Winky Wanker

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story

2006-08-08T13:13:00.000+08:00

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story
A review of the movie by a foreigner, for those who had watch this before (you guys know who you are), comment please.

Retards in Malaysia

2006-06-20T00:25:00.000+08:00

As can be seen from this video from Malaysia, it is obviously a place with highest concentration of retarded childrens in the world.

Again, thank god that the retardness didn't spread to me when I was still a child back then in Malaysia.

going to get myself a dog

2006-06-17T13:54:00.000+08:00

...and move to japan as soon as possible.
enough said.

Conversational English Lesson

2006-04-20T17:09:00.000+08:00

What most boys secretly learned during recess time in school, the japanese do it the different way, they have instructional video for it.

The only way

2006-04-18T00:10:00.000+08:00

... that makes abstinence works.

translation: no vagina, no AIDS
(poster for some AIDS awareness campaign)

Happy Fucking Birthday to Me

2006-04-15T02:31:00.000+08:00

It's my birthday today, and I'm officially twenty now.

So, what's the big deal?

There is none of any.

Instead, let's just see what else interesting is happening today.

We have another movie from our never grew up 6 years old japanese kindergartener, the famed and beloved mischievous little bastard who have a serious innate tendency to show off his hand drawn little 'elephant' with pants off while dancing around whenever possible.

He is coming out with a new movie today in japan, Odore Amigo (Dance Amigo). Like any good Shinnosuke Nohara flick should be, this movie as expected, will have a lot of Shinchan fooling around (with pants off most of time), a lot of chasing long legged beautiful 'sister', and definitely a lot of dancing, samba dancing, as the movie title suggested. Along with the dancing, there is a special appearance by Korikki, a professional wrestler, but is actually the master of para para dance in disguise, I doubt any of you know him, so I include this video to show you his great dance moves. This guy plus Shinchan is just going to be an insanely great dancefest coming to happen.

Check out the official site, and you know what? Even kindergartener these days keep a blog, Shinchan has one right here. You going to see the photo he takes when visiting kids at other kindergartens to give out movie tickets as presents, Shinchan is the kid with largest head if you find it hard to discern and make out which one is him from all those japanese kids that probably look all the same to you.

To further commemorate what a great day today is, Studio Ghibli also released an extended trailer for their next release 'Gedo Senki' (Tales of Earthsea), schedule for release in Japan in july this year. Its director is Miyazaki Goro this time, instead of his father Miyazaki Hayao. From what I see from the trailer, it resembles the earlier style of Miyazaki Hayao works, and the artwork is still as always, sharp and stylistic, Studio Ghibli's art direction never fails to amaze.

Next, on the same day in history, April 15, year 1912, at around 2:30am, the exact time in the history that a young man named Jack died drowning after a sea vessel named Titanic hit an iceberg, at least he died fictionally in a movie called 'Titanic'. Now, he's back in a sequel movie, aptly named 'Titanic Two The Surface'. Just see the movie trailer below if you don't believe what I've just said.

What a great day today is, and happy birthday to me.

Why Woman Have Breasts?

2006-04-10T17:33:00.000+08:00

Seriously, from evolutionary point of view, why does breasts exist? Have you ever give a thought on that before? It has no biological advantage, just like nipples on males, it doesn't make sense. It takes nutrient to maintain, and I'd say alot of nutrient, many girls usually lose a cup size after a successful diet (what a waste). Furthermore, it is not 'aerodymanic', try imaging running around with two lump of lard front of your chest, and at a time when there's no such thing as bra, like stone age, having a breast is hindrance, something that ensure you get chased down by sabretooth tiger in no time. So why?

From creationist point of view, why did God designed woman that way? If what He wants is abstinence for everyone, why not just design the breast to develop after a woman had her first sex or first pregnancy (like most animal do)? instead of develops when one reached puberty. Maybe he wants everyone to have sex when everyone at puberty afterall, in His great design plan. Now you see the absurdity? I meant the idea of creationist, not abstinence (chill, Justin). It's obviously bullshit, which many will easily agree, so creationist view is not going to be in our discussion. And by the way, I think abstinence is also proposed by the same group of people who proposed the creationist view, and don't forget geocentricity, saying the earth is center of universe, some people still believe that. It was on the newspaper few weeks ago, which the guy said, it's proven in bible. I think the bible also proved that stupidity is infinite through that guy. What a great book.

There must be a reason for this, and don't you just glad we have institutions like university with smart peoples on trying to solve every type of problems and answer all kind of questions out there. And here is the explaination of our breast problem through evolutionary psychology point of view, it's a great essay. It tried to explain why breast evolved (something to do with "Fisherian run-away selection", same reason why peacock have such frivolous feathers), and why men find breast is sexy (which how the breast looks could have some hidden signal, for example, larger breasted female may be a signal that one has enough fat, and may bear fatter child, an advantage for insulation, and body food storage). There is also some interesting stuff in it that I didn't know about before, like chimpanzees which we share common ancestral don't have permanent breast, it develops on a as needed basis. It's a 'turn off' for males chimpanzees to see a breast, unlike human, because a developed breast on female chimpanzee means it's about to give birth, or had just gave birth, trying to copulate will just be a waste of precious sperm, since it is very difficult to get pregnant in time like that.

There is so much more in it that I can't bother to list them out one by one. Go read it yourself. It's a damn good piece of work.

On How to Not Find a Job

2006-04-05T00:56:00.000+08:00

I'm not sure this is a podcast or actual radio broadcast from Hong Kong, it's all in cantonese, and extremely funny.

click this button to stream the mp3 and hear it, right click on it if you want to download.

Say no to porn

2006-04-03T15:15:00.000+08:00

Here I sit thinking Malaysia is a 'boleh' country all this time, hmmph! Why the goverment after saying rakyat 'tak boleh merokok' (no smoking) by issuing a clown ass campaign last time, and here comes this 'tak boleh tengok, elakkan diri dari laman lucah' (say no to porn).

Where the hell is the 'boleh' spirit??
Oh, now I know, 'boleh' is for all those stupid 'Malaysia Book of Records' stuff.
(not even a world record thing, basically, do anything no one has been stupid enough to do it before, you'll get into the book)
(update: even my favourite magazine, wired magazine has it lamented here in their latest april issues)
Now I get it. I had it all wrong for all this time.

This time instead of showing you raisin looking manballs caused by excessive porn surfing, in the style of the disgusting smokers mouth ala 'tak nak' anti-smoking campaign. They show you how to press 'alt-F4'. Good moves there, because pressing 'alt-F4' is the magical keypress that will just make porn sites dissapears from this world, and everyone will be happily ever after again, with ponies riding you to the heavens.

This must be all Justin's fault for all his talk about abstinence and shit, and see now what happened.

Speaking of all these porn sites thing remind me of a bizzare experience I once had. Some of you might know, but most not, that I once worked for a few months after graduate from high school in a kindergarten, in their small computer classroom, looking around 20 little kids and assist them or just play along with their so called computer education.

The kindergarten is sort of a catholic school, they have a church inside. I said sort of because it's not exactly one, since the students are not required a catholic, or even the staff, like me, they even have malay kids in, so it's quite bizzare when you see these kids singing stuff like 'I love Jesus' on the piano everday (or something along the same line, I have no idea on the name of the song, but I am pretty sure they have 'I love Jesus' on lyric, in chinese and english, and of course, no malay version). My classroom is just beside the piano room, and sometimes kids in my class sing along with the piano just to irk me when they have piano playing next door.

And no, I'm not that a sicko to share my story of surfing porn in a holy place like a church, that's blasphemy, and I'm not able to do it anyway, because the computer classroom is not internet-equipped. See? that is the only way to stop someone from surfing porn, even a serious porn addict like me can't do anything about it. Here's a suggestion to my goverment, want to stop porn surfing? Close down all internet service provider, it should be an easy task, there's so few ISP in the country to count to begin with.

It has something to do with the headmaster, who is also the priest of church if I'm not mistaken. There was one day that I was asked to go to his house after work. And again, NO, stop your sick little mind imagining stuff. His house was just inside the school compound, on the second floor above. I was there just to fix his computer just like he asked, you know, the usual stuff, his computer is running slower and slower for no reason at all. Of course that's what everyone says, for no reason. There's always a reason, and this particular computer of his has internet access. See where I am getting myself into? Here comes the bizzare thing, there I was power up his computer, waiting for everything to get loaded and see what I can do by looking around inside the computer. Suddenly a porn website pop-up window jumped out of no where, and instictively I checked the 'favourite' bookmark list, found some 'naughty' links up there. The priest was standing beside me while I do all this, and hell was it awkward? The first thing he said to me? "It must be my son", he said it with a cool stance. Yeah right, as I know, he only has a daughter and wife living with him, and for his daughter to look at lesbian sex? Hmm, well, that's for you to decide. I rest my case on this.

And by the way, I just want to say I get paid after that for deleting all those dirty links and cleaning up the spyware infested computer, for RM50, or maybe more, I can't exactly remember, but it was quite alot for me at that time as far as I can remember, for just doing that. I do things like that all the time, and never get paid before.

My Study Wiki

2006-04-03T00:34:00.000+08:00

After playing around with this blog template, I get more and more interested in web programming. And I just finished setting up a wiki for my use of taking study notes and stuff. Here is my study notes in wiki, there's not much to see since I just started it. It's quite cool because it doesn't need any installation, the single html file you see is already the whole application in itself, all written in javascripts, and it overwrite itself when you update stuff in the wiki.

You can try to set up your own, it doesn't have to be put online, if you don't have any access to webserver space, just put it in your usb thumbdrive or memory stick, and bring it everywhere with you. You can download it at www.tiddlywiki.com. I really recommended it, at least it works better than using lots of little text files on desktop created with windows notepad.

Video from North Korea

2006-03-30T19:10:00.000+08:00

This sort of relate to what I learned in psychology lecture this afternoon, on Skinner's behaviourism. With proper conditioning and stimuli, brainwashing can be done. Just look at these people in the video, and dare you not tell me their mind are fucked up?

