Back in July, I took a month-long gap break after i left my previous firm before starting my new job. It wasn’t a big decision for me, i had always longed to do it, and the opportunity came along. I didn’t have any vacation trips planned because my daughter’s exams were coming. In my mind, i had a short list of things i wanted to do in the 31 days. Or at least try to do. Like train for my 10K run, read a lot of books, watch all those movies on my HDD, spend time with my family, go to the park with them and play badminton, do my…

At the start of the year i signed up on the challenge to run and complete in a 10km race. Now, I know that for most people, 10km is a pretty easy race, but this is coming from a guy that back in Primary 5 had to walk to finish a 800m heats in school. For the past 5 years or so, I’ve been running a lot in the gym, doing about 3 to 4km on the treadmill. Later I started running on the road in the evenings. Only these past few months I’ve intensified the training, running about 6-9km three or four times a week. Anyway, i went with…

I took a month break in between jobs. I had a short list of things to do, like train for my 10km run, read loads of books, paint, etc. and also, to try some new restaurants, and re-visit some of my old favourites that I haven’t been to in a long, long time. Looking back over the month, covered quite a lot of makan places, some okay, some great. Here are some of the highlights: Sagano Japanese buffet Renaissance Hotel KL. On my very first day of holiday, i came here for their buffet lunch. I used to come here when I was working around KLCC, but it seems that…

Today I brought my 12 year old daughter to make her new IC. Many many years ago when I was small my dad brought me to make IC in the small town I grew up in. I remember we just went to the NRD. There was no queue, no number machine, no online application coz there as no Internet. All we did was walk up to the counter. Remember those old blue ICs with the strange fish-like embossed pattern? Anyway things are much more straightforward to apply now.vthe problem is that there are too many people applying now making the queues very long. i went to the NRD near my…

My mum gave Alyssa a large angpow for her birthday. When we asked her what she wanted to buy with it, she didn’t hesistate to say “a bike”. She never had an adult bike, now’s probably still not too late for her to start learning. So WY did some googling about where to buy bikes around our area with a budget of RM300+. This was one of the places we visited in Tasik Prima. This place seemed to be embracing the whole online store plus physical store concept. Nice shop but not in our price range. This is another shop in Bandar Puteri we visited. It’s quite famous as a…

A few months ago i applied for the High Speed Broadband (HSBB) connection package introduced by Maxis. The promotion had just been launched, called ‘Maxis Home Fibre Internet’. Basically, it is using TMNET Unifi backbone, but with different pricing from TMNET’s own offering. At that time, the offer was for RM118 per month for 10Mbps. This offer is no longer available, the normal pricing for 10Mbps is RM138 per month. Comparatively, TMNET Unifi is currently running a VIP promo of 10Mbps for RM199 per month but with extra offers. How to apply: First you need to check if your area has Unifi yet. If you see the banners advertising it…

The news just came in a few days ago, Digg Was sold to Betaworks for just USD$500,000. This for a website that turned down an offer $200million from Google last year. The fall from grace is spectacular, even by dot-com standards. Most laypeople haven’t heard of Digg, but 4 to 5 years years ago, for me it was the greatest website on the face of the Internet. It’s basically a news aggregator, where people submit in interesting stories, and other people up vote them if they like it. The popular stories stay longer on the front page, the unpopular ones get voted down. It’s a simple premise, and due to…

I used to stay in University Gardens SS3 for a short while many many years ago. I had first come to the city fresh from school and put up with a family friend for a few months. This part of SS3 was and still is pretty quiet, I’m not so sure if people still call it ‘University Gardens’ anymore. Hidden between the LDP and SS2, its a nice neighbourhood with a few row of shops, a Shell station, a community hall (or as I like to call it, the Indian wedding hall), a covered basketball court (it wasn’t covered back then) and a few tennis courts. There’s a pasar malam…

I was invited to this event via a FB acquaintance, and seeing that last Saturday was a rare weekend where my family had nothing on, i took a drive down the Federal Highway to Central Market. It was billed as “KL Alternative Bookfest + Art for Grabs” with the catchy tagline “buku adalah sahabat manusia”, i was going there more to check out the art and maybe drop by T-square (I haven’t been there since I started oil paintings). My wife’s main reason for going was to eat in Petaling Street. Traffic was good and we snagged a parking spot right in front of Central Market itself (great job by…

All these years I’ve been changing car tyres at a shop near my house. Its pretty cheap by Puchong / PJ standards, and for a long time they accepted Bonuslink cards (they no longer do). But i found them pretty good, plus it was convenient. But the price of car tyres increase every year, ironic because Malaysia is a rubber-producing nation. This strangely affects not only imported tyres, but also locally produced ones like Sime. The last price hike at the end of 2011 have increased the price of tyres of my current car from RM90+ to RM200 since i started using it from 2004. That’s more than 100% increase.…