May 2007 Archives

I haven't been visitting Uncle Lim's blog much lately, so when Lynn pointed me out to an exclusive with Michael Backman on Uncle Kit's blog I just couldn't resist.

I previously wrote about Uncle Backman in an entry titled Malaysia Bodoh. To me, Uncle Backman has stirred a large can of worms with his writings - which I am totally in support of.

Too bad a foreigner has to be the one that gives us Malaysians a wake-up call.

Anyways, in this exclusive, Uncle Backman has mentioned some very good points again.

"Many Malaysians don’t seem to understand this. Many like to travel overseas - but when they do, too many look but they don’t see. They don’t see how things in Malaysia could be improved. They don’t want to learn from anywhere else. They think Malaysia is a special case. They should be bringing back new ideas to Malaysia. Instead they just want to bring back duty free."

No la if you're wondering if the picture is Michael Backman's doing it's not. I snapped this picture of the flag outside a Malaysian restaurant here in Melbourne. Obviously it seems that this flag hasn't been taken down for years or something. So patriotic ah they all.

Also shows that Malaysians are the same locally and overseas. Loves their country yet prefers to close one eye on things they don't like.

Why do I say this? Read on.

I dunno what's going on here - but I don't understand how this listing came up on my site Adsense.

Like... WHAT THE???!!!

Must be because of the Male 2 Male escort entry probably... but Gay Malaysia??? O_o

Well, looks like it has happened.

SY and Cookie are now in Penang - gone back for good. Well, can't really say Cookie has gone back for good since he is technically Australian, so he's probably migrated. But you get the point. :)

If you fancy Malaysian hawker food Penang style then you should consider paying a visit to Straits Cafe in Doncaster.

Situated at 694 Doncaster Road, this Malaysian cuisine eatery is easily missed if you're not looking for it while you are travelling on Doncaster Road.

I have to mention that this is probably the first place in Melbourne that I've heard a lot of Hokkien chatter from the staff. That's right, the same language the Penang Chinese community uses.

We started the night with an entree of Lor Bak - which are deep fried rolls of minced pork with pepper powder & soy sauce, maybe some other herbs, then rolled in thin soybean sheets.

This dish is normally served with a bowl of 'Loh' - which is a bowl of thick broth thickened with corn starch and beaten eggs in Penang and a bowl of chilli. However, there is only the option of having it with chilli here, which I didn't mind considering how hard it is to find Lor Bak here in Australia in the first place.

Saw this ad on a lamp post near my office after I parked the car.

Just couldn't help it - had to take a picture as I had my camera with me.

I have been thinking of doing entries like this for a long time. The world is sick and it is high time that more effort is done to heal it.

This is going to be the first of many more entries to come that will focus on saving the world! Well I hope to help anyways.

This entry's focus is on our little armoured ant eating friend in the Asian and African jungles - the Pangolin. More specifically, the endangered Malayan Pangolin that can be found in our Malaysian jungles.

Wikipedia:
Pangolins (pronounced /ˈpæŋgəlɪn/) or scaly anteaters are mammals in the order Pholidota. There is only one extant family (Manidae) and one genus (Manis) of pangolins, comprising eight species. (There are also a number of extinct taxa within Pholidota.) Pangolins have large scales on their skin and are found in tropical regions of Africa and Asia. The name "pangolin" is derived from the Malay word pengguling ("something that rolls up").

It happens that the Pangolins are one of the many animals that are trafficked out of Malaysia to be chopped up and eaten - for god knows what reason.

I have had it with Scode - and have now removed this CAPTCHA number generating comment validation from all comment pages.

I have now installed MT-Akismet, which works in the background to help regulate spam (which is 95% of my comments).

I hope this improves your commenting experience on HarbX.com and you won't be receiving anymore silly errors when submitting a comment.

Please let me know if you find any more bugs.

Thanks for your patience and support as always.

Dirty Toilet
Originally uploaded by KarlangasM.

This morning when I went to wee wee in the toilet at my work place, one of my colleagues walked in to have a wee as well.

Let's bear in mind this is the guys toilet we're talking about, with the dude holding his little brother while doing his business.

After doing his business, he zips up, and walks out of the toilet while I was washing my hands. Hang on, anything wrong here?

Wasn't he supposed to have washed his hands like me???

At least, even without soap, should he have washed, or rinsed his hands???

Let's think of the resulting scenario - in the office the fellow would go back to his computer, work on his computer, and he would have deposited his fair share of germs on the keyboard.

Some other colleague might come to help him on something, sits down and starts typing on his keyboard and this would make it seem like some kind of like second hand little brother touching in a way!

Vue de Monde may be considered the best French restaurant in Melbourne, and one of the best restaurants in Australia. So, I had very high expectations for it when I made a booking for 2 almost seven weeks ahead- specially for SY's birthday.

Yes, you need to book really early if you want to dine at this fine French cuisine restaurant, as they are booked out almost every night of the week for at least a month.

The restaurant is located in the Melbourne CBD at 430, Little Collins Street, in the block between Queens St. and Williams St.

Now I have never been to a French restaurant before, and my impressions of French restaurants (no offense) from movies are that they can be quite stuck-up. Well let's blame Hollywood for that.

I am pleased to say that Vue de Monde is nothing like that; as after the first 15 minutes there, I discovered that I didn't even need to have put on my best clothes to go there.

Stepping into the restaurant, we were immediately shown to our table and the waitress helped us out of our coats and took them away to be kept.

A wine connoisseur assisted us in selecting our wines - a glass of French Amadieu red for me and a Bernier champagne for SY.

This is probably a good time to talk about the menu here at Vue de Monde- or rather the absence of one. Vue de Monde is the first restaurant that I have been to that does not have a food menu. The waitress explained that the restaurant has a team of chefs preparing 50 to 70 different dishes per night. What they do instead is come up with a degustation or tasting style menu that is tailored specifically to each person on the night itself.

