Langkawi LIMA 2007

Have wanted to experience air show all my life, but never really got the chance. But LIMA changed all that, now that I have heard the sound of aircraft flying close with afterburner on, and also smell the smoking fume from fighter jet, I think I can rest my craving...

So next stop is to fly a plane with the stick...

Anyway, besides airshow, the main reason is also to take a break, away from routine, away from life. So what else is there at that small island?

I know my *friends* forced me to drink alot of absolute fokca & take obscene photos of me when I was drunk. I might have some foreign object forced into my body for all I know, as I was happily drunk on my bed on both nights.

Besides that also have chance to visit the places around, really a nice place to live, not hectic, no traffic jam and the air does feel bit more fresh. Surroundings either sea or trees....

Somewhere in pantai Cenang


Somewhere in some yacht zone


Somewhere near cable car outpost


The total % breakdown in expenditure below could really sum up the whole experience..

• Nearly half of my spendings are for food, basically the 3 of us did not settle for normal local food - the western food is ok only, but thai food at pantai cenang not bad, Mahathir's roti shop very expensive, the typical local food is just so-so

• Next follow up with transportation - the price during LIMA is not cheap, have to thanks Edwin for securing a cheaper alternative (rent a car in land, instead of jetty), the rest is petrol and cab to jetty

• Entertainment and accomodation was last on the list with NO signficant spendings to be reported, LIMA fees of RM20 also included in this category.
  
  
  Overall, the trip is fun and nice, but will not go again since there is no repeatitive value in this island as there are better beaches, better booze (not cheaper) and better place with leng lui.... too bad KY cannot join me for this :(

and things can be better if Alvino did not treat this vacation like a sleeping tour, the whole trip like he just wanted to rest his tired body.

Starting on the day to Langkawi ferry he sleep

LIMA also he wanted to sleep

Take cab also sleepy

Sleep king and smiling queen...

Anyway, thanks guys for the great trip, lets plan for another one :P

Long time no post

I haven't been posting for the past 2 months, actually alot has been going on, financial, family, work.... shit, work must be the biggest headache. Then there's hobby and wish list....
Stucked in the whirlwind of revolution. Hope reformation took place ASAP.

Reality or Game?

Looks like games nowadays are getting more and more realistic, I used to think my PS2 are one of the greatest gaming console because of its great processor (at that time) and there has been rumor during the launch that Japan is restricting its sale because of potential baddies might use the PS2 processor to power guidance missile or some crap. But apparently things have change for the better, nowadays PC games have evolve into something very detail and crisp, we have dunno-what-generation-gaming-console out in the market (Wii, PS3, xbox360..etc) and they are now nicer than any of the graphics I have seen as a gamer myself.

I remember last time we have great games like Doom, Heretic and Quake…. They are good games (at that point of time) and we are happily fragging in cybercafé or home LAN party. But now the games have changed, one of the example I have is when I came across this GT4 comparison site, and being a car freak, I still could only score 10/14 !!! The graphics nowdays really are pushing our eyes to the limit.

If you are free, click here and try it out.

So many priority in life right now, I am not sure whether PS3 is really worth to put on the list, after all, I can't stay in this state forever... the hell with grow up

Street driving pt. 1

Street driving is a complicated art, the survivability depends highly on the ability to adapt (change), techniques to overcome challenge and of course a little bit of luck, all of this to get the joy and suffer from commuting process. It is exactly what Fort Minor sing in their song “Remember the name!”, its 10% luck, 20% skills, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and a 100% reason to remember the name”. If there is ever a statistic to compare the accident rate between average Joe and Ah Beng racer, I would put my money on Ah Beng when it comes to safe journey. Why? We have seen many reckless asshole that plough the road with their crazy high speed zig-zagging and uber acceleration but we seldom see them involve in any serious accident. On the contrary we have young kids driving on their father’s BMW 3 series and got killed when they skidded on the corner and hit a tree; we have people accident when they lane switch from auxiliary lane to main road; we have people rear ended another car during a downpour and the road is wet…. So many cases, why those ah beng didn’t die?
Answer is simple, they knew the condition of the car and environment better than a typical Joe.

