You gotta be kiddin’ me!

Just when I thought I found the perfect domain name, I get to know that some prussian ah beng already got to it first, damn it! and the worst part is even the capital letter pattern is the same! double dammit!

http://andee.net

*slaps forehead*

Exactly One Year Ago (an open message to PMR candidates)

I was at Mrs. See’s place studying for the upcoming PMR exam with an injured leg due to the fall I took. With two holes in my knee, I was struggling to get literary devices (KOMSAS) into my head whilst having someone explain to me how Trigonometry worked. Exactly one year ago, I was less worried about the PMR, I was more worried about where I’d sit during the exams. No, I wasn’t going to copy, I just didn’t want to climb the stairs to get to the class I was assigned to. Exactly one year ago, I was praying to get 8A’s knowing very well that it’s a distinctively demanding task. Exactly one year ago, I was exchanging wishes of luck with other students including ones from other schools. Exactly one year ago, I was wondering what it’d be like when our SPMs were over. Exactly one year ago, I was getting ready to sit through an epic.

Juniors, learn from our mistakes. PMR candidates all around, good luck and do good. Hawa and Syaheera, I know if by any given chance also, only either one of you would end up here anyway, so ganbatte. We see bright futures for the both of you, and if you don’t get to go to where you wanted to, we’ll be looking out for you in 4 Science Wawasan =)

Moments

It’s when coincidental things like these happen and make me realize that going to Oregon is no more. At least if I’m going to have to be staying with my uncle lah. With the help of Uncle Google’s nephew, Google Earth, I present to you SW Rigert Road, 97007, Aloha, Oregon and Beaverton High School.

That’s the house I was staying in back then, also known as my uncle’s
house on Rigert Road. It’s obviously bigger than how the picture shows
it and that drive way is actually slunting down 20 degrees so it made
the perfect place to sled a short distance during winter!

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Now this is an interesting satpic. It’s an overview of what seems to be
184th Avenue? Where marked, during the winter is a huge unoffical sled
track for us with BBT (big boys toys) sleds to ride on, it was very
much enticing and exhilitrating. at the end of the road is a house
which is next to a small valley which me and my cousin Alex almost flew
into during one of our sled runs when I couldn’t stop the sled because
it was going too fast

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And finally, this is Beaverton High School. On the east side of the
picture you will see the track and football field and on the west you
will see the baseball field which is actually just across the Beaverton
shop district. I was told that an outdoor shooting happened right here!
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Well, that’s the best of the 503 for ya, from my perspective that is. It’s moments like these really
makes me miss Oregon Hopefully one day I’ll be able to visit this
place again as an independent individual. Cheers!

Daniel!

Congrats Daniel, the new Malaysian Idol! Nita and your fans, please go home, thank you.

Fog Me Dead.

What the fog lah, you know the only reason why I hate MySpace is because the user has such a level of flexibility to edit his own page to a maximum critical level of a GIF overkill. I just couldn’t stand 600 videos playing or 590 GIFs everywhere on the page so that’s why I came here to good old decent Friendster. But then, now Friendster wants to be crappy like MySpace, allowing audio and video to be played on page. I can just imagine, you’ll be surfing through one asswhore’s page and bam! your whole computer hangs by a moment only because it’s trying to load all the AV on that one single page. I was talking to Jimmy about this earlier and he’s already got his plans to put "animated things" and videos of punk rock bands in his profile. No, but seriously folks, there is only so much Paracetamol and Panadol AF tablets to go around in the world, so do the rest of us a favor and avoid decorating your page and stick to nice and simple designs.

For the love of god, IKEA does not sell furniture for cheap lah! They say "Pay less, Live more" but it actually means "Pay more, Live less" okay?!

RM28 Roti Canai

Just to prove to you how crazy Japanese people can be, I was reading up on the World Expo 2005 happening in Aichi (where Tokoname is at!) over at BERNAMA  when I spotted an article about the restaurant in the Malaysian Pavillion, "Malaysia Boleh" selling a piece of roti canai at a dumbfounding RM28, or should I say 800 Japan Yen per piece and still had a half an hour line of people queueing up eagerly waiting to get some.  Since they sold roti canai like it’s the only thing on the face of the earth left for humans to consume, revenue figures go up to RM50,000 a day (equivelant to 1,800 pieces). "Malaysia Boleh" is run by Fine Co Ltd Japan, a Japanese-Malaysian
joint venture, which also has two other restaurants at the Aichi Expo
– European Table and Omaimaniya Nippon – serving Western and Japanese
cuisine respectively.

