Rezeki Jangan Ditolak October 13, 2007

So how was the first day of Raya for you all so far? It was awesome for me! Actually, I started the day wondering in bed if I’m late for work or not. This is soooo bad. On weekdays I’m busy convincing myself its the weekend (“No, it can’t be over!”) and on the weekends I wake up with a jerk wondering if I’m already late. Anyway, I finally dragged my carcass out of bed to go for a mini-marathon at the gym…

Once I arrived at Taipan, I got a message from Pauline asking me if I’m free for dinner at Klang. Apparently her dad wanted to belanja everyone who helped out at the factory. Haha, I felt quite bad because I worked there a handful of times and each time I was treated to a grand lunch. Like, I think I had sharks fin soup at least twice? And on top of that all, we get another good dinner to boot? Felt quite shy to accept the offer, but as our Malay proverb goes – rezeki jangan ditolak, so it was set. Mini-marathon ended up as just one Body Combat class. ;P

And I’m soooooo glad that I actually went! Not only was the meal awesome (more pictures on that later!), but it was fun hanging out with Pauline and Michael at … Tesco. Hahaha! We arrived at her house at 4pm, took the long dreary drive to Klang (it was raining whales and dolphins), and one of her family members suggested shopping at Tesco. But guess what? Ended up Pauline and I were the ones doing most of the shopping. They just bought groundnuts, but I was like a kid in a candy store! There’s so much stuff here that I don’t see in my favourite local Carrefour, or even Cold Storage. Sheesh, this sounds so aunty but I’m in love with Tesco. @_@

Hahaha, I took like 50 candid shots of them, but I think candid shots can look quite nice too! Like this one!

They got tired of the candid shots and insisted in posing nicely for me.

I have very .. HEALTHY eating habits. *koff*

We proceeded to the restaurant called ‘Restaurant Taman Rahsna Klang’. The reason why we had to go so far to eat there was because Pauline’s dad knows the restaurant manager there. Like damn kam cheng la. Tried many superb, special dishes that I’ve never gotten to eat before. There was one dish where the chef himself came to specially prepare for us. Fuuh! Really a great experience. Thanks for dinner, uncle! Please let me work in your factory again next year. ;p

Pauline and Michael… waiting for the food to be served.

One better than 4 seasons is … 5 seasons! This five seasons had scallops with veggie, satay with black pepper sauce, fish fillet in springrolls, abalone covered with yam and siu loong pau in soup! Everything was super delicious!

This was the dish where the “gou sau” chef himself came out to prepare. Smoke billowed from the pot up to the restaurant ceiling… patrons sitting at the other tables were staring and drooling at the fragrant smell. Later, we saw them ordering the same dish as well… what is it???

Can you see what it is? It was poured fresh onto a pot with burning charcoals underneath it. Then half a glass of beer was thrown over the ingredients, which caused the smoke to billow out. Estimated total cooking time = 6 minutes. ;P

There you go! Steaming beer prawns! Super fresh and succulent, just couldn’t get enough of it! *salivating*

A must-have dish according to Pauline’s dad. On the surface, it just looks like normal Teochew-style steam fish. But this one is soupier. Basically a Teochew-style steam fish and soup all in one. Pretty good, but couldn’t compare with the beer prawns.

Pauline is eating ‘scallop satay’, how luxurious. ^_^

Fearing that we didn’t have enough to eat, two extra dishes were recommended to us by the manager-fren. This is ribs with preserved mango. The ribs by itself was very tender and the sauce was perfect. Eating it with the preserved mango was an interesting and unique touch. This restaurant is quite creative!

Another dish with a twist – fried rice with roe on top. Everyone was saying how interesting this dish was.

Me, Pauline and Michael waiting in the groovy lounge of TF. Why does my face look so long omg.

Anyway, I’m still bitten by that gym lovebug. I think from now onwards I won’t be blogging of anything interesting at all (if I was to begin with). On weekdays it will be allll about work. On weekends it will be gymadventures! Well, I’ll leave you with some random pictures that were just lying about on my harddisk. Tomorrow I foresee about a 4 hour stay in the gym…

Souvenir from Sardinia from Ben. My woolen friend sits on top of the CPU in the office.

