March 2007 Archives

I attended the WebDU conference in Sydney the end of last week.

The big sponsors of this event were Adobe and Daemon. There were many more smaller sponsors like RocketBoots, Wacom and Penguin books which sponsored quite a number of books to giveaway throughout the conference.

They weren't kidding that this was "like a rock concert for geeks" - as almost every attendee brought with them a laptop. I never felt so left out before for not owning a laptop. :) There was even this guy that was constantly videoing and uploading to YouTube through his laptop.

Anyways, I found the 2 day conference very useful.

Sessions I attended were about usability, Apollo, search engine optimisation, and ColdFusion.

For some reason, I have always wanted to visit Cambodia.

I was able to make this side trip with SY during my recent holiday trip back to Malaysia. This was all thanks to the low prices of Air Asia which I highly recommend if you're looking to book a trip around Asia.

We arrived at Siem Reap International Airport just before lunch time on the 2nd of March.

The local currency is the Cambodian Riel, but the default business currency here is the USD. So although you might save on the price of the flight and hotel through an Air Asia booking, bear in mind you need to get yourself some good ol' American greens.

We had booked our stay at the Borei Angkor Hotel, which had a 4-star rating. The hotel arranged for a complimentary car to pick us up from the airport, and after some negotiation, we hired Lee Hai and his Camry as our guide and driver for the next few days.

After recharging with some Cambodian food at the hotel, we set out to see the floating village on Tonlé Sap lake.

I'm headed to Sydney today for the WebDU conference.

This is the first time I'm going to such a conference, and my company has been kind to send myself and another of my teammate there to participate.

Being a conference targeted at web designers, the main sponsor of this event is Adobe - so I'm expecting probably a lot of pro-Adobe talk, which doesn't bother me at all.

I'll be attending some sessions regarding Apollo and web usability, and even a few sessions on upcoming technologies.

I'll be offline until Sunday.

I'm back!

Yup, after almost one month of blogging absence, I am back. I've arrived back in Melbourne for one week now. And it's taken me that long to get off my sorry Malaysian ass to start blogging again.

And what better way to start this then with this old article I dug up on Bloomberg.

Want Condo on Moon? Get a Malaysian Contractor: Andy Mukherjee

Sept. 29 2005 (Bloomberg) -- Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi may have found a smart way to ease his country's massive oversupply of building contractors. After 2020, a lot of them can find work on the moon.

The southeast Asian nation recently began preparations for its first foray into outer space: an astronaut aboard a Russian spaceship in 2007. Malaysia's own moon mission, according to local media reports, is scheduled for 2020.

Someone, it seems, forgot to tell Malaysia that lunar expeditions went out of fashion more than three decades ago.

I used to go to school at St. Xavier's Institution here in Penang.

1997 was the year I was in form 5, which was the last year of my high school life. Almost 10 years down the line, I would never imagine that I would be the person organising our 10 year reunion.

Thanks to Charles and his family, we were able to secure 3 tables at the Ocean Green restaurant for a great price.

We had a good turnout, with 26 people turning up for the dinner, and a few more coming for the after-party after.

Here's a picture of the gang - the class of 1997 almost 10 years later.

Many thanks to all who attended and special thanks to Boon, Joshua, Clarence and Weng Choy for helping out with the phone calls. Many thanks also to all that have assisted in getting everyone in touch with us - hopefully we'll be able to continue hunting down all the people that we have lost contact with after all these years.

To my friends of 97, make sure you keep in touch and don't forget about the Class of 1997 forum hosted on harbx.com at http://www.harbx.com/sxi/forum/.