Consistently inconsistent

I'm extraordinarily ordinary, with an amazingly mundane ability to talk circles on the subject of squares. I swear politely at wonderful idiots and am one of the many to be able to clearly speak gibberish.

My wonderfully articulate mumble has charmed many. Those who are angelically bitchy are treated to a graceful extension of my perfectly malformed middle finger. I then walk away, glancing back and ignoring their hurt expression at being praised.

I always leave them wanting to smother me with disaffection. On my bad days, I allow myself to treat them like the princess that they aren't. One of us always end up joyously unhappy but I can always figure out who.

I am evolving!

I just vacuumed my apartment. Ok...you may stop laughing now. C'mon! I'm not THAT spoiled! Sigh...

Anyway, I just cleaned up my apartment. Notice I said 'clean'. My apartment is still untidy!

I also bought fruits for myself. I have to admit that the quality of food I'm eating here is close to garbage. Ok...I'm exaggerating but seriously, I'm used to way better quality of food back home. The sushi's fine I guess but the good stuff is more expensive than I'm willing to pay. Sure, you can get a meal for 500 yen. However, that meal will consist of rice and some meat or fish (being cooked is optional). No vegetables, which means no source of vitamins and minerals. A really crappy diet. Hence, me with my bag of grapes. I'd buy apples or oranges next time once I find a nearer fruit stall to my apartment. I'm *not* going to carry a big bag of apples/oranges across 10 train stops...

As the food is generally cheap and horrible or good and expensive, I'm now spending my free time checking out search results for "cooking for 1" on google. Yup, I'm independent, standing on my own two feet and all that crap.

I think I might be succumbing to the dark side and actually become a 21st century man who cooks and clean. Holy shit...

Well...I had nothing to do the other day so I decided to take a personality quiz!

You Are An INTP

The Thinker You are analytical and logical - and on a quest to learn everything you can. Smart and complex, you always love a new intellectual challenge. Your biggest pet peeve is people who slow you down with trivial chit chat. A quiet maverick, you tend to ignore rules and authority whenever you feel like it. In love, you are an easy person to fall for. But not an easy person to stay in love with. Although you are quite flexible, you often come off as aloof or argumentative. At work, you are both a logical and creative thinker. You are great at solving problems. You would make an excellent mathematician, programmer, or professor. How you see yourself: Creative, fair, and tough-minded When other people don't get you, they see you as: arrogant, cold, and robotic

What's Your Personality Type?

I YAM AH MAAN!

I just reaffirmed my manliness. After a year of driving a car with an automatic transmission, I drove a stick shift earlier tonight. No stalled engine makes me a happy man. :)

Random thought for 15/05/2008

I'm currently attending Cisco QoS training and this training involves some mathematical formula to calculate stuff. Outta the blue, it made me think about maths.

What is zero divided by zero? Is it zero, one or infinity? :P

6 weird things about me

A friend of mine tagged me to write 6 weird things about me. If you're curious, his blog posting's at http://championloser.blogs.friendster.com/loser_club_president/2007/05/6_weird_things_.html

I can't think really think of any weird things about myself. I'm probably weird in some ways but I just don't know it. As such this list is going to be a list of things about me not many people know. Hopefully that's good enough for you, Zaki!

