Last Saturday, my parents (also known as Irfan’s Grandparents) came to spend several days with us. It was the first time, they saw Irfan all dressed up ready to go to school with his memory bag prepared for battle. It was also fun for them to be seeing Irfan spelling out words, writing the alphabet and reciting bedtime and mealtime doas. His claim that W was an inverted M is quite amusing.[[image:zippy01.jpg:Watching TV:center:0]] Sunday morning, Ain, Irfan and I took Tok & Opah Irfan for a visit at Sungai Congkak. Irfan as usual loved the river and liked seeing leaves go over the rocks in the river. I also showed him beautiful blue dragonflies, water skimmers and vibrant, green algae growing out of roots of the tall trees at the riverbank. Tok Irfan took some great photos.[[image:zippy03.jpg:Irfan on the rocks:center:0]][[image:zippy02.jpg:Good luck getting me out of the water:center:0]] Irfan also had […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: January 2007
It’s That Double Celebration Time of the Year Again…
… where I wish my sister Sila a very happy birthday and my parents (and Irfan’s grandparents) a very happy anniversary, both from Irfan, Ain & me. May this year bring more joy and happiness into their lives. They’ve been the best family ever and I wouldn’t want my life with them in the past 34 years to be different in any way whatsoever.
Continue readingTennis
A little bit of retrospective blogging: back to Mak and Abah’s visit here. Even though it was early November, we had a nice warm-ish day, so we decided to head out to Miami University Middletown (MUM) tennis courts for a little exercise. Abah, of course, has been playing tennis (and playing it well) for 40 years. Hisham and I both learned to play when we were little, and I know I was never very good at it. But I do love going outside, going to the courts, and getting some exercise (trying to beat Vin which I have never done yet – give me time!). So the four of us packed into the car, and took the short drive to MUM. We couldn’t drive right up to the tennis courts (they closed the gate to the access road) so we parked the car in the car park a short walk […]
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Cracken’s Collection of What?!?
In the tradition of West End Games’ series of sourcebooks such as Cracken’s Rebel Field Guide, Cracken’s Rebel Operatives and Cracken’s Threat Dossier (all of which are books written in-universe by the fictional General Airen Cracken), I now bring you the non-official mini-sourcebook pdf for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (D6 rules version)… Cracken’s Collection of Crazed Crackpots. It’s created 100% by open source software. The artwork was made with The Gimp, the layouts were done in Scribus, and some elements were saved in EPS and ported from Inkscape. And it’s compressed into a zip file by Ubuntu’s onboard archiver. It’s basically a book about some dangerous escapees from a nuthouse for the criminally insane. Stats are included for D6 roleplaying goodness. Take it seriously at your own risk… and sanity. Apologies for not having the time to create a back page. Oh, and Airen Cracken doesn’t really appear until […]
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Yesterday’s Birthday Cake
Yesterday was Ain’s birthday. I thought I could have the money to buy a present for Ain this year. But we spent way over our regular budget this month getting Irfan prepared for kindergarten. So, maybe next year. Anyway, there was cake as can be seen in the photograph below. And apparently Irfan ain’t partial to yoghurt cheese cakes. Which is good news, cause there’s more for me! 😀 Happy birthday, my wife and my companion through adventure and hardship.
Continue readingBread for Abah and Mak
A quick review back to Mak and Abah’s visit here last year. After all this while of looking at the breads I’ve been baking, I finally got a chance to have them taste my home made breads. Here’s Abah and Mak’s introduction to one of Vin’s favorite breads, Raisin Orange Bread. While I was making this bread, Abah was running around wondering when he would get to eat it! After all, with bread baking you have to knead the dough, let it rise, then shape the loaf and let it rise again (that’s about the average way to bake bread, with 2 risings). Without the rising, the yeast won’t make the bread nice and fluffy! Then after all this, the bread has to go in the oven to bake. Abah was just about ready to give up on the bread when it finally got out of the oven. [[image:us346.jpg:Abah and […]
Continue reading10 Reasons not to go outside
After about a week of rain and snow flurries and overcast skies (luckily it wasn’t too too cold so no snow stuck), Friday was a sunny day. Cold and windy, but the sun was finally out and Vin and I took the afternoon off to go out and spend the afternoon together. Saturday wasn’t a bad day either. But this is what I woke up to this morning and my heart fell. Let’s not be shy about it. Believe me, I don’t make any excuses – I will say it out loud and say it strong. I HATE SNOW! I loathe it. I think that snow is the single most depressing thing in the world, and the one reason that I would think about moving. Here are 10 pictures of the scene I saw when I woke up this morning. The first snow of the season that has any kind […]
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Illustration Friday: Super Hero
It’s been several ice ages since I participated in an Illustration Friday. So, here’s one for this week. Created wholly with the Gimp 2.2 using the handy-dandy Wacom – after I finally figured out how to activate pressure sensitivity of the stylus. Which took me an hour or so. The subject is “Super Hero”, something almost ever child dreamed of being at least once in his or her life. So here is a kid acting out his fantasy to be a costumed crimefighter, hopefully without breaking a limb falling off the roof.