Naan and chicken rice is also sold for RM35 and RM42 respectively at the expo. Just when I thought I was a sucker for getting that waffle-ice cream contraption for RM6 at the Bon Odori festival, a little bird comes flying to me and soothingly tells me… that I’m not stupid unappreciative of good food. I think.

I wish.

"You’ve just done it again. What I thought was the inevitable had undoubtedly happened again. You expressed your insensitive and selfish feelings yet again and push me around like I’m your little plastecine toys. It won’t go down that way. I wish I could tell you off. I wish I could scream into your face "stop expecting me to act like I’m your slave". I wish I could say how poor and sour your true colors are. I wish I could prove you wrong like how you are. I wish you would stop thinking that you’re right all the time. I wish that you would stop bugging me about miniscule issues. I wish you could just stop yourself. but of course, I can’t, and it won’t happen. You are you, nobody can change that, and I to admit I still like any way you are, as long as it’s you and not a silicone mask that you fitted to put on a dramatic show to point all the faults to me. If I had the chance, I would sound everything I’ve kept inside right now and you may hate me for it, but frankly you’re getting out of control and you need to be stopped even if I have to be the one that goes down for it. You simply do not know what you want, and you’re going on a path I can’t follow. You’re getting out of hand."

Interesting write up, pretty much sums it up in one composition, don’t you think so? It is a small world where everyone shares a lot of common interests and problems…

iPod nano

Just when you thought your friends at Apple are done making you spend, they’re back again with yet another seductive device named the iPod nano. Why? I think it’s really self-explainatory, but if you still don’t get it, it’s as thick and thin as a conventional 2B pencil. Who needs an iPod Mini? This is my next iPod for sure, it comes in 2GB and 4GB flavors for the regulars and junkies of music. I’m assuming it’s using a CF II drive so it’s unfortunately still not solid state which means if you drop it, it may just be your next featherweighted paperweight. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you it comes in BLACK too. It’s an iPod, and it’s black in color. Oh my god, please stop all this.
________________________________________________________________________

Take everything you love about iPod and shrink it. Now shrink it again.
With 2GB (500 songs) and 4GB (1,000 songs) models starting at $199, the
pencil-thin iPod nano packs the entire iPod experience into an
impossibly small design. So small, it will take your music places you
never dreamed of.

Believe Your Ears

Call
it astonishing. Unbelievable. Impossible, even. Then pick it up and
hold it in your hand. Take in the brilliant color display. Run your
thumb around the Click Wheel. Put on the earbuds and turn up your music. That’s when everything becomes clear: It’s an iPod.

It holds up to three days’ worth of music. It plays for up to 14 hours between battery charges.⁽¹⁾
It displays the color album art for the song you’re listening to right
now. It carries your photos, podcasts and audiobooks. It syncs seamlessly with iTunes. It connects to a host of iPod accessories. Simply put, iPod nano is 100-percent iPod. And then some.

Touch and Go

iPod
nano’s Click Wheel puts music under your thumb. Click to fast-forward,
rewind, play, pause or access menus. Use the touch-sensitive surface to
control volume or browse music. You can do it all without looking. But
with an iPod this beautiful, who’d want to?

Song Stylings

Add accessories
to your iPod nano via the Dock connector and headphone jack and your
music will always keep up with you — at home, on the go, even in your car. Of course, in either signature white or sleek black, iPod nano itself makes the ultimate accessory.