1. In my profile, I put one of my interests as "books". That may be a slight understatement. I'm an avid reader and I literally devour books. For those who've visited me at my place, one of their first comments are "Wow, you have a lot of books..."
2. I play the guitar. To be honest though, I was never really that interested in music when I was younger. I did take organ lessons when I was much younger but I got bored with it. I wanted to play songs that I heard on radio and my tutor was telling me stuff about a bunch of black dots. Suffice to say that my motivation level to practice organ wasn't very high at that stage. Anyway, when I was Form 2 or Form 3, I took up playing guitar. I was very much in love (hey, we all went through those puppy love stages so cut my some slack) with this girl and wanted to impress her. She had such a beautiful voice. She could sing The Cranberries very well. I decided to take up guitar playing. My first song on the guitar? Zombie. ;)
3. I almost got into a fight in a bar. I was chillin' around Q-Bar quite some time ago when I saw this girl sitting kinda alone at the bar. She was talking with some guys but it didn't look like she was with any of them. She had a sad, wistful smile that sorta tugged the heart strings. Ok, so I have a White Knight complex. Don't worry though, I'm looking for therapy right now. Know anyone good? Anyway, I approached her, we started talking and laughing when suddenly this guy came outta nowhere and started pushing me. I was getting a bit pissed. I'm not a violent person but the temptation to push the fella back was quite strong. He kept saying "What the fuck are you doing? She's my girlfriend!". As for the chick, she was getting a bit hysterical. I swear they did not look like they're a couple. They're not holding hands. They're not touching each other. For god's sake, about the only thing they did was share a cigarette. C'mon, I've done that before with some of my girl friends. That doesn't mean I'm in a relationship with them! Oh yeah, cigarettes. Maybe that's item 4. Heh! Anyway, I decided it wasn't worth it. Well, actually some stranger nearby persuaded me not to. That stranger's words? Something along the lines off "C'mon bro, it's not worth it la. Relax la. Chill!". So I walked away. I gotta admit it was a bit fun glowering at the so called boyfriend while the fella was pushing me. He's shorter than me so I was looking down at him when I was glowering. Sometimes being moderately tall is useful. God...I can be so petty sometimes...
4. I used to smoke. Not anymore though but there's nothing really stopping me from smoking again. I even bought a bunch of cigars from Langkawi which I plan to smoke sometime in the future. Haven't found anything to celebrate yet though so the cigar pack stays unopened. Oh, the main reason I stopped smoking? It gave me a funny feeling at the back of my throat and messed up with my sense of taste. I like food WAY more than I like cigarettes. Heck, I could barely tolerate smoking. Don't really understand why people would wanna smoke...
5. I drink booze. Yes I know it's haram. Yes I know I'm going to go to hell. My reasons for drinking is personal and pretty much none of your business. Of course, I'd also like to point out that I fast, I hardly ever miss Friday prayers, I pay my zakat and I'm completely and utterly faithful to the concept that only Allah is my God and Muhammad is my prophet. I know, I'm a blooming hypocrite. I prefer to refer myself as a wonderful mess of contradictions though. :D
6. I've dated many women, all of them wonderful people. Among the memories I have, some of the best includes ice-skating, eating some weird dessert in the middle of the night somewhere in KL and pizza session in Taman Tun. Of all the women I've dated, I've confessed my feelings to only one person. Shocking, eh? I know, it's the new millennium. I should be expressing my love to everyone. Don't worry, I'm also looking for therapy options on this one.

There you have it. 6 things about me that not many people know.

Malay as a second language...

Do I really talk Malay like a foreigner? If I do, man...that's so sad...

I mean c'mon! My vocabulary in Malay language is excellent! Ok, so I don't have any Malay accent but whaddya expect from someone who's born in PJ and lived in KL/PJ area for pretty much his entire life? I can't really have a Kelantanese accent now, can I? ;)

On the other hand, when I speak English people think I'm a native English speaker. I get a lot of "Hey, you're English is pretty good!" statements from people.

Of course, the puffing up of my ego is tempered by the fact that I apparently speak Malay in a funny (as in weird, not haha) way. Sigh...

Weekend, going...going...gone! (plus some year end reflection)

Argh...there goes my weekend, all THREE days of it.

On Friday, I left work at exactly 5 pm. Heh, I was looking forward to the 3 day weekend and couldn't wait for it to start! I arrived at gym at about 7 pm and was happily jogging when I got a phone call from my manager.

"Amir, what are you doing tomorrow? We need you to attend a technical meeting with customer. It should be between 2 pm to 5 pm only. See if you can find out what's causing the problem."

