The Chinese lunar calendar today ushers in the Year of the Horse. So Gong Xi Fa Cai to all my Chinese friends. As is usual in every year, the house that my family visits every year is my God Grandma's place in Sungai Chua. Surprised that I have a Chinese God Grandma? Well, if it weren't for her last time when I had a fit as a baby, God knows if I were able to be here and be doing this very thing right now. Alas, she hasn't really been in the best of health and her memory is fading in and out, especially since she had a brain tumor removed a couple of years back. She also used to make the best "Kaya" (a kinda paste you spread over bread) ever! We really, really miss that.

Took some time later in the afternoon to visit my good ol' friends, Roger and Raymond. I've known the twins (and their folks) since kindergarten (pre-school to you Yanks!) and I'm just glad that we're still able to keep it up to this day. Finding new friends is easy but keeping them over the years is another thing altogether.

Since I had nothing much to do today I decided to start cleaning up my room. It's starting to look so cluttered and messed up with things strewn all over the place. Cleaning my room has some sorta therapeutic effect on me. Whenever I'm pissed off with something or whatever, cleaning my room just helps and depending on the degree of cleanliness and tidiness that I get in the end result, the cleaner and tidier the room gets means that I was really, really pissed off! So anyways, I'm neither angry or pissed off at the moment so it makes the starting attempt a bit difficult so I ended up doing just my desk for now. It was the messiest anyhow with scraps of papers, notes, cables, tools, etc. strewn all over it. At least I can see the desk itself now so, heh! That'll do! :P

Hardly a month passed by and here we have another one of my friends from Purdue who tied the knot. So, many congratulations the both of you! Uhmmm... I didn't bring my camera this time around so I don't have any pictures at all for this wedding. Sorry! :P

Right after the wedding, some of us were thinking of making it up to Genting Highlands tomorrow and spend the day there. I was really looking forward to that until later in the evening when Amy informed me that it was called off since Bard is down with a fever. Ickkk! Looks like another uneventful Sunday for me tomorrow...

So, nVidia today launched the new GeForce4 graphics card. Hardly a year ago, I bought an Asus V8200 Deluxe card which was equipped with a GeForce3 and to date, I hardly see any games or applications that actually take full advantage of the Geforce3 featureset like pixel shaders or such. But existing applications (mostly games) that taxes the graphics card to the limits (like Quake, Max Payne, etc.) runs real sweet on it. Anyways, I don't regard the GeForce4 as being revolutionary such as when the GeForce3 came out. No doubt the GeForce4 is a much faster card but there's really nothing new as far as the architecture is concerned. There are a couple of new featured introduced in the new GeForce4 but I reckon its not so much of a compelling reason to upgrade (Those things burn quite a big hole in your wallet too!) so the GeForce3 card will definitely remain in my PC for a while.

I get hyped up whenever I come across a piece of news with John Carmack in it. You would have noticed in my About page that one of the people I look up to is John Carmack. So, just who is this John Carmack you ask? Ever played Wolfenstein, Doom 1 & 2 or Quake 1, 2 or 3 Arena? He's the creator of those games' engines. What makes me look up to him is that he is a technical idealist and most of the things that he has come up with are driven not by business but technical correctness. I can only wish that most of the projects I work on is just like that, 'cos most of the time, its the business requirements that drive things and when things get tight, compromises have to be made on the technical side of things, leaving things totally dysfunctional (I'm tempted to drive the point home by highlighting products made by a certain very large software company but I'll let it go for now!). He also recognizes the fact that he is not that business savvy and thus has hired somebody to take care of the business side of things while he concentrates at what he does best, i.e. programming. This is of course the opposite of what usually happens in the industry. Great engineers who were brilliant in their field end up managing the company or such. Anyways, he has come such a long way that people, especially those in the PC graphics industry, regard him as an authority as to what should be right or wrong when drivers (mostly OpenGL) are being built or developed. I will be putting in items in here whenever The Man is in the news from now on....

It's Federal Territory Day today so it's a day off for me. Went around KL in the afternoon and I got me The Fast And The Furious DVD. Whilst the action was frenetic, stunts were nicely done, soundtrack was thumping (Dang! I really dig on those tracks by BT!), special features were worthy, some nice (not gorgeous or hot though, heh!) babes (Jordana Brewster), it's a shame I can't say the same about the storyline though. It's just as shallow as some Malay movies with some lumba haram (illegal street racing) theme thrown in. Anyways, it's a good DVD to throw in your rig, crank the volume up and bother some neighbors on a quiet afternoon or evening. Heh! My rating: 4.5/10.

