sixthseal.com – Page 289 – Leading the wild into the ways of the man…

Petaling Street after midnight

August 22, 2003 by HB

Right. Ethanol induced hunger prompted me to go in search for food.
I called room service but unfortunately they were closed. I went down
and asked the receptionist:

where I could get food at this hour. She suggested Chinatown (I
assumed that is Petaling Street). Righty-o, off I went with of the two
things known as C2H5OH/C2H6O and C15H10CIN3O3 and found myself at
Petaling Street after a 15 minute walk which I couldn’t remember. Heck,
I wonder why I’m back at the hotel, I hardly remember leaving. 😉

Petaling St. was a bit deserted towards the back as you can see in
the photo above. It seems that most shops close up at around midnight,
if you squint a bit you can see the guy pulling his cart back home to
the right of the picture.

The front bit is still quite populated though, but I went a bit back
to see if there’s anything interesting to eat and it seems that there’s
no smaller shops so I settled for fried hor fun (something like kueh
tiaw) to go.

Here’s a photo of the shop I went too, notice the guy giving the peace sign at the digicam while I was taking photos. 🙂

Anyway, I got the hor fun and walked back to eat and now I’m here
updating again even though I’m very sleepy. Here’s a photos of the RM 5
fried hor fun:

It has seafood, chicken, beef, deep fried pork bits, cabbages and a generous helping of hot chilli sauce on the side.

This is not the okonomiyaki post, that will be up much later today.
Okay, now there’s really an unbearable wave of sleepiness…off I go,
I’ll reply later today when I wake up.

Buying a computer at Low Yat Plaza

August 21, 2003 by HB

Low Yat Plaza

The photo above has an interesting annotation to it. While I was
taking this picture, an American tourist came up to me and said hello.
He had the exact same digicam (Nikon 5700) and he introduced himself
and said he noticed me taking photos using the LCD monitor (which is
how I always take pictures). Well, he said he just wanted to give me a
bit of friendly advice – he told me he’s always used the viewfinder
(the one you have to squint through like film cameras) because that
causes less jitter.

Anyway, yeah, I did notice that I haven’t gotten the optimal holding
position and shutter release for this new digicam right, but using the
viewfinder does not cause any more stability for me, coz it’s a
question of getting to know the digicam and giving the shutter just the
right feather touch to not move the body. Better photos will come in
time, after I break it in..been taking heaps of photos these few days.
Well, anyway, I said thanks for the tip, but told him that I suspect
that using the viewfinder to take photos while standing in the middle
of the road in KL is likely to result in a trip to the hospital. 😉 He
laughed and said “Very true”.

All IT Hypermart @ 4th Floor Low Yat

Well, I had gotten all the price lists from the Low Yat and Sungai
Wang vendors twice – Sri Computers generally has the cheapest prices,
but All IT Hypermart has better prices for some and their service is
MUCH better than Sri Computers. It’s on the 4th floor, it might have
been cheaper to pick and shop, but Sri Computers offers competitive
prices and they give discounts. My bill came up to about RM 2700 but I
told them I’m only prepared to spend RM 2250, and after some
negotiations, they agreed to push the price down to RM 2300 and
assemble everything for me (saving me bloody fingers [sixthseal.com]) and carry everything down from Low Yat to the taxi stand at BB Plaza. 🙂

My configuration is not top of the line, but it’s acceptable:

AMD Athlon XP (Barton) 2500+ CPU
ABIT NF7-M DDR400 FSB533 nForce2 based motherboard
Kingston 512MB DDR 333 RAM
Samsung 52X 24x 52x 16x CD-RW + DVD=ROM combo drive with 8 MB buffer
Maxtor Diamond Max 80 GB 7,200 RPM w/ 8MB cache
Samsung 17″ SyncMaster 763MB monitor
Appropriate casing w/ 450 watt power supply
Sony 1.44 Floppy disk drive
Temporary keyboard and mouse

I chose the Barton for something new, even with a lower rated speed
I figured I’ll give the relatively large L2 512KB cache a run. I got
the 2600+ (Thoroughbred) last time, so I’m going for a different one
this time. The nForce2 architecture motherboard was chosen for
economical reasons, this model comes with an integrated GeForce4 MX and
sound + other misc. stuff I haven’t explored. I know the nForce2 shares
system RAM though, so I got 512 MB, I may add another 512 MB in the
near future. Currently, I allocated 64 MB for the integrated GeForce4
GPU, the largest it can go is 128 MB. Unfortunately, I had to use
DDR-333 instead of DDR-400 RAM for compatibility with the integrated
graphics.