• They knew their Goodyear Eagle GA is a non-directional tyre, so its water characteristics sux, they know not to speed during the first phase of rain coz oil from the road will be virtually ‘floating’ around which makes the road very slippery.

• They knew the limit of the car during high speed cornering because they have ‘frequent’ that zone, they know what speed is safe for such corner and will their car sensitive to porthole



• They knew their braking ability of their car and will find a way to avoid accident if they see the braking distance is too close, rather than an average Joe who pray to god so that the brakes will save them



• They knew their acceleration rate of their car and know whether will beat the red lights or not

But if you ask a typical Joe whether he knows any of the statement above, I can bet with you they knew not more than half of it. Partly because they are ignorant and do not think the knowledge is critical to their survival on the street. I have my first accident when I underestimated the power of 140kmh, or another word, the handling of a 1000kg car running at 140kmh is not linear as you are driving on 80kmh. To stop within 50m is ridiculous in stock standard form. That is why I hit the back of a bike (luckily with no casualty), this is a costly lesson because I have to pay to repaint my bumper, but it also taught me power without handling is useless. So I know adjustable will have its value…

The point of this post is to enlighten people especially the average Joe type to love the ones you dear most and don’t drive ignorantly on the road. The bastard who drove like an arse will meet his doom one day if he is not good enough, no point cursing him/her because he/she is entitled to the road as much as you. Just be defensive when driving and you will reach your destination in your expected time.

Perception of mother land

Do you have the respect you expected from your workplace? Do your ring of peers acknowledge your level and give you the honor and listen to you the way you deserve? Respect has been a main attribute to shape the world we have today, every developed nation fight their way to obtain their success WWII started because after Germany signed the Versailles treaty, the alliance pact implemented restriction and try to subjugate the country, being a nation of people who think they are the ‘ultimate people’, they lost the thing that they once have – respect. So with that they try to win it back by launching WWII, a war that went wrong in the middle of the course but what is important is the reason for them to launch the war – To reclaim their honor and respect.
Japan got their respect when they have workers dedicated to their job and future, by bringing a nation that have taken 2 nuclear blast at their home soil, not to mention losing the war, only to bring it back to full industrial strength in less than 30 years. We have South Korea coming up the radar of respect, with 50 years ago, ranked 1st as the poorest country in Asia after suffering a long war with North Korea. Not anymore after they have achieved world recognition in car making, shipbuilding & electronics.

In order to get respect, the people of the nation itself must also feel proud of themself first, but sadly we aren’t. If we take a survey, there is a high percentage that the Chinese of this country is the most degenerated among Asia region, lets take Singapore for example, they have a very screwed up mentality and they are slave to credit card, just like Taiwan, but they live a couple of standards higher than majority of us, that makes them feel superior and indirectly they seemed to made more contribution to the world. This might be a fucked up way of seeing it but we can’t deny its true. We might be happy with a RM3k a month salary but people in the world are already working towards RM30k a month.

So despite all the crap, why are we still here in this fvcked up country? Alot of concerns apparently, most were still here because:

• they believe out there, you'll be treated as 3rd tier citizen
• we have a commitment to our family here in our mother land
• naturally changes are unwelcomed as it disrupt the status quo of an already functioning system
• the items we gain here is enough to bring us through till old age
• they afraid its difficult to get a job out there if they leave their company here
• they never ponder the possibility of leaving

If we look through our history, we can see that chinese is one that does not dare to take the big leap. Ever since we got forced to smoke those damn heroin i guess.

Therefore the future of our mother land is at our hand, do I see a future with it? Do I feel proud of it able to walk in space and crap? Seriously... nope. But maybe I'll let the next generation to worry about that.

New sports: Tennis!

Started my first game of tennis after 27 years of existence, I must admit this may be the worst sports I ever played in my life, with ugly serving, wrong forehand, pathetic backhand, bad return and virtually zero ball control, I am amaze that only 1 ball was strike out of bound (fly out of the confinement zone).
The game lasted 2 hours with 2 players, another 1 would volunteer to collect the balls which oh-so-frequently blocked by the net. Luckily my stamina is still there.