Again, these people on video, I believe, are the lucky one among north korean, at least they still get to eat, for doing these mind blowing collective behaviour. And as you can see, their 'great leader', Kin Jong Ii is the only one being fat in the whole video, that is somekind of black humour right there. There are many still starved in famine just didn't show up in the video. Don't you somehow just glad that China escaped the chance to end up like this?

Worldmapper

2006-03-30T01:58:00.000+08:00

So, basically, this is how the world will look like population wise in a few hundred years later, india the fattest, along with china, while malaysia stay slim as always, with australia nowhere to be seen.

link: Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before

Wrong Reason to be...

2006-03-27T12:12:00.000+08:00

You know you have the wrong reason to be in school when you see someone like him end up being a CEO of dotcom.

Life is funny sometimes. Maybe it's not totally wrong that I think this world is not exactly a fittest win it all world, there's some hope left for me afterall.

Go read his life path, it might procure you some hope too, if you're loser like me.

link

Site Redesign

2006-03-25T12:27:00.000+08:00

This blog has undergone some serious revamping and improvement sprinkled with AJAX magic. The whole design may still look the same, that is because it hasn't changed much from the original template that I choosed from the available list of templates provided by blogger.com since I like it the way it's designed, and I don't think I can really design anything but ugly stuff. I am not a designer, but I can do a little programming, put it to good use, and the site can be made more accessible and user-friendly.

Things I have improved upon are mostly the inner structures, one of the things that I don't like what blogger.com has implemented is their commenting system. It usually takes a long time to load, and most of time, in a pop-up windows that can take quite a while to load especially if you're a heavy user like me who has tons of windows on desktop, left with not much system memory to spare on opening another pop-up windows. Little thing like this can sometimes make people (that's me) hesitant on posting comments at many blogs that uses blogger.com system. What I first did to overcome this was to embed it in the item page directly, so that visitors can just scroll down and see a comment box waiting for them to fill it in. It was done easier than I had initially expected, no javascript is needed except for cosmetic purpose on the interface, as for the functionality, just plain old html is all you need.

But that was still not a good enough solution, those who wanted to comment will have to click on a link on the main page to load another individual item page to access the embedded comment box. The best thing to do is to put the comment box under each post on the main page as many would have suggested at first sight, but that would made the main page too bloated that can cause longer load time, not to say too much complexity in coding, and unsightly to boot. With this in mind, a best of both world solution was implemented with an AJAX technique to extract and load the embedded commenting system from item page on demand at the main page. The best implementation of AJAX of website that first came to mind is gmail, the google webmail system. Did anyone realize that when you check your mail in gmail, you always stays on the same page, and it loads only the part it needed as required, this makes it more streamlined and intuitive to use, since it feels more like a email program than just a website.

To do the same thing with my blog, a magical mumbo jumbo called AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) is used, a subset of AJAX, but much more simple to implement, and useful in this specific requirement of fetching and display html data on demand instead of xml schema as in AJAX. All that needed was some javascript functions of AHAH, and modification of existing template. Besides the comments, the backlinks was also modified to use the same implementation at the main page. Please click on them to try it yourself, both the comment and backlink links are at the end of this post. If it works, it'll take a few seconds to load the commenting system, and show it immediately after that, all these contents are loaded on demand after you click on the link, which means the main page can still maintain its original size, but loaded with more features.

The next thing I added is on the right pane, a flash based mp3 music player under 'What I Listen'. At first I only wanted to add a list of album cover arts of the music I like recently, but that was kind of bland, and I think most people would have no idea what songs are those by looking at the cover arts since what I listen are hardly mainstream unless you live in taiwan or japan. What I did was again, a best of both world solution, a music player that shows you the album cover arts while playing the songs as streamed mp3. The mp3 should play in less than 5 seconds after you choose to play it unless you're still using 56kbps connection. I am very satisfied by this as it actually do more with less space, since that I don't need to have a list of all of the pictures of cover arts at the right pane, and just load it one by one while playing the accompanied song instead. Another added functionality is that you can add this music player together with my playlist to your sidebar if you're using firefox web browser and have the same taste of music as me, that is, all you need is to click on the link provided under the player and it'll add a bookmarks to your firefox, click the bookmark in your firefox and it'll show up as a sidebar player, cool eh?

Other trivial modifications on the right pane include a reversed archived list (it now sorts from the newest first, with help of little javascript, why blogger.com default output is sorting oldest to show at top is still a mystery), and a new referer link section, link to me, and your site's link will show up under "Referer" section, that is only if anyone ever clicked the link on your site anyway.

If you're intersted in doing any of these modification at your own blogger.com blog, please refer to the list of links below.

Related Links:
Inline Comment Forms - Singpolyma Technical Blog
AHAH: Asychronous HTML and HTTP - microformats.org
Howto: AJAX for Blogger peek-a-boo content
XSPF Web Music Player (Flash) - plays mp3 on your website

Polymorphism explained

2006-03-21T19:01:00.000+08:00

Warning: geek content, skip if computer programming has nothing to do with you.

You might had a hard time trying to understand how polymorphism works, with those 'cat' and 'dog' example oftenly overused in textbook. Now, no more. I bet you'll totally understand it right after seeing this OOP Concept explained: Polymorphism in terms well understood by college students, with words like 'pussy', 'penis', 'ass', and 'hole', everything seems much more clearer and concise.

What is wrong with her?

2006-03-20T20:22:00.000+08:00

What can actually go wrong with this picture? While it is generally accepted that a man don't hit a woman in any circumstances, but be well assured that you won't think so after seeing what this woman did to the cat she's holding on her hand. A word of warning, don't click on the link if you can't handle it, as it is extremely graphic, disturbingly disgusting, and will make you lose hope in humankind (again).

Seriously, you might be curious, but please don't go and look at it if you just had your meal, or are a cat lover.

I'm a cock

2006-03-20T04:33:00.000+08:00

I'm not talking about myself being a dick or a male variety chicken, just to be clear.

Do you remember writing those essays or composition as homework in school last time? I especially hated karangan, essay writing in malay, if only those could have title like 'Saya Sebatang Kotek' (hence the post title), then maybe I could somehow aprrehend the whole reason and meaning for us to do that unless I was aiming to work as a gossip reporter writing for malay languaged newspaper or magazines.

But anyway, I just discovered this extremely funny blog LENG MOU? by two fellow malaysian currently residing in UK. Can't believe I missed out this blog for almost half a year, I consider myself serious blog reader (maybe not serious, consider describe it as addictive compulsion is better justified), check out the list of blogs I read that I put on the right pane, you think that's a long list? Wait till you see my OPML or bloglines feeds list, then you realize what LONG really means, long as in my 20 incher under my pants.

Back to the LENG MOU? blog I was just going to talk about. I was reading through their archives non-stop, since it's so entertaining. Found out one of them is Mai Hagiwara fans (me too!), and kept mentioning her in quite a few blog post, that one alone is a good reason enough for putting them into my feed list, great mind thinks alike, more so great men usually have same taste in japanese av, don't say I didn't tell you.

I stopped the reading halfway through the archives and to blog here on their post entitled 'Saya Sebatang Kotek'. This clicked for me, and lighted a bulb above my head to do something about it, to make use of my 12 years worth of Bahasa Malaysia education, do a revisit of writing a karangan in this blog, one with title I had done in the past in school, but writing it the way I never could have do then, before my BM skill went down the drain before I can realize it. michealooi.net once had something similar for writing stuff in BM before but it was not as funny as this one.

Maybe the combination of Bahasa Malaysia and gentinal parts alone is inherently funny in itself, I remember any conversations among classmates in high school that involved words like 'kotek', 'puki', 'pepek', 'konek', 'tetek', 'lancap', 'unani', 'nonok', not to mention 'cibai', 'lanchiao' (which I think both are already unofficially in the malay vocab), will end up in endless laughter. We even tried to hunt down all of these lewd words by flipping through the dictionary, just for the fun of it. Maybe it's the hormones, or maybe it's just really funny to say them in malay, which anyway can explains my wide vocabulary of gentinal related phrase in malay, way more than the numbers of way eskimos can say 'snow' in their language.

Here's the essay entitled 'Saya Sebatang Kotek' that I would very loved to write it in school if possible, maybe in another alternate universe it may happen.

Helo! Nama saya Abu. Saya sebatang kotek berwarna hitam dan berukuran 15 inchi. Ya, banyak orang kata pemilik saya Bob sangat bernasib baik dilahirkan dengan saya tetapi sebenarnya, saya tidak dicintai. Tiap-tiap hari, saya disimpan di dalam seluarnya yang amat gelap dan dikeluarkan cuma apabila tiada orang di sekeliling. Manapun, Bob ada kalanya meluahkan hatinya kepada saya. Bila tiada orang nampak, Bob akan keluarkan saya dan menyentuh saya dengan kasih sayang yang amat lembut sampai says muntah. Saya tahu dalam minda Bob... saya memalukan dia.

Semuanya berubah pada satu hari bila Bob sudah lebih 20 tahun. Dia tiba-tiba mula menyukai saya dan juga membeli pakaian cantik untuk saya.

Walaubagaimanapun, pada satu hari, dia keluarkan saya di depan satu gua gelap. aku tidak beberapa suka situasi itu tetapi dia melembutkan leher aku dengan sentuhan kuku jari dia. tiba-tiba, gua it kena rusuk hantu! dia mempunyai dua batang leher and dua biji kepala! kepala it pelik sekali kerana rambutnya macam lima batang jari kaki! ok dan ini berlaku: Gua kena rusuk itu menggunakan kepala mereka untuk bunuh aku!

mereka cuba memotong saluran oksigen aki dengan memicit saya dengan kuat! aku hendak "duduk" pun tak boleh kerana kaki terajang! Tetapi, nasib baik dia perlahan sikit kerana tuan saya menjerit kesakitan.aku hampir termuntah tetapi tuan saya menyelamatkan nyawa saya dengan melarikan diri dari gua rusuk itu. pelik sekali, dia masih menyentuh saya seperti hendak memanaskan saya.