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Lunch With Nanda
Nandakumar has been a good friend of mine since I was 14. Form 2 was when this newcomer to Sitiawan traipsed into our classroom and sat close to me along with the usual suspects, Teik Sing, Khoots, Warren, et. at. Despite being good friends, we rarely see each other these days. Life positioned us where it was difficult to meet, and inundated us with many other issues to deal with that meeting Nanda wasn’t the foremost on my mind. The last time we met was during Laskmanan’s wedding before Irfan was born. Until today. Ain and I met up with him at SS20’s roadside restaurant. (It was my idea to eat there, I hoped he liked the food.) He has to get back to work on shift at the oil rig next week. There were plenty to talk about and not enough time to talk about everything. We talked about […]
Continue reading5 Favourite Movies – A Meme
Tagged by the Hijack Queen with her metahuman abilities to hijack any sort of forum thread – quite an impressive feat if I might add – I will attempt to oblige her with my top favourite movies of all time as of today. The “as of today” statement is a proviso, cause the movies can sort themselves differently as time goes by. If this was 20 years ago, there would probably be two hundred science fiction and fantasy movies crammed into just the five spots. Since this is the here and now I will cut it down to one movie per spot, and diversify genres somewhat. Hey, you know what? Let’s put in a mini-review for each just for the hell of it. 5. Trainspotting (Danny Boyle) – 1996 [[image:5movies03.jpg:The worst toilet in Scotland:left:0]]Trainspotting is the movie by Danny Boyle that shot himself into the mainstream and Ewan McGregor into […]
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Irfan Goes To Kindergarten
Today was Irfan’s first day at school. He was awakened an hour earlier than usual and was thrust under a shower much to his displeasure. But after a warm bottle of milk, he was all psyched up at the notion of going to school and meeting new friends. Among the shadows in the back, Irfan’s dad was hoping he’d learn about how to handle the darker side of humanity, such as jealousy, vengeance, rage and other disagreeable traits stemming from fear and the inability to deal with one’s emotions. And certainly a bunch of 4-6 year olds will teach him how to deal with those. Yes, they will. But getting back to getting ready for school, Irfan really loved his socks and shoes. He couldn’t wait to get into them and fly out the door. Here is Irfan showing off his new uniform and his Spider-Man backpack which I bought […]
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A New Playgound (On the Computer Desktop)
After I vowed to install Linux into this here home computer some time last October, this machine is now 100% Linux. The 100% part was because my old two hundred year old Windows installer CD had reached the end of its days and I needed an operating system quick. Why didn’t I retain the old Windows XP already installed in the computer and go dual boot? I broke it fiddling with dual boot, thank you very much. The Linux distro installed is Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. Although its original desktop environment was GNOME, I’ve installed K Desktop Environment (KDE) over it, effectively turning it into Kubuntu. So cutting through all the techinical details for now, here’s what the desktop and its associated applications looks like. Take a look at the desktop. After years of using Windows, this took some time to get used to. The wallpaper is homebrewed with GIMP, […]
Continue readingBahamian Break
Christmas is a time for us to take a break. Get away from real life. Leave work behind and relax. Last year, we flew out to San Francisco and took a road trip up the coast north of San Francisco. This year, since we’d just done the road trip through the South West (it was 2030 driving miles total) so we decided we wanted to just go someplace warm and veg out. So we went to the Bahamas! Wheeeeee! We were away for 8 days, staying at the Paradise Island Harbor Resort [[image:bahama14.jpg:Harbor Resort:center:0]] We arrived in Nassau and took a bus to the Harbor Resort on Paradise Island. The Bahamas is made up of hundreds of islands and Nassau is on New Providence. The bus took us across a bridge to Paradise Island. Here are some pictures of the Harbor Resort on Paradise Island: [[image:bahama11.jpg:Vin catching some rays on […]
Continue readingSome Internet Stress Therapy For Everyone
Click on this link and I double dare you not to go “Awwwwww…..” Click it!!! Via Fark.com.
Continue readingIn a galaxy far, far away… Southwestern Road Trip Day 8
After a long hiatus, here’s the final part of the Southwestern Road Trip. Finally! I know! Forgot already. But here’s the last part of the story. Our final morning in Flagstaff dawned bright and early. We were packed up and ready to hit the road to head south to Phoenix. We were planning to be in Phoenix by lunch time to meet up with Vin’s cousin Becky, and the drive would take about 2 hours total. So we decided to meander down to Phoenix by way of Sedona. We ended up hanging out at Red Rock State Park, visited Cathedral Rock (which Becky, Vin and I climbed in a previous visit), and then drove on to Phoenix. [[image:us345.jpg:Flagstaff-Sedona-Phoenix:center:0]] While I was speaking with the manager of the Embassy Suites (they fixed our hot water, but Vin’s and my room never got above 60 F the whole time we were there […]
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Two Views Of The Same Page
Because I’ve using Firefox on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to surf the net, here are two different looks of this website’s index page. I have no preference on which is better looking, but apart from the fonts, there really isn’t much difference, thanks to Ubuntu not being able to display the Trebuchet MS font. The original screen resolution is 1200 x 800. The top is the WinXP Firefox with the Aluminum Kai 2 theme; and below is the Ubuntu Firefox on Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Tangerine theme. Click on the thumbnails to view the larger images. Last night however, the home desktop died a fiery death and I can’t reinstall any OS. Not WinXP, not Ubuntu. (Thankfully, God created work laptops.) Thanks to a suggestion from Kris Vanderwater the Atlantean, I’m now downloading Knoppix ISO file to see if I can run the Knoppix Linux-based OS off the CD. However, if […]
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