why. [[popup:cylon01.jpg:(thumbnail)::center:1]] This priceless image was found at this costume and props page.
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Pangkor 1992: Fu Lin Kong Temple
I was back on vacation from studies at the end of 1992 when Woon Seong, Shahar and I went on a trip to Pangkor. It was disconcerting times in those days, when I haven’t seen any of my Sitiawan friends for almost 2 years. When I met them during vacation, there was always the fear that things would not be the same as they had been in ACS. We were all experiencing new things at separate locations, far apart. My fears, I discovered, were not unfounded. It was true, things had changed. Not for the better or for the worse. It’s just that things were now different. But we adapted. Once upon a time, I feared that our fellowship might be broken after long periods of being incommunicado. Now I know that even after years of absence, one can still be as wacky as before, when meeting old friends long […]
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Pivot-Blacklist: Now Installed
Once in a while I’ve had spammers cluttering up the comments in the blog. Usually they get deleted whenever I log on and check on the site. Now I’ve gone and installed Pivot-Blacklist, a fantastic spamkilling extension for the Pivot CMS. For now, all comments are enabled with an anti-bot question field. The question might look idiotically simple to you (and would be changed periodically), but all automatic blog comment spamming bots wont be able to answer it. There are other features to Blacklist which I will experiment (and have fun with) with later. Here’s to a spam free blog in the future.
Continue readingSome Neil, Some Saddy
Briefly here are several things on the net that made me go “Wow! Cool!” in the last 48 hours or so. Well, the first is pretty cool. The second made me laugh out loud so hard, my nostril hairs complained. But then, many people have complained about my strange sense of humour. The Neil Part Gaiman is his surname. The news isn’t that the follow up to his novel American Gods, Anansi Boys, is out. It’s that the nice people at Harper Audio has allowed Neil to post the first track of the audiobook of Anansi Boys (read by Lenny Henry) on his site. It’s a 16mb mp3 file, if anyone’s interested. Mr. Nancy’s back, yo. The Saddy Part Dumpington is his surname, and he’s the, uh… folk hero created by everyone’s favourite depressed character, Strong Sad. [[image:dumpington.jpg:Isn’t that great?:center:0]] It’s a tragic lttle tale, but tragedy seems to wrack […]
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Hockey Time at ACS Sitiawan
PE time in ACS Sitiawan during our time was usually the PE teacher asking us football or hockey, or if you’re an Amerikaner, soccer or field hockey. I remember 70% of the time we opted hockey. Here is a rare photo of Form 3A1 in 1988 on the field during PE. This picture was taken using a disposable camera. I vaguely remember taking about a dozen pictures in school with this camera, and this was the only exposure that survived some sort of cosmic cataclysm. Because the lens quality of the flimsy camera was terrible, this was the best resolution I got on standard photo paper. From what I can tell, from left to right, we have (forget the guys semi-blocked off in the background) an unidentifiable Indian guy, Khoots, T’sing, Sathya, Keith Lee, another unidentifiable Indian guy (maybe Vernon), and Warren. Since most of the hockey sticks at the […]
Continue readingHenna
Malay weddings aren’t complete without henna. Malay culture isn’t the only one to include henna in its rites and rituals. Henna is an ancient tradition practised by many ancient cultures, and is an integral part of weddings and childbirth for Hindu as well as Muslim cultures. I had hoped that one of the benefits of marrying out of my own culture would be that I would be allowed to skip some of the more tedious rites, but (un)fortunately, my aunts and cousin would have none of it. So whether we liked it or not, henna became part of our wedding. After the aqad nikah (marriage) ceremony, Vin and I both sat down for my cousin Ija (Kak Long) and she meticulously applied the ritual henna on our digits. Well, Vin only had to have the three fingers on his left hand hennaed. I had to have all of my fingers, […]
Continue readingA Fantastic Tale of Old
I realise that since this blog went online, there hasn’t been any entry that features some sort of fantastic anecdote that happens to me during the day. Like being at the zoo and a herd of rampaging rhinos escape their pen, or my needing to jump from one rooftop to an adjacent rooftop to save my life, or a meteorite that crashes and irradiates me, ultimately endowing me with super powers… One of the reasons is because I’m working full-time to get my e-book website online, I don’t go outdoors as I much as I used to anymore. The good old days were when I was working 5 days on, 5 days off in Terengganu on the east coast. 5 days off time and being aimless gave me a lot of opportunities to get into adventures. And when I worked in marketing at the advertising company in 2000, I was […]
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The Blog’s New CSS Layout
So now our blog is mostly dark blue and greens with dark red links. I thought we needed some sort of a change, and I thought I’d have a go with the css and the Pivot templates. I also put one of the nifty non-IE codes that gives a small radius to the corners of the blocks on the right and left columns. So if you’re on IE, you’ll only see the normal sharp corners. I’ve also tried my best to format the pages so that anyone with 800×600 screen resolution would have no problem with the frontpage. But although it works with Firefox, IE seems to make the right column overlap with the centre column a bit. Also, I’ve reduced the number of entries on the centre column to 10 and provided 20 most recent entries on the block at the right column. And finally, each entrypage is given […]
Continue readingSuperman: A Dick and Loving It
When you think of Superman, the first thing that comes to you mind is a virtuous, heroic, superbeing who strives to save innocent lives from disaster, and defeat the devious plots of super villians and invading aliens. But Superdickery.com has a collection of images from early Superman comics (some not so early) of Superman being a dick. Not just an annoying dick, but a real self-centered and dangerous asshole, even to his closest friends. And not once or twice, but repeatedly. For instance, can you imagine Lois Lane actually finally marrying him in the 90s after putting her through things like this dozens of times? [[image:superdickery1.jpg:Superdickery1:center:0]] There must be an easier way of not wanting to get married. Which, of course, would lead Lois to fabricate mind-bogglingly bizzare schemes in order to get Superman to notice her as shown thusly: [[image:superdickery2.jpg:Superdickery2:center:0]] For God’s sake… deal with the devil??!? Haven’t she […]
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Illustration Friday: Reflection
After two straight weeks of cheerful pieces based on the titles given by Illustration Friday, I present to you something that’s on the other end of the scale. Here’s this week’s Reflection. Hope you like it. Or not. Medium: Digital painting
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Hishgraphics.com is Now Online
Good news, everyone. Well, I hope it’s good news to at least my 5 regular readers out there. (Okay, 4 regular readers I admit. Happy?) It would appear that hishgraphics.com, the website I’ve been working on is 90% finished. I’ve removed the “Under Construction” label on the index page. I still need to work on the copy on most of the pages here. CSS and some of the site design are still screwy to me, but it should be transparent to you. But most important of all, the first product, the e-book named The Secret Library is finished. You can check out the black and white free download of the book on the site. Check it all out at www.hishgraphics.com.
Continue readingNYC 2123
[[image:nyc2123.gif:NYC2123:center:0]] We’ve seen online graphic novels before. But we haven’t seen one like NYC 2123, which is the first to be optimized for and downloaded for viewing into a PSP. Like the title implies, the story takes place in New York City in the year 2123; a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk dystopia which is a cross between William Gibson’s Neuromancer and current computer and information technology trends. Who needs a brain jack when you have wi-fi neural connection? Everything is open source, even drugs. The bodysculpting subculture is also briefly seen. If you have a PSP, download it and view it whenever you have the time to read. If you don’t have a PSP, like me, just enjoy the online version of the story.
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