2 pm to 5 pm? It didn't sound so bad. Even though it's a Saturday, the problem seems like an interesting challenge so why not? Did some preparation, played FM2007 to relax and had a good sleep. Next day afternoon, I went for the meeting. To keep a long story short (and also avoid giving confidential information!), meeting was from 2 pm all the way to 8.30 pm. So much for a short one. After all the discussion, we've arrived at an action-plan which involves me working from Monday night entering Tuesday morning. To make things more interesting, I then have a meeting (on a completely different issue) back in office at 10 am Tuesday. Heh, no rest for the wicked! Hmm...maybe I can claim emergency allowance...

So, Saturday technical meeting, Sunday emails and planning, Monday night work. Oh, and Tuesday morning meeting and Tueday afternoon more backbone fun! While I love my work (it's challenging and never boring!), it does get tiring. As soon as I'm done with my current project, I'm looking for a nice break next year. Maybe go to some beach or something and enjoy the seaside. Then again, if there's something interesting on, maybe I'll postpone my vacation and work some more. ;)

Hmm...looking back, I've been doing a lot of stuff this past year. I've done implementation and integration on SGSN, GGSN, Juniper routers, Extreme switches, Funk RADIUS servers, Bind DNS servers, Netscreen firewalls and SUN Solaris servers. I've also done backbone integration with VAS nodes such as SMS, MMS, WAP, Video Gateway and Video Mail. Beyond that I've done a large number of network trace analysis on Sigtran traffic for Video Gateway (H.323 and Megaco protocols mainly). All in all, I'd say it was a rather productive year. I'm looking forward to what next year will bring. :)

PS: Warning, bragging ahead! Did you know that I set up the first GGSN in the Ericsson world that handled HSDPA in a commercial network? I did that last year in Philippines. :D

It's been a while...

Yup, it's been a while since I typed my blog. Various reasons for this really, but among other things, it's been a quite hectic life for me.

What can I say? At the start of October, I'm fully involved with a project to build up the entire backbone for a new mobile service provider. It's a rather massive job which I'm doing together with an expert from Australia. Now let me say again that it's been an absolute pleasure working in my present company. Ericsson has some of the finest engineers around and it's been an absolute privilege and honour to work with them. I think I can consider myself very lucky since I'm learning a lot of things that I can't get anywhere else by talking and discussing stuff with them. I'm sure you all already know. The best way to learn is not from books or classes, but from the people who has actually done it.

The first stage of the backbone was completed after 3 days, first circuit call (voice & video) after 7 days and first packet call (data transfer & web browsing) after 8 days. Imagine, all that accomplished in a total of 8 days! Until now, I'm still amazed at how we managed to accomplish all that. Keep in mind, we started the implementation with unconfigured hardwares and softwares and after 8 days, the core network was essentially completed. What was missing are external connectivities such as connections to other mobile networks (Celcom, etc) and to the international gateway. I love working with amazing people! :D

Right now I'm still involved with the project but now it's mainly integrating the core network with VAS (value added services) nodes such as SMS, MMS and WAP. I think I'd be quite busy all the way until the end of January. It can get tiring and there are plenty of challenges but on the bright side, at least I'm not bored. Besides, building up a network from scratch and integrating it with various components certainly looks good on my resume! :)

On non-work related matters, I'm now a proud owner of a 20" widescreen LCD monitor. The monitor is simply beautiful. I plan to do a marathon session of anime and tv-series one of these days. I've just got my hands on "Ghost In The Shell 2nd Gig" and "Lost" season 1. Ahh...perfect timing.

