Leading the wild into the ways of the man…
Husna Cafe is a Malay food eatery located at Tabuan Laru. We went
there for lunch. Half of my brain is not working today, so forgive the
starkness and general lack of descriptive qualities of today’s written
word. :p
This is the interior.
There are different options for rice.
Here’s the options for food.
Here’s more options for food.
This is what I ate.
We also shared a bowl of clams.
Jesus Fucking Christ, this has got to be the worst post I’ve made in this blog. 😉
I finally have a new cell phone after my old trusty; the Ericsson
T-28s finally kicked the bucket and went to cell phone heaven. I’ve
been waiting around for the right model to come out, going without
mobile phone service (the horror!) for days, before my tardiness was
rewarded. My girlfriend gave me a Sony Ericsson K700i as an early
Christmas gift!
I’ve used this cell phone for about a week now, to familiarize
myself with it for a review. The contents of the Sony Ericsson K700i
box consists of the charger, the hands free cum FM radio ear buds and
the mobile phone itself. There are also manuals, a CD and other
miscellaneous stuff at the bottom.
The CD contains the PC Suite software (sync software) and several
other software like an Image Editor, MMS Home Studio, Sound Editor,
Mobile Networking Wizard (the K700i also functions as a modem) etc.
Here’s a photo of the full contents of the Sony Ericsson K700i box.
This is what the cell phone looks like. There’s a peel off scratch
guard on the screen that shows several features of the phone – 65K TFT
screen, VGA camera and video recorder, Bluetooth, 41 MB of inbuilt
memory, 4x digital zoom etc. I love how the Quickshare text on the
bottom of the phone changes the color hues as you turn it around.
The Sony Ericsson K700i is billed as a “dual front” phone – a
marketing buzzword that essentially means one side looks like a digital
camera and the other looks like a phone. This is the back of the cell
phone, the one that looks like a digital camera.
Here’s a close up of the digital camera bit. It’s very nifty –
there’s the sleek lens module, a nice shiny mirror that’s used for
self-portraits, a bright LED light for night/dark conditions.
There’s a quick start button on the left side of the cell phone to
go to the digicam/video recorder feature. There’s also up and down
toggles for various functions, depending on the context. It’s a zoom
in/zoom out feature in the camera, a volume control while on calls, and
an up/down button while text messaging (SMS).
The other side of the phone has an “Online” button which makes the
phone go into connectivity mode. It has various modes of communication
– GPRS, Bluetooth, IrDA, etc.
The top of the phone contains the IrDA (Infrared) port, which I use to sync with my notebook. It works with a Palm as well.
Here’s the keypad of the K700i. It has nice, (relatively) large
buttons so there are no problems with using the keypad. There is also a
joystick which is not so easy to use…or maybe I’m just having trouble
getting used to it.
The screen is a generous 176 x 220 pixel TFT display capable of 65K
colors. I was surprised by the richness of the screen when I first used
the cell phone. It has really rich and vibrant colors with a fast
refresh rate.
The Sony Ericsson K700i boots up with the Sony Ericsson logo and the keypads also illuminates with a purple hue.
It boots into a setup wizard the first time it’s on, which is easy to complete.
In no time at all, the cell phone is up and working. There are
several build in themes to choose from, all animated! The animated
display is very nifty…
I switched to a futuristic design as my personalized main screen.
The light blocks flicks in a rhythmic manner and I’m keeping this one
for the sheer Nifty Factor (TM).
The main menu shows all the applications that are on the Sony
Ericsson K700i…there are several features on this phone – MMS, EMS,
SMS (any S basically), MPEG-4 playback, MP3 playback, radio (FM), Java
applications etc.
Heck, there’s even a place to input business card details which I’ve
successfully beamed (using IR) to my Palm, since supports various
formats, including the Palm vCard specification.
The most nifty feature in the SE K700i is the light that comes on at the back of the camera. It’s very bright and allows photo taking in dark conditions.
Here is a photo taken with the Sony Ericsson K700i:
It has been downsized from 640 x 480 to 400 x 300.
Click on the image for the original photo.