So wanna say thanks to Jeebs for the tennis racquet, its the first step towards moulding the next Pete Sampras, all I need to do is to get the forehand right, master the backhand to fix the problem of ball coming at my LHS, and also develope a more beautiful serve. Then I would probably ace my way towards total domination.

Can't wait to play in the Malaysia open and beat Michael Chang's ass :P

Dark age of PC gaming

Have been a gamer all my life, since the beginning of time. My first computer game if I remember correctly is "digger", a somewhat boring game that always got died at level 4.
Those are the age of "frogger", "buck roger", "space invader", "and the all famous "Pacman" time, thanks to my dad who forked out an awful lot of money to buy the first commercial PC (x8086 from Intel) when I was about 8 years old

Then I got the first Pentium-75 with Trident SVGA video card at the age of 14 and started to play games like the famous "F-19, Mechwarrior, and Command and Conquer. I still remember those days where I would play repeatedly for the different ending and experimenting with silly tactics and idea...

At 19 years old gaming moved to my college period with Pentium III-450 running on nVidia TNT2 AGP interface with the game of Half life, Mecharrior3, Homeworld, Counterstrike, Warcraft III, Age of Empire II, GTA III and many many more...

Then now at 27, my dad brought himself an Intel Core 2 Duo with GeForce 8600 GT with PCI Express. I was obviously excited and happy that my gaming experience will get to continue for at least the next 8 years or so!!! So after some hiccup during the installation and setup, it was good to go!

Without wasting much time, I excitedly use the new computer to surf gamespot for the BEST game around to check out the new computer's capability, to my surprise the list hasn't much change since my Pentium III era.
If one notice properly, majority of the games are 1997-2004!!! Unbelievably stupid of the software house to NOT coming out quality games I would say.

So never mind, I knew a game which is good since playing with Jeebs at cybercafe - Company of Heroes. So straight go and buy and became the first game to be installed in the new PC. Not bad for the campaign, but currently lack of any nice games in mind... in fact the long awaiting Starcraft2 doesn't look good compare to CoH on the demo :(

The main reason for these is probably due to the changes in PC game publisher / maker, as we all know, Westwood, Virgin Interactive, Sierra, Blizzard and rockstar are some of the top game maker, occasionally we have rogue publisher that make it once in a while like Epic Games (Unreal ONLY) and Barking Dog (Homeworld: Cataclysm) which only made 1 or 2 hitz before biting the dust.... but there are alot of acquisition movement in the field that caused many to be disappeared from the face of the earth like Westwood, KOEI (anyone still remember this?) and virgin interactive... I believe we will continue to have sux game for a few more years before the age of PC Games enlightenment is upon us.

Please give us a 10.0 game in the near future!

Transformer the movie

Never really a transformer fan myself, it was part of my child's routine to watch this, along with many others like He-Man: The master of the Universe, Silverhawk, Thundercats and the likes... then later it evolves to Baja Hitam, Robotech, then onwards to Initial D, slamdunk with now a loyal fans of hentai..... *cough* anyway, transformer wasn't really my cup of tea, those blocky robots aren't anywhere as cool as Gundam and Macross anyway, but 2 weeks ago my perception changed.

It was on GSC at Pacific 2 weeks ago, have to say this is by far the best movie I've seen for 2007. I did not read any review and critic's comment before going, and I was purely expecting a skirmish type of engagement fight between Optumus and Megatron with the typical "You slap me, I slap you back" kind of battle, what started out in the first 10 minute is just simply amazing, Qatar airbase got pawned by just 1 Decepticon unit to oblivion...


The aircraft used in the movie is also quite sentimental as there are the latest air force F-22 Raptor, the symbolic AC-130H with an integrated howitzer artillery piece used during Afghanistan & Iraq war, and the cute A-10 Thunderbolt II, which was my all time favourite. Most of the aircraft does not show in any major film and their appearance really make the DVD worth getting :)


So therefore not all anime --> CGI animation movie sux, this one definately spells exception. Overall this movie deserve a 9/10 rating with good action, plot and casting all together. It wouldn't be surprise if this made it to some of the nomination later.