It was raining so heavily this afternoon that I couldn’t get to my car to go home. While waiting for the rain to stop, we were all busy with a problem - flood water from the roof. Yes, the gutter up on the roof must be overflowed and at first it looked like a small leak but within seconds it turned into a river and before long, it was like Niagara Falls. We tried to divert the water flow so that it wouldn’t get to the carpeted floor. We failed terribly - most of the carpet got wet.

With such heavy rain, no doubt the ground floor would be flooded as well. I went down to have a look, the front of the shops and the roads were filled with water. Every time a car passed by, it created a ripple so big you could surf on it. There were some cars still parked in the parking lot which was by now, extremely flooded. No idea if the car can start or not after this. I think the water level was about a foot deep. Good thing I did not park my car there.

During lunch today I saw this guy wearing this ordinary black t-shirt with some wordings at the back. Well, it all seems ordinary until I started reading what was written on it. Sarawak Bowling “hampionship?!” and “losed?!” WTF is that? I looked over to Ann and she was giving me one of those “I’ve spotted a big English language mistake” look. Who in their right mind would design such a shirt? I think the person who designed this shirt have something against the letter “C”. Or when he was a kid, missed an episode of sesame street with the letter “C”.

Wouldn’t it be worse if it happens to be the word “closer”?

You’ll get “Loser!”

Wahahaha!

Click for larger picture

Last week I did a post on worms in food. Guess what, there is a sequel to that one. Yesterday I went to this vegetarian place for lunch with Sola and Xpo. Guess what I found in my veges? A small cooked worm, which appeared to look more like caterpillar. I was not alarmed or spooked by it, the first thing I said when I saw it was “GOT WORM?” and we all laughed. The phrase “GOT WORM?” has been the laughing stock of the office after the first incident. All I can say is the veges at that place are super fresh and they don’t use pesticide because you can still find worms in them.

Now for the new “GOT FLY?” episode. Just now we went out for dinner at The Banquet with Ann’s grandma and aunt’s family from Sibu. As I was approaching the table, I saw this fat fly chilling out on one of the napkin on our table. In a new place like The Banquet; sparkling clean and cool looking I wouldn’t expect to see a fly. The good news is I did not find any in my food.

Ever downloaded a file with the extension .ISO or .BIN? These files are image files of a CD or DVD. What is a CD image, you might ask? A CD image is a copy of the CD’s data being stored into a single file. CD image is usually used when copying a CD. Burning software like Nero usually creates an image file when duplicating CD, you might not see this file because it is only temporary. Other places where you might encounter such file would be, when you download games or software (linux distribution) from the internet.

What do you do when you get this file? How to use it? There are two ways to use this image file. One of which is to burn it onto an empty CDR or DVDR. The other is by using virtual CD-Rom software to run it. To burn the image file you pop in an empty disc into your burner, launch your CD burning software and select burn “CD image” or some software will say “Burn Image”. When the burning process is done, you can now access the data in it like any other CD. Sometimes the image files for CDs are a little bigger than the usual 700MB. This is normal because the image file might have properties to store, which makes the file bigger than the limit. Some image files might come with a separate pointer file to tell the burning software what mode to burn the CD. An example would be a .CUE file that comes with .BIN image.

Using virtual CD-Rom to run CD image is known as mounting the image. With virtual CD-Rom you can access the data in the image file without burning it. This is good, if you just want to try the image before making it into a physical copy. To mount an image file is fairly simple, no rocket science here. An example software would be Virtual CD. Launch the Virtual CD-Rom and select the image file you want to mount and you are set to go.

Congratulations, you have graduated the Burnology course for CD & DVD image

It is the weekends again, time to visit mom and enjoy her cooking. This week had been quite exhausting for me. Getting training, giving training, doing research and learning a whole lot of stuff. Due to these and my writer’s block, this blog only gets updated once a week. I’ll try to make it more frequent if I’m not busy.

Today at mom’s we made “Pisang Goreng” fried banana. To make Pisang Goreng you need to, obviously, have the banana. The banana used to make pisang goreng is not your average yellow banana. It is a lot larger in size and girth, known as “Pisang Tanduk” . The other main ingredient would be the batter - a mixture of water, oil, flour and rice flour.



As the kitchen helper I got to cut the bananas into thin slices while mom mixed up the batter. Cooking oil was poured into a wok and heated up. When the oil was hot enough to start deep frying, each piece of banana was dipped into the batter and fried in the oil. It didn’t take long for it to cook. The best part of cooking this is the eating part. Haha..

After returning from lunch with Ann, I was told by my fellow colleague that they had a super interesting story.

“Arr.. What super story you people have?” I asked, my curiosity peaked. Barely holding onto their laughter, they told me their story…

It goes like this. During lunch, two people ordered the same dish. The dish arrived and they started eating. One of them finished first. As the second person was finishing he found a disgusting black, wiggly worm in his food. So what do you think the first person might be thinking? Both ordered the same thing, they arrived together and obviously they are being cooked together.

There was no peace in the office the entire afternoon as he asked nonstop:

“Was there a worm in mine?”
“Did I swallow it with my food?”
“Was that a worm or a leech?”