TIBA-TIBA tuan saya mendekati gua itu lalu memasukkan saya ke dalam gua itu!Taat dan kesetiaan saya pada tuan saya hilang sekelip mata. aku ketakutan apabila dalam gua itu, menunggu apa-apa yang akan terjadi pada saya. aku tidak takut dibunuh. tanpa penyediaan, badan saya digosok pada dinding gua itu! gua itu busuk sekali dan amat kering lagi ketat! tapi perasaan berubah apabila gris magik mengalir pada dinding dari siling rumah. aku rasa pada masa itu, hantu dari gua itu sudah merusuk tuan saya kerana tuan saya terjadi gila dan memasukkan saya dalam Simple Harmonic Motion pada 1000rpm. lepas beberapa jam, tuan saya masih bertenaga dan gua sudah dibanjiri dengan air merah! air merah itu tertumpah keluar dari dinding pecah.

aku terasa pening lalu memuntah. aku mengotori baju cantik saya. aku amat kasihan sekali. tetapi hantu dalam tuan saya sudah terbang pergi. tuan saya melepasi saya dari gua gila itu, menanggal baju cantik saya dan mencampakinya. aku tidak kisah kerana baju itu bau coklat dan aku tidak suka coklat.

(406 patah perkataan)

Go check out the LENG MOU? blog if you haven't do so.

Barney the purple Gansta

2006-03-18T01:47:00.000+08:00

For all you Barney, the purple dinosaur haters out there, this video may change your mind, I sort of like him this way now.

The Science of Sports Bra

2006-03-13T19:18:00.000+08:00

It's science with naked breast, what more can I ask for?
That is all I needed. Where can I sign up for this major?

Link to the Shock Absorber website

Ping Pong Madness!

2006-03-06T02:02:00.000+08:00

I didn't know ping pong can be played until such level of skills involved, just simply amazing! Check out the body wheel and running up to the table, it's crazy!!

Year of Dog

2006-03-04T23:35:00.000+08:00

I find this video extremely funny, in the later part especially near the end is great. Some may find this being somekind of racism against chinese culture though. But what the hell, I don't find it offensive at all, I'm liberal.

Fake Miniature Model

2006-03-01T17:37:00.000+08:00

Look at this miniature model, isn't it minutely painstaking detailed? There's even some miniature people walking on the street, and don't miss out the construction sites, you can even every little bricks if you looked hard enough.

... Did that fooled your eyes? It's was just an illusion, which can be done by using a special kind of lens, tiltshift lens to create this kind of out of focus aerial photography.

If you're interested, it also can be done in photoshop, with which the technique I learned from this tutorial on fake tiltshift in photoshop.

More photo of this style can be found over here, these are real aerial photograph taken with a tiltshift lens, not created with photoshop by the way.

Below is the original photo I used. See the difference?

Monster Sex

2006-02-26T19:02:00.000+08:00

not exactly what you think, but still is 18+ video, not safe to click, unless you really want to
i utterly lose hope in humanity after seeing this...

Glow in the Dark Pigs??

2006-01-13T04:50:00.000+08:00

See this glow in the dark pig. What's next? Flying pigs?

Real Life Densha Otoko

2006-01-12T22:34:00.000+08:00

Check out this Google Video. It is from the highest rating tv show in japan, it's so freakin cool, they always have this 'what the fuck?' moment in it, and this is one of the best. Go take a look at it, it's about the densha otoko, it's really interesting if you saw the drama before.

Taipei 101

2006-01-02T16:23:00.000+08:00

Happy New Year, Taipei 101
Originally uploaded by Coolmitch.

Another spectacular shot of the Taipei 101 during new year countdown found in Flickr interestingness pool.
The fireworks last for about two minutes by the way.

Closing 2005

2006-01-02T01:46:00.000+08:00

It's been a fast year.

I've been slacking a lot, especially this semester.

Started taking part-time job inside campus, at computer centre.

Learned not much this year, let's see...
Assembly language wasn't that difficult as I first thought though.
Same goes for the genetic engineering I took for no reason at all.
Economics for freshman was quite challenging. Glad I'm in engineering instead of business.

Biggest surprise...
Took up Judo lesson as P.E.
It was quite fun.
At least now I can watch Judo match with appreciation.

Biggest mistake...
Failed my Calculus II, going to need another semester of supposedly free time slot which I can use for other fun stuff to reclaim the 4 compulsory credit point, just because for giving up the final paper. Stupid me.

Biggest success...
err.... (*to be filled in later indifinitely*)

That's all for year 2005, not much pain, not much gain too.
It's a fast past.

2005 CLOSED

Happy New Year, 2006!

2006-01-01T18:32:00.000+08:00

It's kinda late, well, at last, a new year with a futuristic year number, 2006, almost like I'm living in the future already! Can't wait for year 2015, maybe I'll be living at Mars then. Anyway, here's a new year greeting from taipei, apparrently the taipei 101 building is not just the tallest building, but also the largest 仙女棒 (fireworks stick) ever conceived in the history of mankind.

Where goes the tears?

2005-12-28T17:36:00.000+08:00

From tear jerking life threatening terminal disease bound cutesy innocent schoolgirl above in 'One Litre of Tears', to jailbait seductive sugar daddy girl asking for a new house with nice fresh air below. It can only happen in japan, I'd tell ya.

I'm sure her 'ottosan' is now already either in jail for indecency act, or had declared bankcruptcy, and most probably, both of them.

p/s: you got to had watched the spring season drama 'Ichi Rittoru no Namida' (One Litre of Tears) to get it. Else just enjoy the video, so to have something to fantasize about when you're alone in the bathroom.

Looks ain't everything

2005-12-27T21:09:00.000+08:00

This proves it all

On Taiwanese Food

2005-12-27T14:12:00.000+08:00

A interesting thought I just read from somewhere.

Taiwan isn't the ideal place for finnicky eaters. There's cheap food in abundance here, but I have issues with a lot of it. The photo above is indicative of the inexpensive fast food you can buy on just about any street here, and at the night markets that seem to draw unending streams of young people looking for bargains. The food is pre-cooked (mainly deep fried) and often undefinable, i.e., your guess is as good as mine as to whether it's animal, vegetable or mineral.
As I walk by these stands, I am frequently assaulted by the stench of food cooking in deep-fat fryers, in oil that apparently hasn't been changed in months. There are also bubbling cauldrons of soup, huge vats that are often adorned with chunks of overcooked tofu swimming on top. I'm willing to try new things, so I once ordered a bowl. I won't be trying it again anytime soon.

Defining what Taiwanese food is seems to be nearly impossible. I can describe to you what Beijing food is (same with Shanghai food and Cantonese food and Sichuan food), but I can't describe Taiwanese food, except to say it seems to be an odd mish-mash with no distinctive flavor that sets it apart.

I've lived in a lot of places now, and usually don't have problems with the local food. I have some problems here in Taipei. There were so many cheap restaurants in Beijing that I loved. In Singapore, I'd go to these little stands where they'd grill fresh stingray served on banana leaf - incredibly delicious. In Hong Kong, I could order cheap roast duck or barbecue pork just about anywhere. I know there must be similar places here, but so far they're eluding me. Here, all of the budget food seems to be pre-cooked and deep-fried. Or cooked in huge communal troughs.

I've had some great meals in Taiwan, including the best dumplings I've had anywhere. It's only the inexpensive local food that gets me depressed. Could it be that I'm just looking in the wrong places? I live near the university, Shi Da, and the entire area seems to be wall-to-wall food stands offering near-identical fare. I'm willing to keep an open mind and to consider the possibility that Taiwanese food is wonderful. Where should I go for proof?
from The Peking Duck blog

These are exactly what bothering me all these time, before coming here to taiwan, all those bombardment taiwanese variety programs on tv showed nothing but the abundance of nice and tasty cheap food, all lined up one the streets, all waiting you to try it out, at least that's my impression from watching one of the show called 'Shi Zi Lu Kou' by Jackie Wu with his usual comedy duo Nono and Kang Kang. So, was all those just camera tricks? editing? I can say they're too good with it.

Sushi

2005-12-15T22:04:00.000+08:00

Here is one funny spoof, proportion of funniness scales according to your knowledge in japanese culture. Go see it. Documentary On Japanese Sushi (at google video, flash video format, takes quite a long time to load)

Mother of All Roots

2005-12-12T21:50:00.000+08:00

This is what I called the true root among roots. A naked one that is.

Going Home

2005-12-03T20:59:00.000+08:00

Finally received my flight ticket via mail. Added a countdown timer at the sidebar for the event.

WinampCDArt

2005-11-29T23:39:00.000+08:00

WinampCDArt widget for konfabulator, in my opinion, is the best thing ever since sliced bread. This magical little widget automatically search for CD album cover art of the song you're playing in winamp over the internet, and show it on the desktop as a CD box with the cover art. There is a similar widget for itunes called 'itunes companion', and windows media player natively also has a somewhat crude cover art support, but I still like using winamp as my default music player since it runs faster and has smaller memory footprint, so this widget definitely make itself into one of my favourite must-have on my pc.

If you're adventurous and have the technical knowhow, the author had already have the latest 2.01 beta here waiting for you to try it out. It now supports skins for cd box and 'pile mode', which looks like this...

a pile of virtual cd box sitting on your desktop, complete with album cover of songs you're currently listening to on the top of the pile, and below that, those you had just listened to, how can anything be more awesome than this?

Fatal Consequences

2005-11-23T03:31:00.000+08:00

I should have died long time ago......and so are you.

Love Song

2005-11-14T19:35:00.000+08:00

If you read enough blog, rubbish blog in particular, they always posted songs lyrics all the time (read: friendster blog). Why so? Probably they don't have things to write with the puny brain of theirs, and have to resort to copy and paste something, for absolutely no reason at all. There's no reason to do so for since no one is actually going to read it, why bother to copy and paste? Just don't write if you got nothing to write. Like what I do. That's why you see my blog post is so far and few all the time.

But being a blog as this is, also a rubbish one, I should adhere to the unofficial ruleof blogging, and post something about song, and lyrics too. Although also copy and pasted from somewhere, but I guess most people will never know where this come from, since it's quite niche. It's a self-created love song, by a taiwanese guy in Dong Wu university, which he used to wooed his current girlfriend with. It's a Jay Chou style, with the usual rap stuff in it, but it's not mumbled, and you can hear it quite clearly what he's rapping about. Not to say, it's also very high quality, professionally done.