Download: Movie clip taken by K700i [sixthseal.com]
This is a short clip taken by the Sony Ericsson K700i. It’s in .3gp format and can be viewed with Quicktime.
I love the Sony Ericsson K700i. It has the right balance between features and size. Thanks Louisa! 🙂
The only problem is that people complain that I’m shouting at them
on the phone. I have to explain that my old cell phone has a really bad
mike so I had to talk really loudly. I’m still getting used to the much
more sensitive one on the SE K700i. I’m slowly learning not to “shout”.
😉
ABC Seafood (also known as Ah Seng Seafood) is arguably the most
popular seafood restaurant at Topspot Seafood, which is a whole level
dedicated to produce from the sea, located at the top of a car park.
ABC Seafood Restaurant is Stall #10, but you can’t miss it – it’s the
biggest stall in the place with garish neon lights that makes sure you can’t miss it. 😉
There are a lot of choices to make the “main dish”, which would be
pickings from this large display of items. I usually head here first.
It has a large fish display, which we choose a fillet from. ABC
Seafood is popular due to their fresh seafood. There’s a large range of
fish on display, from small to big, whole to filleted.
There is also a wide range of large lobsters and prawns to choose from…
Of course, bamboo clams are aplenty over here. You can’t miss out on
this if you’re visiting Kuching – it’s only available fresh from the
mudflats of Kuching.
The best thing I like about eating here is the memorable ritual of
choosing what you want for the obligatory “vegetable” dish. There are
crab sticks, various fishballs, quail eggs (my favorite!), baby corn to
“sweeten up” the dish, peas in a pod, carrots and non-magical mushrooms.
This is the dish that we had. You basically grab whatever you want
to eat and everyone does the same and piles it into the same dish. It
gets cooked by the cook and is the first one to be served. I remember
doing this even when I was little, while visiting Kuching. Nostalgic.
Here is what the mixed dish looks like after it’s cooked. There’s
quail eggs (of course), crab balls, crab sticks, sea cucumber, prawns,
pod peas, broccoli, baby corn etc. The restaurant always sprinkles
cashew nuts on top of the dish before it’s served. This imparts a nice
crunchy texture to the dish and a sweet aftertaste.
The second dish to be served is the acclaimed bamboo clam. Bamboo
clams tastes like mussels, and it’s usually cooked in curry powder.
This stuff is great, I tell you…
Next up, came the fish. We chose to have the fillet deep fried and cooked in sweet and sour sauce.
The butter prawns came next and I just love this stuff. ABC
Seafood’s butter prawns come with chilies, which adds a nice
spicy-sweet aftertaste. I must shake the hand of the person who thought
of deep frying prawns with butter. There’s this sweetness to the
“butter scrapings” that is just so memorable that I salivate just
thinking about dinner last night…
Of course, no seafood dinner is complete without “O-Chien” or oyster pancake.
It’s a great meal, but I wish we had enough room for that gigantic
fish head. It looks radioactive blue and I bet it would be good in a
radioactive curry fish head dish…
Staring intently into the pages of the book; reading with great intensity
Thirsty quest for knowledge; needing to know the meaning of life
…and everywhere I look – blank pages; with nary a single word to be found.
Not even a Page 42.
I went to Sri Aman and back with one of my company directors and a
liaison for work related stuff yesterday. Sri Aman is one of the
districts in Sarawak, and is located about halfway between Kuching and
Sibu. It takes 6 hours for a return trip, maybe 7 if you stop for
buying durians. 😉
Sri Aman is basically famous for three things – Fort Alice, Benak
and the Mount Hosanna Chapel. The photo above depicts Fort Alice, which
was built in 1864 as a defensive structure back in the Brooke era. Sri
Aman used to be known as Simanggang and was the place where the Dayak
warrior Rentap attacked Fort Alice during the headhunting heydays of
Borneo.
Fort Alice is made of hardwood and all of
the structure you see today is as it was in the old days. I was puzzled
as to why a “fort” would be made of wood, until I was told that it was
not a fort meant to withstand ground attacks (although it can do that
just fine, wood nevertheless, since it’s on high ground, giving it a
distinct advantage against attackers), but attacks from the river.
