The best thing ever that could happen is the discovery that this hotel I’ve staying at has a free wi-fi connection. This discovery is nothing less than imbuing me with the ability to post a couple of photos which I took earlier today, from Kuala Kedah to Kuah. We had to leave the car with a shipping company that conveyed our mode of conveyance to Langkawi by ship. Unlike the ferry to Penang, we had to travel separately upon a passenger ferry. The ferry played Resident Evil Apocalypse en route. I fell asleep soon after the movie began. I woke up 20 minutes before it ended. When the end credits played. the ferry was about to begin docking operations at the Kuah Jetty. Here was the muddy banks of Kuala Kedah at low tide. As the water began to rise, mudskippers and crabs plied their trade under the pier. Here […]
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Tomorrow I Go Off To Langkawi
I go tomorrow not for vacation, but for work. I can’t wait for it to be over. Ain and Irfan aren’t here with me now. They’re at Taiping attending Cik Eda’s wedding. I miss them. (No doubt Sila will be posting an entries with pictures of the event.) Ain and Irfan will be back on the 2nd, which means I wont be seeing them before I leave for Langkawi. I will be back on the 9th. I wont be seeing Vin and Sila again before they leave for home. It’s going to be a long week.
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Why It’s Been Quiet Around Here Lately
It’s been a busy month, even since before Aidilfitri. The reason of it all will now be shown as a series of photographs for the event that took place at Shangri-La Hotel on the 24th and 25th of October. Sorry, no photos of me cause I didn’t get anyone to snap one at any time. Here’s the aforementioned series of photographs with captions: Before I left, I shook the organiser’s hand saying, “Awesome party, yo.” Next stop: LIMA 2007!
Continue readingOur Seventh Year
[[image:7thanniversary.jpg:Seven Years Already?:center:0]] It’s been seven years since Ain and I were married, more than eleven years since we met. Through all that time, there’s been a lot of ups and a lot of downs. And I’m glad I went through it all with Ain giving me strength at my side and I’m looking forward to more years like that.
Continue readingFestivities And Then Some
Tomorrow is the last day of the month of Ramadhan. Tomorrow we head back to Sitiawan for Aidilfitri. We will try to beat the crazy traffic (an evil, sentient gestalt entity which appears every holiday season) by leaving Kuala Lumpur at 0200 hours. Also, this year is the first time Irfan happily chants, “Yay! Yay! Balik Raya!” which after a full Ramadhan of solid exhausting work, brings a smile to my face and takes my enthusiasm for the festive season up a notch or so. I still have a bunch of stuff to do before the end of the year which is weighing down on me like cinder blocks on my shoulders. Which just translates to… I’ll be back Tuesday night. I’ll also try to take and upload some Aidilfitri photos in the meantime. SELAMAT HARI RAYA AIDILFITRI TO ALL Yes, and even to Cindy O. Bear in the back […]
Continue readingLaptop Problem, and then a Solution
I still haven’t replaced my home workstation since it crashed and burned back in April. I’ve been using this work laptop 100% for my computing and browsing needs since. It used to work great until a couple of months ago when everything (in the Windows partition, mind you… Ubuntu still works fine) suddenly seemed to be work slow. The problem was very apparent when video and audio were running. Not all the time, but enough times to really annoy the shart out of me. Also, another annoying symptom is that it takes 10 minutes for the laptop to finish its startup cycle. But now… no longer. I did some googling (which I should have done months ago) and came upon some help in various websites. So apparently, the primary IDE hard disk switched transfer modes from DMA to PIO. I thought I’d post how to fix this problem if any […]
Continue readingHari Merdeka ke-50
Kami yang merantau jauh mengingatimu di hari kemerdekaan yang ke lima puluh. Lima puluh tahun kami rakyat Malaysia tidak perlu tunduk kepada penjajah. Lima puluh tahun, Merdeka! Walau jauh di mata, namun tidak di hati. Selamat Hari Merdeka, Malaysia! [[image:malaysia_flag.gif:Flag image obtained from google image:center:0]] *chewah – boleh tahan tak? berkurun tak pakai Bahasa Malaysia standard 😉 Dan, sebagai penutup, lagu Tanah Pusaka. Satu-satunya lagu patriotik kesukaan saya: Sungguh gemilang negerikuYang kupuja oh tanah MalaysiaDi merata duniaHarum semerbak namamu oh Malaysia Aman makmur kaya-rayaSelama-lama hidup maju jayaOh tanah pusakaNegaraku yang berdaulat dan merdeka Tanah pusaka bertuahBerbagai bangsa didalamnyaHidup aman dan berjagaBertekun kerja dan berjasa Musuh melanggarku gempurSungguh rela kugugur keranaKau tanah pusakaBiar putih tulang jangan putih mata [Translation: We who are journeying far remember you on this your Fiftieth Independence day. Fifty years that we Malaysians did not bow to any conquerors. Fifty years, free! Although we are far away, […]
Continue readingCan Anyone Guess This Tune?