After spending a lot of my time on Neverwinter Nights online play, I'm now taking a break from it and am now enjoying "X3 - Reunion". The game is simply beautiful and space has never looked so pretty! I love the feeling of vastness that is present in "X3 - Reunion" and it's wonderful to go exploring the various space sectors in the game. Sure, it's a single player game but it rocks! Check it out at http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3/info_en.php

A quick tour of my room

I've finally included pictures in my blog, as you may have noticed with my previous post. Words are boring and since blogs can also include pictures, I figured I might as well bore people with pictures. It's economical, y'see? After all a picture's worth a thousand words. :D

Anyway, since I figured some of you are interested in pictures of this tiny new hut I'm staying in SS3, here are 2 pictures. What can I say? I'm a lazy photographer! I don't even have a proper camera. All pictures are taken by the 1.3 megapixel camera of a Z800i Sony Ericsson phone. This is not an endorsement for you to BUY a SONY ERICSSON phone. In fact, do not BUY SONY ERICSSON. Ahem!

This is my room. The bed's probably the best feature in this photo. As you can see from the box, I haven't really unpacked yet. Yes, that's a 'sejadah' that you see at the bottom left corner of the picture. I may be a bloody sinner but hey, I do pray...sometimes! Anyway, it's the heart that counts. By the way, that's my official line when I'm to be judged in the after-life. I'll keep you all posted if it works. Heh!

My favorite section of the room. That's my gaming rig!! 'Nuff said. :B

Oh yeah, I do plan to get a new chair. I kinda threw away my old chair when I moved so right now that chair is about all I could find when all the stuff arrived. It probably belonged to someone else...

The rooms do look a bit big compared to the outside photo that I posted previously. While the house is rather tiny, it's not so bad when you come inside. Y'know what they say about objects in the rear view mirror look closer than they are? Well...think of it this way. Photos of housing interiors look larger than they are...or something! ;)

You're beautiful...

My mental thoughts have been behaving rather abnormally for the past 1 week or so. Of course, I'm still mentally alert and capable of being productive at work, performing analysis of network traces, etc. No worries, I haven't suddenly gotten forgetful or scatterbrained. Yes, yes. I know. Debateble. *rolls eyes*

No, as far as that aspect is concerned, I'm functioning normally. The weird part is that out of the blue, the song "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt has begun making regular appearences in my head. Perhaps a bit of background info will help.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away...oh wait. Wrong story.

About a month or two ago, a girl started working in the same area as my department is located. She's definitely not an enginner, or else I'd already have her name, address, phone number and we'd probably have watched a coupla movies together already. Well...maybe just her name and phone number, but those other stuff are strong possibilities! Heh! Anyway, she's kinda cute I guess. My first impression is that she had damn nice legs! She was wearing some sort of power-suit kinda thing and after seeing lotsa girls wearing jeans these days, the medium skirt was a very nice change of scenery and I gotta admit that her ankles are rather shapely! But I digress. Besides, my thoughts were all pure!

Anyway, getting back to the story, at that time her hair was tied in a bun. Let me put it this way. She was the model image of a professional woman executive. As the weeks pass, while the image is still maintained, the dressing became less severe and more on the gentle and feminine side. Me? I'm enjoying the view while cracking my head trying to solve some issue or another.

I think James Blunt started singing in my head about a week ago or so. As I recall, she dropped the bun and let her hair loose. Ahh...such transformation! It's like seeing the blossoming of flowers right after the rain. Now each time I catch a glimpse of her, the song resonantes in my head.

"You're beautiful. You're beautiful. You're beautiful, it's true."

Bird shit...

I hate bird shit. Each time I go to Jasima (a mamak nearby my place) at night, the only parkings are all under the trees and those stupid birds sleeping in the trees shit all over my car. I mean, I don't shit when I sleep. Why the hell can't those birds extend the same courtesy?? Sigh...

Jeremy got married!

Recently, a close friend of mind got married. I think he's both braver than me and stupider! Haha! Seriously though, it was a cool wedding. The food was delicious and the wedding costumes beautiful and exotic. The ceremony was insanely boring though. It was freaking long! I was already a bit sleepy since I had to wake up early to go for the wedding. I have to admit my parents were shocked.
Y'see, I happen to belong this this religion where it's sacrilege to wake up before noon on public holidays. If I'm awake before 12 pm on holidays, I go to hell. For this wedding, I actually woke up at 8 am. Man, you won't believe what elaborate rituals I had to perform to cleanse myself of this grievious sin!