Lyrics:

LeT's Go
我來秀一秀這不是我的表演秀
只是我內心世界不停播的radio
想睡的快起來快快的坐起來
千萬不要錯過這個歷史性的這一幕
而世界真奇妙又地球真的非常小
誰也沒有預料透過朋友介紹加上平時禱告
我的白雪公主終於脫去神秘面罩
妳的身影不停在我腦海跑
就像奧運聖火一直不停在燃燒
害我心裡撲通撲通跳撲通跳
逼我熱的脫下外套鼓起勇氣不在害臊
start to design 追你的圈套
如果你沒跌進這善意的圈套
不管耶穌媽祖默罕默德玉皇大帝聖至麻原章恍宋七力都為我哀悼

--
好不好好不好作我的女朋友好不好
一切只要你的一聲好我就和你吃飯吃到老
要不要要不要當我的little sweet要不要
一切只要你的一聲好我就陪你陪到天涯海角

隨著秋後的寒意冷風伴隨暗戀的涵義
射出一道溫暖強心劑
不斷編織的記憶冥冥之中全都是天意
洋溢幸福的空氣相互窺視的心已聯繫
--

我漸漸發現到愛情就像瓶毒藥
在我內心處發酵讓我不時在傻笑
我慢慢感覺到地雷在體內引爆
有種衝動想大叫告訴你我真的很可靠
我的身高沒有jordan高(那又怎樣那不怎麼樣)
我的職業不是老饕
但是我人真的很好功能更不少
興趣is把你餵到飽(大家一起吃到飽)
專長替你穿外套(好暖)
疲倦了給你來點慰勞
遇到麻煩....~我讓你依靠讓你靠沒什麼大不了
(這是任賢齊的老歌)
大不了甚至無怨無悔幫你包書套
心中垃圾幫你掃一掃
你問我愛你有多深
(這個歌更老)
這麼深冬天我也願意化作暖暖包給你抱(這麼窩心)
就是因為我愛你這麼深

--
好不好好不好作我的女朋友好不好
一切只要你的一聲好我就和你吃飯吃到老
要不要要不要當我的little sweet要不要
一切只要你的一聲好我就陪你陪到天涯海角

隨著秋後的寒意冷風伴隨暗戀的涵義
射出一道溫暖強心劑
不斷編織的記憶冥冥之中全都是天意
洋溢幸福的空氣相互窺視的心已聯繫
--

現在給妳1分鐘思考
30秒來打草稿讓你決定好不好
妳是c加升記號我是d加降記號
就在五線譜遇到譜出完美e大調

愛情盡頭我們一起找
愛情電影我們一起導
靈異相片我們一起照
行行好來個擁抱
這麼好的男人哪裡找
常在你我的心中
好不好好不好答應我好不好
要不要要不要 little sweet 要不要
只要一聲好吃飯吃到老......

好不好好不好答應我好不好
要不要要不要 little sweet 要不要
只要一聲好吃飯吃到老......
--
好不好作我的女朋友好不好
一切只要妳的一聲好我就陪妳陪到天荒地老

Eerily Familiar?

2005-11-10T02:14:00.000+08:00

Just saw this piece of news from mrbrown.com

Excerpt:

A New Jersey school district will pay $117,500 to a student who was punished for creating a website that included critical statements about his middle school.

The settlement of the lawsuit brought nearly two years ago follows a decision by a federal judge ruling that Oceanport school administrators violated Ryan Dwyer's free speech rights...

"While my parents and I are happy the case is resolved, most importantly, I'm hopeful this will help ensure that free speech rights of students aren't trampled on again in the future," said Dwyer, who is now in 11th grade...

"Our schools should encourage debate and political engagement rather than punishing students who provide a forum for free expression," Barber said.

(from USAtoday.com)

For those who know me from high school, does this remind you of anything? $117,500. Oh, man... If only I'm from America....

Mid-Term Hell

2005-11-08T03:48:00.000+08:00

When you get older, relatively, time pass away faster that it once was felt. (Why the hell did I feel old? I start to feel guilt on time spent playing games, a luxury only teenager can have. Sure sign of the end of teenager life. Goodbye carefree teenager me... sobs sobs.) The best self sought explaination I can have for this time relativity thing is that when you're like only 5 years old, one year is 1/5 of your whole life, and for a 20 years old, it's 1/20, so there's a four times difference there. Coincidentally, these days, one month feels exactly like one week long only, it flew by unknowingly. And WHOAH LA! It's already more than two months since the semester start, and mid-term exam hell is just round the corner again. Sigh....

My Fair Laddy

2005-10-26T15:13:00.000+08:00

My Fair Laddy (我的逍遙學伴) is a soon to be released movie depicting Taiwanese campus life about one boy and two girls, students at Chung Cheng University in Chiayi, Taiwan.

學伴, I reckon, is one of a kind thing that only can be found in Taiwan. (I'm sure there are similar case in other asia region like mainland China or Hong Kong, but I bet it must have started from here) Literally meaning learning companion or learning patner, but there's more than what it seems and not that simple. For those uninitiated, firstly, 學伴 must always be from the opposite sex. I guess from here, those who keen at these kind stuff, can already have guessed it right what is going on. To bare it out, 學伴 is but just an euphemism and pretty nice way for us guys to have our chance (and of course, the other way round for the girls also).

This is how it works, 抽學伴 is a semesterly ritual, where you submit your personal information, usually on a piece of name card with your phone number and such , to the guy (99% chances it's a guy, guessed you already know why this is so anyway) who responsible for the PR (public relation) in your class, which he will then go hunt for other PR guy from other major or other schools, and exchange name cards with them. (that was how it works in the old days, where the '抽' mean something, ramdom picking factor is there, you randomly pick someone from the card stash, nowadays, this is unecessary anymore since the popular use of msn among everyone, just your msn account name is passed out around instead, and conversely you are given your 學伴's msn by your PR guy, now it should be more clear that why the PR guy is a very sought after job position in class comittee. They always get their first pick from the list. So, here come the tips of the day for college life in Taiwan: Be very nice to your PR in your class!!)

There's still more I can write on this tidbits of college life here, I'll leave it for the next post, I need to rush out for my next class lecture right away. Don't forget to check out the link below for a 90 seconds trailer of the movie mentioned.

Overslept

2005-10-26T12:50:00.000+08:00

Overslept today and missed a class, why?

Because I overwoke
(stayed up way too late, how 6:30am sounds to you?)

Apple Daily

2005-10-23T01:45:00.000+08:00

Any guess on why newspaper is more interesting here? Same goes for why basically everyone can watch news channel whole day here.

Raisin Extractor

2005-10-10T18:00:00.000+08:00

I hate raisins in my bread and buns too. It doesn't taste nice, and looks so... unappetizing. I still don't understand why people want to have them in breads. My high school friend, nicknamed Mr. Bear once said raisins looks like testicle of an overmasturbate, undernutrition guy (or the other way round? I can't remember), I couldn't have agree with him more. Did that gross you out? Good, try to remember it when you eat your raisins next time.

Densha Otoko

2005-10-09T13:44:00.000+08:00

Watched the extra special finale of 'Densha Otoko' downloaded from the always resourceful China bittorrent network. It was on TV just last thursday (10/6) in Japan, thanks to the hardworking China pirates, the show complete with chinese subtitles, was immediately available just a few clicks away from the comfort of my seat, in less than a day right after it was aired on FujiTV in Japan. Amazing, isn't it? If you had ask me a few years ago, I wouldn't have believe such thing is possible, if you must know, at the ancient age of us still struggling on downloading small filesized mp3 over 56k dial-up, the download of high resolution videos that their playlength counts in hours was simply impossible (mp3 is like what... play for a few minutes only!? but takes more than half an hour to complete a download, go figure). It was just a mere fantasy that we once thought wouldn't be possible in any near future at that time, not unlike how we now think flying car is not going to be possible any soon right now. But yet, it is now happening before our eyes, furthermore it's working so well with such popularity and efficiency that many thing were made possible that enable us to consume media in such convenient way, albeit all these is done on realization that this is illegal since it's without consent of the creator and copyright holder alike. But again, who am I to care about all these? As long as I can get my dose of entertainment without fail.

Back to the special finale, how was it? Most of it are just recaps from the drama, although it's still funny, but the story kinda weak. Also it's a shame that my favourite evil Jinkama only appeared for a short while at the beginning, it would have been nice if this special finale is about how she get nasty with all the guys she dumped.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, 'Densha Otoko' (Train Man) is a story of a japanese geek who saves a beautiful OL (office lady) from a harassment of a drunk man on train, and later sparked off romantic development that the extremely introverted and girl shy geek otaku had start to seek help and advice on a internet bulletin board under the nickname 'Densha Otoko' whenever he has a date or situation out of hand with her.

What makes this interesting is that it is a true life internet love story that really happened between March and May of 2004 on the japanese 2ch bulletin board which you can still see all the original post archived here (and partial english translation here).

By receiving collective advices from the forum posters, Densha Otoko got new haircut, bought new clothes, and began meeting the girl regularly. After seeing the girl, Densha Otoko socially inept personality was changing little by little for the better, for after a few months, and again under encouragement and push from the fellow 2ch forum posters, he later confessed his love to the girl. The girl accepted her, it was a huge news on the bbs forum, and it spread quickly on the internet to become a phenomena that later spawn a novel, four manga adaptations, a movie which instantly became no.1 box office after it released, and this TV series drama that had just finished airing special finale earlier this week.

It's like 'beauty and the beast' fairy-tale-like love story but just happenned to be in present-day Japan, and the beast this time is an otaku that has unhealthy obsession on anime, games, and idols. I myself is somewhat little otaku-ish, playing wtih games and computer all day, compulsive japanophile, poor social skill, all these describe the otaku-ness inside of me. It's reassuring to watch a drama about otaku that have such happy ending. Where is my lucky break like Densha Otoko?