Up to 4GB⁽²⁾ of skip-free storage on a featherweight
iPod means you can wear almost three days’ worth of music around your
neck. Or jog with 1,000 songs on your arm. Now that you can take your
music everywhere, there’s no limit to where it will take you.

iPod nano Features

• Holds up to 1,000 songs and full-color album art
• Only 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inches and 1.5 ounces
• Bright 1.5-inch color LCD display
• Up to 14 hours of battery life⁽¹⁾
• Apple Click Wheel
• Charges and syncs via USB
• Accessory-compatible Dock connector
• Completely skip-free playback
• Works with Mac OS X or Windows 2000/XP
• Plays music, podcasts and audiobooks
• Holds up to 25,000 photos⁽²⁾
• Syncs contacts, calendars and to-do lists

Product Page
TV ad
iTunes 5   

Euro Fun Park

*dammit, this is what I really hate about using TypePad, it really loves to resize any pictures to fit the table and this makes the picture suck very badly, so please click on the picture itself to go to the original uncropped (uncrapped too) picture*

Sunday night came again and we missed the drift-fest at the
stadium’s parking lot yet again. Suddenly there’s this bright light
coming from behind the stadium (the other side) and I just had to find
out what it was, to my surprise it’s a fun fair! I never knew this huge
contraption came into town, but normally when I see one of these I
won’t really take note because they’re damn dangerous to me. But then
since adrian said that the ferris wheel looks unusually big he forced me to go check it out at least.

 
Euro Fun Park. I recall there being an Asia Fun Park at Kesuma Lakes
near my uncle’s place and one near the Johor river, so I think maybe
it’s like a franchise or something, just wondering where’s the US Fun Park, enticing shoot-the-bush and win a prize games sounds like fun. Not
surprising to see the RM2 per person tag on the front for entrance
because we knew somehow inside you needed to buy some form of tickets
or tokens to go on rides but then suddenly the counter girl was asking
us

girl : why are you giving me RM4?
me : um, one person RM2 right?
girl : yes, but then for the both of you it’s RM2 only
adrian : eh, she thinks we leng chai is it? *fuyoo*
me : shut up la, ehm, why eh?
girl : you are still going to school right?
us : *shrugs* yes why?
girl : then means only RM1 per person and you get a bottle of mineral water for free lah…

suddenly a big wah! struck us. like this we can call the whole
school to come lah then right? I mean the kids’ ticket also priced at
RM1.50, we must be so much smaller than kids and it’s not
because of adrian’s beach pants! so nevermind lah, pretty overjoyed, in
a way. Okay, not really, so we got a nice and big smile from the macha at the entrance gate (I think he’s the bouncer, hope he’s not gay or anything) and jogged in.

The huge ferris wheel, aptly named the Euro Wheel is the first thing
that amazed me, it looks alot like the one up at First World Plaza
except it’s bigger, and it doesn’t look ciplak, since this is a ciplak
fun fair but it’s got to be the first "original" fun fair I’ve ever
bumped into using expensive equipment so this fun fair gets my offical Theme Park Name Upgrade Coupon and
seal of approval for safety. Then we turned left and everything
dropped, including the mood. two bucks per token, and to go on the Euro
Wheel you had to have 2 tokens..

me : ha there see have to buy token, I told you already loh
adrian : wah, 2 bucks per token ah? what the kuku chiaw man..
me : ya la, then what you expect?
adrian : I thought pay at the counter just now means can naik (ride) already..
me : well you thought wrong, its RM2 per token
adrian : I know la, like this better I look out if people drop their phone

he’s an ass, so don’t mind him. So but it was really too expensive
for us to afford (I didn’t bring any money deliberately) so we just
went around and look see look see only. It’s pretty typical considering
the machines they use are rather huge, like this one called the Vortex
which is basically just one of those rides based on the counterweight
infrastructure where when one bucket goes up the other will go down and
you keep spinning and spinning. I know, it sounds boring when I explain
it here but if only I had a good picture of it you’d know what I was
talking about.

RM8 to ride it once though, can you believe it?
This is like a miniature version of the one in Times Square and they’re
charging people 8 bucks per ride, it’s no wonder they can afford to buy
the equipment that they have. The Vortex, and a couple of other not so
interesting rides were on the west side of the park, and there was some
6 feet long rumah hantu (haunted house) and a roller coaster on the
east side. The haunted house must be a big dissapointment, as I saw
some 8 year old looking girl coming out of it with a shrug when her dad
asks her if it’s scary or not. No surprise

 
Hey, a spinner! Very interesting, it’s the exact same model as the
one in Genting, as there’s a Zamperla stamp at the back of the fuse box
for this thing, but it’s gonna cost a hefty price to ride compared to
Genting’s spinner, RM6 to be exact, and that’s per ride. It’s very
noisy really, every ride had some weird Ah Piao song playing to it,
including this one and all of them playing together at the same time
just makes it like a huge nightclub for jimbangs, not good. Oh well,
there were some other rides, and games but I didn’t bother to layan
them, adrian however was very much interested in the shoot the ring off
the bottle and win a cellphone game though. Hah! Sure, luckily after he
witnessed that every shot is not the same and that accuracy doesn’t
count, he moves over to the next stall.