Nuts from MrLee, from his home state – Sarawak. He seems damn shocked and disappointed when everyone said they have no idea what nut this is. Do you know? He says its from the same family as olives. The taste was … weird. Must be an acquired indulgence…

The Company gave us this photoframe from the annual dinner theme award participation. Because I didn’t have any photographs on hand to slip in, and because the default photographs (pictured above) were soooooooo cute I decided to leave it as it is and promptly propped it up on my desk.

A few days later, Sifoo Wong asked me if the two little girls in the photoframe were pics of me when I was young. DOTDOTDOT. -______-”

Our resident man with the plan Mr NXY came back from his work stint in Sri Lanka bearing goodies! We got a keychain (elephants!), a box of Dilmah green tea (which I saw in Tesco today wtf hahaha!) and lots and lots of Hershey kisses.

A craze that hit us perhaps 7 years ago, but as always, I’m late to catch on! I keep wishing that I can have thick toast with peanut butter and condensed milk for breakfast! Oh why did I ever order this so that it can prey on my mind!

Ok more random pictures tomorrow. I’m most definitely going to get the goggles. I must I must I must! Must go swimming! Swim I must!

Thoughts and Such September 9, 2007

Helped out again at The Factory on Saturday. I have a crick in my neck from standing up and sticking labels on packets upon packets of cooking chocolate. Anyway, I feel obliged to help out because they are short on human labor at the moment. Plus it can be quite fun… although painful. Oh yeah, we were quite busy the whole day, didn’t even have time to whip out my camera and take a photo of all the chocolate. Even though there’s no pay or whatever… that’s what friends are for! I’m just sorry I can’t help out more often because I’m lazy and I need at least one day of rest! As it is, I feel like the weekend has ended and now it’s back to work again so soon.

Anyway, what I really want to talk about today is about work. I’m still in a ‘holiday mood’ so to speak. I can’t help it, I’ve been taking tonnes of leave. Hmmm.. my colleague informed me that ‘they all’ have been observing me and say that I’m doing everything but work at my cubicle. That’s a bit too much isn’t it? I might admit that for the past week and the week before that (before going on leave… ) but like I have mentioned before — when I’m busy nobody notices. Besides, my work still gets done right? The amount of outstanding work for SMRs for me stands at zero. Can I help it that I get things done fast and therefore have free time? ;P

Ok, better not talk this way, after I end up getting piled with work. But anyway, it’s not that I have any hard feelings against this colleague of mine. I *really* should be less of a slacker, take on more work, explore on more stuff in my work. There’s a huge folder of tips and pointers on exploring the AS400 that I printed out ages ago (in the Hardworking Era) that I still haven’t read. I found an interesting article on how to create quik-n-easy PRTF files through the STRSDA function. Should go and try it out, as it is I’m currently editing PRTF files through STRPDM, and it is a HEADACHE, lemme tell you.

Let’s see, tomorrow I have :
++ preparation for a Disaster Recovery Simulation (raise job schedullers for restoration + inform CSO on backup for Monday + ensure tape delivery by Tuesday + raise request for access for users)
++ modification for a drawdown module (actually, I want to email my user and ask her if the mod is necessary)
++ creating a new SMR for myself on enhancing account statements
++ enhancing aforementioned account statements

That should take like, what? Half a day? Item #4 doesn’t even really count since I have til the middle of October to finish it. Sh*t, that’s the slacker in me talking. Always the Last Minute Hero. Ok ok.. I will finish it by tomorrow then.