Back to School

2005-10-09T00:16:00.000+08:00

Damn it, it's already a month since my last post. And it's three weeks into my second year of university life. This sophomore year looks like it's going to be the most strenuous one, just three weeks, and I haven't yet grasp on or have any slightest clue on what's actually being taught in class, especially on the discrete math subject. What even more worse is that we have only one professor opening this discrete math class for us to choose from, and it is compulsory credit point that has to be taken. Doesn't help on the situation that this particular professor always babble nonsensical stuff on which has nothing to do with the subject he's trying to teach in the middle session of the class. His topics of chatters range from Jin Yong wuxia novels, traditional chinese medicines, clinical depression that he once had. He also constantly laments that youngsters nowadays (that's us) can't appreciate his jokes (really lame joke, trust me!) because lack of maturity. I can somehow guess and know why this guy once had clinical depression already. Sigh..... I can see clinical depression is coming my way too.

Being Poor

2005-09-05T01:56:00.000+08:00

Being poor is a motivator to never be as poor as your parents. How true.... read this

Bra

2005-08-20T22:45:00.000+08:00

Sorry about lack of post, been busy this few days. (busy chores include eat, sleep, playing game, and so on)

While looking through my photo files in harddrive, found this little picture here that may worth blogging about. It was taken around December last year, discount sales at shop selling brassiere (the pretentious word for the breast supporting undergarment worn by woman), or just simply bra. The bra stacked like mountain, and the word sign above them said "High Class Wonder Bra", and the next line under it, suprisingly enough, said "3 dollars per gram".

gram, as in the metric unit of weight, and 3 Taiwan Dollar is approximately 0.35 Malaysia Ringgit, checked with google just now, which is dirt cheap, consider that you can't buy anything with 3 dollar here, the one dollar coin here looks almost exactly like one sen coin in Malaysia, a little brown bronze coin, which people don't even bother to pick it up if it's dropped onto floor, how sad this is.

It was the first time I saw bra is not sold in quantity but in weight. Maybe anyone can tell me this is actually very normal, for shops to sell bra this way, and just that I don't frequent enough and little of undergarment shops, which if that's true, I'll start my bra adventure of making sure I visit at least one of these shop every week after this.

Lion Eating Poet

2005-08-11T01:20:00.000+08:00

After living here for almost a year, devoid of any english exposure (I have since yet to watch anything in english on TV except a few times on discovery channel, even most stuff on channels like MTV, National Geographic and Discovery is subbed in chinese voice over, imagine that there are probably more shows in japanese than in english on TV, but again, I don't watch TV that much these days), I already reached the stage that it even makes me feels it's a miracle that I still can keep my blog in english. Weird but true.

Today I'll try something new, trying to post something in chinese. I think most chinese user know or heard before the famous tongue twisters about 44 stone lions, this is the ultimate version of it. Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, the whole essay is written in classical chinese style with only one sound 'shi' in different tone, it shows the beauty of written chinese language, it is totally comprehensible easily by reading it, but not when it is spoken out.

《施氏食獅史》

石室詩士施氏, 嗜獅, 誓食十獅。

氏時時適市視獅。

十時, 適十獅適市。

是時, 適施氏適市。

氏視是十獅, 恃矢勢, 使是十獅逝世。

氏拾是十獅屍, 適石室。

石室濕, 氏使侍拭石室。

石室拭, 氏始試食是十獅。

食時, 始識是十獅, 實十石獅屍。

試釋是事。

Meaning in English:

In a stone den was a poet Shi Shi, who loved to eat lions, and decided to eat ten.

He often went to the market to look for lions.

One day at ten o'clock, ten lions just arrived at the market.

At that time, Shi Shi just arrived at the market too.

Seeing those ten lions, he killed them with arrows.

He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.

The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.

After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.

When he ate, he realized that those ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.

Try to explain this.

Things like this makes me glad that I can understand and use both chinese and english. Do you know according to a report, it takes "an educated English speaker 1,300 hours to achieve the native-proficiency of an educated native speaker of Chinese, while it would only take about 480 hours to achieve the same level in French or Spanish."? Trying to learn the chinese language alone, takes approximately the same effort as learning 3 different indo-european languages. Just simply mind-boggling to know about this fact.

Cosplay Convention

2005-08-05T20:36:00.000+08:00

These photo are from the comic convention at my university last week that I almost forgot to blog them until I was browsing someone else's online album yesterday who had took some picture there. This is the second or maybe the third cosplay event this year, just in our university alone, there's too much of such event that I've lost count of it already, but the one last week is the largest one if I'm not wrong. Want to know how big it is? See it yourself.

It's 'People Mountain People Sea'!!

The cosplay phenomenon is very popular among youngster here, as the manga and anime latest offerings is spread through here from Japan before it reaches other part of Asia. Cosplay is role-playing the character by dressing up in costumes. Some of the favourite cosplay is of course from famous manga like Naruto and Bleach.

Kakashi and Gaara from Naruto

Sasuke from Naruto also, I like this one.

Zaku, cosplayed by another Naruto wannabe

Another 3 shinobi from sound village in Naruto manga and anime.

All members of Naruto

Kuchiki Rukia from Bleach, simple and effective

Kurosaki Ichigo from Bleach, is that a butter knife?

Death Gods with their Soul Slaying sword from Bleach

Afro Kickboxer, from One Piece probably

SEED cosplay

Besides anime and manga cosplay, there's also video game cosplay.

Final Fantasy series, Yuna looks the best, and I actually thought of cropping out the far right unsightly view, but leave it there afterall for comparison sake.

Chun Li from Street Fighter, you'll definitely see one in any cosplay event

Devil May Cry

King of Fighter...

...now becomes King of Ah-Qua

This is the pose of him asking for help from passers-by to call an ambulance after I inserted a coin, and KO'd him on the spot before taking this picture.

Viewtiful Joe, it's funny to look at it for some reason

characters from 'Fatal Frame' game on PS2

Battlefield 2, PC game, can't think of other references

Some cosplay you just can't see the face, because it's behind mask, so even damn ugly people can play this without hurting retinas of others.

A good example of a very considerate citizen who tried to protect retina of innocents, but still fails somehow.

The eyes is larger than her mouth, go figure. It must be very hot in it. Very possible it's a guy not a girl inside the costume.

Why don't they just stay at home?

After seeing this, I realized if real human girls were to have eyes that big just like all girls do in comic, it's very creepy

Kamen Rider, 'Bajah Hitam' in Malaysia

Masked Man, no idea on where this character from

Power Ranger VS The Monster

never gets old for the kids, still scratch my head on why almost all 5 to 10 years old boys liked these kind of 5 person group superheroes where the monster always get enlarged to skyscaper height at the last 5 minutes of the show, and the superheroes never summon their robots and combine 5 of them into one large humanoid shape robot also skyscaper height to squash the monter like a bug before the monster had any chance to transform into super huge monster.

And don't forget the beloved robot and super mecha from Japan, can't believe they have that cosplayed until I saw them.

Isn't this just cool? The whole suit is handmade from cardboard. Damn these nerdy fanboys.

Another whole mecha suit, imagine going to toilet in that

Female Gundam complete with lightsaber

Look at his crotch!! LOL!

The guy inside must be some super low self-esteem fella with a ultra small weenie trying to compensate his shortcoming by doing this cosplay. This is a real robot from some anime I never see before by the way, someone told me it's very accurate to the actual robot in the anime.

Now here is some movie characters cosplay, there's not many of them, since it's a comic convention afterall.

The axe gangster honcho from movie 'Kung Fu' by Stephen Chow

Kill Bill trio, they can kill with just their looks alone

Constantine, with err... Marilyn Monroe behind him

Of course, like most people, I did not go there to see real life counterpart of manga or anime characters, what's the meaning in that? I was there to ogle at the bubbly cute girls. There were lots of girl there who are not actually cosplaying, but just dressed in lolita or schoolgirls looks, it's fashion fad in Japan.

Hmm..... looks a bit retarded, but who cares, as long she's cute

Some tennis related comic perhaps, not too sure, cute girl anyway

Wanna be my naughty cat girl?? Meow....

Another cat girl in black

Little white angel, enough said

Chocolately tasty, mmm....

Sports outfit of japanese schoolgirl, still need to ask why GTO wants to become a teacher?

Another angel with lolita looks

for those with schoolgirl complex

Is acting retarded part of the whole lolita look is all about?

Out of the place, but greatly appreciated cosplay as race queen

Not sure if this is the Tsunane Obachan in Naruto, but Tsunade is not a cutie type

Why only manga characters wear like that but not in real life?

White lolita

Black lolita

I suggest all girls should wear like this during chinese new year, many uncles will give a bigger angpows for this, trust me

Cutie Honey, that's the name of a anime

Too bad the wind wasn't strong that day...

Doesn't she looks like Charmaine Sheh, the hong kong drama actress?

Beauty in elegant black

I discovered the male toilet was suddenly full of people after this picture were taken...

Gothic style, very cool

The girl at the right is actually fully naked, she was cosplaying Eve

Cosplaying chinese emperor's concubine?

"Can I have your phone number?" that's what they said to me

"Give me your phone number, or die!" an overjealous by-stander on rage when he realized the girl don't ask him for phone number like she just did asking for mine

They were trying to hint me something with the apple on their hands, wonder what's in their mind...

Not many girls would take frankenstein as their boyfriend
It would be great if they can do a sommersault, and I take a freeze shot when they're in mid-air

1001 Arabian Nights, belly dance not included

Wedding dress, at a comic-con, totally out of place, but still is great looking girl, the right one

French maid, three of them at your service

Nurse in french maid outfit, only available in japan comic fantasy land

Sketchbook

2005-08-05T00:06:00.000+08:00

DQ ISSUE 3, a website with collaborative drawings of highly detailed sketches mostly done with blue-ink ballpoint pen. Only wished that my classroom doodles can be this good.

Kung Fu Science

2005-08-04T03:59:00.000+08:00

What Einstein, kung fu, and wooden planks have all in common? Kung Fu Science is a project inspired by it being Einstein Year now, aims to spread the awareness of physics in daily life. Kung fu as it turns out, is all down to the science of physics, the equation F=ma explained what all it takes to chop wood with bare hands . On a side note, I never knew physics Phd can be this cute. I'd let her steal my peach anyday!

update: more video goodies on science behind kung fu from discovery channel!

Teapot Temple Demolished

2005-08-02T23:30:00.000+08:00

The weird temple of Ayah Pin is destroyed by authorities, and all his wives arrested. More on Star newspaper.

