Monday Blues…

Monday, Monday, Monday… what can I say? Not the best day of the week. Perhaps the worst even. Start of the week but wish it was Friday day. Monday, Monday. Call it blues. Call it melancholic. Anything but jazzy.

I practically had to drag myself out of bed…at 9am this morning.

How do you kick start a Monday? You can’t. Have tried it for 30 years. Still doesn’t work. A fag doesn’t. A shag doesn’t. A double shot of expresso doesn’t. Hell, not even alcohol.

Monday is piss ass. Sorry to sound all negative and all, but despite what the Nescafe radio commercial says about Monday, it plain sucks. Period.

If anyone happens to have a happy Monday, drop me a line! :/

Money spent on car this week:

I’m going list every little penny I spend on my car – either weekly or monthly, whichever is applicable. Modders will be modders, and whether that little bit is spent on modding or repairing, maintenance or petrol, I’d love to take note of it, just for kicks.

Money spent on car:
1. EBC BlackStuff brake pads – RM100
2. Labour costs for installation – RM30
3. Petrol – RM60

By the way, here’s a link to my car and the mods I’ve done to it so far (and the dough that’s gone down the drain!) at Zerotohundred.com

Life’s Like That…

Thought I would have a nice, quiet and happy day today. But it’s kinda decided to have a slight twist in the end, a little like a M. Knight Syamalan movie. You see, I had a great sleep, and much one needed too, after a good night out at my cousin’s hubby’s birthday (can I say cousin-in-law? :/ ) last night. My cousin-in-law’s 30th birthday was celebrated at a Cafe Citron with one 1/2 of the Teh Tarik Crew – Mizz Nina + DJ Fuzz. By the way, MizzNina is my cousin-in-law’s sister, not that I know her personally, but well, that’s the novelty. Had a good time with the family and friends, with lots of whisky shots (Chivas rocks!) in between. Oh, got an autographed copy of their latest album – What’s Next?

Back to the story. Paid a visit to NA Garage, a distinguished auto tuner based in Taman Mayang to get my brake pads changed. Thanks to Andy (not my IT colleague), who sold me an almost brand new set of EBC BlackStuff, I was impatient to replace my older, spongy, crap piece of local made pads. The change was done in about 20 minutes and I gave it a test run before paying up. There were a couple of track cars in the garage, one which turned turtle during the qualifying rounds of MME (Merdeka Millenium Endurance Race). Amazingly after the turtle incident, they brought the 1.6 MIVEC Satria back together in 12 hours, in time for the race, which it eventually finished. Quite a feat I have to say.

Anyways, on my way to the office (office on Saturday? GO figure.), was pulled over by cops on the Sri Hartamas freeway for speeding apparently. I was doing 108kmh in a 80kmh zone.

“Selamat petang encik”, said the traffic officer politely. I proceeded to pass him my license as he took down my details. He told me that I was speeding and thus I replied that if I had committed an offence, he should give me a summon.

He replied, “Patut disaman, tapi kita boleh tolak ansur.”

“Saman pun RM100 lebih je bang. Macam mana nak tolak ansur?”, I asked in which he replied, “RM50 boleh?”. Shoot me, but I said yes, and passed him the cash. I do not usually bribe, as I do not believe in encouraging this widespread farce with our cops, but somehow I did not have that civic-mindedness in me at that moment.

Perhaps as a punishment, just 10 minutes from the ‘speeding’ feat, a Camry driven by a dumbfuck, came out of a petrol station along Jalan Ipoh, and proceeded to french-kiss the right side of my bumper. I tried my best to avoid him, but unfortunately his superslow reflexes failed to stop the Camry in time. Obviously driving someone else’s car, the idiot was in a car workshop uniform, so I presumed he was driving the car to return to the owner. Anyways, there was no damage to the Camry. But it did transfer some paint to my bumper, which includes a nice deep scratch. My rear rims were tainted with blue hues and scratches too. Not impressed. It was only early in the year that I repainted the whole car. Grrr….

So there you go, proof that life is fair. The balance of the ying and yang. The chi. Whatever fuck else. The universe is just. You get what you give. Perhaps bribing the cop gave me bad energy which in turn caused the accident, to balance out the negativity. Whatever fuck that means.

Sigh.