Anyway, enough about that, I just need to get headphones soon and
the Logitech Freedom Optical (the one I’ve been using up till the water damage incident
[sixthseal.com]) sometime in the near future. I love the Zero Degree
Tilt keys, I type much, much faster. My old headphones (which was
recently broken) was the A$ 330 (RM 660) Sony MDR-V700DJ, which I
bought in Melbourne. It has served me well, though it gave me a
hankering for good headphones. I don’t think I can afford that now,
considering I have non-existant income in Malaysia, but I’ll try and
get a comparable one. Enough rambling, let me tell you about how I had
make 3 round trips using a taxi to Low Yat Plaza. That’s 6 trips…and
it’s all my fault.

I got everything back in the first run, but unfortunately I seem to
have forgotten all about monitor to PC power supply cables. I…er,
didn’t know what they were, so I went back to get a dedicated one.
*cough*. Then I came back to the hotel and booted up and intended to
install Windows XP Pro…but I seem to have lost the CD I brought over.
Curses. It was in my resume file and I must have dropped it while going
for the interview. A new hard disk with no OS…how troublesome…only
1 of my 4 other hard disk that I brought along has an installed OS
(others are data only) and that’s Windows Me and it hanged at the
startup screen:

Hooking up stuff at the hotel room

Anyway, the third trip was to Imbi Plaza to get another Windows XP
Pro CD. Oh yeah, what about that “software piracy” crackdown?
Everything seems fine at Imbi Plaza and Low Yat. Well, the last return
trip was a bit of a hassle…no one wanted to take me coz of the
traffic jam and the few that wanted to asked for a flat rate charge of
RM 15 for compensation. I know that’s common practise in KL and it was
peak traffic hour, but I didn’t want to, so I waited for one that
charges based on the meter and you know what? It came up close to the
quoted price too due to the obscene traffic jam. 🙂

Imbi Plaza

Anyway, I’m off to bed…will confirm with XM Expanded Media to see
if I got the position tomorrow. I’ll also post up many photos of
okonomiyaki, from the preparation through the cooking to the final
dish, so if you like things like that, come back tomorrow afternoon.
Well, I see from the stats that Malaysian visitors come to less than 2%
of the total so it’s appropriate to note that my local time is GMT +8.
Oh yeah, I have to pay extra bandwidth fees again this month, now that
really sucks. Someone employ me so I can afford all this.

Traffic congestion…and police with submachine guns in the day, something I’ve only seen Sibu police carry weekend nights.

I’m sorry I can’t reply the comments today…I’m about to fall
asleep on this keyboard here at the hotel’s business center, I didn’t
get a modem so I have to update here…it’s okay, they average 35 Kbps,
not blindingly fast, but it does the job. 🙂 I will reply every single
comment when I update with the okonomiyaki photos tomorrow. Thanks for
the feedback!

CyberTime @ Petaling Street

August 20, 2003 by HB

I’m at CyberTime at Petaling Street now…moved at around noon today and I’ve just grabbed some lunch:

Anyway, the good thing about CyberTime is they have relatively fast
net access (400 KBps sustained) so I can upload my CF Card stuff up to
my server and free up the space so I can take more photos. 🙂 I haven’t
experimented with the advanced settings yet, but I’m happy with the
image quality so far. It’s a 5 MP digicam w/ 8x optical zoom, best
thing about it is, it uses the standard (well, proprietry for all
non-Nikon owners ;)) 2CR5 rechargable Lithium Ion battery, so I have
two batteries instead of one (the other one is from my broken digicam).

Well…I’ve put up the procession photos from yesterday, it’s in the
post below. I’m feeling tired today due to waking up early for
breakfast, so I’ll update again tomorrow. See ya everyone.

P/S – Nigel, I got your SMS, sorry for not replying, the same thing
happened (lost msg after reading it)…a very serious problem I need to
isolate and retify soon. Thanks for the message. :)

Ghost festival procession photos, Bukit Bintang

August 20, 2003 by HB

Here are the photos from the Bintang Walk procession. There was a
“ghost festival procession” of some sort in Jalan Bukit Bintang
yesterday, I heard the participants are supposed to be possessed by
certain old spirits. Not sure if I got that right, but it’s a good
excuse to carry weapons and take drugs and act in a wild manner that is
above the soceity’s norms while in public and within view of law
enforcement officers. I kid! Sorry, jokes about religion are sensitive,
my apologies if I offended anyone, it was meant strictly in jest.
Anyway, please don’t flood my inbox with hate mail, you know I’m not
like that, it’s a joke, I couldn’t resist. 🙂

Anyway, back to the procession, it was very interesting, the photos speak for themselves, here you go:

This is a long one

Gets a bit unwieldy at times as you can see

Mobile prayer lorry

Bloody

Don’t mess with them:

This is the youngest participant:

My favourite guy – he was wielding two saws and sucking on a pacifier.