Not sure what, some catch the duck with a prize winning arse game, I
guess you’re supposed to get the one that has the word TV or HANDPHONE
on it’s bottom, I knew he would’a tried it if he had the money to, he
had this weird horny face when he saw *something* inside the hut where
the game was placed at. Well, I’m not sure if it was the game or the
attendant (yeah, a chick). The dude is like a guy on PMS really, he’s
excited about everything, the rides, the games, the chicks, the huge
teddy bears.

The conclusion is, this park isn’t really worth a visit if you’re on
a budget, but then again, who goes to a theme park with a budget in
mind right? it’s all about fun, but at RM2 per token and some rides
needing RM8 per go, it’s not cheap. Personally, I think the rides that
cost more than RM4 to go on kind of shows that the machinery is good
lol, anyways it’s worth a try. The spinner and ferris wheel I mean, the
rest, well it’s what you’d find at an every day fun fair. Well, I know
you’ve noticed it so there’s no point in hiding, sorry for the very
much horrible pictures, they’re all courtesy of my N7610 which I will
be gladly pushing out the door anytime soon to make way fo the W800i,
verrry soon.

Mixing Singaporeans and KL

Pity. Wendy Cheng, better known as Singaporean celebrity girl blogger XiaXue has been undergoing major heat for saying what she did on her blog about her trip to KL a few weeks ago. I can’t exactly point you even to a snippet of her post as she just took it off her site, but I’ll give you a brief description of what it says. She describes how dishonest our people are, especially the cabbies because she claims they love to cheat tourists. She called some guy a malay fucker, laughed at a couple’a Arabs in KLCC, claims that Petaling Street is "the" place to be to get conned and molested. Says our fashion sense is out, that being the reason she didn’t buy any clothes from around here. Complains about the price of immitation goods (hm) and much more. Now, I’m not trying to highlight the worst of what she said, but honestly this is all I remember from the post. She is now on a blogging hiatus. Edit : Check out the bottom for the linki to her entry, it’s apparently not yet removed.

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Now, in the line of fire, she’s getting support from fans (or just some Kiasu Singaporeans) in the form of comments on her article and just as much in chatterboxes of opposing parties like ShaolinTiger and Vincent. I’m not sure about Vincent’s thoughts, but you should check out ST’s 3 episode series of counterattacks to readers and supporters of XiaXue who had posted baseless insults and comments on his site, labelling him and/or Malaysia with anything associated to that select few of rude words, it’s very much enticing and humorous! Take this bit, In the first episode, he politely wrote a little fact sheet on basic hints for tourists.

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Fact (or Fiction) 1 – Taxi Drivers

Taxi drivers all over the world are dishonest, if they see you are a
tourist (pretty obvious in my case), they will try and con you somehow,
if it’s Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, they will just skip using the
meter and charge you a fixed (inflated) price, which if you don’t know
better, you won’t use.

Especially in Malaysia, they’ll even do it to locals, the Taxi’s are
not regulated very well here so you can expect it. Just make sure they
use the meter or don’t take the cab, that’s common sense, or if it’s
rush hour, you won’t get a metered cab so agree on a decent price
before getting in the cab.

In UK or Singapore or other countries that are strict on meter use,
they will just drive you round in a couple of huge meters, add on some
extra magic surcharges to inflate the price.

Fact (or Fiction) Number 2 – Things in KL are not cheap

That’s true, if you go to Starhill or KLCC obviously, duh..

And it depends how you define cheap, you have to know what you are
looking for and what the price should be. Proper shopping is found in 1
Utama, Ikano, Mid Valley and my Favourite for all things Sungei Wang
(and Low Yat of course for I.T stuff and telecomms) definately NOT at
KLCC or BerGAYa Times Square. There are bargains to be had for sure and
things are pretty cheap here, I find them much cheaper than Singapore
for example, of course not as cheap as somewhere like Vietnam or
Thailand..

