Signs are clear

I think it’s quite clear.

Don’t go at it alone.

Don’t screw your team.

Don’t leave them behind.

See ?

Bandung Again

I think I like this place quite a bit. It isn’t too warm, some shopping to do, cheap food, cheap lodging & no language barriers. What’s not to like?

Sis and I were tour guides and planned everything for the cousins. Driver, lodging and airfare. By the way I still think the food on Air Asia is bad. Everybody Can Starve.

I remembered being there with the IASA gang. Quite a good trip but I was quite disappointed with the photos I took with the kit lens.

Brought new ones this time.

Stalls on top of the volcano

Anyway this was mostly a makan and shopping excursion and boy did we eat a lot of stuff. So much so that one person got sick. I think it was due to the vegetables not being cleaned properly but there you go. Hazards of eating in foreign lands.

Sapu Lidi

Sapu Lidi

A favorite among locals and for company events this place serves Sundanese food in the middle of a rice field.

It’s a unusual theme for a restaurant and it was one of the best restaurants we tried during the four days.

Satay (chicken I think)

Fried noodles

Fried Fish

Yummy chicken!

For dessert:

Dessert

The food is good. Really good. Quite filling. Last time we sat by the lake but this time we just took a regular hut because there was a company event going on there. People in Indonesia seem to be in a festive mood. Maybe it was due to the elections. Anwyay everytime I go to Indonesia someone notable dies. First trip was Suharto. Next MJ and Farah Fawcett. Sigh.

Anyway here’s the Geo location to Sapu Lidi:

View Larger Map

A little more on the food adventures in Bandung later.

Been a busy couple of weeks fighting fires.

That Takes Class!

I’m so proud of her. Barely 20 minutes after reaching 80 she earned herself the achievement ‘That Takes Class‘ in Wintergrasp:

She’s growing up primarily as a frost spec tank but even at relatively poor quality of gear, she seems to do very well against other classes. Maybe those were scrubs but then…..

Anyway been mining like crazy for titanium. Need it for all the titan steel to make the set items for her…. and then I read on WOW Insider, Death Knights to be nerfed in the next patch.

I guess they really want us to work on the gear…..

The Yelping Magpie

I recently came across several Malaysian social-political blogs that have a very strange political angles.

Get ready for this.

They read a lot like the newspapers that I don’t really care about. Yup that means the Star, the New Straits Times. Ultra-nationalist papers like Utusan and Berita Harian I couldn’t even bother to glance at. Anyway Awang Selamat doesn’t really think I deserve to be here so toodles to you sir.

So is this what ‘engaging the new media’ means?

Taking what you write on print and transfering it to the interweb?

Lets look at a post by Yelping Barking Magpie.

This blog is literally filled with racist vitriol against Malaysian Chinese. Look at him take a stab at Guan Eng:

Now Lim Guan Eng ’s DAP (offshoot of the PAP when Singapore being kicked out of Malaysia) is doing the same in Penang. When in power the DAP starts to ostracize its coalition member, namely the Malay majority PKR from getting involved in a decision making process in that opposition run state.

He takes a stab Senior Minister Lee as well:

Tell me why is this Lee Kuan Yew coming here to meet Lim Guan Eng, Lim Kit Siang, YB BABI and Nik Aziz and other mentris besar and then meeting other opposition leaders! Why are we allowing this and is not there any Wisma Putra protocol that applies to this grand old Chinaman from ther Red Dot?! He didn’t even put visiting TDM as part of his itinerary, betul betul kurang ajar punya China

Kurang ajar eh?

Update: Real name of  Yelping Barking Magpie is Rusdi Mustapha. So we know for a fact he is a real person and not a pseudonym used by many writers (like Awang Selamat).

I see he has a daughter who’s married to a English/American.

I wonder what he thinks of that kind of pendatang?

Hanazen

The cousins came from down under for their regular scheduled visits and we decided to set everyone up for a nice Japanese meal at Hanzen.

The nicely decorated wasabi

For some strange reason it isn’t the same as eating out with sis’s evil twin, everyone went ‘box set’.

The cousins!

Anyway Hanazen is located in Jaya 1. If it’s unfamilliar to you think of:

1. Jalan University
2. Diethlem Petaling Jaya (the blokes who have warehouse sales very often)
3. Sin Chew Jit Poh.
4. Screw you, you’re not from Petaling Jaya !

Anyway you can see items 1-3 in the map below:

View Larger Map

I am not very good at remembering what I eat, specifically if it is in a foreign language, so I’ll just call them out as I see it.