First day working in CC

2005-08-01T13:15:00.000+08:00

CC stands for computer centre. It's so damn boring, only have spent one hour here, and anything that can be interesting already wears out. So, from seeing what people around me doing, the prospect of me being busily occupied in the future isn't high, there's nothing much to do around here. My current chores consists of sitting at the counter, waiting for students to come refill their credit account for using printer in the centre. Another job for me is to duplicate out lots of Windows XP CD with the cd burner stack machine, copy and burned the most numbers of cd in a day of my life, feels like working in underground factory somewhere in china doing this, but it's not illegal by the way, the school signed a contract with Microsoft allowing us to do so. You can see how free I am, that I am blogging this from there.

World Champion is Born

2005-08-01T01:05:00.000+08:00

Congrats to Nicol David! or should I say Datuk Nicol David? It looks weird on her name by the way.

Nicol David beat Vanessa Atkinson 3-9, 9-3, 1-9, 9-1, 9-4

Malaysia in Aichi Expo

2005-07-31T19:49:00.000+08:00

Kissui.net blogged a review on the Aichi Expo 2005, and it's sad to know after reading it that of the few bad points of the exibition she saw, two of them are from Malaysia Pavillion area. One is the generic poster that uses the default font and default adobe photoshop gradient tool color (link), promoting biotech in Malaysia (our country is specialized in that?), another is the use of mannequins with default westerners' face (link) for showing local costume and fashion instead of using 'patung' with authentic malaysian face like other countries did with theirs. Poor and lazy effort I would say.

And this is how the exterior looks like, does it in any way reflects what kind of a country Malaysia is? This looked like a club, the Kissui.net blog says. Maybe Malaysia goverment is trying to promote the country to the japanese as a night club heaven, or something close to it, I wouldn't know.

PC Fair

2005-07-30T19:21:00.000+08:00

Just came back from taipei world trade center, went to see the Taipei Computer Applications Show 2005, supposedly to be the largest computer show for consumer alike, and the entrance ticket is 200NT dollar. So I thought it must be something real big, as big as the Computex a few months ago, but consumer oriented instead of a trade show. But I was wrong, personally I think the PC fair in Malaysia at the PWTC is better than this one. The one here is more like a showcase, not a budget heaven for those who want to buy computer stuff, there's only a few rare booths that sells stuff, the rest is just hiring show girls and promoter, promoting their stuff to visitors, not much selling involved. I think maybe the stuff they sell at the Guang Hua Plaza (like our Low Yat Plaza, just messier, and cheaper), is already at dirt cheap price, there's no need for them to organize a fair to attract more buyer, so they just concentrate on promoting their brand.

There's also this Electronic Entertainment Show just next building, it has free entrance, and the stuff is more interesting, not very big, but all of them are games related. Most of the booth are online games company, since it's the latest fads anyway, they also have one section devoted to japanese game company. Japanese game company means Sony and Nintendo, but there's no PS3 or anything next generation, just some PS2, PSP, and the Nintendo DS on display. Get to play them there, there's no need to queue in line to play them since there's lots of machine around. Played Tenchu, Ridge Racer on PSP, and some naruto game and Gundam mecha game on PS2, and a Nintendog on Nintendo DS only for a short while, because the game on display is just demo, just get to play it for like 3 minutes, then a message show on screen popped up saying it's a demo, please go away, or something like that in japanese, and I didn't read it quite clearly, but I think the message meant to shoo me away from hogging the machine for too long. I think my hand now is quite itching to buy one PSP after trying my hand on them there. They must have put some chemical or something like that to achieve such effect on me. Must resist dark force...

Hard Gay

2005-07-29T15:47:00.000+08:00

The best piece and funniest show I've ever seen on TV, filled with plenty of WTF-ness. "Hard gay" is the latest phenomena in japanese comedian world. Hard gay is the persona in comedy skit of a variety show that the comedian guy dresses up in homosexual stereotypical attire consisting tight leather jacket and hot pants, runs around in Tokyo street, offering helps to people, doing 'social improvement', while thrusting his pelvic and yelling 'woooo!!' non stop. And he do this on the busy street usually, disregard of lots of people including childrens and even elderly around. Don't know what the hell I'm talking about? You just have to see it yourself, this shit is just too funny to explain it in words.

Here you can find even more video clips of Hard Gay in action, but it's a blog of a "Hard Gay" fan in japanese, if you guys are interested after seeing the video clip link I gave above, I can compile a complete list of links to video from the site for you, just tell me.

Spank the Monkey

2005-07-29T08:35:00.000+08:00

Spank it, will ya?
I spanked my monkey at 280 mph.

Himatsubushi

2005-07-28T21:30:00.000+08:00

Try this game of Himatsubushi, literally meaning 'waste of time' (or 'free time filler', whichever you prefer) in japanese, it a little fun and weird flash game, where your main objective is to keep your mouse pointer, or the cursor safe as long as possible from the crayon shin-chan look alike, which he will try to grab or hit your cursor with lots of tricks you never thought or expected. It's not as easy as you'd think, and the game requires you not to leave the central blue area or your score will get reset. I would also like to tell you this game is a pain in the ass that is really irritating because of the smart asss shin-chan always gets you, and makes you shout profanity out loud disregard of people around you (don't play this in computer lab, trust me), because of the grins he makes everytimes he gets you, makes you want to smash the computer screen, which I did, and hurt my hand a little bit, just to warn you. My highest score until now is just a little above 1500 points, how high can you get?

Doom Movie

2005-07-28T08:03:00.000+08:00

New trailer for the movie Doom is looking decent good. Isn't it kind of sad, when saying a video game inspired movie to be decently good is actually giving it a positive remark. Couldn't blame it for after had anticipating on past video games movies like Resident Evil and Final Fantasy that have greatly dissapointed us. Let's hope this one will be a great one like the Tomb Raider did, although I just think the only great part it did was choosing the right actress for the Lara Croft role. (Angelina Jolie, mmm... *wipes saliva*)

The Rock looks alright to be the main character in the Doom 3 game, even if I don't remember how the guy looks like or what his name is in the game, since most of the time in the game is pitch black, it's a frustating game of toggling between the guns and torchlight (what idiot can't hold a gun together with a torchligh? stupid game design), I threw it aside after playing it just one weekend. But The Rock seems to be the right person to act as a brawny 'shoot first ask later' guy, and the props in the movie looks exactly like it should, as authentic as it is following the game. Looking forward to this one.

One Sentence Post

2005-07-27T23:07:00.000+08:00

The key to all human happiness is clarity of purpose.

back out to rethink what is the purpose I started this blog for...

Feel the Magic

2005-07-26T07:58:00.000+08:00

Kimi no tame nara shineru is the japanese version of Nintendo DS game 'Feel the Magic'. The japanese title means 'I would die for you', how come it get translated to 'Feel the Magic'? No idea at all. The Sega Japan website has this web demo for those without DS to try it out, it's fun. I remember they have something similar for the Warioware game at the Nintendo official site like this also, you can go find it out if you're interested. Try this demo game (created with flash) if you want something short and fun to play, it's kind of addictive, too bad there's only 3 demo on the site, and it's quite short.

Free Konfabulator

2005-07-26T02:14:00.000+08:00

The Konfabulator is now available to download at http://widgets.yahoo.com/ for free. I have used the Konfabulator for almost a year, and never thought of registered it because I am a cheap stingy, that I have to admit. Looks like my stinginess pay off afterall, it's now free!

Mario Battle No. 1

2005-07-26T00:32:00.000+08:00

Many of you must have played mario before, but have you ever thought of playing it without having to collect coins and jumping on the enemies? Mario Battle No. 1 is a modified Mario with all the enemies, coins, bricks and stuffs all removed. Why? It's art, you see, this modified NES rom of Mario game is created by this artist named Myfanwy Ashmore. Inside the game, you just wonder around without having to do anything, just looking around, go for a walk, appreciate the world around, until you run out of time and die. Just like in the real world, you wonder around, and die, art imitating life. You can download the NES rom from the site, and play it with a NES emulator, which is also available from the site.

Konfabulator purchased by Yahoo

2005-07-25T18:42:00.000+08:00

Konfabulator is one of my favourite program recent years. Macworld news has this article about Yahoo's acquisition of Konfabulator, which the acquisition will be announced on Monday (US time, of course). And the best part is that Yahoo said they will be giving Konfabulator away for free, woohoo!

At the Konfabulator website, they also created a webcomic for this special event, go and see it, if you're interested in the history and how Konfabulator is created. There are ten parts of it, this is the part one titled The Beginning. Enjoy.

The One Dollar Shirt

2005-07-25T00:02:00.000+08:00

Ever wondered how to fold a dollar into a shirt? The One Dollar Shirt origami step by step picture tutorial can teach you that. I got a dollar bill here somehow, got it from our university headmaster earlier this year during the chinese new year dinner gathering, each students attended were given a red packet (a tradition of chinese new year, the elder gives red packet with money in it to the young ones), inside it was this one dollar US bill. I'm using it to fold my own dollar bill shirt. A US dollar bill looks best when it's used to fold this shirt instead of other currency, because the edge seal looks like a necklace, and the 'ONE' wording on the paper money, looks like a necktie on the shirt. And did anyone notice the sideline 'In God We Trust' on the shirt beside the necktie? It's just a cool shirt, wish I have one real shirt that looks like this. Not sure that I would wear it though.

Farm Sluts Short Movie

2005-07-24T22:47:00.000+08:00

It all began from a spam mail. See this interesting and funny short movie about an unfortunate man who constantly failed to kill himself and keeps getting misunderstood as sex maniac by his parents, all of it started because of a single spam mail he opened in his office that has 'farm sluts' porn in it. The necro ending is quite quirky and creepy too. A movie to remind you not to open that spam email!! Quite hilarious.

Radiohead's Creep

2005-07-24T21:57:00.000+08:00

Radiohead's Creep. Another flash site for today, not game, but a music video this time. A strange but wonderful video, just great and perfect, both the song and animation. Whoever made this is very talented, everything is super detailed in the animation. Simply amazing stuff. Watched it 3 times in a row myself. Must find some Radiohead album after this.