Fact (or Fiction) Number 3 – Petaling Street Sucks

No shit? I know people from Malaysia, who’ve lived all their lives in KL who have never been to Petaling Street.

It’s a huge tourist trap, I do buy some things from there, but you have
to be savvy, you have to know exactly what you want, and how much it
should be. The quality of the watches is extremely high if you know
which stalls to go to and what you are looking for. You have to be a
pro in haggling and have a good eye for quality. Sunglasses are good
and cheap, just check the lenses have the correct focus point,
sometimes they don’t and they’ll subsequently give you a headache.

Bags/wallets etc are ok there, some are great quality, but most are following fashion, and they are ugly as sin.

You go to Petaling Street for the experience of Petaling Street, and to
eat, some great food can be found in that area, it’s not particularly
cheap, but it’s very good. If you shop there, shop with someone who
knows the prices and when you have specific things in mind (I go there
for my Oakley’s before diving season starts, I don’t want to pay RM800
for a real pair, then get it crushed by an air tank).

Fact (or Fiction) Number 4 – KL foodcourts are more expensive than Singapore

This is frankly not at all true, if you eat in some low quality shitty
foodcourt in the middle of KL, it will be expensive and bad, that’s
just common sense.

If you go to a decent place like the foodcourt in SS2 you’ll get good
food at a normal price (cheaper AND better than the foodcourts I’ve
tried in Singapore).

The only food I find good in Singapore is the expensive stuff, like
those hotel buffets and the ‘good’ resturants, there is some good food
in Geylang too, but other than that, the quality of day to day normal
food is so-so.

Fact (or Fiction) Number 5 – KL sales suck

This is pretty much true, KL has sales every few months, so they aren’t
massive, prices are just lower generally. Like I can get things cheaper
in UK during sales than anywhere in Asia, because the sales are real
sales. Singapore Sales are better than Malaysian fake pseudo-sales.

Not everything is 10% though, you often get 40-60% off during sales, but only on selected lines.

Fact (or Fiction) Number 6 KL Fashion Sucks

Yeah this is true, if you go to Times Square or Sungei Wang to buy
clothes, duh…Even Sg Wang has some decent shops, you just have to
look, Times Square is just a disaster though.

KLCC has all the normal boring stuff, I suggest heading to 1 Utama, The Curve, Ikano or Mid Valley for better buys.

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Well, Kenny is also in trouble due to this actually, from his latest post you can see that he’s pretty neutral, but XiaXue somewhat "gave up" in him for not siding her, or so I think this is the case. Kenny is a Malaysian lah, so you can’t expect him to just put his hands up and follow your orders. I pity Kenny really, since he’s like in the center of the blogosphere, he maintains a good relationship with everyone, which is a good thing most of the time, but in this case, everything means otherwise.

No shit really, this is why I chose to write that composition about how technology disrupts our peace. XiaXiue, perhaps, may have wanted to express her thoughts differently (though she definetly picked the wrong words to use) but because the Internet can do just as much as help you publish what you want to say in text, there’s no expression to back it up to reflect on how the writer meant to say it, and this leads to major misintrepetation, which is what happened. The fact of the matter is that thoughts expressed on the net are so idle, you’d barely know what the original meaning is! To me, this is all a big misunderstanding – though I’m enjoying my daily feed of laughs from the comments and counterattacks – and everyone got everyone else’s feelings and emotions wrong. However, I can’t say much about XX’s selection of words like pig, malay fucker, ti ko, etc as that is hands down rude and wrong. She claims to have meant it in a hanging-out-at-the-mamak-stall (open minded) way but way too many people got the wrong idea and the bottom line is she should have by now given a public apology to the citizens of KL. No matter, I’m still once again enjoying my daily feed of humor!

PS : I like ShaolinTiger’s concept of blogging being something casual and that a typo or grammar error check is normal in the nature of blogging, so from today onwards, I will not be double checking my entries before posting them and I’ll only be fixing an error once I’ve spotted them by some other way, blogging should be fun and easy, not hectic!

EDIT : XiaXue never removed her post, it’s still her at http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/2005/08/kl-pretty-much-sucked.html  so check it out when you have the time, and my bad on the error at the top, I think she removed the comments and not the entry itself