Well, if you ask me I think it was a datura/belladonna like substance in their tea. 😉

Procession down Bukit Bintang (Nikon 5700)

August 19, 2003 by HB

I’ve just taken photos of the parade (?) down Jalan Bukit Bintang
(caught it at Bintang Walk) with my new Nikon 5700. Yeah, I’ve finally
decided on that, managed to find a store selling it at RM 3100 (cash
only) or RM 3168 (with 2% credit card charge). It’s a graduation
present from my dad. Anyway, I can’t actually show you all the photos I
took of the parade because this Internet cafe is running Windows 98 so
it won’t detect a USB digicam connection and mount it as a new drive.

I didn’t bring the driver CD out and Nikon View supports a minimum
of Windows 98 SE (this cc is running the first edition) and I can’t
find the drivers on the Nikon site for the life of me. Anyway, that
long assed explaination is why I can’t post up the photos today. I can
do something a little unorthodox though…I’m using the webcam to
capture the digicam’s LCD screen during play, so that blurry photo
above is supposed to be of this guy wielding this very long stick with
Sharp Things on both ends while in a trance.

Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on, I just saw a lot of police and
Rela members to control the crowd and traffic while I was walking back,
and saw that there’s a procession going on. I got quite a few photos,
it’s like the procession that happens at Cheng Beng, where people piece
theirselves and walk down in a trance. I’ve always wondered if they
took anything…does anyone know? A deleriant perhaps, or a psychedelic
of some sort?

Well, I could only see two groups in the procession, Chinese and
Indian. The Chinese ones were mostly pierced across the cheek and they
wield all sorts of things like meat cleavers, saws, and all that and
walk around in a trance guided by the front person. The Indians had a
lot of limes on their bodies, and there’s this guy who was being hooked
by well, hooks and pulled by another guy. Lots of blood, very nice. The
procession puts the fun into photography, great event to break in the
digicam with.

Anyway, I can’t upload the photos today, so tomorrow it is then.
Well, regarding the Nikon 5700, I think it’s great – been thawing on
getting either this or the 5400 and finally decided to forgo portablity
(the 5400 fits in a pocket) for the additional 4x optical zoom (5700 is
8x optical). I could fit the 5700 in my pocket if I were wearing cargo
pants, but otherwise not, so I slinged it around me, that would
probably be the way I’ll be carrying it now.

Well, that’s it for today…going back to the hotel now. I’ll be
moving to another hotel near Petaling Street starting tomorrow. My
apologies for not being able to upload the photos, I hope the Petaling
Street Internet cafes would have a newer OS, because I’ve filled the 32
MB CF Card and most of the 128 MB one.

P/S – Jasmine, thanks for your SMS, I couldn’t reply because the cell phone didn’t save the message after viewing. Sorry!

I think I’m forgetting something but I don’t know exactly what…anyway, I’ll update tomorrow.

am pm ezone, Low Yat Plaza

August 19, 2003 by HB

I’m currently eating a chicken sandwich and drinking peach tea at
AmPm ezone at Low Yat. It’s supposed to be the largest cybercafe in
Malaysia (it says so on the outside). Anyway, I dropped in to recharge
my cell phone battery again and I’ll be surfing around to read digicam
reviews later. am/pm ezone
[ampmezone.com] also has a phone beside each terminal and they allow
free local calls within the KL area. Interesting. Anyway, I was
supposed to go to Petaling Jaya today, but I called beforehand and
Nikon says they need 1-2 WEEKS just to give me a price quotation (that
time does not include repair), so I thought I’ll get another digicam
and leave my old one as a spare. That’s one reason I’m at Low Yat,
another is I’m getting the price lists for computer accessories.

I can’t get it today though, there’s too much luggage, so I plan to
come here sometime at the end of this week and get all the stuff I need
to assemble a box and put it at my new place first. The room I’m
renting is not vacated yet and won’t be until the 1st of September, but
I’m putting the bulky stuff over first, probably just chuck it in a
corner of the house or something. I won’t be having my own connection
on my own box until next month, but photos of stuff would be up
starting next week or maybe even earlier, going to get a digicam in
these few days.