Here's the lyrics for Radiohead's Creep. Click to expand

Puzzle Game in Space

2005-07-24T18:34:00.000+08:00

Save a piece of wood planet by guiding a space guy through a tons of puzzle, in a point and click interface. It's original and totally bizzare, an absolutely fabulous and exellent short game made in flash. One of the most captivating site, the artwork is just simply superb, at least in my eyes. Most interesting.

Zero Gravity Experiment

2005-07-24T02:40:00.000+08:00

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to see a water balloon pop in space? 3 videos is available from the NASA site. A similar related experiment of exploding balloon in high speed video from NASA also. So, this is what rocket scientist do eh?

Here's another experiment that shows how a cat in zero gravity situation behaves. As we all know, cats always land on their feet when falling, but when there's no gravity for them to know which direction they're falling, what will happen?

Spirited Away Cosplay

2005-07-23T07:24:00.000+08:00

Spirited Away cosplay, do I have to say more?

English Lesson for Pervert

2005-07-23T06:24:00.000+08:00

The link of this post is NSFW and contains sexual material, proceed at your own discretion.

Weird and kinky english lesson for pervert from japan. Some of the funny sentences include:

Oh, you have good penis.
(can anyone tell me what is a good penis?)
Although disliked by the mouth, lower mouth isn't!
(what the hell?)
This is 4000 years of history of China..!
(it's not funny here, but damn hilarious if you read it inside)

And I don't think they purposely try to make it funny in the first place.

Darth Vader with Schoolgirl

2005-07-23T05:20:00.000+08:00

A picture of Darth Vader wooing japanese schoolgirl, what can be cooler than this for a geek? It's from the ad campaign poster for the mobile phone company 'au' in japan, they have a series of poster with Star Wars characters like this, here's another one with Yoda in it.

The expression on Yoda face is priceless. The guy on the right looks not so happy that Yoda is on the moves stealing his chick.

Windows Vista

2005-07-23T05:07:00.000+08:00

Microsoft just announced the final official name for their next generation OS, Windows Vista, that is. Apparently, Longhorn is the codename, and they didn't want to use it as the marketing name for the OS. Isn't this Vista name less catchy compared to the name Longhorn? Or even Windows 2006 sounds better than Vista, really don't understand what those people in Microsoft are thinking...

PSP updated with Web & TV

2005-07-22T19:18:00.000+08:00

The Sony PSP has a new firmware update (version 2.0), and also a new look update. The system software update includes several functions that PSP owners have been long waiting for, additions of web browser and TV programs download capability to the system. Sony also officially announced the white PSP (look sweeter than an ipod!), which will be released a few weeks after the europe regional release of PSP.

Now, for everything to be perfect, it just have to drop the price a little more, and some killer apps game like Gran Turismo, and real Metal Gear Solid on the PSP to be completely drooling. I'll be one waiting for it to happen before I pick one up.

Planarity

2005-07-22T19:05:00.000+08:00

Planarity is the latest craze in online flash game, it was just created two weeks ago, but there's over 600,000 visitors to the game in the short time it has only been online. It's still work in progress, but fun nonetheless. It's created by a 19 years old computer science major John Tantalo, the aim of this addictive and simple puzzle game is to move the blue point vertices, to make it so that there's no single overlapping line. Once it's cleared, you proceed to next level, there's no last level, you can play it forever, but most people can only reach level 5 or so, and very very few that can go past 10 levels except those with strong spatial reasoning ability. I'm still trying my way through the level 10, tell me which level you can reach.

Here typing this is also a 19 years old computer science major, maybe it's time for me to create something radical and contribute for the online world also.

Playstation 3 Dev Kit

2005-07-22T18:00:00.000+08:00

Japanese blogger Masakazu Honda recently blogged about the PS3 dev kit he saw. Based on his information, the dev kit includes a Cell chip running at 2.4 Ghz (PS3 Cell chip will be running 3.2Ghz), and a GPU chip running through a 4x PCI-Express slot (just a fraction of bandwidth compared to the FlexIO bus used in PS3 for RSX graphic chip), which probably is nvidia G70, the very latest Geforce 7800. According to him, some of the demos from the Sony's E3 press conference were running on this machine of same type.

It's looking huge and only has a fraction of power the Playstation 3. Things look very promising in the future. If what he said is true, we can expect visuals exceeding those displayed at E3 and also the recent Playstation Meeting 2005, which quite a numbers of demos running on this baby. In his blog, he also mentioned some interesting point about the multi-threading problem on the PS3 architecture. It seems that Sony has provided developers with software tools to allow them to choose from three different available algorithms that will allow the system to automatically assign threads to different SPE in the Cell chip. This way, the developer can utilize the power of SPE better and more effectively without having to take much effort as much it was once thought it would be.

Can't wait for this PS3 to be released next year. Must save money from now on.

Resident Evil 5 Trailer Videos

2005-07-22T16:48:00.000+08:00

Resident Evil 5 Trailer Video from IGN.com. Everything is so detailed, it's like gamer's ultimate wet dream comes true. IGN.com is the only place to find the video, because they were lucky enough to bring along a video camera and tripod with them to the Playstation Meeting 2005. Check out their IGN PS3 section, there's other cool stuff going on, happenings in the Playstation Meeting 2005 like new tech demos, and first hand report on some partial developed PS3 games running on actual PS3 hardware. A lot of videos for video games junkies, don't miss it.

GTA:SA re-rated as Adult Only

2005-07-21T22:49:00.000+08:00

GTA: San Andreas is now re-rated as an Adult Only title, by the ESRB under the pressure of US senates because of the Hot Coffee sex scene mods for the game. What I really don't understand is, why is this happening? Is having sex more serious than doing drive-by shooting, or beating up police senselessly in the game? Why I don't see people in real life get jailed for having sex (almost everyone got to have sex in life, just the matter of time) But instead get jailed for doing the other stuff which is the norms in the game like knocking down pedestrian with your car, heisting the bank using explosives, and many more. And sex is the achilles heel for this game to get re-rated as Adult Only, but not those criminal stuff. Why??

Banned PS2 ad from France

2005-07-21T22:33:00.000+08:00

This is a TV commercial from two years ago found at french site, it's a advertisement for the discount promotion on Sony Playstation 2, click here to see it. (and that thing is not what you think it is, really!)

(via BoingBoing)

Google Moon

2005-07-21T00:55:00.000+08:00

I'm sure most of you have already tried Google Earth before, here comes a new addition to the Google maps family, Google Moon (http://moon.google.com), it now only has the Lunar Landing Site, which the manned moon landing took place on July 20, 1969. It was a sudden project just started last week inside google, and this is the result, in commemoration of the big step in human history, landing on the moon more than 30 years ago.

Resident Evil 5

2005-07-21T00:04:00.000+08:00

Leaked image of Resident Evil 5, due out on PS3 and Xbox360, Capcom just announced that the next sequel is not available on Nintendo platform, and they're working on both PS3 and Xbox360 release. Capcom has ditched Nintendo for Resident Evil 5 this time, after working together for titles like Resident Evil 4 and Viewtiful Joe.

MobuzzTV

2005-07-20T22:56:00.000+08:00

MobuzzTV is sort of like a tech news video blog. But it's updated daily on weekdays with a video that last couple of minutes, and the host is cute also, go check it out. It's also supposedly watchable from a 3G mobile phone, couldn't test that myself, don't have both the phone and phone subscription service with 3G capability. But the online streaming video alone is more than enough make me keep visiting it daily.

Eric Myer Photography

2005-07-20T19:43:00.000+08:00

Eric Myer Photography is a pretty cool photography site, the links is to his work on people face mix-match potraits, it allows you to match tops and bottoms of various face potraits of many different stereotypes of people with interesting result. Go and try mixing up male and female potrait to see what will come out, it might suprise you. Make sure to check out the rest of the photographer's work, it's equally stunning.

Fold n' Drop Windows

2005-07-20T14:37:00.000+08:00

This Fold n' Drop technique should be implemented in UI design of next generations Windows or Linux or whatever OS it is. It works better than it looks. You drag something you want to move or copy to another opened windows in the screen, without the hassle of juggle through the copy and paste, you just drag it, flip through the windows like sheets of papers, and drop it on the windows you want it to go. There's an Java executable available on the site for those who are interested to try their first hand on it, and video also available for you to take a quick look. The screenshot shown here is taken from the java executable when I was playing it. This also answered the age long question of what is the backs of windows look like, basically it's just plain white with nothing on it, as you can see from the screenshot.

Sausage Carving

2005-07-20T14:16:00.000+08:00

Winny Sausage Carving Tutorial is a japanese site that teaches you how to carve sausages into cute animals or flowers shape. It's all in japanese, but there's picture all over the site, and videos for those who don't understand japanese to follow. Just click on any design you like, a step by step picture by pop up, with a link to video for you to watch and follow. Useful for anyone who tries to make japanese style kiddo bento set.

Harry Potter audiobook, illegal that is

2005-07-20T01:25:00.000+08:00

JK Rowling was reportedly refused to allow her book to be released in ebook form. In less than 24 hours after the book official release, digitized pirated copy of latest Harry Potter is available on IRC channels in .txt or .pdf file, and soon spreaded to every forums, P2P sites imaginable. This shows you how the fans are working endlessly sacrificing their time just to contribute spreading this piece of work.

Now, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is available in audio form out there in the net. I will not give out the url here as it's not right to do so. There's always google for you to utilize, and TeleRead has a short .wav file of the audiobook for you to sample.

Teapot Cult in Malaysia?

2005-07-19T21:07:00.000+08:00

Can anyone tell me what the hell is this 'teapot cult' news in BBC news site is exactly about? Isn't that teapot statue thing something your friendly local municipal government built to waste millions of rakyat's hard earned money? What the hell is going on?

From the boingboing article:

A Malaysian cult devoted to the icon of a large teapot has been attacked. Some local Muslims are said to be angry that the group, which promotes interfaith harmony, is "stealing" converts from mosques.

Still scratching my head on this...

Black and White to Color

2005-07-19T17:19:00.000+08:00

If you have ever tried to colorize black and white picture by hand, you should know it's a tedious process and oftenly the picture look weird unless undergoes lots of tweaking hours after hours.

Colorization Using Optimization is the algorithm developed to overcome this problem.

