The Three Tags

I'd better do some tags before everybody gives up tagging me. Looks like majority of them are already

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Thr33 Things Tag

The three names I go by
- Mosh
- Real Name
- Mohamad

Three jobs I have had in my life
- Waiter
- Cleaner
- Wood Oven Pizza Maker

Three places I have lived
- Kuala Kangsar
- Alor Gajah
- Kota Damansara

Three TV shows that I watch

Not a regular TV buff but will watch if bumped into
- Nip/ Tuck
- House
- Whose Line Is It Anyway

Three places I have been
Today?
- Meeting
- Toilet
- Kak Zah's

People that e-mail me regularly
- Wife
- officemates
- koleq old boys

Three of my favorite foods
- mee goreng mamak
- mum's (and wife's of course) cooking
- tiramisu

Three things I would like to do
- play online games
- play games
- play "games"

Three friends I think will respond.
- have no idea
- same here
- same as above

Things I am looking forward to
- sleep
- weekend sleep
- "sleep"

Eh abih dah? Tu la dia...

Kuala Visit Part 1

It is Thursday the 23rd already so I have to write about the 20th anniversary trip that I was talking about in the previous entry before I forgot all about it. I think everybody that turned up have the same general conclusion about it, superbly excellent!

I'll give you the rundown of the informal itinerary of the trip. Formal means the planned itinerary for the weekend planned by the MC0BA organizing committee (which is almost identical annually) and informal means whatever that was planned by our very own batch committee to commemorate our own experiences there that would run parallel to the main one.

Ideally we had to be there at 2pm on Friday 17th. Aplril at Safar1 Resort at 2pm even though my initial plan with my car-pool mates were shooting off at 2.30pm from KLSeeSee after completing the Friday Prayers there. Not surprisingly, only me and the driver adhered to the plan and we ended up shooting off from Jalan Doota toll booth after rendezvousing with our final car-mate chauffeured to the toll plaza in his brand spanking new German mark at around 3:30pm.

The trip up north was itself an event. With music from the mid 80's blaring through the very loud sound system dwarfed only the loudness of hearty laughs all around, it was definitely a trip back across time, with 4 almost-40 lads ganging up together, trying very hard to forget the 20 years that has passed by.

Is this love that I'm feeling
Is this love that I'm feeling
Is this the love that I've been searching for
Is this love or am I dreaming
This must be love
Cos it's really go a hold on me
A hold on me

After several stops while we were traversing the highway, we only arrived at our destination around 7.15 pm despite the driver clocking a minimum speed of 150km/h while we were cruising to be greeted by the sights of many almost 40 overgrown boys, laterally mostly, chatting up in the parking lot of the resort. It was not a minute before half hour that we finally offloaded our bags, shaking hands, hugging and reminiscing about old times. As for me, I am glad that I could recall the names or nicknames of almost all of them, save one or two of the pretty inconspicuous ones, despite not meeting some of them for almost 20 years compensating how age has taken the toll on the wrinkles and significant lateral expansions. Looks like my long term memory has not failed me as much as my short term ones. Signs of old age with silverish, receding hairline? Possibly. But at least all of them recognized me at first sights as well :p.

I wanted to choose the upper bunk beds but despite the fan spinning at full speed merely 5 feet above our heads, was a bad choice because in the prevailing hot weather, that would be suicidal considering that you will not feel a thing on the upper decks so naturally I moved into the lower deck of the bunk beds. So there we were, CEO's, SVP's, MD's, Macai's and Kuli Batak's alike bunking in double-decker beds, wet to the bone due to perspirations in those air-conditionless dormitories, sharing showers and toilets.

After maghrib prayers, we performed a solat hajat for our batch-mate who was supposed to come but unfortunately was diagnosed with AML about 2 weeks ago and is currently undergoing chemotherapy session and hospital confinement for at least a month. The solat hajat was also dedicated to one of my batch-mate mother who was at the time has been hospitalised in a semi-comatose state for about 11 months due to a stroke-like attack on the brain triggered by an asthma attack. She passed away on Tuesday 3:30am on Tuesday 22nd. April. Innalillahiwainnailaihiroji'un.



Consequently, there was a BBQ dinner. Courtesy of Gromm Hellscream aka Bawal, here's a cool video clip of the event. Great job Bawal! I can't view the video proper while in the office here so I'll link the video properly when I get home. As for now, anybody curious enough can go with the link here.

To be continued...

edited to add proper yootoob link and XC:XX. Copyright reserved ke? I don't know. Just nicked it off my FB XC Group

Alma Mater Revisited

All set to go! Kuala here we come!

To be conveniently ignorant, it is really hard to believe that it was 20 years ago I was in form 5 in this school, more than 10kg lighter. While they have this MC0BA weekends every year, I haven't been back for eternity since 2005 when we celebrated our 100th. anniversary of the school. Old school, old boys, old attitude, at least when it comes to the old boys weekend. This is the opportunity to "relive" the heyday days with no worries, no responsibilities and not much care to the world. Forget 3-star, 4-star and 5 star hotels. CEO's, CFO's, office boys and balachi's alike would be staying in dormitories where bunk beds are the not optional and common toilet is the theme of the day.

Furthermore, to commemorate this special year indeed, thanks to the hardworking committee they have prepared additional itineraries for us which includes an open air BBQ and football and hockey matches against the current Form 1 children. Ah well. The current U-18 boys might be too tough to be handled alone so let's see how the coming-to-middle-age boys will fare against the almost-pube ones.