Something in the news that both angered and cracked me up at the same time. Apparently, these 24 hour eating outlets are a source of social ills and thus the solution to overcome it is by not allowing them to operate on a 24 hour basis. Another reason given is that rather than having people frequenting the eating outlets in the wee hours of the night, the time is much better spent having a good nights rest instead. What a load of crap, I'd say. Eating outlets as a cause of social ills? Gimme a break! Just how many incidences have been reported so far about eating outlets being vice dens? People don't go mugging, gambling or get laid at those eating outlets! They go there to get food! And the time is better spent sleeping so that they can come to work "feeling fresh"? Hello, Minister! What about those people who work on shifts? Are you going to deprive them of their basic need to live? Not everyone has a 9-to-5 job, y'know. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a classic example of how shallow minded some of our ministers can be. It's just plain, downright stupid. People go to these places to get food, to ease the hunger pangs that come to them in the middle of the night, to meet friends, to wind down after a whole day and evening's work. At the same time, these eating outlets have become part of the unique Malaysian culture and thus taking them down would mean taking part of our culture down as well. As far as social ills are concerned, has there been any statistics compiled to show the correlation between the existence of these 24 hour eateries with the number of immoral activities? I certainly don't think so. Y'know what? If they're really intent on not wanting people to go out at night and engage in those unhealthy activities, why not just impose a curfew? Simpler innit? The people aren't kids, for heaven's sake! I just hope whatever plans they have to put a stop to the 24 hour eateries will fall through. At the same time, The Star is running a public opinion poll on whether or not the authorities should ban those eating outlets. Go do some justice...

Whoohoohoo! I've never laughed so hard for four straight hours in my lifetime ever! And I never thought I could break a sweat from laughing too! I just came back from watching Malaysian Comedy Pest 2002 at The Actor's Studio, Bangsar. It was certainly worth all the money spent! The performers, Patrick Teoh, Comedy Court, Harith Iskandar and Afdlin Shauki, are certainly the best and just damn good! How I wish there were more performances like this! Patrick Teoh kicked the show off introducing the line up and also a cheque presentation to Vision Homes in Ipoh, to which proceeds from the show are forwarded to. Comedy Court (featuring "Two Indian Fellas") then took the stage and they had a skit in which a female reporter from the BBC came down to Malaysia to interview the person on the street. They mocked just about every Malaysian on the street that we'd typically find (a Chinese businessman, a Malay politician, an Indian lawyer, a Chinese pimp and two Auntie characters) and it was certainly dead on! (One of their more memorable lines being "Malaysia, truly Asia!", "Can lah!") Harith Iskandar was up next with his stand up comedy act which again pokes fun at Malaysians. Guys learnt a thing or two from his "Zen of Stillness" in a relationship! After the intermission, Patrick Teoh and Jo Kukathas took the stage, first Teoh as himself and Kukathas as a Y.B. (Yang Berhormat) in a talk show skit and then Teoh as a Security Guard and Kukathas in a character that can be implied as Dato' Shahrizat Jalil (her favorite line being "You are so ignorated/ignoration!" just brought the whole house down!) was in a cloning lab/clinic. Afdlin Shauki was definitely the best of the best! His jab at himself for being fat, his liking for Angelina Jolie, at Siti Nurhaliza (complete with a parody of 'Percayalah'), some inconviniences faced by our Sikh friends after the events of 9/11 (with his spoofing R. Kelly's number to "How I Wish I Can Fly" and Britney Spears' "I'm A Slave For You"), and the rendition of "We Are The World" as would be sung by the original artists, Bollywood artists (imagine We Are The World sung to the tune of "Mein Shayar Tou Nahi" from the movie Bobby), Hong Kong artists and of course, Malaysian artists (We Are The World to the tune of S.M. Salim's Apa Dah Jadi, Search's Isabella, Ella's Layar Impian and Raihan's Bismillah!). Man! Never had I thought Malaysian comedy can be this good! All the thumbs I can get up to all of them for putting a blast of a performace!

Came across this piece of write up whilst checking up on stuff I'd miss during the week. I'd say, how true! I can relate to the experience at various points in time, past and present. Whenever a Company Big Shot has a problem with the computer, we're supposed to drop everything and attend to the issue at once, only to find out that the person forgot to issue the "Save" command, plug in a cord, move the mouse back to the center of the mousepad after it got to the edge (okay, so I exaggerated the last one there! still...) etc. etc. Compared to five years ago, software developers have made such big strides in making their products as user friendly and smart as possible, yet people still fumble about. I guess my theory on "Make something as idiot proof as possible and they'd come up with better idiots" holds true then. Heh!

Ickk! Did the deejay really have to play that "Can't Get You Outta My Head" song by Kylie Minogue in the morning when people are just about to wake up? That song really lives up to its name. You know how the first thing that you listen to in the morning can stick in your head for the rest of the day? Well now, I just can't get the bloody ditty out of my head! And it's pissing me off! While we're still on topic, there's another song I heard the other day that made me cringe, "Stupid Cupid" by Mandy Moore. Why oh why does she hafta squeal the 'cupid' part in the chorus?! It's worse than the sound of fingernails across a blackboard, if you know what I mean. Urgghhh! Alright, alright. Something to calm me down...

Listening to Olivia - Bizounce