I find myself reaching for a non-existant digicam in my pocket
everytime I see a scene that warrents a shot, but alas, my fingers are
always grasping at air. 🙂 Yeah, a digicam would be my first priority.
Thanks for all the price comparisons everyone, the cheapest price I
found for a Nikon 5700 is RM 3500 and that comes with a free 128 MB CF
Card. It’s not the RM 2800 I’m expecting, but it seems to be about as
good as it gets, considering most shops retails it at RM 3999.

Now that has got me thinking whether I should skimp on the box or
skimp on the digicam…probably the former. 🙂 The Nikon 5700 does give
me pause though, I tried to fit it into my pants pocket (which is where
my digicam usually goes) and it didn’t fit so well. There’s a
rather…hmm, disquieting bulge around the general area when I
put it in, so yeah, perhaps I should go for a more portable one,
although the 5700 seems to be a delicious morsel. The 5400 retails for
a bit less and it’s smaller, due to the 5700’s 6x zoom lens but they’re
basically the same.

Oh speaking of bulges, I can’t walk 10 meters in Bukit Bintang
without someone asking me “Eh, yau loi yan mou? Yau hou sang ga.”.
That’s “Hey, are you interested in girls? I have young ones.”. It seems
that the ah, adult entertainment industry is alive and well in BB,
perhaps prospering even, I don’t recall being prepositioned with such
frequency last time I stayed at BB. I usually don’t bother replying,
but this one time yesterday, just for shits and giggles, I replied
“Hmm…loi yan wo mou hen choi, nei yau feng tau yuen mo?” which
translates as “Well, I’m not interested in girls, do you have any
“ecstasy” pills?”.

Well, what transpired was rather interesting…the pimp (or
middleman to be polite) gave me a funny look and said “Wo lei to mai
loi yan ga, wo moi mai yeun” – “I sell girls here, not pills”. 🙂 I
guess you had to be there, it was kinda funny. It’s interesting though,
coz I thought the two businesses are somewhat interrelated in Malaysia.
I’m glad it’s not. Disclaimer: I was only asking for fun, I do not possess or consume any illicit drugs.

I digress too much, I should be looking at digicam reviews now. I
saw a couple of Sony models that looked okay, and the prices are cheap
for a 5 MP digicam, I’m not a big fan of Sony due to their proprietry
MS storage format, but I saw several new ones that accepts CF cards
too. Well, I’m off, gotta decide on a digicam soon. Thanks for the
suggestions everyone. 🙂

@ Internet, Bukit Bintang

August 18, 2003 by HB

Greetings from @ Internet Services at Bukit Bintang. I had wanted to
get a PC upon arrival and hook it up with the hotel’s telephone system
for net access but I was too tired the first day (didn’t get any sleep
the night before coz I was packing) to shop for components. Anyway,
today is the second day and I was at a job interview from 3 (went
early, was scheduled at 3:30 pm) till 5:45 and now I’m at a net cafe in
BB to update. Well, not only to update, one of my cell phones require a
USB port to charge because I broke the original charger and got a USB
port phone charger coz my box was almost always on back in Melbourne. I
will miss that 10 Mbps connection.

Well yeah, so one of my phones have been running low on battery ever
since I arrived, so here I am today to borrow the net cafe’s USB port
for charging my cell phone. Oh yeah, I just got a KL Digi number too,
it’s 016 303 1371, so if you can’t reach me via 016 869 0110, call this
other one instead. I have no problems giving out my cell number since
they’re both prepaid ones. 🙂 Anyway, the KL number is easier to
remember if you think “13 to 1” (literally) as in “The odds are 13 to
1” in Chinese (Mandarin).

Anyway, regarding the interview, I guess it went okay, though I had
a bit of trouble with the ASP coding part coz I was more familiar with
ASP.NET and I misread the question and did in-code validation before
the database update. It seems like a great place to work at though,
it’s XM Expanded Media. They’re located at Kenaga International,
somewhere between Hotel Mutiara and Fitness First (a gym I saw on the
other side). It’s on the same road as Nouvo, if that helps. Not very
far from Bukit Bintang, I took a cab though.

Well, I’ll hear from them by Friday, so we’ll see how this interview
goes. I did mention that I run a weblog, which most career advice sites
do not advice, but I was asked about other interests in the interview
and I couldn’t think of anything besides digital photography. I did not
mention the site, but it doesn’t taka a genius to surf over,
considering I gave resume@sixthseal.com as my email address. It doesn’t
really matter anyway, because every email variation at the
sixthseal.com domain (except veritas) goes into the catch-all address,
me@sixthseal.com.

