Happened to be in Penang again, and went to this newly opened Jusco, so close to where my friend lives at Bandar Perda.

This Jusco has quite big pet section compared to others that I’ve seen so far, and this thing attracts my attention.

Even tough it’s been sold under the name of “Dog Tent”, well, I want to call it Cat Tent.

This is how the packaging looks like, and it requires virtually no installation at all. Can be used straight away out of the casing.

As always, I am accompanied by my loyal product tester – Oyen.

All of Oyen’s favorite thing as 1 package – blanket, Bastis Pet Bed and Cat Tent. Life is heaven.

And 2 photos of Oyen fully utilizing this new toy for them.

• 12 Comments

Public holidays for Malaysia this year are so nice. Most of them fall on Sunday, which the next Monday is automatically been made as replacement holiday. What does this mean? It means long weekend.

Chinese New Year for this year also fall on very nice day – Monday and Tuesday. Therefore, I have 4 days to kill. Don’t intent to take leave for the coming Wednesday to Friday. Rather save that for something else.

So, for this long weekend, I’ll be going to 3 different places. First stop – Genting Highland. Book a hotel room there for one night.

Below are a few photos that I managed to take while I’m there around my hotel and indoor erena.

Next stop is Penang. Just visiting friends. Didn’t take any photos there, only a few shots of my friend’s cats. There will be another post on this. Anyway, went to Pantai Bersih to witness the sun eclipse, but too bad, it’s quite cloudy that day and thick cloud cover the sun.

And the final stop is Perlis – my friend mum’s house. Aaahhh.. Finally a break away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

And since Padang Besar is not far from here, that’s my final destination before heading back to KL. Didn’t buy much thing though. I don’t have anything in mind at that moment of what to buy.

• 3 Comments

Every year, for every celebration, my company is sending an e-card to our clients, as an effort to reduce the usage of papers, as our awareness to environment – save more trees. This is the e-card for Chinese New Year this year.

And with this, I would like to wish all my blog readers that will celebrate this – Happy Chinese New Year. Wish you all a happy and prosperous year of Cow!

• 1 Comment

KUALA LUMPUR: Rakyat Malaysia berpeluang menyaksikan gerhana matahari separa pada kira-kira jam 4.30 petang pada 26 Januari ini.

Menurut Agensi Angkasa Negara (Angkasa), gerhana matahari anulus akan berlaku pada tarikh itu selama tiga jam 46 minit bermula dari lautan Hindi ke sebelah Barat Indonesia.

Dalam satu kenyataannya semalam, Angkasa berkata fenomena itu berlaku apabila bulan merentas di hadapan matahari, tetapi tidak menutup matahari sepenuhnya kerana saiz ketara bulan lebih kecil daripada matahari.

“Rakyat Malaysia berpeluang menyaksikan gerhana matahari separa pada kira-kira jam 4.30 petang apabila bulan mula menyentuh cakera matahari. Keadaan ini dikenali sebagai ‘sentuhan pertama’ iaitu permulaan gerhana matahari separa,” kata kenyataan itu.”

Source: Harian Metro, 13th January 2009

Finally, something that I have been keeping for 9 years in my drawer come to use. I got this during my university days, which was in August 1999.

There was total eclipse that year in Europe. And England just got so excited about it, that when I woke up one morning and check for mail, I see this has been distributed to all houses for free. Why is it so? It’s the first visible total eclipse in the United Kingdom since June 29, 1927.

Well, really looking forward for 26th January. Even though only a partial eclipse can be observed here in Malaysia, why miss this rare phenomenon?

• 10 Comments

It’s the talk of the town now – Windows 7 Beta is finally ready to be downloaded. This article at LifeHacker is a good starting point on how to easily download Windows 7 Beta. If everything is ok, you will be getting a product key to be used during the installation.

Now move on to the hard part, especially if you are in Malaysia and on TMnet broadband. Getting the 2.43GB ISO file downloaded. Wow! That’s 7 hours 25 mins to go? I turned out going out on Sunday afternoon, and let the download continue.

Upon reaching home, it’s 2 more hours to go. I’ve waited patiently. And this is the longest 30 mins of my life. I keep looking at the download window to see the progress.

Finally, at 11:32pm, I managed to get the ISO download. It went longer that when it first reported. I started my download at 1:56pm. That’s about 11 hours 30 mins worth of waiting time.

I just hope that ISO is fine. I will be a nightmare to find out that the file that you downloaded is corrupted. I don’t have spare PC to use for testing. I also don’t have any unused hard disk if I were to do dual boot. I also don’t want to risk myself of re-partitioning my current hard disk using Partition Magic or any tools of that kind. My last resort if to use Virtual PC. This is the software that I use a lot at work.

Phew. It’s so relief to see that the ISO boots fine on Virtual PC. Even though it’s late, let’s the installation begins.

The installation went quick smooth, and quite fast as well I have to say. And this is something new that I see during installation – homegroup password – to be used to add another computer to the group. This has been called WORKGROUP since the release of Windows 3.11 Workgroup. Now they calling it homegroup for home PCs. It’s time.

Finally, the installation has finished, and Windows 7 is booting for the first time. I kinda like the Windows logo animation during the start up.

The login screen. No different from the one that you see on Vista, but,

once you get the desktop, I have to say the the look is very refreshing. I kinda like how the taskbar looks like. Now it’s only showing icon, pretty much the same thing as how MacOS shows opened application on its dock.

The sidebar is no longer here this time. Well, in Vista, that is really something that uses lots of resources when enabled. It’s good to see it’s gone. I never actually use that sidebar anyway in Vista. This time, the gadgets can be drag directly onto desktop.