Things Mad Friends Do When They Are…Well, Mad…

My friends Tony and Alvin (pretty famous duo on telemovies and dramas at the moment!) sent me a link to a music video they did recently. It’s well-shot and directed. Will put a lot of local/foreign music videos to shame, I tell you! And it’s quite funny too! Oh, watch out for Melissa in ‘Milkshake’ – she’s hot!

Have a peek…it’s a whopping 50MB download, but well worth the wait. Visit the site here. Enjoy!

Things Designers Do When They Are Stressed…

Continuing from where I left off yesterday. The almost resolved and recovery from the System Meltdown. Here’s a pic to prove that I can still monkey around in times of distress.

By the way, that’s the kevlar plastic casing from a spanking new eMac on my head. My partner-in-crime Andy and I took apart two eMac 1.25Ghz machines to upgrade the puny 40GB to a more acceptable 160GB. This is the first time any of us have ever seen the internals of an eMac, let alone disassemble one. A great source of Mac apps, files and resources – the iRC channel, #macfilez, provided 350MB of Apple service manuals of its product range – from Apple iMacs to PowerBooks to XServes. Referring to the manual diligently, we took 30 minutes to disassemble and reassemble the first. How we wished it was a proper desktop/tower. It takes the removal of at least 30 screws to access the hard drive module. A true engineering feat by the Apple Design team to cram that much of hardware into the white eMac casing, but it is really sheer hard work for a simple hard drive upgrade. User-installable items like the RAM and Airport card is simple though.

The upgrade of the 2nd unit went smoothly, initially, taking just 10 minutes to disassemble. But a really clumsy Verne dropped a screw into the depths of the motherboard, much to the disappointment of the unofficial IT-team (that’s me and Andy, by the way!). Swearing as we went along, we managed to wiggle the screw out from the motherboard, then went on our way to reassembling the remainding parts.

Certainly a challenging task, and I don’t recommend this to be done at home, really, not if you want to void your Apple warranty. Want a hard drive upgrade? Bring it to an Authorised Apple Reseller or Service Centre.

Shame we didn’t take pictures of the process, would have been great to feature on this blog. But anyways, to hell and beyond!

System Meltdown

Not quite the Holocaust or Armageddon, but however I look at it, the past three days have been rather hellish to say the least. Firstly, our laggy 1.25Ghz dual processor G4 server went down like a bitch. Locking up at startup, faster than you could say “Apple Rocks”, the server just refused to boot. Entering single user boot while attempting to repair using “fsck” brought no improvements.

Our server is configured with a software RAID, 2x 160GB mirrored drives for data, and another 2x 160 mirrored for the system. We use the server as a short to medium term backup facility for our 20-odd users. Mission critical? Yes, I would say so. Containing data almost to full capacity, we were certainly worried, especially for unofficial Mr. Techie (that’s me!) and official Mr. Techie (partner-in-crime, accountant cum IT cum AV man Andy).

Went through the usual troubleshooting – safe mode boot, single user boot, zapping PRAM. No luck. Eventually tried it with a Panther-compatible Norton Utilities 8.02 bootable CD. Breathed a sigh of relief as the server finally booted up and the familiar Norton Launcher presented itself on screen. Attempted to scan and repair the system. This took hours as I configured it to scan every damn bits of the drive including media, catalogue structure and files. Initially suspecting a damaged catalogue B-tree which can cause havoc in the system, Norton froze half-way. Nice. Norton has saved me many times, although not the best disk utility on the Mac platform (don’t agree? shoot me…), it has proven its worth many a times of trouble.
Re-booted, and re-attempted scan/repair. No luck yet again.

Finally got hold of our tech support guy from our Mac supplier to come over. Hardware failure? You bet. After some tests, we found that the 2x 160GB RAID containing the boot-up Mac OS X 10.2.8 Server software had failed. Both the hard drives. That explained the lagginess of the system of late, despite optimisation and what naught. The failure was unexpected, the server being quite underutilised and untested mostly. Fortunately, we had a new 80GB spare, just purchased and we plugged it in, installed Panther 10.3 Server,, and got up and running in about 30 minutes.

Thanking our lucky stars that all data was intact, we placed an order for another 4x 250GB hard drives to be delivered in a couple of days. I have to say that Panther Server is quick, and most notably when running on a DP (dual processor).

Backing up has been a tough process, with lack of spare storage space and all. Had to format my personal 120GB and 80GB externals just to backup the server data. After 2 days, the data have been successfully backed-up and ready for a clean reformat of the drives when the newer ones arrive.