It was like an episode out of Friends. I’m glad to say… I have colleagues who depicted certain Friends characters – without the laughing track… but of course, we provided our own. Now if there’s some way to film it in front of a live audience and start selling DVDs of our lives.

Last night we went to Sidewalk to celebrate Ah Poo’s (aka Eric) pre-birthday. What did he get for his pre-birthday? The usual cake, two packs of Durex in a red case. I bet he was really happy to have those gifts. After admiring his gifts, we moved on to the cake. We only put one candle because he wanted to keep his age a secret.“Pssst he is 26+1, single and available”.

After the cake, we hung out and played mind boggling IQ trick quizzes. Before we called it a night, me and XpO were thinking of what special prank to pull on Eric tomorrow in the office. Finally, we came up with this.



Two eggs and one water filled condom waiting for Eric on his table before he came back from breakfast this morning. He was very excited to see it, haha.. I even have a video to show how “happy” he was.

This is a mini laptop, specially designed with Phua Chu Kang in mind.

Very simple to use. It comes with no processor or RAM, with a handy measuring tape and ultra compact. It is actually a calculator built into a measuring tape with a mini notepad.






I noticed something is missing though, got notepad and calculator but no mini pen. I guess this will come in the next upgrade.

What do you do if your internet is down at home?? Go out. Drive around with your laptop, you can easily find open networks where you can connect to for free internet. This wi-fi network you are accessing to is not TMnet hotspot, it is people’s personal streamyx line. This is what happens if you don’t secure your wi-fi network properly.

When someone can connect to your network like that, they not only can access your internet. Your PC in your network is also exposed to the outside world. Imagine this, some hacker parks outside your house, accessing the “interesting stuff“ you have on your PC. Yes, and they are also interested in your “uninteresting stuff” like credit card number, password and etc.
How do I protect myself? The easiest way is to not have wi-fi. Now it seems that we have no choice but to have wi-fi because we are lazy. Wires are just too messy. So if you must have wi-fi, here are a few things you can do to deter unauthorized access to your wi-fi network.

Set a complex and hard to guess password for your network. This is one of the most common bad habits faced in network and computer security, where user set simple and obvious passwords. It is not hard to set a complex password eg: “P455w0rD”. This is considered a complex password with combination of upper and lower case characters and also numbers.
Make sure you have the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) or WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) enabled on your wi-fi router or access point.

Move your wireless router to the center of your house so that the signal doesn’t leak out. Unauthorized users are more likely to move on if the signals they get are too weak.

Set specific IP address slots for wi-fi use. If you have two devices using wireless just set IP addresses for two slots. Limited IP address slots means less holes for unauthorized users to come into your network.

More security tips can be found on the web. I’m only giving the basic security measure so that it will deter unauthorized access to your wi-fi network. The best way is to keep your network as low profile as possible. I know in Kuching there are many unprotected and open network. You can try driving around with your laptop, within minutes you will get four to five open wi-fi. This is not a good practice, so I hope that with these tips, there will be less open wi-fi in Kuching. Any questions, just post it in the comments.

Ann and I went over to my mom’s place for lunch yesterday. As usual the table was filled with dishes from the best restaurant in town, which open only on weekends and public holidays. Mom’s cooking :). My mom had a project planned for the afternoon, making “chai kuih”. Wah… My favorite! Had been since when I was still a little boy. Before this my grandma made it, so today we tried our hands at making the traditional teochew chai kuih.

After lunch, we started by making the dough for the kuih. The ingredients for the dough are rice flour and warm water. When mixing the flour with warm water the mix clumped up and can be very sticky so it needed a lot of elbow grease to stir them. We had to keep kneading nonstop. When all the flour had dissolved, we transferred the sticky dough to a table surface to stretch it.

While stretching the dough, add some ordinary flour, some water and oil. It was hard to stretch the dough as it was still very hot. Me and my mom took turns to wrestle the dough till it was silky smooth. The dough was set to rest, while we made the fillings for the kuih. This teochew chai kuih is filled with Chinese chives (“Ku Chai” teochew name).

The chives were chopped up and mixed with cooking oil, liquid baking soda and salt to taste. It is a good idea to add more oil and salt as chives need them to taste nice. Ok, now is the “fun” part, I get to play with my food. I took some dough about half the size of a ping pong ball and flattened it. I got it as flat as I could, preparing it for the filling. Here is the tricky bit, to seal the dough. Having no idea I just simply wrapped it up. Guess what? Ann was laughing her head off when she saw it. She said it looked like a caterpillar. I think it looked more like a bug. *lol*

Ann tried her hand at wrapping one, but guess what, it looked like a dumpling with holes. It was uglier than mine! Karma can be funny that way. Sorry, no photo to show and no evidence also because she ate her creation after it was cooked. I think she wanted to bury the evidence. After all the wrapping, it was time to put all the kuih into a steamer and steam it. I asked mom, how to tell if it is cooked? She replied grandma said cook till you can smell something. Arr?! Smell something? Like what, burnt smell?? Haha… and we joked about what if no smell, how? I think it took about 15min to cook. Moment of truth came, mom transferred the still-hot dumplings onto plates and I chucked one into my mouth. Mmmmm….. tasted so good, like how grandma made it. Success!!