Archive | 2006

2006 The Year That Was – A Summary – Part I

Well the year is coming to an end yet again, it’s New Years Eve and it’s time to PARTY! I’ll be at Sepang International Circuit tonight participating in a new Malaysian Book of Records record, 50 years of drifting for 50 years of independence, there’s also a rave..so that’s why I’ll be there, and a free chance to trash my car on the track of course.

You can find more details here: Transit: Sound of Smoke

Anyway, 2006 has been an interesting and rewarding year..a lot of things have come and gone and all in all I feel it’s a been a much more positive year than the previous two.

JanuaryArchives

Unsurprisingly the whole year was plagued with incidents of lousy service and quality of connection from Streamyx, this started right in January..

Streamyx

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Continue Reading · 8 Comments · General Nonsense

Taking Back Control

I don’t often talk about my work, or my job, just where I am and what I do outside of work.

A while ago I quit my job, I couldn’t stand it any more, there were many reasons why, some I might go into here some I might not.

One of the main reasons was a project in Saudia Arabia, Riyadh to be exact..for the duration of 3 months. Now I’m not awfully fond of the location and the timespan..is way way way too long for me to take. Especially for what I’m getting paid..

I don’t get some super-fantastic salary, I am accorded no ‘expat’ benefits, I am treated (and paid) exactly like a local. Actually in someways underpaid…according to market rate.

Anyway the consistent mis-management, complete lack of client expectation handling and lies through-out the upper tier of management have become too much to bear.

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Continue Reading · 26 Comments · Ranting

RIP Granny – Sad News at Xmas

I just found on Boxing my day my dear old Granny passed away on Saturday.

Thankfully it was peaceful, it was her time to move on, I felt I might not see her again after my trip back to UK this year.

She was looking very tired, this picture is from 2005.

Granny 2005

I didn’t take any pictures of her this year as I didn’t want to remember her looking so frail!

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Continue Reading · 28 Comments · Serious Issues

Merry Xmas Y’all!

Sorry for the lack of updates, my Streamyx was down since last Saturday morning, I just found out it was back up late last night, so it was down for about 9 days.

Merry Xmas to me, Streamyx is back!

Merry Xmas to you, you get new updates now!

Merry Xmas

(Apologies for the old picture, no working camera right now)

I’ve so much to post but had no connection…so there was nothing I could do which was a bit infuriating!

Anywhere here’s an update and back to normal service soon now the connection is back.

Merry Xmas to all my faithful (and not so faithful readers) and I wish you all the best, I’ll update again before new year so don’t worry about that.

I wish you got all the presents you hoped for and you were good boys and girls so Santa treated you well, I got everything I wanted and more and had a great time catching up with friends last night at KY’s party.

So Merry Christmas everyone and see you again soon!

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Continue Reading · 19 Comments · Site News

Book Review – The Five (5) People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

The 5 People You Meet in Heaven

Part melodrama and part parable, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven weaves together three stories, all told about the same man: 83-year-old Eddie, the head maintenance person at Ruby Point Amusement Park. As the novel opens, readers are told that Eddie, unsuspecting, is only minutes away from death as he goes about his typical business at the park.

I don’t usually read books from the best sellers or top 10 list, I tend not to be a sheep, reading completely different stuff from an eclectic range of genres.

My bookshelves are filled with hardcore hacking tomes, fantasy, sci-fi, biographies, crime books, martial arts manuals, health and philosophy books and so on.

For once the last few months when I was traveling so frequently I decided to devour some of the tops picks, the best sellers..

The first I chose was this, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I thought it was some kind of sappy self-help book, but I wanted to know why fairly sane people kept raving about it.

Mitch Albom got famous with his previous book Tuesdays with Morrie, another massive hit. I might read that too given time.

It’s a cute story, it’s easy to read and it’s enjoyable. It’s well paced, not patronising and kind of sweet in a non-sickly way.

Really though it’s the same old tale, what goes around comes around, karma and all that but told in a slightly different way.

Definately worth a read, easy to pick up and finish in one shot.

It’s not ground-breaking, or fantastic, but it’s good. It’s beauty is in its simplicity, yeah there’s pages of cliches, but its straightforward it’s not pretending to be artsy or intellectual or bourgeois.

It is nice to read a book now and then that is just easy to read and enjoyable.

Worth a try, I give it a good solid 7/10 – A good one to put on the xmas list for people you care about.

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Continue Reading · 14 Comments · Books & Literature

Hotel Reservations with hotelreservations.com

Herein lies my review of Hotel Reservations (hotelreservations.com), for the purpose of the review I will refer to the site as HR.

The interface for HR is reasonable, quite plain and grey in colour, I would think for a holiday/hotel kind of site it should have a more colourful and exciting interface to get people in the mood for holidays.

Hotel Reservations

The central tabs DO NOT work in Firefox and nothing happens when you click them, they do however work fine in Internet Explorer. There’s a mark down for lack of cross-browser support.

Tabs

Companies really should ensure everything works on all platforms before releasing to the market as 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera do have a large market share.

The country switch feature also works differently on IE than on Firefox.

There are grammar and spelling mistakes in the page which give a bad impression of the site and would make me wonder about their professionalism.