The Fort Alice of today is rather dilapidated and generally run
down. There has been no restoration work done on it and it is used by
the locals as a hang out area, reputedly as a solvent (inhalant) use
haven. I was led by a couple of kids inside the structure and found the
way to the second floor of the place with their guidance.
The upper tier of Fort Alice is even more derelict that the outside.
There are missing floorboards and the kids warned me that some of the
places are rotten and would break if I crossed the points. I managed to
make my way to one of the outposts – the main one overlooking the river.
This is where Fort Alice gets its fearsome reputation from. This
outpost used to be mounted with cannons aimed at the river (which was
the main mode of transport at that time). The British had colonized
(read: occupied) Simanggang and set up a fort to shoot down the local
headhunters. Simanggang (now Sri Aman) was a vital area as it was the
point where the headhunters had to pass through to get from the inner
areas to Kuching.
Fort Alice was built to counter this threat. There is a bottleneck
at Batang Lupar (the name of the river) and one of the outposts is
located directly above that river bottleneck. The headhunters who
traveled down with their longboats, were easy pickings for the British
cannons, who managed to shoot most of them down from the Fort Alice
vantage point.
Anyway, enough of history lessons. 😉 We ate at the open air market
at this stall which mysteriously serves up the same dishes to everyone.
You just say you want rice and the stall will cook up the “meal of the
day”, as it were, and serve it according to how many people your party
amounted to. There was a soup dish with meat and vegetables, a dish
with mixed char siew and steamed chicken, and a mixed vegetable dish
with seafood. Like I said, the unusual thing was, everyone got the same
thing, you didn’t get to order. Interesting…
Well, the second thing that Sri Aman is famous for is Benak. It’s the local word for tidal bore.
Apparently, there are only a few places in the world where this
phenomenon happens. The benak, or tidal bore, comes in from the river
mouth and roils and churns and fills up the river very rapidly in the
course of about 10 minutes.
There is a picture of a picture of the famous benak that took place in 1992. It was one of the biggest one, I heard.
There is a timetable at the river which has the time and dates for
when benak or the tidal bore would occur. It only happens for a couple
of days a year, the really big ones. It has something to do with the
moon’s gravity pull at this area, which makes the tidal bore occur.
This is the inlet at the river where the benak will come roiling in
at 7:10 pm that day. However, since this trip is work related, and we
had to get back at a reasonable time, we did not stay to watch it.
Mount Hosanna Chapel is the third thing
Sri Aman is famous for. It’s located 33 km away from the main Sri Aman
town. The interesting bit about it (besides the unique architecture) is
the lore that it was a place where God spoke to the philanthropist who
funded the church construction and healed her. Or something like that.
Mount Hosanna Jesus Prayer Chapel is a small chapel that’s on top of
a hill. There’s a long staircase going up the hill to the chapel, which
I imagine is a rite of passage of some sort. There are really a lot of
steps to get up to the Mount Hosanna Chapel.
This is Mount Hosanna Chapel. There is mass every Sunday at 11 am. I
love the fresh design – it appears to have three conical shapes with
the middle one towering over the others. Its novel…I’ve never seen a
church designed like this before.
My coworkers passed me a plastic bag of stuff which looks like
tissues and told me that someone was looking for me at the SARBEX
exhibition last night and wanted to give me this.
It turns out that it’s a pack of Scott tissues and a Kimberly-Clark
dispenser. It came from James Wong, who happened to read my blog
regarding an entry about this item. He’s a representative of
Kimberly-Clark Trading, which has brands like Kleenex, Scott, Huggies
and Kotex amongst its umbrella.
I called him to thank him for the gift, it ranks as one of the most
unusual ones a reader has given to me. 😉 It’s great though, it has 12
packs of Scott Pop-Up tissues with each one containing 140 sheets.
It also has a Kimberly-Clark dispenser attached. I learnt from James
that Kimberly-Clark does not only make dispensers for WCs, but also for
the food industry, and this is one made for the latter.
Now, this Kimberly-Clark dispenser is very nifty…it opens up to
reveal a space which you can fit a pack of Scott Pop-Up Tissues.