With just a few strokes of colors to identify different color spaces, the algorithm will automatically generate high quality color image from the marked black and white picture, like in the example shown. The matlab code of the algorithm is available on the site for those interested and know how to run the matlab software. A similar windows application is also available at this site of another university. Well worth a look even if you're not a computer science major like me, it's simply amazing and almost unreal it seems to be at first.

Lego Computer

2005-07-19T17:05:00.000+08:00

Step by step pictorial guide on how to build a computer casemod with lego. It's just simple cool, isn't it?

bloglines down again?

2005-07-19T16:20:00.000+08:00

latest update: the bloglines feed is back to normal, all my subscriptions is still there. Kudos to bloglines.com people. It's time to export my subscription list into opml file, just in case it'll be really all lost next time.

Is it just me or what? All my subscription feeds in the bloglines is gone, at first I thought it was just like the last time that it went invisible because of some javascript issues caused by new extensions I installed on my firefox browser. This time I didn't do anything, but it just went disappeared from one moment to another. Can't see my feeds from either after login, or using the public view. (Can anyone please click on it, and see if you can see anything there?)

The 'What I Read' blogroll list on the right panel is all gone because of this too. Arghh.... hopefully they'll fix it soon enough if it's their server's fault, my blog reading addiction can't stand any longer of this. I need my fix too, fix of daily blog addiction.

update: after checking the technorati tag on bloglines, it's not just me that suffer from this. At the official news blog of bloglines.com, it is announced that "Bloglines will be down this evening, July 17, 2005, starting at 7PM Pacific time" and they expect the downtime to be about one hour. Let's hope everything will be fine soon.

Face Sketch

2005-07-18T22:58:00.000+08:00

Remember those police drama before CSI? All they need is just an artist sketch of the bad guys to catch them, no any of high tech stuff involved. You can play with the police face sketch tool with this flash website. Choose the right combination of hair, eyebrows, nose, face shape, you can actually get a close likeness to someone you want to sketch. Good fun if you have too much time to waste.
Who is that guy in the picture? I have no idea either, it doesn't looks like me. Just a random sketch playing around with the tool when trying to sketch out my face. There's quite a lot of faces saved in the database on the site, you can load them on one of the buttons on the right side. Some of them are really funny, like the Micheal Jackson's mug shot sketch.

The Mosquito Project

2005-07-18T21:08:00.000+08:00

The Mosquito Project, where mosquito comes from the future!! Ever wondered where these little pesky insects come from, and why it sucks our blood for? It's all answered in this little flash game.

top ten richest people

2005-07-18T20:14:00.000+08:00

So, according to this top ten list of richest people in the world, from what I see, the only way to become top billionaires is to either be born as an arabian with oil wells behind your backyard, or become university dropout and start a computer company. And don't forget you have to be a man too, there's no woman on the list, yet.

Hmm.... maybe it's time for me to become a billionaire also. Let's see... I'm a man, okay, that's settled. I'm not arabian though, not to say have any oil wells. What I can do now is to drop out from university. Oh man, this is just too easy!

This list is quite old and inaccurate if I'm not wrong, because there's no that IKEA guy in it, he is supposedly to be super rich recent years, and even beat Bill Gates off the top rank for a short time, right? And same goes for the Wal-mart family also, didn't see them in the list. Forbes list of world's richest people is more accurate and updated. Go and check if your name or your uncle name is there.

typhoon day

2005-07-17T21:28:00.000+08:00

Too bad it's summer break right now, or else we'll be having an extra holiday tomorrow to stay indoor for this coming typhoon. The last typhoon holiday was last year a few months after I came here. It came at the right time because it saved me for giving me an extra week to do my chinese subject assignment report which I forgot to do and the deadline was next day. Maybe this one is just for the compensation of last one. From what I see now, it seems weak and only little weeny of rain, not much winds. Maybe things will be different in midnight.

Matrix Ping Pong

2005-07-16T21:42:00.000+08:00

Low quality of the video resolution aside, this video is very entertaining piece of japanese variety TV-show at its best. Puts others TV show out there into shame, especially terribly boring taiwanese variety show with stupid host and his cheesy jokes. That's why I only watch japanese TV shows these days.

Whose fault? MMU? or You?

2005-07-15T17:05:00.000+08:00

Just read today post from Jeff Ooi. One of them mentioned MMU, it's not the first time MMU got mentioned on that journalistic site. If I'm not wrong, almost everytimes, it's negative metioning among very few positives one.

This time, the problems is stated in the two letters sent to malaysiakini.com. (Student unwittingly trapped by MMU, Close encounter with MMU graduates)

So, whose fault it is that such situation happens? While the first letter mentioned about the admission glitch which can be easily rectified. And most probably stem from just one or just few negligent university employees who can't handle their job professsionally and accurately, for this is still forgivable given the numbers of student admissions the university has to process in a short time, and the relatively young history of establishment the university has compared to those of its size, it's understandable that one or two mistakes will be made. But the second letter nailed down the current dire situation of our local scene of higher level education. It's not just MMU in the whole context. With all the spoonfeeding, poor language command in english, unenthusiastic work attitude and lack of real technical skills among local graduates that is rampantly reported on local newspaper. It's not before long recruiters will start to shun local graduates, just because of this reported bias alone.

Why does this happen? Is it the university's fault? for not able to churn out graduates with fully developed mind and skills, and simply award degree even to students who are not competent enough. Or is it the students' own fault? for not able to realize that university is a place for them to learn and develop themselves, but not a place that you buys lectures time and gets a certification paper in return.

The faults lie in both side, and especially true at student side in MMU case. As one who has experienced in attending both local private university before (MMU) and foreign public university currently (Taiwan University), I can see the huge difference between the mindset of students in two places, but not the quality of education in the two universities. From what I get to know by chatting around in both campus, I realized that the problem is really in the students themselves.

In MMU, the majority of students I know, admits that they enrolled and joined the course just for the sake of getting into a university, without even knowing what to expect in the course they registered for. In a groupwork assignment, I further realized that most of my coursemates knows nothing on the subjects even though they showed up on every lectures, and they somemore expect others in the rest of the team to do their work for them, thinking their responsibility is just to look over the progress. These group of people treat lecture and the assignment as spectator sports, I guess.

This shows the overly low academic requirement for admission that created these problems is the base stagnant for all the problems above, as most students don't show seriousness in choosing their major of study, and lack the real ability for university level subjects that further causes problems like grade point inflation, reduced of subjects difficulty just for their sake.

Whereas from what I see here, the way things work is the total opposite, choosing major of study is serious business. Most students decides whether or not to go into university even as early as junior high school (form 1 ~ 3, in Malaysia), because they need to take general public exams to get admissions into senior high school of their choice, unlike us who get straight 5 or 6 years in secondary schools. For those who don't intend to go university or college, they can choose to go vocational high school, which prepare them for the job market right after graduate. There's also art high school, which a few of them is quite famous, because a numbers of celebrity like DJ, singers, actors graduated from it. For the academic inclined, they'll enter high school to prepare for the next big public exams, and university admission exam. They choose the major and university they wish to join, and study hard to make it happen. For each university, and each different major even in same university, they need to take admission exam just to gain entrance, if their general public exams results don't get them assigned to the university and major of their choice in the first place.

So, can you now see the difference? Most students in Malaysia did the opposite thing, they take the public exam, and see where will the results bring them to, which is so weird not until before I start to think of it. The abolishment of the SPM will further makes things worse can be seen from this. Let's hope and pray that someone in the ministry of education will someday wake up and understand that what they need to do is not to further reducing difficulty of our education level, but to amp up our students ability, so to make more people able to join in the higher education without any conpromising. That may not be the easiest way to go but that is the only way of really providing a brainy labor force with real ability to improve the country, not just plain illusion in graduate numbers to show the world.

update: Head, School Relations and Programme Promotion Unit of MMU just gave a reply on regard of the admission glitch to malaysiakini.com

other blogs which has mentioned the same topic:
Bureaucratic Bungle @ MMU? (Education in Malaysia, a comprehensive site on the local education)
Multimedia University, Again... (MageP's Lab)

googlezon, 2014?

2005-07-14T21:38:00.000+08:00

One of the best site I've seen this year. Flash movie that takes a while to load, but it's just amazing and disturbing at the same time. Genius piece of work, thought provoking. It's a flash presentation showing us the future of media and internet, in a matter-of-factly way. What can happen in year 2014? See it yourself.

Old Grandma Hardcore

2005-07-14T02:36:00.000+08:00

Found a very interesting website. This is not what you think! A site with the word "Hardcore" in the title does not necessarily requires you need to click 'YES, I'm 18' to enter. Old Grandma Hardcore is a super interesting blog about a grandma who plays video game, just about every games, a hardcore gamer, blogged by his grandson. My own grandmother plays game also, but only before the mainstreams of games become racing games, sports game, and shooter games. She was playing those catridge era games every night when I was still around lower primary school years. I played with her all the time too, tetris, pac-man, tank war, she always beat me, and usually purposely let me win, so I'll keep playing with her. Too bad games nowadays are only targeted at young audience, so my grandma had to revert back to what most grandmas do at night, watching soap opera. She also likes to watch wrestling, WWE, smackdown, whatever it is, she started to watch those before it was ever shown on local TV, and even before I was bornt, as I was told by my mom, she got them from video rental shop. Normal grandma rents soap drama, she rents wrestling shows, just to let you know how interesting and peculiar character my grandmother is. It's just too bad she doesn't play games anymore, or else she'll be the coolest grandma. I asked her once before, she just told me that she can't handle 3D games, it makes her dizzy to control in 3D, she likes to look at us play though, but not all kind of games, just loves looking at us playing action games that needs jumping a lot.

Hamburger Magic

2005-07-12T02:52:00.000+08:00

Coolest street magic ever! A guy, pulled out an edible hamburger from burger shop signboard on street. Just like the fat kid's wildest dream comes true. What's more, he can stuff the burger he had a bite on it back into the signboard, with the picture of the burger ate off one corner back on it, really cool! A must see!

The amazing hamburger trick (via Hedonistica.com)

This guy is my hero, not just because of his magic skills, but his well endowed ability of making japanese girls around him squealing like that. He, for one, is the god of all men. Someone should pass him the playboy's centerfold to practise the next amazing trick.