Adding to the system meltdown, our trusty B&W G3 350Mhz used as a scanning machine also refused to boot-up. I suspect a hard drive failure as well. And as if my hands weren’t full enough, I formatted my G5 1.8Ghz, reinstalled Panther and restored all my data. It’s been a long time coming, the G5 not performing to its full potential for some reason. It’s been laggy and buggy to say the least. And for some reason, have always had problems with FLASH-memory based cards/drives. 100% data corruption of anything from GIF files to JPEGs to PDFs. After all the time and effort, the problem has been solved, and I’m happy that the G5 is back to being zippy and responsive again…

I’ve got another story to tell…but I’ll leave it to another time. This time round it isn’t computer/system/hardware failure. It’s human error. Pure and simple. Grrrr…

Word of advise before I end this – BACKUP YOUR DATA!

I Will Survive, revisited…

There never fails to be something amusing and funny to start the day with, especially when things are frantic and hectic. Enjoy this!

Sing to the tune of “I Will Survive”

At first I was afraid,
I was petrified,
When you said you had 10 inches
Lord I almost died,
But I’d spent oh so many yrs
just waiting for a man that long,
That I Grew strong,
And I knew that I could take you on. . .

But there you are,
Another lie,
I was ready for a big mac
and you’ve bought me a French fry,
I should have known that it was bullshit, Just a sad pathetic dream, Should have known there was no anaconda lurking in those jeans.

Go on now go,
Walk out the door,
Don’t you promise me 10 inches
then turn up with only 4,
Weren’t you a prat to think I wouldn’t catch you out,
Don’t you know we’ re only joking when we say size doesn’t count.

(Chorus)
I will survive,
I will survive,
Cos as long as I have batteries,
My sex life is gonna thrive,
I will always have good sex
with a handful of latex,
I will survive,
I will survive. . .hey . hey

It took all my self control
not to laugh out loud,
When I saw your little weiner
standing tall and proud,
But to hell with all your ego’s
and to hell with all your Needs,
Now I’m saving all my lovin
for a cordless multispeed,

Go on now go,
Just Make a dash,
Last time I saw a prick that small was watching Gladstone run nude hash, I should have asked for confirmation, Should have asked for referees, Then I wouldn’t have you waving that wee winky thing at me.

Go on now go,
Just hit the track,
Don’t you bring me home no tiddlers,
Cos I’ll always throw them back,
The only thing that I could do with a prick as small as yours,
Is to stick it with a tooth pick
Dip it in tomato sauce.

(Chorus)
I will survive,
I will survive,
Cos as long as I have batteries,
My sex life is gonna thrive,
I will always have good sex
with a handful of latex,
I will survive,
I will survive. . .hey . hey

Go on now go,
Get out of my sight,
I’m going back to my appliance,
Cos I know it’s length is right,
And if I ever see your tiny tockley at my door, You’ll be counting up your inches as you pick them off the floor. Go on now Go!

Un-Malaysian Malaysians?

I noticed something jaw-opening and mind-bending (for me at least) yesterday while having my usual 6.00pm teh tarik session with my colleagues yesterday. We had diverted to an Indian shop for our drinks and food due to heavy rains, our presence absent from our usual mamak stall. What surprised me was that a couple of them didn’t know what a thosai was, much less what a puri, vade and pakora was. Scratching my head in bewilderment, I had to explain what they were, and recommended a few items for them to have with their teh tariks.

I’m baffled because we are Malaysians. I think that is a strong enough declaration which really does not require any explanation of any form. But for the benefit of those curious about what the former statement means, I will try to explain. As I told Dr Ramesh Biswas, a reknowned architect and author based in Vienna, Austria, whom I had a pleasure to work with on a book on Malaysia – Malaysia – Riches From The Golden Land, “Malaysia IS Food. Forget the shopping, forget the site-seeing. Malaysia IS Food, plain and simple”.

From the wonders of Chinese cuisine, to tasty Malay, to exotic Indian plus many more saliva-inducing yummies, Malaysia is all about good food. There isn’t a corner in the city which isn’t offering food of some sort, any time of the day. It’s wonderful. Choices, choices, choices. If local fare isn’t your thang, try Italian, Spanish, Tex-Mex, Greek, Swiss, German (*pant* *pant*). Or fusion. Whatever turns you on. Spoilt for choice, that’s what we are.

