A classic parody of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”
And this is a live performance record by Gloria Gaynor, singing I Will Survive. Absolutely beautiful performance. The tune’s so catchy you won’t realise your body’s rocking!
I can summarise my just-concluded holiday trip as this: falling down from 15,000ft up at 200km/h, and climbing back up again to 2000m. And that was simply, simply awesome.
The skydiving experience was just unforgettable. Steadily climbing up from the ground to 15,000 ft (about 4.6km) in the small skydiving plane from Taupo airport, I didn’t think about what I was about to do. The view was nice to take in, and at that high an altitude I can see the whole of Lake Taupo, a lake with a size bigger than Singapore, and more. The tandem master tightens the harness that attaches me to him, while cracking some jokes along the way. It was not until the first person went out of the plane that the realisation of what I was about to do suddenly hit me, and it crunches me to the gut. It was the “oh my God, oh my God, oh my God” kind of gut crunching, as I watched one by one of my friends went out of the plane’s door. When all my three friends have already jumped out, the tandem master pushes me to the edge of the plane’s door, and I can see now the landscape below, the water and land, 15000ft below my feet, with literally nothing in between.
The very first moment my body fell out of the plane and into the air, I felt like my heart dropped, and everything else that happens afterwards is better told by videos and pictures rather than words. Continue Reading
I never thought I would actually write this post. This is truly an act of frustration.
I humbly request each and every one of you internet users out there that are still using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to do any of these actions:
Both the above softwares can be legally downloaded for free.
Why, you might ask, the need to change? “IE6 has been working fine for me since time immemorial. Why should I bother to change?” Well my friend, let me explain.
IE6 is an old technology. It was first released 9 years ago. Since then, a lot of newer and more modern browsers have come out, like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, even Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. These newer, modern browsers support newer technologies that allow for more engaging and interactive web experience, which many of them are not supported by IE6. We web developers are very, very keen to integrate these new technologies into the websites that we build so that you, the end user, may experience a more engaging and interactive web experience. Continue Reading
If you can install just one and only one add-on to your Firefox browser, let it be Adblock Plus.
The internet is a wonderful place, but it can be better. Internet as an advertisement medium has been growing bigger and bigger every single year. More and more companies, organisations, and websites are putting ads all over the internet. Almost everywhere you go, you’ll see those banners floating around the contents you want. Sometimes they’re benign, just a little text links pointing to websites or services that are relevant to the content you’re viewing. At other times, they’re just downright annoying, offering you prizes you could never win, or explicit images that are sure to draw unwanted attention from your friends and families passing behind you. Even worse, there are times when the only thing separating your wonderful computer from streams of obtrusive and abusive pop-ups and, the most dreaded of all, viruses and worms and spywares and what-nots, is just a single click to that fancy colourful banner image.
So yeah, there’s no doubt to that: the internet is infested with ads. They annoy us, they slow down page load, and they can trick us or appeal to that side of us we’re not so proud of.
Which is why you should never miss out from installing the Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox. It blocks almost all ads from every page you view, not just hiding them from your view, but completely blocks Firefox from even loading the ads. The result? A faster-loading, cleaner webpages everytime. Continue Reading
I have been wondering why Malaysia doesn’t have a minimum wage law. In New Zealand, every single employer are obligated by law to pay at least NZ$12.50 per hour to their employees, regardless of their profession or position in the company. That means everybody, including people who sweeps the floor and clean houses (a lot of students do this), gets paid at least NZ$12.50 per hour.
Which is why I was rather appalled when my mom told me that the 7 Eleven outlet near my house is paying its shopkeeper around RM650 a month, for working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. In New Zealand, the employer would be obligated by law to pay the shopkeeper at least NZ$2600 a month. That’s a lot of difference.
Currently, NZ$1.00 equals to around RM2.40. However, it is important to note that even though its currency is higher compared to us, the numerical value of the products sold there is only slightly higher than the prices over here. This means that if it costs us around RM2.50 for a packet of 10 regular-sized eggs, over there it’s only a little bit higher than that numerically, around NZ$3.00. This means that dollar-by-dollar, it follows that at least we should be paid a minimum wage of RM12.50 per hour or more. But we’re not. Continue Reading
It’s amazing how far games have evolved, not just in terms of graphics, but also in terms of the physics simulation, artificial intelligence, storyline, as well as gamer’s immersibility and varied gameplay mechanics. When it comes to judging games, the best we can do is shortlist a few, and let personal preferences crown the best. With so many games within so many genres, it is equally valid for one person to say Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series as the best games ever, and another to say the title goes to The Sims series.
However, as far as graphics is concerned, there can be only one clear winner: Crysis Warhead. Released in 2008 using the same game engine as the original Crysis, it is still to date the best-looking game. Having said that, it is still nowhere near real-life looking. While the movie industry has already achieved seamless artificial world simulation, as shown by James Cameron’s Avatar, the gaming industry still has a long way to go.