Argh, I hate disaster recovery simulations. Seriously, I don’t think there are many system analysts who are forced to be involved in these _____ (fill in the blanks). And preparing the documents for these things are a pain!! Oh yeah, never get an A1 for your 1119 English. Because that makes people at the office think you like writing DOCUMENTATION. @_@

Oh I whine about DR Simulations but I’ll do ‘em anyway. Hey, I’ll be even more pissed if I set the precedent on those 2 new systems and then someone just copies and pastes my documentation and reuse it for the same system’s DRs next year. But talking about DR wasn’t the main reason why I wanted to rant all this out. The point is that I found a colleague’s blog, and I read everything like the nosey parker that I am. And…

Basically I don’t know her so well, although I have gone out to gatherings with her and what not. I mean, we work in different teams, in different floors. Her team has this “understanding” that programmers are damn free. Well, it’s more like we programmers have erm… seasonal torrential thunderstorms, like when there’s rollout of a new system, new deadlines for urgent SMRs, etc. Their work is more constant than ours I guess since they have to handle servers 24/7. I just didn’t know how busy they are until I read her blog. Then I started feeling guilty for not having enough work to do! Isn’t that funny? Shouldn’t one be happy that their intray is always easily convertible into items in the out tray by the end of the day? Shouldn’t I be GLAD that I have a job which enables me to have enough time to do what I want. A job should be something that lets me enjoy life, not become my life.

I feel so guilty that I actually pray that there’ll be a Phase 2 on the project that consisted of 100% blood, sweat and tears that I did last year. We were so busy that we spent months in the company hostel so that we could work until 12 – 3am. We came back on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays as well. I felt so much pressure getting back test results and doing testing and re-doing programming and learning more and more about Java in order to perform certain functions that I felt like my head would burst!! Sometimes we don’t even get appreciation for the things we do from the users… and then our boss is not happy with us because the users are not happy. It really feels like you are already down and out and people are pouring even more hot coals on top of your head. Now that its all over, I have forgotten what that time feels like. I know it was hell because I became damn grumpy and my thoughts were constantly on “once this project is finished, I want to QUIT!” But now when I’m happy and free, I want to go back to that? This is strange… For some reason I want to have all those “pressuring” feelings back again… because it starts the adrenaline pumping…

I think when I go back to work tomorrow I am going to ask for more work from my boss. Wtf.

Anyway, after thinking about all that… I think the reason why I was so unhappy last time wasn’t because of the work. It was because of a false sense of entitlement that I had. Expectation in our work is alright, expectation itself anywhere is also alright. But a sense of entitlement isn’t. It can really eat into you if you always feel that you are entitled to this or that just because you did something. I mean, you can EXPECT to get a raise… if you don’t get it, that’s that la. You feel disappointed. But if you have this sense of entitlement that you deserve to get a raise, and you don’t get it… the feeling after that is indescribable. It’s rage, disappointment, anger, jealousy, all rolled into one.

So I want to get rid of this sense of entitlement in me. Do work for the sake of doing a good job! Take on extra work for the sake of learning more, not because you expect to get more for doing more! So on and so forth! But at the same time I want to get rid of this sense of guilt that I have. Just because people always catch me slacking off doesn’t make me a slacker. I myself know the work that I have done and that I do. I work for me, not for others to see.

Gambatte Leech!!!!!! XD XD XD

Malaysia, Truly Asia August 20, 2007

A lot has happened this weekend, don’t really feel like talking about it at the moment. Funny how things end up… I guess at the end of the day, when facing whatever choices you have to make in life, you have to ask yourself what your bottomline is. (Hah! I actually learnt that in the building better work relationships workshop, Raymond can attest to that). Figuring out what your bottomline is is actually not that easy. It’s basically asking yourself “what is the 1 thing I really want in life that I can sacrifice all else for?” E.g : if your ultimate bottomline is “to be rich”, then you must realise all the other things that you are willing to sacrifice for that – time with family, happiness at job, good relationships with everyone, etc. Of course, there is a way to achieve your bottomline without drastic sacrifices, but ultimately, there will definitely be some sacrifices lah.