So it’s really funny that some have not even discovered our local fare. Where have they been? Having Chinese food, everyday 365 days a year? Gee, that’s sad. Really. Which comes to mind Malaysians who go overseas and just glue together, never exploring, never mingling, never even trying to learn the local culture. Instead speak their own dialects, eat Chinese food and shop in Chinatown. This is not about Chinese bashing, just giving an example, so don’t flame me

Back to the matter at hand – food. I got some puzzled stares from the Indian shop owner and his wife when I wanted my koli varuvel and payasam, almost not believing that it was this chinky Chinese dude ordering Indian food. I was quite surprised since it is quite a norm for me, as I do enjoy Indian cuisine a lot. And I mean a lot. Give me banana leaf rice anyday. Or thalli, the vegetarian version.

Hey, why not we all meet up for a good round of banana leaf rice one of these days? I’ll bring two of my most Indian friends – one who is Chinese and one who is actually Indian. We’ll have a laugh and lots of good food, I promise.

Oh, by the way, want a review of Kashmeer Naan? Visit AW’s blog.

“Malaysia IS Food”

Speedsters Hear Ye – Proton Track Carnival

One car, two drivers, a combined racing distance of 300km, three big races and prize money amounting to RM56,000 – that is the drama, excitement and rewards the PROTON Track Carnival at the Johor Circuit in Pasir Gudang from October 1-3, 2004 promises both competitors and spectators.

The main event at the carnival will be the Enduro Battle, a 42-lap or two-hour semi endurance race for Proton cars divided into two categories; Class A for normally-aspirated cars 1601cc to 1800cc, and Class B for cars up to 1600cc.

Unlike the normal Proton car race, this event allows competitors to carry out modifications to the engine, chassis and bodywork of the car as well as to explore the use of aerodynamics. This is in line with efforts to uplift the standards of racing, promoting technical research and development in automotive performance, and in providing greater and more exciting spectator action.

Close racing action however, will be the order of the weekend. Each team will comprise of two drivers, each required to compete in an 18-lap Sprint Battle with the combined results deciding the car’s position on the grid for the Enduro Battle. To level the field and competition, one of the drivers must be the holder of a novice competition licence and has never won any event in the past. The biggest element of fair play will be the installation of a restrictor in the induction system, a deliberate move to keep the cost of going racing at a minimum and in providing a ceiling to the outright power output that the machine can achieve.

“Our primary objective is to attract newcomers to the sport and as you know, cost is always a major factor in going motor-racing. What we’re doing is lowering the cost required to go racing. The race format has also been designed to produce competitive and talented drivers. We want them to concentrate on the driving more than worrying about not being able to do too much to their cars,” said PROTON Motorsports’ Head of Marketing Khaidi Kamaruddin.

“The race format has also been designed to give competitors maximum time on the track. What this means is that they’re looking at a full weekend of racing, from the time they go out for practice and qualifying on Friday. It is also an event that emphasizes on team tactics and team work and to win, they will have to perform consistently throughout the weekend.””

The prize money offered to those in Class A are as follows; 1st (RM10,000), 2nd (RM8,000), 3rd (RM5,000), 4th (RM4,000), 5th (RM3,000) and 6th (RM2,000). Class B will offer the following prizes; 1st (RM8,000), 2nd (RM6,000), 3rd (RM4,000), 4th (RM4,000), 5th (RM2,000) and 6th (RM1,000).

The entry fee for the event is RM1,500 for Class A and RM1,000 for Class B, and to register, kindly contact PROTON Motorsports at 03-5191 1055 or e-mail to asria@proton.com or adiank@proton.com.

My take:
After the successful Street Shootout (SSO) series, Proton is seriously doing their bit in promoting local motorsports. I’m all for it. Now where do I get that extra dosh from? Anyone interested in sponsoring? The entry fee is attractive and reasonable, and prizes are good as well. It is my ambition to participate in the Malaysian Super Series and/or the Merdeka Race or a local Proton Production race series. Hope to do that before I am 32, if that is realistic. Now, where did I put the keys to my track car again?

Online, Offline, Offline…now really back online!

Itsamac, my webhost replied that there is nothing wrong with the server. I double-checked and silly me, the domain had expired. Thankfully it’s not like a super-duper (sorry for the uncool superlatives) famous domain name people would love to own, so it was still available for renewal on Network Solutions, the domain authority. Got it renewed for 3 years with discount. So no worrying for another 36 months!

Welcome back, Verne!