Anyway, there was I, one sleepy sucker in a rather long and tedious wedding ceremony, in another Malaysia state at 10 am. The wedding finished at around 2 pm. Apparently, Indian weddings are like this, very formal and very ceremonial for the next 4 hours. Man...if I had to go through an Indian wedding, I'd probably elope!

Anyway Jeremy, congratz on the wedding! You're a braver man than most of us, and I think luckier too. Not many wives I know tolerates a bunch of suckers hanging out at your place, getting drunk, eating pizza and watching a stupid action movie! Cheers, mate! Tell me when you guys are expecting a baby. I really hope to the kid takes after the mother rather than you. God knows you're such an ugly bastard! Heh!

Sucks!!

This past 2 weeks, I've been busy with an update that is to be done on a network. I've now failed to update the node twice. Life sux...

PS: Don't bother trying to guess which network. Service is completely up so no one will notice anything.

Damned if I know...

One of the hardest thing about writing a blog for me is choosing an appropriate title. How exactly do you condense an entire thought that covers a wide-ranging subject and come up with a one liner. I took Comp Science, not Journalism! Perhaps there's a secret to this blog thing that I haven't figured out yet. Hmm...damned if I know...

Anyway, I've been a bit busy lately. Hence, the lack of blog postings! =)

I just finished a migration project. Man...that was tiring. All the work was at night and the next morning I'd get phone calls asking for a short report on how's the migration going. To make matters more interesting, it was a multi-vendor migration so there were *ahem* special interests to take care off. Sad to say, I kept being handed the short end of the stick. Due to some difficulties, most of the blame were sent to my direction. Certain parties claims that due to problems in the IP Core network, the migration results were not too impressive. Let me set things straight. There's NOTHING wrong with the IP Core network. It's been working fine for the past 2 years. It'll continue to work fine. Of course, convincing the parties involved takes some work. I had to show network traces, discuss RFC documents, highlight 3GPP implementation methods and debate how GTP protocols are being implemented on a router. Still, it's an interesting experience and will be an invaluable part of my professional growth.

Next up will be an update of a network application backbone. 4 Solaris node patching in a 4 hour maintenance window and it's all on a live network. Fun! And that's only the first phase of the update! Should be ok though. Initial testing indicates that patching should take around 2 hours and I'll be patching them all at the same time and monitoring it via a terminal server. Next phase is a bit easier. I'll be transferring update packages to each node of the application backbone and it'll be using some sort of GUI. It's all about clicking the mouse button.

There's one upcoming project that I'm a bit excited though. A trial network is being planned and I'll be handling every aspect of the IP Core network. Now THAT should be fun. Every single node in the IP Core will be set up by me. Switches. Routers. Firewalls. GSNs. All of it. Me. Yeah!

Of course, with all this stuff happening, I haven't really had much time to go out to party. I'm actually amazed at how much extra money I have by NOT going out to party! I kinda miss partying though. The drinks....the chicks....well....mainly the chicks!

Things should settle down by first week of March though so I'm sure my partying will start again!

Oh, I've finally succumbed to temptation. I'm now a member of the MPH Reader's Circle. Since I've started working, I no longer rely on my parents to buy me books. After spending a total of a few hundred bucks on books, I figured it's only wise for me to join the MPH Reader's Circle. At least I get to accumulate points!

I've also recently bought 3 new books. Heh, I know. I could go to gym, I could party all night long, I could play guitar and I could go to rock concerts but deep down I'd always be a geek. I can just imagine myself. I'd be 50 years old, white hair and all that and I'd still head to the bookstore and pick out a few books, with at least one of them being either a science fiction or a fantasy book. Hell, hopefully by that time the 7th book for Dune would be out!

