RACONTEUR-ESQUE SCRIBBLINGS

The view from the room Cats on a road island. What's interesting is that the word Kuching is the Malay word for cats, and there is also a cat museum tucked somewhere in Kuching A dish of Kolo Mee. This one had chicken and mushroom topping, slightly deviating from the original barbequed pork version. This adorable 'don'ts' signage was photographed through a window of a building that may someday become a pub. I thought it was too cute to be not shared ;) It has been said before that a vacation every now and then, no matter how short will always make you feel better about life, and give you the push you need to move things forward, to work better and generally keep your sanity in check. After some planning, reading countless reviews, worrying (unnecessarily, unfortunately), and having a mad Wednesday that seemed to move too fast for my own good as I spent it worrying about a lot of things, from the fact that the advisers date of arrival has been pushed forwa...

Click to check the answers Through a bit of research, and with some help from a friend, here are the answers to the "guess the names of the bands so that you can spend some time cracking your brains and spoiling your eyes" quiz. http://www.sethjones.net/?p=345 http://uk.download.yahoo.com/plus/fu/oa/answers.jpg (courtesy of Sreenivas)

Ahem! If you're a reluctant procrastinator like myself, I implore you to stop reading right here and click on the exit button, because I assure you that if you do continue, you will end up procrastinating, like I did. Anyway, the picture above was in circulation over the net a few years ago, stating that there are about 75 bands hidden in the picture, all under (or formerly under) the record label Virgin Records, and I had spent a few good hours over several weeks trying to figure out the bands that were rather cleverly hidden there after seeing it on this blog . I managed to get a few before giving up because I started seeing stars, but no one seems to know if they are right or wrong! So, what you've got to do is to see if you can identify the bands/singers listed above and then place your answers in the comments section. Further discussion will ensue when I get back :)

Let's begin with the worries 1. There's only three days left before I begin my three day adventure with a friend, an acquaintance and a stranger in the land of the hornbills , and I've been scouring the web looking for information about the places we could visit, how to get around etc, and the news is not good... apparently, activity ceases at about 7pm, and public transportation may not be available. So do we rent a car? I don't know... 2. I tried doing some packing last night... because I know for a fact that I cannot trust doing anything on work nights, especially since I won't be around at work on Thursday and Friday, I'll have to work extra to cover the lost days... which when you look at it, seems to mean that taking a vacation or break sort of beats the purpose... 3. The combination which I thought I set for my luggage does not seem to be working. Now I can't lock my luggage, and although I'm not exactly carrying anything expensive - it'...

I have a feeling I've done something like this before, way back in 2006, but since time has passed since then and so has the number of books I've read increased, I'll do this one more time. Tagged by the wielder of the argentum sword BBC believes the majority of people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. 1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read. 2) Tally your total at the bottom. 3) Tag a few people you think would enjoy sharing similar information about their book interests. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x) 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x) 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x) 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x) 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x) Revisited at least once a year 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x) 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x) 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x) 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles -...

It was over 24 hours ago when I discovered something and I've not been able to stop myself from flashing an idiotic grin each time the very thought of the thing crosses my mind, and if you know how my mind works as well as I do, then you'd know that it means I've been grinning to myself at least once every hour. See, I came across a wonderfully exciting post in a blog I read almost on a daily basis and actually thanked the blogger for such an enlightening post. I even went as far as recommending the post to another blogger . The only problem with the whole thing is, the article was meant to be a joke - a pretty obvious one, really... if and only if I had read the label/tag at the bottom of the post, which I obviously didn't do the first time, and only noticed it when I visited the blog the second time to share the link! It did cross my mind for a fleeting moment that the words "stuff I made up" didn't seem so right, but I just ignored that feeling, onl...

There I was, sitting in an air conditioned meeting room (but the label outside the door said Library) amidst a few computers, some people and a trainer, wondering what substance could possibly be in the fragrance (which I believe was placed there because someone assumed it smelled nice -I thought it was strangely minty, and that's pretty strange coming from someone who thinks that mint rocks!) that was released every 5 minutes or so because it seemed to induce an indescribable feeling of needed to sleep right away. Hmmm... did I just discover a remedy for insomnia?

Right...so while the rest of the country talks about learning science and maths in English, or more accurately the plans to discontinue learning science and maths in English for various reasons that I shall leave alone, because a) I have long left school b) They most probably will change their minds again c) Everyone else is talking about it; I figured that I might as well touch on something else I found while checking out the papers today, which is about a proposed tiger park in Penang Rethink plan to build tiger park, Penang urged By PRISCILLA DIELENBERG GEORGE TOWN: The Penang government has been advised to reconsider its intention to build an ambitious tiger park in the state. Malaysian Nature Society Penang Branch chairman Kanda Kumar said setting up the park would not be right as Penang had no record of the animal’s existence. “Most tourists would rather spend on heritage and food, not see animals in cages. Land-stressed Penang can do with more houses and recreational ...

We receive a staggering amount of input on a daily basis, through all our different senses, and it is a wonder that none of us has crashed due to an overload, well, except some people, perhaps but that is not what this post is about. Now, the way I see things, I find that stories of creepy nature creep me out the most when they're located nearer to me, for instance, when I was a wee kid of five, I had gone to the bathroom late at night, and on the TV was a local Malay horror movie, and at that very moment I looked at it, an image of a woman with long black hair and fangs looked back at me from the screen. At the same time, the story about the sounds of animals in chains late at night in an Australian Outback (the animals were apparently ghosts), although gave me the creeps when I first read it a few years ago seems to have not much of an effect on me these days. Yesterday, while I was reading one of the blogs I usually read, I came across the blogger's fear of monsters an...