[[popup:aota.jpg:(thumbnail):I hope I remember the music theory:left:1]]So my keyboard, an old Yamaha PSR-300, has been out of commission for a while since the power adapter died a glorious death. Then, there was a movie score tune that has been playing incessantly in my mind, so I decided to write it down somewhere. But since the keyboard is non-functional, there was no way I could play the tune on it. So yesterday I thought why not search the net for a virtual keyboard. Bingo. Then playing the tune, I thought… why not write it down. So I wrote it down. Click on the thumbnail to see if: I still remember my music theory and notes and symbols and whatnots. You can identify the tune. P.S. I don’t think I have a category for this type of crap on the blog. Oh well. P.P.S. Playing a virtual keyboard using a graphics tablet […]
Continue readingAnother Opera!
Quick update! So after the disastrous Nixon in China opera, we went to the final opera of the Cincinnati Opera 2007 season, Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. [[image:2webbill_performance.jpg:Aida Graphic, borrowed from the Cincinnati Opera website:center:0]] It was really, really good! The singers were amazing, the sets were huge and fantastic, and Vin and I were very happy with the entire experience. I must get us some opera glasses before next year’s season! See you next year, Cincinnati Opera! 🙂 * I have to say I LOVE all of the graphics they used for the operas, especially the Aida one. Gorgeous, no?
Continue readingFinally Playing with PHP
Referring to some help sites and pulling back the curtain to look at source codes, I finally got the nerve to save some text files which I wrote on a text editor as php files, which I usually always do in html! Not really ground breaking stuff; all I did was to include the navigation and the footer parts into the main files from separate php files. Later I’ll see about learning to link the php files to a (gasp) MySQL database! I should have started to learn this stuff earlier. It would have gone a long way in teaching me stuff that would help me in my project paper for college. But in the meantime, both the Hishgraphics Gallery and the workplace website are now fully php-ized! Yeah, they look the same from 2 days ago, but the Legos I used to build up those two sites are all […]
Continue readingIrfan Wants To Be A Doctor…
[[image:who01.jpg:Who’s being displayed onscreen here?:center:0]]… but it’s not that kind of doctor. Now, when he’s got shampoo in his hair, he fancies himself as the Gallifreyan Time Lord, known as the Doctor from BBC’s Doctor Who series. Specifically he wants to be the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant. He keeps going on and on about travelling about in a TARDIS, having his own K9 and enjoys the fact that every week the Doctor (along with anyone in his vicinity) has to run from something chasing them – be it disease-ravaged human constructs, werewolves, Judoon policemen, or Cybermen, or Daleks. If the Doctor has to flee for his life, Irfan digs it a lot. Not too bad, really, cause I haven’t seen Doctor Who since the Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor and I still thought BBC’s production of the series is constrained by a lack of budget. When I first saw […]
Continue readingOw! My Butt!
Last night my body temperature hit the roof. This morning, I thought it’d be prudent to visit a doctor because it’s been too short a time since the last time I went feverish. Which was when we were in Pasir Mas about two weeks ago. So, the doctor took one look down my throat and called Ain to check out the white spots on my tonsils. “Septic tonsilitis” is what I got and my temperature was 38 degrees Centigrade, though I was pretty sure I felt much better at the time compared to say three hours earlier. The doctor rattled out the treatment he was about to dish out, but what caused me to go “Wha-?” was the word “jab”. Great, I was about to get a cold, hard metal needle inserted under my skin. It’s something I haven’t done for years, in fact probably since I was a teenager. […]
Continue readingWay Past Its Prime
[[image:compy001.jpg:Old Reliable:left:0]] Fracking great. I get back from vacation, boot up the computer and connect to the internet…. and after 10 minutes the computer crashes. I can’t reboot the computer. Ubuntu hands during the startup sequence. I try booting up an Ubuntu Live CD and it crashes. I try both Kubuntu and Knoppix and they crash. The nice people at Ubuntuforums.org advise me to try formatting the hard disk drive using a Windows installer CD. I get my hands on one, and it crashes short of the formatting menu, then I was unable to boot up from the CD. Methinks it’s not a hard disk problem. It might be a RAM problem or even the motherboard’s had it. It’s been a good desktop computer since 2002 and it hasn’t given me any big headaches since. It had operated with Win ME, Win XP and Ubuntu (both Gnome and KDE). It’s […]
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Away For The Weekend Again
We’ll be heading out to Ain’s parents this weekend to attend a wedding. Tok & Opah Irfan will also we joining us tomorrow there, then they’ll be heading back with us to Kuala Lumpur via the Gua Musang road, which they’ve never been before. Hope to show them some sights there on our way back. We’ll be back Monday, according to schedule. So here’s the last post from me in the month of March, a great blog entry I found on FraudWasteAbuse, “Why Men Are Never Published On Dear Abby”: Dear Abby, I’ve never written to you before, but I really need your advice on what could be a crucial decision. I’ve suspected for some time now that my wife has been cheating on me. The usual signs… Phone rings but if I answer, the caller hangs up. My wife has been going out with the girls a lot recently […]
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Another Suitor For Lily
Young Tiger Lily Belle, who just meowed her way into Sila & Vin’s household, already has suitors apparently. You can get the details from Sila later, about the poet and the two-timer. I would like to suggest another candidate for Lily. A powerful sandcat. From Arrakis. The Shai-Hulud: From here.
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From the Tenth Floor At Night
Atok Irfan took some fantastic night photos from the balcony of the tenth floor here, something I couldn’t have done without a tripod. You can see the Menara Maxisegar and the Menara MPAJ in the first picture. Click on the thumbnails for larger images. Thanks to Irfan’s grandfather for the beautiful photos.
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