It’s meant for this variety of tissue, the pop-up tissues fits in
just nicely. Of course, you can’t use it without unwrapping it first…
[Update: I just received a call from James, who
told me that there’s a perforation on top of each Scott Pop-Up Tissue,
so I didn’t have to open up the whole thing, just open the top bit and
it’ll work. That’s for sanitary reasons. Jesus, was he fast… ;)]
…so this is what it looks like after I put one pack of the tissues inside.
Now I have my very own Kimberly-Clark dispenser. Never shall I run out of tissues again! 😉
Thanks, James!
SARBEX 2004 is going into its last day today, so I reckon I should
focus on what SARBEX is all about – property. SARBEX is basically a
property fair. The vast majority of the booths are taken up by housing
developers showing a variety of apartments, gated communities and so
forth.
There are premium condos and exclusive retreats like Santubong
Suites, which bills itself as “an exclusive condominium precinct for
those who appreciates the finer aspects of life”.
How would you like to live here?
The above shows a model detached house with it’s model roof taken
off so you can see what’s inside. There are a lot of to-scale models
being displayed – you know, the kind that’s just begging you to touch
it. Naturally, the exhibitors recognize this as a threat and most of
them are kept under glass. 😉
There are some large commercial developers here too…like this
Bandar Baru Semariang booth, which encompasses several normal sized
booths and is re-decorated nicely to give it an elegant look.
Bandar Baru Semariang is a commercial cum housing development. There are shop lots and residential settings on offer here.
This is one of the semi-detached houses in Bandar Baru Semariang.
It’s starting from RM 299,888. That’s a 99 year lease though. I love
the attention to details in the models – look at the cars, the road,
the porch, the garden, the pillars supporting the structure…it’s
great!
You know what I’ll really like though? An office…with lots of people working in it.
There’ll be a conference room, where we can have inane discussions to while away the time…
…and when I’m not in meetings, I’ll be sitting here in my cushy
office, surfing the net, updating the blog, watching movies/TV
series/DVDs…
Now, that’s the life!
NO-BURN is a product that’s marketed as fire retardant paint. It
looks out of place in an exhibition which focuses almost exclusively on
property. However, it seems like a damn interesting booth and we
Huygens Asia people went to check it out. 🙂
The thing that catches your attention from this booth is the stack
of wooden structures being displayed that looks like it has been
burned. The charred boxes, despite the superficial aesthetic damage,
still retain its structural integrity. The world is now a safer place
to live in, says the literature, with a picture flame under the world.
The attendant at the booth didn’t mind us poking around, so we set
about on doing our own experiments. The photo above shows the sample
test products which has been coated with the No-Burn fire retardant
chemical. There are pieces of plain paper with one half of it coated
with the No-Burn chemical and the other half uncoated. There is also a
stack of cardboard which has been partially dipped into the No-Burn
fire retardant paint.
We started out with the pieces of paper first. I love this sample
tests, one side is printed with an RM 100 bank note as seen above.
There is a distinctive demarcation along the paper…notice that the
treated part of the paper has a slight red tint. The untreated part of
the test currency is white.
The flip side of this currency really cracked me up…it is a spoof
of a US dollar card with NO-BURN in the middle and the phase “In
No-Burn We Trust” on top instead of the usual “In God We Trust”. Nice!
It’s also treated with the same fire retardant chemical, as can be seen
from the discoloration.
We started on this test sample first. We got a lighter and Mancy
tried to set fire to the part of the paper that’s treated with No-Burn.
It didn’t catch fire. Then we tried to burn it even more. It still
didn’t alight, but it did scorch the paper a little. But it didn’t burn
the paper. Damn…
Here’s what it looks like after our repeated attempts to make it
burn. The paper didn’t burn away, it just scorched. The interesting
thing was, the No-Burn chemical treated paper gave off little smoke,
but a strong chemical smell when it was burned. I wonder what it’s made
of…
Anyway, we then started on the untreated part of the same piece of
paper. Oh, that burned all right…it burned very fine indeed. 😉
Thus, we burned it a little more. It’s paper, so it burned very well, we had to put it out by blowing on it.