When they say put in a pinch of salt, how big is the pinch? Or even worse, salt to taste... whose taste exactly? What if you were brought up in a household that used less salt, then what? That was one of the reasons I never took cooking seriously, plus I spent most of my adult life practicing precise measurements, and a pinch (of anything) would get you in serious trouble. What's really funny though is that we at work liken making paint to baking a cake - well, more of the mixing of the cake batter than baking, although we have ovens at work, but not for food. And yeah, we make paint... and they call the formulas recipes! The other day Trauma Queen suggested that I follow Aunty Helpful Dictator's footsteps and include recipes for the stuff my sister and I slaved near the kitchen for (there was not enough place in the kitchen, so we made use of the dining area for some of the work!) and I figured why the hell not, although I'm afraid that our bastardized versions of the r...

Otherwise known as "I have no Life" So, after 2 hits on Facebook and a few hours of cumulative procrastination, this is it, the 25 most random things about yours truly which I had put up on Facebook and decided to put up here as well... 1. There are a few street lights that go off or on each time I pass under them. Even more recently, I discovered a light that went out at work when I walked under it. This will be fun until it gets repaired 2. I started using glasses since the age of 7. Since then I've broken a few, lost one in a bus and even temporarily misplaced another for two weeks 3. I got my drivers license at 18, but never really drove actively until I had to at the age of 24 when I desperately needed to and got my own car because I was a bit scared of driving. Soon after that my sister gives me the nick name Evil Knievel! 4. A group of Singaporeans once asked me if I was really a Malaysian when I said that I don't eat durians ! 5. Most people who ...

It was meant to be a birthday bash for a cousin who turned 21 less than a month ago, but because all families are somewhat weird in their own special way (where ours involves family members going into silent mode never to be heard from by not answering calls and declining all social events for at least a year for no apparent reason), it ended up being a little barbeque party for a 29 year old and a 47 year old! And a small cake cutting ceremony with the birthday song but no candles! (We would have needed about 76 candles!!) Why cancel a party just because the original reason for throwin the party was not around? So, we spent the morning right up till the evening preparing stuff for the potluck. Cutting and chopping, washing and well, working in general! My sister and I picked modified Italian food as our theme with a dish of our version of Bruschetta. Next we decided to make Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms using local ingredients (ie substituting Italian sausages with Malaysian made ...

It was in the late afternoon, almost evening-ish on the 8th of March 1980 when a woman in labour was wheeled into an empty waiting room thanks to a negligent nurse. Not much later, a little baby girl was born in that empty waiting room while her family was anxiously waiting for them elsewhere. That baby was me. *Somewhere out there on a radio playing in someone's house, or in a car, or even a restaurant, one of the many radio stations would have been playing the song "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" Many years later a few hours before she officially turns the unseen page of age 29, she sits in front of her laptop listening to some music while figuring out what to write to document that particular moment in time. It's been an interesting journey and she wonders what the final year of her third decade has in store for her. She reels back in amazement at the speed time has flown by, but she knows that she wants to make this year one hell of a memorable one... As o how...

She took the modem out of the refrigerator this morning, gave it a pat on the back and whispered sinisterly... "you better be in working order tonight" Connection problems never seem to leave me. All my life (Oh, fine... the past year mostly) I've had to deal with inefficient customer service, disconnections, a broken ethernet port right after my laptop warranty is over, and in the latest "don't let Terra get on the net" attack, my modem decides to act up. I spent about 3 hours last night attempting to connect, but my adsl light kept flickering and wouldn't stay still. Nothing worked, seriously... and as a result I went through the following processes relentlessly. Hence the three hours.... Patted it nicely Tied the connection with rubber bands (the connection port is a wee bit loose, I noticed) Turned it on and off again and again Restarted the laptop (why? I don't know) Changed all the wires I could think off Changed them again (I ...

If nothing has changed, Jason Mraz will be performing tonight - a concert which I did want to go to initially just for the sake of going to a concert, but it didn't pan out due to various reasons. Anyway, there is this person from one of our sister companies whose job seems to be forwarding e-mails on our internal e-mail program, and most probably had mistakenly included me into his list (our database consists of all the names of all the people in over a hundred companies and there are two of us who share the same first name), and I figured why not share one of them. We could all do with a laugh... no matter how small :D THE ASS FAMILY LATE FOR WORK?

I suppose it wouldn't be too far off the mark if I were to tell you that it all began with the economic crisis of 1997. You see, it was because of the crisis that the university upped it's intake from 4000 students to over 6000 students the year I went in by absorbing the MARA scholars who were supposed to further their education abroad. It was also because of that, a dorm room that was meant for two found itself with three people. And then there was the old fan. Not any ordinary old fan which would creak like joints on a cold day while cooling the air, but the kind of old fan that simply refused to speed up although you turned the speed to maximum. For that reason, we slept at night with the windows thrown open (after all, we were on the 2nd floor and it was a pretty safe place (university residential college) or so we thought), dealing with the consequences of having cats leaving their kittens under the bed by running helter skelter for help from cat lovers to remove cats an...