Ok, I kinda got off topic. And this “bottomline” thing is not really that interesting. Not like the rest of this entry is super engaging, but let’s move on. My boss not really enthusiastic about the idea of me cancelling my leave after I have applied for approximately 2 weeks leave in August. So for Godssake, any fellow lepak-kers, fellow bored souls, fellow rotting-at-home kakis… please hang out with me la…
This was the conversation I had with my boss:
Me : So basically, I’m wondering if I can cancel my leave. Like, take two days off only instead of 7.
Boss : Hah? Don’t cancel la Leech. You already have so many leave outstanding and it’s already August.
Me : But I’ll have nothing to do already boss! I’ll be rotting at home!
Boss : Who says? By then you’ll have your car already! Go out with your friends!
Me : They’re all working also la boss. I only have leave, they don’t.
Boss : Then go shopping!
Me : I got no money ~~~~…
Boss : Haha! By then your ex-gratia bonus and accrued increment will be banked in already!
AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!
Confirmed I’ll just be rotting at home la!

Okay, kinda tired now so I’ll spare you some food pictures from the August Baby Lunch gathering (next time I’ll take pics of the people who we are celebrating for instead of the food la ok!) and skip to my Factory Girl stint report again. Pauline’s dad aka Uncle from hereon told me to spread the news far and wide that he is looking for volunteer workers. Hahaha. Erm, you get good food (pictured below!) but on an ad-hoc basis. So if you show up to work for him and end up getting RM5 nasi lemak pack, don’t blame me.

This weekend I even worked less than before. Only 4.5 hours, but it was really boring because I didn’t get to stick labels on pretty looking products. Only double action baking powder and bread softener (erm… ‘Emplex’ they call it). All white powder only, sien to look at it. Thankfully Pauline urged me to go to the “back factory operations” to help her to pack wafer roses instead. Those are really pretty! Oh, and this time, Michael joined us as well… although Pauline’s amount of work is easily TRIPLE the amount of work that Michael and I do…

Here are some pics from the factory. Still no stockroom pics, and I think I’m kind of forbidden to take pics of the stockroom, so I won’t keep my hopes up from now onwards:

Packing the wafer rose by the dozens (4 of each color) into the plastic boxes before they get sealed off by the other workers (not allowed to take their pics).

Up close… pretty isn’t it?

Sealed and labelled (oh yes, we labelled these too!) and ready to be shipped off.

The double action baking powder.

The Emplex… aiyoo, this one had like 2.5 HUGE cardboard boxes. What with the double action baking powder before that, it was seriously an endless supply of white powder. @_@

Oh, we did this too! Sticking the yellow labels for the silver cupcake cups! The label says “Silver Cake Cups 80s” and I was wondering what was so 80s about the silver foil cups. Hahaha!! *lame*

This was what Pauline’s bro & gf did… labelling & packaging for the EMULCO. I donno what is that also… is it something like flavouring? But it’s not liquid like the essences. There’s honeydew, mango, pineapple and lychee emulco here. (Think got more in the stockroom…)

As boss’s daughter, Pauline gets to take some products home. >_< So it was in the car going back that I also found out that their company packages jelly strands! So I asked her "when can we try this?" and she replied "on Monday". I actually meant when can we try packing the jelly strands, but Pauline thought I was hungry for jelly! ;p Anyway, that means I get to eat jelly tomorrow! Yay! ^_^

By they way, the #1 food that I’m good at cooking is JELLY (does that actually count as cooking?), so sad that a certain someone never got to try that.

Oh, and we had a near 2 hour lunch again courtesy of Uncle. It was one of those air-cond coffeeshops, but the food was pretty fancy. Erm. We actually had sharksfin for lunch! Hahaha! Some pictures:

The sharksfin soup… a bit plain actually. No sharksfin also… *humanitarian a bit la…*

Long bean, 4 angled bean, ladyfingers and petai – spicy style. Ugh, hate petai. Got dunno-what-kinda-taste beh tahan…

Two-style fried chicken wing and drumsticks.

A very unique curried fried ribs dish.

Another unique salted-egg-coated fried prawn dish.

Two-style fried fish fillets. On the left is sweet & sour style, on the right is the Thai mango kerabu style. Both style also more flour than fish. Hehe.

By the way, Pauline angry cause her dad called all the fried stuff. Hahaha! Actually, I didn’t even realise until she and Michael commented on it.