It looks like chicken, it smells like chicken, it must be chicken!

I choose you chicken てりやき!

It is a bento set so it comes with other stuff in it.

The fried rice

The cawa moshi

The salad. They serve pasta with it.

We ordered other stuff but I couldn’t really move around in that crowded place that night, so I took what I could reach from my spot.

Someone ordered the beef teriyaki

Neko also ordered a side dish, crabs ! They have a very nice baked taste to ‘em.

Baked crabs. Note: You shouldn't really eat the salt it's sitting on.

If you’d like to try Hanazen:

Blk C, Unit 43, Level G, Phase 1

Jalan Universiti

46200 Petaling Jaya

+603-79548000

Some of the more sharp eyed readers might find the color balance is a bit off. Here’s the reason. I left the wrong metering mode on. So I did the best I could to adjust the color balance after the fact.

Gotta take more test shots next time.

Menteri Besar Lama – Update

So the guy from Pangkor managed to get the court of appeals to stay the decision of the high court in KL. It’s their right, but keep in mind 3 months is a long time for a state to have no functioning and effective political leadership.

Even an UMNO veteran is sounding the alarm bells.

Too much of this and everyone will just walk away in disgust.

Who is to blame after that ? The lying new media?

Menteri Besar Lama

It’s true. After much drama and debacle befitting a lazy afternoon episod of the Bold and the Beautiful, Nizar (and everyone in Malaysia who understands and adheres to the concept of democracy) has finally  got the victory and ruling they so desired.

Victorious Nizar! - The Malaysian Insider

There’s lots of cheers from everyone, but there’s also caution.

I don’t know. I see everything in equal terms and possibilities.

We should be worried, but this is a very different world from the sixties.

So What Now?

May 7th came and went. It went where everyone knew it would go eventually. To the victor with the bigger army and better guns. Frankly after the fracas that happened in Perak could you ever honestly trust the Barisan National to be sincere? Put political bias aside.

The story/end result is still the same. Certain parties drove events in Perak that led to this farcas and used whatever it had at its disposal to win, at any cost.

I’m not really sure how these people sleep soundly at night. I know what I can do though. I pay my taxes every year and I have my rights as a citizen to vote. I’d strongly recommend all Malaysians to exercise their choice at the next general election.

Some interesting comments and remarks:

1. Self-installed Kings
2. May 7 is the Day of Infamy for Perak and Malaysia
3. Careless Whisper
4. An inconvenient judge

Just today the prime minister announced a willingness to cooperate with Pakatan Rakyat to resolve the Perak crisis. Sorry but I don’t really think anyone can think that this could possibly be a sincere peace offering after what has been said and done.

Unless they have something to gain from it.

Ipoh Trip

We regularly make trips back to Ipoh. This isn’t due to any sense of patriotism that is achieved by giving almost thirty ringgit to highway concessionaire PLUS. We visit our grandparents on quite a regular basis.

Neko blogged a little about Sun Mar Poh recently and I guess I’m not gonna repeat her review here. We had that for dinner. The next day when we were due to leave on a Sunday we went to a bunch of stalls new the stadium in Ipoh and ate Kampung Si Mee noodles! This is what came out of our orders:

Yummy noodles!

Mmmm yummy. Frankly you don’t get noodles like this in Kuala Lumpur anymore. Well not anywhere that I went.

One of my other favorite dishes in Ipoh. Chee Cheong Fun!

Chee Cheong Fun!

Always the thing to look out for when in Ipoh. Our aunt always gets us a few packets for breakfast when we go back. I love putting soy sauce on it. Simply adds to the flavor in the morning. If you are in Ipoh you might want to hop to Canning garden to get this. The hawker who sells this is quite a popular bloke but has little patience with customers who keep repeating or re-emphasizing their orders. You have been warned.

I did manage to make use of the telephoto lens, took a pretty sweet picture of a piegon sitting in a tree.

Hello birdie!

I thought it turned out pretty nicely.

Killing Google Updater

I’ve had some strange experiences with some of the stuff I’ve been running on my desktop. Inexplicablly my machine would *feel* very slow. I’ve narrowed down the culprit to one particular service which was running.

GoogleUpdater.exe

This little fine piece of software somehow manages to interrupt all the valuable resource on my machine and grind it to a halt. I’m not the only one either. Quite a few blokes on the web have observed such strange behavior. I tried one of the solutions listed which was to deny permission to the executable itself. That really didn’t work because somehow or rather it came back.

As a last resort I just removed permissions from the folder it was in.

Seemed to do the trick. Everything running as it should now.