Advance?

This should be Advance I guess, and well to be grammatically correct it should actually be Advanced.

The range of hotels available is good but it just looks like it’s plucked from some API from a back-end system.

The prices are reasonable, I found a good range when searching for hotels in Kuala Lumpur, they have a good range of hotels available all around the world.

KL

I was unable to call the booking line as I am not based in the US so any reservations I make would be via the net directly.

The site has Adsense at the bottom of the page, I don’t see any reason why a commercial site like this should have any 3rd party adverts?

Overall the site is ok, it’s nothing special, there’s no cool AJAX interface, the HTML isn’t cross browser compatible, they have some pointless Adsense adverts, there are spelling and grammar mistakes and the only plus points are decent prices and a good range of hotels, but can’t you find those on any old hotel site?

In this kind of space you really have to add value and differentiate yourself using your interface, as to a consumer that’s all you are.

Now is the age of the social web, it’s time to harness tagging, blogging and community building to support your product or service, don’t try and focus only on traditional means online, try and use new and unique strategies.

Good idea, but bad execution and poor quality control.

This is a sponsored post.

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Continue Reading · 3 Comments · Trips & Travel

Streamyx Sucks AGAIN

AHGRH!H!H!

Meant to post some more pics over the weekend, got lots to do…but Streamyx was down since 11am Saturday morning.

Until now.

I called them twice, apparently they are having some major nationwide outage…I wonder what happened I really do.

There’s nothing on the Streamyx site about this either, it’s out of date.

Can’t they just keep us informed?

Is it too much to ask for a stable connection? I’ve given up dreaming of decent latency and a good ping time for gaming as they continue oversubscribing.

Can’t you buggers work on the weekend too? If you call at the weekend the earliest they can look at is Monday..

Gee thanks, I happen to be most productive at the weekends, especially for my online business..

That means I’m losing money and many hours of productivity due to your unforseen downtime.

I ended up playing a lot of Call of Duty 2 though, which was cool!

And finished a bottle of Glenfiddich 12 year old, cheap crap.

It’s the same story during holidays as well, if your net happens to be down during Raya, good luck, might get it back in 10 days time..

What exactly is it we are paying for?

I saw a new promotion for RM77 aswell, so new subscribers are getting a cheaper deal than us existing customers? Why don’t we cancel and subscribe again? Get another free modem and shit?

Doesn’t make any sense to me really.

The Malaysian Internet Exchange is supposed to be coming up soon, which will introduce cross-ISP peering..this might really help the net problems we have. I’ll get more info about that soon, I’ll publish what I have now on Monster.

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Continue Reading · 9 Comments · Internet & Tech, Ranting

Model Shoot Putrajaya

It was fun!

No time to post yet…still have to post first model shoot from TTDI! Melaka Trip, Butterfly Park Macro pics, UK trip still not all posted yet, argh!

Pensive Pamela

The youngest of the 3 sisters, Pamela.

The Putrajaya Botanical Garden is really beautiful.

Damn hot, will post the rest soon…eventually!

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Continue Reading · 16 Comments · Photography

Movie Review – DOA: Dead or Alive – Pr0n?!

DOA

A number of fighters are invited to DOA, an invitational martial arts contest. They travel to the tournament island by plane, until they have to jump out mid-flight with parachutes, and then have until sundown to reach the main island to be entered into the tournament. Fighters are then pooled against one another in a knock-out style tournament, with the loser of a battle sent home, and the winner progressing to the subsequent round. The plot revolves around four female fighters who begin as rivals, but subsequently find themselves teaming up against another force.

The first 20-30 minutes of this movie are basically soft porn, skimpily dressed girls prancing around kicking ass, riding massive motorbikes and fighting half naked.

Excellent!

The rest of the movie is not much different.

I even laughed a few times, but most of the time I was staring at butts or boobs and thoroughly enjoying it.

The ‘acting’ is laughable, there is nothing that could be recognised as a coherent plot, but still it’s great.

Some chicks kick some ass, the bad guy gets sorted, the victim gets rescued and team work prevails over being enemies.

Ladies

A few of the fights are good but most are over edited and the costumes are rather cosplay, the dialogue is so cheesy it’s entertaining!

Don’t bother thinking, don’t analyse just watch this movie and let your lil’ bro rule you for a while, I guarantee you’ll totally enjoy it.

Basically, do not miss this movie!

I give it a titty bouncing 8/10 just for being so bad – it’s great fun.

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Continue Reading · 16 Comments · Movies

Sunrise Jazz & Rythm Fest 2006 – Mon’t Kiara – Cosmic Funk Express

Well it’s about time I started sorting out my folder for pictures to check, it’s reaching 30GB.

So here’s the first blast from the past, some pics I took at Mon’t Kiara Jazzfest, I did pretty ok looking back with the noise on the D70s and just the kit lens!

It was the last gig for Cosmic Funk Express and great it was, some people actually danced, there was a large crowd and we had a bottle of Swing, so I assume Paul must have been there too!

Swing

Yah of course by the end of the night it was gone..

With the help of the staff from Clear.

Waiter

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Continue Reading · 7 Comments · Parties & Gatherings, Photography