Your waiter/waitress will ask you if you have any food allergies and if you have any preference in food. They will not divulge what food they'll be serving beforehand, so each course will be a surprise.

There are basically 2 options you can have here at Vue de monde, the Menu Gourmand which is a 5 course degustation menu for $150 a person or for the ultimate - the Gastronomes Menu which is their top level menu priced at $250 per person. Extra courses for the Menu Gourmand are available for $15 a course.

For this review, I won't be going into too much detail what the courses are called mainly because I just can't remember the long fancy names. The waiting staff presented each course as it arrives, explaining all the ingredients used and how they are infused to blend together perfectly. Our waitress told me she would email me the names of the courses, so if she remembers to do this I'll update this entry.

Ever since my hosting provider performed an upgrade to my account - I have noticed that some comments from readers are coming in pairs.

I have discovered that when posting a comment, the result is a blank screen and suspect this is probably why people refresh and try and repost the comment.

Apparently this is caused by Perl crashing on my server whenever someone posts an account.

This doesn't mean your comment doesn't go through - it actually does, but the success screen just doesn't display.

I apologise for this problem - and I am now working with my hosting provider to solve this problem.

This will be rectified hopefully within the next day or two. In the mean time, feel free to continue commenting as it still works - but just doesn't show a success page.

Again, I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

I've watched the HD version of this trailer so many times already.

So can't wait for the movie to come out 4th of July (might be earlier elsewhere, hope it is in Australia!!).

Go watch the trailer on Yahoo! now.

Or download the HIGH DEFINITION versions below from Yahoo!

Right Click -> Save As. Then rename to .mov

480p version - 48mb

720p version - 119mb

1800p version - 181mb

REMINDER: Right Click -> Save As. Then rename to .mov

UPDATE: Visit Cybertron Phillipines for the International one, which you can see a few extra scenes!

OK, I've had enough.

On Monday, Wednesday when I went into the bathroom, my house mate left his white undies on the floor. I had to pick it up to dump it in his laundry basket so I could take my shower in peace without constantly having to see it.

Yesterday, he left this gray pair on the kitchen chair. Inside out.

God knows if it's used or clean.

Now tell me, am I over reacting or is this just plain wrong?

I've told him off before. Friends have voiced themselves to him over the discovery of this at our home as well.

This is NOT the first time it has happened.

I went with my colleagues from our Software Development team at SEEK for a 'team building' Laser Skirmish activity yesterday.

We started out the day at 11 am driving to a local pub at Wallan (about 40 minutes drive in non-peak hour traffic from Melbourne) to have lunch. We then proceeded to the skirmish place at Wallan - a natural bush area for our activity.

We were all pretty excited as this was probably the first time our company is actually sending out a team to such an activity for a team building experience.

After putting on our camouflage overalls, we were split up into 2 teams - the 'caps' and the 'diggers' - based on our headwear.

We needed to wear the caps and digger hats supplied as the sensors needed to be attached to them, making our heads the only place you should be aiming for.

Actually I also learnt that the laser in Laser Skirmish is actually just a high powered infra red beam and not a real laser, so you don't get a red dot pointing at you and burning your eyeballs when pointed at your eyes.

This also means that you had better be sure no shrub or objects are blocking your gun's immediate line of sight or you won't be hitting anything!

Last week, I made a very quick trip to Malaysia for some personal reasons.

I was having breakfast with someone close to me which I will not disclose - and she received a phone call.

You see - this person is in the 'school transport' business and the call was from her contact in the local MCA - asking if there was transport services available at the end of the year around October/November. This service will be to transport voters to the local voting places for the election.

So, can we expect an early election this year then?

Looks like they're really nervous by YB Anwar Ibrahim's allowed return to politics early next year.

I can only hope that I am wrong about this as I am fed up of the ruling coalition's rule and I do wish to see the opposition getting their act together to hopefully winning more control of the country.

In case you didn't realise, for the past 10 days my website has been stagnant, and a lot of pages were down or produced a "database error" message.

This was due to my hosting provider's server migration and cpanel upgrade and long story short, they made my account 'useless' as I couldn't do anything on my end with an off-line database.

Suffice to say I am back up again, and things should hopefully be back in full swing.

Many apologies to my regular readers who have surfed up and notified me of the problems plaguing the site.

Your support is greatly appreciated.

The Saints 97 forum is also back up again.

TGI Friday's is an American chain of restaurants that can be found in major cities all over the world.

SY and I have been at the Chapel Street branch here in Melbourne before and we quite enjoyed our visits in the past.

We recently paid a visit here again - with SY's sister, SW.

One thing about TGI Friday's is the similar styled entrances worldwide.

After our very exciting first night making chocolates, we were looking forward to attending our second class - mostly because we get to see the end results and bring home some of our handiwork!

The main things we did tonight were more towards decorating and completing the chocolates - did I mention that we're taking them home already? :)

Yummm... I think this was what was on everyone's minds.

Here's SY with her favourite - melted white chocolate. I think if she could, she would just start eating it straight from there.

When SY told me that she signed us up for this chocolate making course, I didn't know what to expect.

The course was - Level One Chocolates and Pralines, ran over 2 day nights at the famous Savour Chocolate & Patisserie School at Brunswick East.

When we walked in we were surprisingly greeted by a familiar face - Kimberley had also signed up for this course! Oh I just realised that I was the only guy in the whole class of 12.

Our presenter/teacher was award winning chocolate master Kirsten Tibballs.

Kirsten started the night with a short lecture on the different types of chocolate as well as what chocolate is made of. There were also a few chocolates to be tasted, mostly dark ones which was my favourite type of chocolate.