Overall, speed is something that has been improved a lot in Windows 7. And with me running it on Virtual PC where I share hard disk read time, memory and CPU cycle with my main OS – I can feel the speed, it will be a lot better I suppose if this is running on dedicated machine for itself, with I don’t have that luxury this time.

• 5 Comments

It’s that time of the year again – getting 13th month salary (bonus). Decided to save 80% of that. It shouldn’t be about the saving only. This is the time that I want to spend my hard earned money. As what I keep telling myself, it’s better to buy something – at least you will see something. Believe me, money can gone just like that, where at the end of the day, you don’t really even know what you spend at.

My office’s notebook harddisk space is getting low and low everyday.

The email that I’m getting and replying everyday grows really fast in size. Without you knowing, 1GB of space is already occupied by those email.

There’s where my crazy idea came – getting external hard disk for office you. I guess it will be cheaper to buy a bare hard disk, and then shop for external enclosure. But this time I really fancy of getting the out-of-the-box external hard disk. This is the one I’m getting – Western Digital My Book Home Edition – 500GB with USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and eSata interface.

But there’s an USB 2.0 1TB version available, with the price not far from this one, but I have my own reason of getting this one.

First, I only have 4 USB ports at my office laptop, and all 4 are occupied already by wireless mouse, LifeChat headphone, iPod and HTC Touch Pro.

Second, I have FireWire port at my laptop. Better utilize this rather than buying USB port, which I found really messy.

Third, FireWire works without controller, where devices communicate peer to peer, meaning it doesn’t use the processor cycle. So in the event computer is running CPU intensive application, the data rete for FireWire is not affected by this – i.e. it remains constant.

The unboxing process as usual.

I’m quite overwhelmed by the number of cables provided here. 2 power cords (2 pin and 3 pin one), USB cable and FireWire cable. But if you plan to connect this to eSata port on your computer, you have to buy the cable on your own.

And here’s how the back looks like – power port, USB port, eSata port, 2 FireWire ports and reset switch.

The FireWire cable that is provided in the box is 6-pin/6-pin one. Too bad that my laptop has the 4-pin FireWire port, thus making me have to buy this 4-pin/6-pin cable.

Ever wonder why this product is called My Book? Well, it does look like a book, and fit my book rack perfectly ;)

So, I guess this is my first toy for 2009.

• 11 Comments

Today marks the 6th year Synovate is around. This company in Malaysia has been around for 11 years already, with the name of Asia Market Intelligence (AMI) prior re-branded to Synovate.

So this year in Malaysia, we celebrate this company’s birthday with lots and lots of cupcakes. Yummy!

I myself ate 6 of those. LOL.

HAPPY 6TH BIRTHDAY SYNOVATE!

• 0 Comments

It’s the last day of the New Year holiday before we all start working again tomorrow. Sigh! Before my Penang friends embarking themselves back there, they decided to stop by at Ikea first to buy a thing or two (well, one of them bought full load of trolley. LOL)

I didn’t notice that Ikea has a section for pets as well. For the trip this time I’m getting Bastis Basket for Pets and Bastis Cat/Dog Bed.

If you’ve been following about my cats, you should know by now which cat is the first one to test any new things that I bought. Well, it’s none other than Oyen.

Placing this on my bed would be a good sleeping spot for him. No more of him sleeping on my blanket I hope ;)

See the damage at the back of my bed? That is all Oyen’s doing from his scratching.

• 5 Comments

Second day of 2009, I’m taking leave on this day thus make my New Year holiday is quite a long one. Me and other 12 members decided to back to nature this time – spending the night at Sungai Congkak Park & Resort.

Well. Not that back to nature actually. We rented 2 chalet there instead of camping. It’s more convenience and comfortable that way.

Upon reaching there and after settling down, the first activity that they do is to swim in the river. Well, you know right that I’m water phobic? Well suffered that from a little incident that happened when I was 6. I settle down with even more safer activities – taking photos. LOL

How time flies so fast when you are having fun. Without knowing, it almost dinner time already. Better to start cooking for tonight’s dinner before it gets dark.

No instant food here. Dinner is prepared right from the raw ingredient that we brought, inline with the theme of us getting back to nature.

All raw ingredients are ready for cooking…

…and the final product – Fried Rice for dinner tonight…

…and compliment that with BBQ will be really delicious. So next, BBQing session.

The fun part of BBQing is getting the fire started. It such a nice thing to see how the black coal transform into reddish hot thing.

And the so not likable thing of BBQing is to flip over the meat regularly so it is evenly cooked.

But out of all, the most fun part is to taste the final product.

Everybody gets tired after the dinner. The ghost bedtime story telling is always a nice thing to do at place like this. Well, we actually did that. Luckily I fell asleep earlier that night. Do you want to be awake alone in the solitary of a jungle late at night? LOL

• 4 Comments

Before the very first day of 2009 closes itself, I guess I want to have my first entry of 2009 on this day as well. Didn’t actually celebrate it anywhere last night. Decided to go to Putrajaya, but my fried who is working there said that there’s nothing at Putrajaya, plus the road being too congested, just decided to met a few friends around Puchong area.

New year’s resolutions? Just too lazy to come out with one now. Perhaps I’ll do that at some other entry. Review of past year’s resolutions? Well, most of it are just having too big scope to measure. But the thing of me buying a new house in 2008 is quite an accomplishment for 2008. Controlling my financial – well, I see improvement, but I want to improve more this year.

Anyway, wishing everybody a happy new year. I guess this is just another tough year, with so many opinions and analysis that the economy will get really bad this year.

• 2 Comments