Speaking of veritas, I need to make it clear to everyone (again)
that there’s two people writing on this weblog – myself and veritas
(guest author) whos writing may not interest everyone but it is of
interest to a significant amount of people, including myself. Just a
disclaimer that not all posts in here are written under the ‘hbpoh’
nick, though veritas’s posts have photos that all have a
“sixthseal.com” text overlay and veritas’s writing and photos all fall
under the sixthseal.com intellectual property banner (as per his
wishes).

Well, I’ll be off to Petaling Jaya tomorrow, going to fix my digicam
at Nikon if the repair rates are reasonable or get a new one if they’re
not. I’m currently eyeing the Nikon 5700 and 5400, but they retail for
RM3999 here, while I was expecting somewhere along the lines of RM2800
from the US prices. I like Nikon because of their great macro
capabilities. I could take macro photos at 4 mm from the lens, a
feature I couldn’t find in most 3 – 4 MP digicams. I’m looking for a 4
– 5 MP one now though. Where’s the cheapest place to get a digicam in
KL? If there’re no retailers offering it at that price, I’m going to
get it online. Anyway, my cell phone is charged so off I go.

Oh, and since my old hard disk isn’t up yet, I don’t know if I got replied all the comments, coz I can’t check. My apologies.

…and I’m off

August 16, 2003 by HB

I’ll be flying to KL tomorrow. I’m heading to Sibu airport early
tomorrow morning coz my dad has an earlier flight so we might as well
head down together. Anyway, I’ll be staying in Bukit Bintang till
Wednesday and then I’ll be staying somewhere near Petaling Street till
Sunday and then I’ll be staying with my girlfriend’s brother till 1st
of November. It’s a bit convulated, but the room I’m going to rent
won’t be vacated until next month, so that’s when I’m moving in.

Well, I’ve got an interview scheduled on Monday, the time isn’t
confirmed though, so I’ll have to call earlier to confirm the time.
Does anyone know the easiest way to go from Bukit Bintang (heart of BB)
to 27, Jalan Tun Ismail via public transport? How long will the journey
take? Anyway, I have armed myself with Mapopolis [mapopolis.com] and map of KL [virtualmalaysia.com], and there’s always a taxi if I can’t get there.

Anyway, I’ll only be able to update very sporadically in the week
starting tomorrow, daily posts is likely, but without photos. My
digicam is still broken, most recent photos have been taken using a
webcam or is from my personal stock photo collection – the random shots
I take while carrying my digicam around. The plan is to get Nikon
Malaysia to fix it or to get another one, probably the latter though,
because I can’t justify the price to fix it when a better model can be
had for a little more. Anyway, we’ll see about that. FYI, veritas sends
word that he won’t be posting for this week too, in consideration of my
quest for employment, but he’s got “experience reports (all with
photos) of buprenorphine (without naloxone), pentazocine (also w/o
naloxone), triazolam + several other benzos and a wierd zolpidem
experience, basically quite a few from The Wonderful World of
Pharmaceuticals and one rare illicit that is long due (methcathinone –
experience report ONLY)” after this week or when I get a job, whichever one comes first. 😉

Well, I’ve got some last minute packing to do and I’ll also have to
read up some stuff in preparation for my interview, so till next time,
see ya everyone. My apologies for not being able to reply the comments
today, but I’ll do that next time I update. Thanks!

Soylent Green is people!

August 14, 2003 by HB

That is all.

Mop Swamp

August 13, 2003 by HB

I will be leaving Sibu for KL this Sunday. There’s nothing
noteworthy to report today except that things are starting to fall into
place and preparations are basically done. I’ve opened a new bank
account with Public Bank, they issue ATM cards on the spot (during
application), which is interesting because I figured there would be a
wait. They also have an online banking system, which is useful for
paying bills. Anyway, I thought there would be a hassle involved since
I had an account with Public Bank a couple of years ago (which was
never closed) but they were not concerned about that. Now, I’ve just
got to get some funds out of a Fixed Deposit account I have in another
bank and transfer it into this account. My MyKad application has not
been successful, the place is absolutely packed every time I go in, so
I’ve decided to take advantage of the 2005 deadline and do it next time
I come back. 🙂

Oh, apparently there is a lorry loaded with new mattresses driving
around the Medan Damansara area where you can buy the bulky things off
them or trade in an old mattress for a rebate of some sort. I hear it
doesn’t come at the frequency of gas and newspaper distribution
vehicles, but it’s pretty close. What an interesting concept, I’ve
never even heard of this before!