The next experiment was made with the No-Burn paint coated cardboard.
The results were pretty much the same…the No-Burn paint scorched, but didn’t burn, and the untreated cardboard burned…
We spotted a piece of clothing that has been treated by No-Burn on
one side. It’s supposed to be a curtain and is there for demo purposes,
so test it we did…
Unfortunately, the No-Burn treatment didn’t allow any kind of
ignition to occur. Your silent fireman indeed…next time I’ll bring an
oxy torch.
It was fun though, probably the most interesting booth in the SARBEX
expo. Thanks to Kenny, Mancy, Robyn and everyone who helped out with
the experiment. 🙂
Ignition, they call it an obsession,
But I think it’s kinda bitchin’
I think it’s kinda neat!
SARBEX 2004 was officiated by the Minister of Housing, YB Dato Sri
Abang Haji Abdul Rahman Zohari Bin Tun Abang Haji Openg. No shit,
that’s his full name. I’m thinking I should get a longer name myself,
so that people won’t be able to say it without having to pause for a
breath of air midway. 😉
There was much fanfare…okay, the usual ribbon cutting and tour, that’s all. Let’s move on.
Complimentary food was provided by a catering service, one of whom
had the misfortune of meeting a concrete support pillar, but we already
talked about that yesterday. Just watch out for lorries. 😉
The food is typical expo fare…the cups and saucers, ready to be
filled with coffee or tea, sandwiches and plates lined with disposable
serviettes.
There’s fried beehoon (rice vermicelli) and a very strange mixture of vegetables (top).
Chicken wings are also available, as well as curry puffs (top) and beef slices in a bun (far right).
The bastard son of the salmon-egg sandwich also makes an appearance,
with its unorthodox green (pandan bread), spotted white (raisin bread)
and brown (chocolate bread) layers. It’s also available in ye ol’ pure
white variety, for the ones who prefer to stick to tradition.
The tastiest offering in the free brunch is located under a big
wooden cock, which is guarding over the food. Or maybe it was a
hornbill, I can’t tell the difference.
It’s that plate with the triple dessert arrangements. The outer ring
is made of a white, chewy kueh wrapped in pandan leaves, and the middle
has half of some kind of pinkish kueh which is soft and dusted with
coconut and the other containing tapioca mixed with some kind of sweet
milky thing. It’s great!
This is the plate I had. I went back for second helpings…
There was an elderly man who ran into one of the supporting pillars
on Level 5 in Permata Carpark, not 10 meters from where our booth was.
It was one of the people from the catering service and apparently, he
had a bit of an argument with his coworkers, drove off in a huff, and
crashed into the pillar while navigating a turn.
Bomba (Fire Department) had to be called to extract the man coz he
couldn’t move from his seat after he crashed. One of the fireman went
into the cabin to support the structure, while the others used the Jaws
of Life to get the injured man out.
The contraption, if you’re not familiar with it, is a hydraulic
device that’s used to pry through tough steel (like in automobiles) to
free the trapped people in the car.
The man was finally freed after 15 minutes of prying through the
steel of the vehicle. It’s surprisingly able, that contraption, bending
and cutting through steel. He was bleeding from injuries when he was
freed though. I took heaps of photos and also shot a video and I called
Borneo Post after that to sell the photos. Well, one of the reporters
rushed here to meet me and he said he was impressed with the photos.
Sourced: https://1800injured.care/car-accident/
Civil Defense personnel were also there and helped move the man to a
waiting ambulance when he was finally freed. Back to the reporter, he
came to meet me at the booth and he was interested in purchasing the
photos. However, I had expected a minimum of RM 200 to part with the
copyrights. Unfortunately, he told me that Borneo Post only pays RM 20
– 30 to photos submitted by people who are not affiliated with the
paper, so I said I’m sorry to have wasted his time coz I wanted to keep
the copyrights unless the amount could convince me to relinquish it. 😉
It’s all good though, he says he understands and shook hands with me
and asked me more details about the accident. It was only after he left
that I remembered something I should have asked him…I would have
given him the photos for free if he would credit me i.e. put my name
and URL in the papers. It didn’t occur to me then. Oh well. 🙂