I believe the limitation is due to the hardware capabilities of the consumers – our home computers are simply not powerful enough, yet. Movies like Avatar, though much of the world is simulated, are preproduced. The production company took care of all the processing power needed to render the amazingly life-like world. We just play back the movie, frame by frame, where every single frame is fixed, that the movie become nothing more than just a series of still pictures being displayed one after another, at a rate of about 25 pictures per second. This is nothing for our average computer. Whereas in games, it’s an entirely different story. Because the very nature of gaming is to allow the gamer control of the character, there’s no way to preproduce all the still pictures. Every time you move your mouse and changes the view, your computer will have to process and render what to display – including all the physics, the lightings, the shadows, the details, the colours, the shapes, the highlights, the brightness and contrasts – on the fly, in at most one twentieth of a second’s time to maintain a playable frame rate. This requires tremendous amount of processing power, so little wonder then that geek next door spent so much on his PC. Continue Reading
To a certain extent I believe it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that reading is just not in our culture. We don’t buy and read books like, say, we watch TV. Having said that, it does seem to me that reading is gaining popularity among teenagers, albeit slowly. But then again, maybe it’s just me. Truth is, I don’t have any reliable mechanism to gauge how often people around my age read these days, how many books and what kind of book that we read. I conducted a several-question survey some time ago asking exactly these questions. Even though I would admit that the survey was nowhere representative of the population, the result wasn’t very promising.
Generally, most of us are divided into three groups: those that read mainly fictions, those that read mainly non-fictions, and those that reads nothing else than their course textbooks and revision notes.
When I first started reading books several hundreds page long, they were all fictions. That was when I was in secondary school, and my primary reason for reading was to improve my English, which I did, apart from for fun, of course. As my English reading and writing skills gradually improve, I no longer read to improve my English, but rather, for fun. It was like watching TV, only those fiction novels provided much greater detail, most of the times for better, and sometimes for worse. During those days, I didn’t usually buy the books myself – heck, I don’t have the money. So I tend to read the books my sister bought, and because my sister didn’t only buy fiction books, so it was natural that when boredom took over and I’ve exhausted all the fiction books, I decided to pick up that inch-thick non-fiction book and took it for a ride. Continue Reading
Bored of the long holiday and nothing to do at home, I decided to pack my hiking backpack and went up the Titiwangsa Ridge to do a hike up Mt. Brinchang in Cameron Highlands. Of course, I didn’t just all of sudden decided to go and went up there. Planned it a few days before, invited Mr Masukor and Syed along, and off we went. My dad decided to drive us there. Being a geologist by practice, we had a good explanation from him about all the rock and geological formation we encountered along the way.
It was awesome. The trail started from the small town of Brinchang, at about 1500m up towards the peak of Mt. Brinchang at 2031m through jungle trail, and down again through paved road that winds down the mountain, passing along vegetable farms and tea plantation. The total distance was about 11km. We took about 4 hours and 30 minutes to complete the hike, photo-taking and rest-stop inclusive.
A few days ago I went to visit my former teachers in Sri KDU, and had a good chat with Mr Masukor. At one point in the middle of an interesting talk regarding boarding school, he told me that one of his student told him that she has never known any Chinese friends before. Then he also told me that a parent of one of the Chinese student expressed her concern of having her son to stay in the same house with Malay kids, citing that her son have never known any Malay friends before. And yet we boast about being a multiracial country, that our cultural diversity is our strength, that our racial harmony is something to be proud of.
But in reality, though we live side by side, we don’t live with each other. Our racial harmony may well be a by-product of ignorance, of not caring what the other races are doing, of non-interfering and very little interaction with each other, limited to only the occasional meeting in taxis and sundry shops and checkout lanes, where even then we barely talk to each other. This is certainly nothing to be proud of. Instead of the individual races being interwoven with each other to create the very fabric of our multiracial society, it is more like separate strands of ropes that don’t even touch.
Why is this so? I believe that in part – a huge part – our education system is to blame for. For any kids, schools are the best place for them to make friends. Many of us live in a racially clustered society – the Malays live where most (if not all) of the neighbours are Malays, and the same goes for the Chinese and Indians. The only place we can really bring our kids together is at school. And yet the Chinese and Indians send their kids to vernacular schools, where the other races make up of maybe less than 5% of the population. The Malays send their sons and daughters to boarding schools, where again less than 5% of the population are of the other races. In fact, in many boarding schools, there are no Chinese or Indian students at all. Little wonder then when these Malay kids and Chinese kids and Indian kids finish school and join the larger Malaysian society, they don’t know how to react with the reality of our social fabric. Continue Reading
Every time I open my Firefox browser, I usually will do one thing before anything else: check the Twitter statuses of those I follow. Usually this takes only a few seconds as all the updates get delivered right at the bottom bar of the browser. Sometimes I reply to some tweets, sometimes I follow some links and have an interesting read. And sometimes, funny things that people tweet make me smile. And this is just one of those:
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