I've currently a fan of this author by the name Alastair Reynolds. He's British (spells armour instead of armor) and he writes DAMN good science fiction! The book I just bought is called "Century Rain" and next on my list would be "Pushing Ice". I already have all his previous books before that. =)

As I get older, I also realized that my reading habits have...for lack of better word...matured. I'm no longer exclusively reading science fiction and fantasy novels. These days I'm exploring different authors, some which I've never heard before but which the synopsis at the back cover of the book looks interesting. I'm also more into non-native English speaking authors. My recent favorite book was by a Spanish author by the name Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Check out his book called "The Shadow of the Wind". It's REALLY good!

My latest book by a non-native English speaker is called "Out" by a Japanese author by the name Natsuo Kirino. As an added bonus, the author is a she! In one book, I get a different cultural AND gender perspective compared to the one I'm used to. I haven't started on the book yet but the premise looks interesting. It's about a woman who killed her husband, the 3 friends who helped her conceal the body and the inevitable consequences. Sounds fun and it's the type of book I'd never picked up 5 years ago.

Finally, looking for a good drama, I picked up a book by Wally Lamb which is called "I Know This Much Is True". According to the book's synopsis, its a story about a pair of twins, one who is schizophrenic and the experiences they both go through as they go about their daily life. Yeah, yet another type of book I'd never touch 5 years ago. Heh!

New Year!!

Ok, so I'm about 2 weeks late. I guess I spent more time living life rather than writing about it, these days!

New years eve was rather excellent. Celebrated the countdown at Heritage Road, next to Sheraton Imperial. Can't remember the name of the bar though. Me, Seng Leong, Anand and Anand's relatives from Singapore were all there, getting drunk and celebrating the new year with gutso. I was a bit tipsy that night, I think. The vodka lime wasn't so bad but the graveyard was a killer. I'm definately ordering the graveyard again! Heh heh! Hmm...need to look for an excuse to party again though. I need to remember to check the events calender for this year and plan my partying!

Oh yeah, always party responsibly. Do not drink and drive. =)

The year's been starting rather slow for me. Not much work yet. Companies everywhere are still in the planning stage I guess. Unfortunately, that means I spend most of my time at work feeling utterly bored. I fill that time by reading up design documents on mobile networks. I'm almost embarrased to say that I find them rather interesting. I know...despite my best efforts, I think I'll forever stay a geek! Still, I find it fascinating to discover how all the network nodes inter-operate with each other and provide the service that we all take for granted. Next time you use your mobile phone, spare a thought to all the people who worked hard to make all of it work. It ain't easy! =)

My new years resolution this year consists of 3 simple improvements that I feel I should undertake in my life.

1. Arrive to office earlier (and leave earlier, hopefully to avoid LDP jams)
2. Save more money in the bank (rainy season and all that)
3. Engage in more cultural events (my pathetic attempt to stop being such a geek and an excuse to tear myself away from the computer)

Resolution 1 is currently an abject and utter failure. On average, I'm now in the office 5 minutes earlier compared to last year. Heh, so much for leaving earlier and avoiding the LDP jam...

Resolution 2 is also currently a complete failure. After gym, I no longer go to mamak. These days I go for steak at TGIF or something. Well...my personal trainer did say something about the importance of protein!

Resolution 3 has a slightly brighter outlook than the rest. I'm currently going through the list of events in MPO to see whether there's anything interesting. Anand has also introduced me to Actor's Studio so I guess I'm going to support the local performing arts scene soon enough! Oh yeah, I was watching the play Pune Highway earlier tonight. It's a pretty good play actually! Good story and good acting. The only thing that wasn't so good was that they had some dialogs in Hindi or something like that. While I can insult like a native, understanding civilized conversations is beyond me. Heh! All in all though, it was quite a good play. I definitely plan to add Actor's Studio in my list of places to go regularly. =)

Back for a bit

Ah...home sweet home! I got touched down in Malaysia on Sunday and man, I'm sure glad to be back! Philippines is a rather nice place but there's no place like home. Besides, Filipinos don't really eat vegetables and they're favorite meat is pork. Kinda hard for me to enjoy my meals there!