Today, I went for the Shopaholics party. Erm, based on my previous list, I estimated expenditure of RM500. SCARY. I mean, I was buying a lotta want-to-haves and not must-haves and was going to part with RM500 for it. I even went to the ATM in the morning and took out RM500… hahaha. Semangat betul to go shopping. And in the end… in the end… I ended up buying just two items. T_T And only one of those items was something that I originally wanted. Everything else was unavailable, not in my size or not as nice as it looked in the pictures (that’s always the case with any fashion item anyway isn’t it?).

In the end, I got this (in teal. Someone else took the blue one I originally wanted, but I’m gradually falling in love with the teal) and this (in white!). Didn’t expect to get the latter because I thought polka-dots are too young for me, but the dress was REALLY cute, and it had a BUBBLE skirt which I thought would make me look FAT but didn’t! It just looked really youthful and flattering. So grab lor. Even though I don’t really have anywhere to wear it to.

After that, I was about to head for lunch at Kim Gary (or is it WKCCT that’s in Hartamas Shopping Center?), but there was this tent in the middle of Plaza Damas, which a lot of people were crowding to. I saw free goodie bags being given, some important looking person giving a speech… and so I walked nearer for a better look (also, to see if they would give lil ol’ me a goodie bag… haha, so auntie la my behavior!). Anyway, in the end I *was* invited in to their little soiree, which was actually open to public. It was basically some small promotion on the Visit Malaysia Year 2007, and they had some performances to show all the tourists (even though the crowd was 99% Malaysians) some Malaysian cultural performances and to have a little taste of Malaysian food. FREE FOOD YO!!

There was satay, bak chang, popiah & samosa, thosai and free kopi o & teh tarik for all…

The samosa / popiah stall… I mainly ate this because erm… easy to eat.

The thosai stall… quite popular with the crowd too.

Satay being erm… grilled? Anyway, this is only for show. If they really grilled all the satay there on the morning itself, there would be a lot of unfed people. They had 3 HUMONGOUS styrofoam boxes filled to the brim with chicken satay to be distributed.

The very friendly teh tarik and kopi o lady. Later only she did the tarik-ing of the teh which I failed to capture, but never mind la, she wasn’t really an expert. She burnt herself, heh. >_<


The bak chang lady… she was so happy & surprised that I took her photo.

In a separate tent, they had some art competition for kids.

As you can see, I was quite free to walk around and take photos. Later on, too many people were there for the free food, but all in all, there wasn’t a huge crowd anyway. I wonder why, it was quite a cool event, and the main thing was to promote visit Malaysia 2007, but they chose to hold it at Plaza Damas? How did they promote this event anyway? I wouldn’t even have known about it if not for the Shopaholics Party.

Back to the event. There was some speeches being given by a Datuk… trying to envoke in us the spirit to VISIT MALAYSIA and to TAKE CARE of all of our public facilities so that we ensure Malaysia’s image as a tourist destination remains pristine. Following that, there were some performances from some school kids from high schools in the surrounding area and also from local arts centers. There were drum performances, dances, singing and self-defense demonstrations.

Pictures again:

The first performance of the day was the drum performance. The Chinese drums started, then the Malay kompangs, then an Indian trumpet & drums performance followed. It ended with all 3 of them playing together. To my ears it was some kind of wonderful noise… hahha.

Wow, these kids sure are strong.

After the individual Chinese drum performance, the kompang boys started their performance. Couldn’t get a good pic of them because they were standing at the side (near the walkway) instead of being on the stage. The reason they couldn’t go on the stage was because the chinese drums were still being cleared off!~~ Anyway, the people in the front row could see them la.

Then all 3 of them played together, but since I don’t have a good camera + lots of other amateur photographers like me + all not on the same stage, I had to take the pictures separately. Here we have the Chinese drummers at the back, and the Indian drummers in front.

And this one here shows the Indian drummers and the kompang boys. Not to show you the fierce looking Indian man striding towards me ok.

