Jakarta

I'm in Jakarta now.

I'm travelling again. Again.

This morning, I met another frequent traveller in the airport. He's going to retire from traveling soon.

I wonder when will I ever get to do that, you know, stop traveling on my job.

The thing is, if I don't travel, I feel trapped. Bored. Lack of challenge. So I guess, I'll be traveling for at least a bit more. There's so much of the world I haven't seen.

Sometimes, when you travel, you feel a sense of homeliness when you return home. In some very unusual case, you get that feeling when you return to the same hotel. I felt the same homeliness today returning to JW Marriot here in Jakarta. Maybe it's because the rooms are all the same layout. And maybe it's because the power adaptors all sparkle when you plug them in.

Gong Xi Gong Xi !!!

A few days ago, a few special guests visited my office.


A pair of really playful and cute Southern Lions !!! The building management of the office where we were located arranged for lion dance performance to visit all the offices in the whole complex !

Woot !!! Not only did they come in to scare away all the bad stuffs and bring us good luck in the office reception ...

They went everywhere to each table !! We played a small token angpow and a mandarin orange on each of our desks, and it went around to collect the angpow, bless our workplace, and peel open the mandarin oranges.

In between, the lions even found a bit of time to chat up some gals. It's Valentine's Day after all !


But what I found seriously funny ... were the lions visiting and dancing in our server room !!!! Never in a million years !!! Yeah !!! Make sure you scare those switches and routers into not failing us for the whole year, ya ??


Here's the lion blessing my table (and collecting an angpow from me too).


The aftermath of blessing at my workspace. Heheehe ... I photoshopped away some things from the board, and also my name plate ... sorry folks !


I like lion dance ! Here's to a Happy Chinese New Year to one and all ! Hopefully, the lions would bring me plenty of good luck this year !

Gong Xi Fa Cai !!!

Shameless Plug: Photoblog

It's Chinese New Year, the only time of the year when I really slow down and do nothing. So, during this relaxing period of downtime, I've been taking the opportunity to tweak my photoblog a little bit.

In line with my new post on my small and humble collection of Crystals, I've come to realise that it's quite a bad experience scrolling up and down the page to see photos and then to read about it. Therefore, I've made a small change - using Javascript to implement a photo gallery whenever I need to show a collection of photos instead of just one photo individually.

I'll appreciate it loads if you all jump over there and have a look at my handiwork (I coded the Javascript from scratch), and let me know how I can improve you experience even further ! There are some small browser cross compatibility problems - readers on Firefox will see the intro text over and over again. I'm working on that and I hope to solve it soon.

Users who have subscribed to the RSS feed might find some funny Javascript turn up instead. I'm still trying to hack around Blogger to get rid of that bit of code. I apologise if you found ocipala text instead of useful words.

Some of you know I've been a mineral / crystal collector for sometime now. Although no longer actively collecting, I still pick up nice pieces when the opportunity presents itself.

And my crystals make very good macro photography subjects ! If you're wondering how big they are - most of my crystals are quite small. Look at the last photo and you'll understand better. ;)

So, thus my shameless plug on this blog !!! What are you waiting for ? Jump over !

Gong Xi Fa Cai !

It's that time of the year again !!! It's Chinese New Year !

To all friends, enjoy your Chinese New Year with family and friends, but remember to drink responsibly, drive safely, and to gamble within limits. Too much of anything can be bad !

To all rats, since this is the year of the rat, you will enjoy the following benefits:

• Lab rats will be able to do experiment on the scientists one day each week
• There will be no operations against rats in SS2 and Gurney Drive for the entire year
• For this year only, instead of saying "Rats !" every time something goes wrong, I'll say "Hello Kitty !" instead.
• MBPJ will be handing out leftover food to rats in the entire PJ area.
• The most popular noodle dish this year would be Lor See Fun !
• For children born in the year of the rat, they have the option to put a picture of Mickey Mouse on their MyKad !
• Just this year only, they'll remove the statue of that eagle in Langkawi and replace with a rat statue.
• Tour agencies are encouraged to take tourists out to see the rats running about in the streets of KL.
• I will decorate all the mouse traps in my house with paper cuttings, and use lokam as baits.
  
• Cheese makers to donate half of all the cheese they made to mice.
  

HAPPY RATTY CHINESE NEW YEAR !