Filipinos are rather friendly people but like every bloody ASEAN country, whites get preferential treatmet and better service. Sigh...still in the colonial mindset, I guess. Malaysia's also not immune to this syndrome. I've got nothing against whites. I just would like to receive the same type of service. I pay equal amount of money, I should deserve the same service, right?

Anyway, I think I watched more tv during my stay in Philippines than I did in Malaysia for the past 1 year. Heh, after work I don't really have much to do. Since it's holy month, I didn't go partying at all. Watched a few movies though. I personally think that the cineplex I went to is superior than the one in GSC 1 Utama. It had excellent seats and amazing sound system!

Sad to say, due to work commitments I didn't really manage to visit the countryside. My days were spent in a concrete jungle! On the bright side, with all the fasting and INSANELY bad food in Philippines, I came back home thinner! YES!! Heh heh!

I'll be heading to Ireland after this for some training. Since it's not a holy month, I chose a hotel that's in the center of Dublin. It's well within walking distance to many bars and pubs. =)

Sigh...

Life is weird. These days I'm actually doing my prayers more regularly. On the other hand, I'm also getting drunk more often!

Been feeling kinda down lately. I'd like to attribute my feelings to the lack of a divine being guiding the universe. The sad fact is that I honestly believe in God. I just think he's a bastard. Do you know how surreal it is to finish praying, then during the doa part say "fuck you" to God?

Preparation is very important!

Let's see...within 12 hours before the first day of fasting month, I've consumed:

1/2 a tin of Pringles (The tall one)
2 mug of Choc-O-Cino (Some VERY rich chocolate drink)
1 plate of rice, chicken with dried chillies, baby kailan in oyster sauce and fried japanese tofu (Lunch)
2 bars of mini Krispy (Chocolate with some rice cereal filling.)
1 bar of some unknown chocolate (Had a pink wrapper.)
2 plates of rice, mango chicken and kangkung belacan (Dinner. Each dish was supposed to be shared between 2 to 3 people but I just finished gym and was famished.)

I guess I'm fully prepared for fasting. =)

Argh and yay!

Argh!! I just spent RM 150 on taxi fares for 3 1-way trips to and from office!

Sigh...coming back from the company team-building event, I actually left my car keys in Bukit Tinggi. I only realised I left it there when the bus stopped at the main gate of Ericsson. Obviously by that time is WAY to late to ask the bus to turn around! To keep the story short, I managed to contact the event organiser and she got the hotel to send my car key to their KL office. To get back home from Cyberjaya, I took a cab. RM 50 gone.

2 days later (didn't go to office the previous day since I got night work at that time), feeling rather happy with my spare car key, I took a cab to work. Another RM 50 gone, but it should be the last! Besides, at least I'm not the sucker driving in the bloody jam on LDP! =)

Come lunch time, I wanted to eat out so I went looking for my car. I even offered to be the driver for 2 of my colleagues. Found the car, unlocked it then sat on the driver's seat. My colleagues were also already seated and buckled up. Then I noticed my steering lock. I looked at my spare key. No steering lock key included in the key chain. Then I remembered. Both steering lock keys are attached with the key I left at Bukit Tinggi. Crap...Suffice to say that my colleagues were laughing like mad at this stage. I'll probably never hear the end of it. I was laughing too, and banging my head against the steerig wheel. Heh! So, I went to lunch on my colleagues car, and spent another RM 50 to go back home later that day. Sigh...

On the bright side, I've got a project in Phillipines! The project should last 1 or 2 weeks. Yay!! I'm now in demand in the South East Asia region! I'll be framing the ticket since that's the first ticket overseas for me that involves work. =D

I'm scheduled to start my work there on 17th October 2005. After spending 1 or 2 weeks there, I'll fly back to Malaysia for Aidilfitri. Then on the second day of Aidilfitri I'll be flying off to Dublin, Ireland for training. Scheduling is a bit tight but it should be fun! I'm gonna miss all the open houses though. Ah well...