Next up was this REALLY talented little girl. Only 13 years old (ok, at first I thought she was 8 – 11 years old, she looks so tiny!), but has more talent than Daniel Lee or Suki or whoever ok. She did a pretty good rendition of Gemilang (of course, not as good as Jaclyn Victor, but she’s got so much potential!), then a chinese song which sounds a bit kiddish but.. she YODELS in it. And not some kinda silly yodelling like in a Ricola advertisement, but genuine authentic yodelling ok. Damn cute. But the WEIRDEST song she sang was “Venus” (Bananarama). Some more she had some kinda supposed to be MTV-ish dance moves thrown in… it was SO reminiscent of the final scene in Little Miss Sunshine ok. Gosh! I wonder why they asked her to sing that song. Can you imagine 13 year old kid singing “I’m your venus, I’m your fire, at your desire!” ?!?! Anyway, she’s a really talented singer, no doubt about it. I think her name is Evonne Teoh (or is it Yvonne?), btw.

The most colorful performance of the day was definitely the “Malaysia – Truly Asia” dance routine. It wasn’t the most coordinated affair, but the children were all dancing and smiling like professionals.

As mentioned earlier, there were performances on the art of self defense. The chinese have their TAEKWONDO, the Japanese have their AIKIDO and the Malays have their SILAT. Watch and learn how to win a 4 against 1 fight with the art of SILAT … even if your opponents are heavily-armed with KERIS…

“Semua lawan saya sekaligus pun saya tak takut!”

2 down, 2 more to go.

The silat demonstration was actually pretty funny ok! The guy kept stepping on his friends once they are on the ground. Really like don’t give face after you’ve defeated the person. Hahaha!! Following that was a professional Indian dance performance. It was really nice to watch, and the jingling of the bangles on their ankles was delightful! Kids, don’t try this at home…

The day ended for me with yet another self-defense demonstration, but this time by very young kids. Like, from 5 – 10 years old? The small Indian girl is sooooo cute, but she looks deadly when she’s wielding a pole!

The Indian guy standing at the side is like their sifoo… he’s giving them all the cues to change position.

Cute little girl gone berserk with a wooden pole.


Don’t know what are the weapons and guards that they are holding are called, but when they were fighting with them, it looked way cool!

Got all that done, and it was only 12:30pm! Great to wake up early on the weekends. After that, had ample time to go to the gym and work out for FOUR HOURS. Wooh! I foresaw an intimate evening with Counterpain after that, but surprisingly I still feel good now! I know I haven’t been very gymratty the past MONTH after my car went into the workshop (by the way, I still don’t have it back. They have postponed it to TUESDAY, wtf!) and me falling sick. I gained weight! About … 1kg? *fearful eyes* I just can’t say no to second rounds of rice and chicken mcnuggets at the moment. Hehehe.

Disappointingly, this was what was in the goodie bag from the event I went to today:

A giant poster, mineral water, and a random flag. O_o” There was also a programme booklet listing down all the activities the government has planned for the year 2007. If you’re interested, in the month of August there will be :
-Malaysia International Fireworks Competition from 18 August – 2 September at Putrajaya. You can see more details here.
-21st Mount Kinabalu International Climbathon 2007 from 25 – 26 August in Sabah. More details here.
-50 Years of Nationhood – Merdeka Month Celebration on 31st August, but of course!
I’ll update on the rest of the months if and when I feel like it. *anti social*

But I really like this badge / pin thingy that they gave! Not like I’m going to wear it on my blazer or whatever, I just think it looks really nice!

Not related to the Visit Malaysia thingy, but I got RM20 in Isetan vouchers for the theme award from last month. Hahaha, to encourage all staff to take part, we were told we would be given RM20 for the first __ amount of participants. I’m selling the vouchers to the sales lady in Uncle’s office cos she likes shopping in Isetan, haha!

And finally to wrap up this totally long-winded entry, I am really addicted to this song by Kubota Toshinobu called “La La La Love Song”. I finally managed to download the mp3… and have been replaying it over and over again. Before I managed to download it, was watching the videos on Youtube of it. I don’t know why I like this song, just can’t explain. Like how I like Shooting Star and Thank You by Home Made Kazoku. The songs give me this hopeful and happy feeling. Although I know “La La La Love Song” is more on heartbreak than happiness… still gives me that happy kinda ache inside.