Hopefully will get more interesting photos to be posted about the event later even though I'm not bringing my own camera. As for now, this emergency one would do. You can actually click at the photo to get a larger version if you are curious enough. Weekend's starting early today for me. Have a good weekend, boys and girls. Salam.

Scare Tactics

If you have bought a pack of cigarettes lately, you would definitely notice a refreshing change on the latest adornments displayed on the new batches of boxes. I am not referring to those toll-free customer service phone number should you have any queries and encouragement on how you are actually contributing gargantuanally to the government's coffers or the missile money to bomb those helpless women and children. Nor I am referring to those stale simple warning of Smoking is Hazardous to Health. I am referring to those gory images that is prominently displayed at the top part of the front and back of all cigarette boxes. While those images serves as shock therapy to all the smokers out there, apparently it has some added bonus to it as well.

I started smoking regularly when I was 18 years old, starting with a pack a week until now to a-pack-a-day basis. Which means I have been smoking for almost half of my entire being and the fraction will only get bigger if I were to continue along. Wow! I only realised that as I am typing this entry.

Apparently, the bad habit (hey! All smokers do realise that it is a bad habit thank you very much) persisted throughout, braving through the thick and thins of my life such as no smoking zone in the office, severe financial depressions (still is), nagging girlfriends (not that many :p) and consistent hourly harassments from a newly-wed wife for several years to name a few.

And these new graphics has brought up a new kind of assault to this evergreen habit of mine. Similar to the last one I mentioned except that it comes from a smaller yet powerful voice of a very persistent 7 year old girl. Now, simply said, I just can't have my relative peace outside puffing the blues away at home without this little noise in the background saying Apasal ayah hisap rokok lagi? Nanti jadi macam kat dalam gambar tu And the irony is that I can't exactly rationalise my bad habit without actually promoting the habit to her, can I? For all you know, before long, the "newly-wed" wife would find a renewed enthusiasm in her fight for a smokeless environment and tobacco-free smell from me seeing the support that she's getting from her smaller counterpart.

Maybe I should quit. It would do wonders to my bank balance.

p/s: photo courtesy of http://www.quitsmokingpainlesslynow.com

A Rare Post About Work

Did you guys enjoy your Earth Hour on Saturday? Well, we did, for the better part of it. Emitting more COx, NOx and SOx while idling in the gridlock traffic going from Rawang to Bukit Beruntung via the old trunk road without any food only to find out that the candlelight dinner was not a viable option upon arriving at the destination at 8:45pm, 1 hour and 45 minutes later from Selayang Hospital was not exactly the best way to start the Earth Hour. The host ended up turning up the lights at around 9:10 in due sense of pressing demands of hunger, fatigue and restless kids and over-aged adults alike. All for a noble cause of visiting an elderly ailing aunt. According to the the brother of the host, he did his part the night before for 3 hours when the electricity supply was not forthcoming to his house between 12:00am to 3:00am.

How is this about work eh, you may wonder. It is all about work. Working with this KompeniKedekutLetrik, we expected to experience a reduction in demand in relative to the normal demand profile that we normally see on Saturday nights. Well, if you read the papers, our little teapot CEO, our demand dropped by about 550MW as reported here. It is really a gross figure giving the benefit of the doubt saying it in laymen's terms.

And for the benefit of laying, laid, soon-to-be-laid and will-never-be-laid men and women, I give you this little tutorial about Power which is expressed in the units of MW and Energy which is expressed in the units of MWh. If you're observant enough, you'd notice the little h in Energy which is just the measly hour. When you talk about energy, it is fixed and finite. MWh, Joule and kCal all measures the energy. For those counting the calories would know that however fast or slow you devour those teh tarik and roti canai, you would still ingest the same amount of energy that would correspondingly be converted to some milligrams of fat if it goes unused. Power (MW) however, denotes how fast the energy is consumed. So that roti canai and teh tarik would be used up faster when say, you're walking and chatting with gartblue when it is more than 10 minutes to 8:00am or half-jogging your way through swiping the door if your watch is showing the time to be 20 seconds to 8:00am. Even though some fitness buffs might refute my hypothesis, the same amount of energy would be used getting from the exact spot of parking space to that punch clock in both occasions. And the only difference would be ... time taken. Hence the Power (MW) is latter option would be much higher even though it lasts much shorter than the former. Hence I stop there before rambling on and on about the useless stuff. There's always Goog1e and Wik1 if you are curious enough, you know.

Anyway, back to the topic, I did some number crunching on the dip shown in KompeniKedekutLetrik demand profile on Saturday night and came up with this one. And to save my pretty ass, I used relative instead of absolute figures to be published here.

Viola! Err ok maybe it needs a bit of explanation. The blue curve shows the 'typical' Saturday night demand (MW) profile whereas the yellow one is for that particular rainy Earth Hour night starting from 7:00pm to 12:00am. While whatever manipulations that I have made does not account for the difference in weather patterns for those nights that I was comparing, it has minimised it to the point of hopefully not being significant enough. With that assumptions, a host of other assumptions can be derived from the change in demand pattern eh?

So, why don't anybody just give their piece of mind trying to explain the difference in demand. I'll start with one or two first and you can continue later.

1- Some people started way too early. Hey you're seeing the demand dropping already starting 8:00pm. Could it be possible some people were actually confused about the time?

2- Demand only started to recover at around 10:30pm. It seems that many people liked the darkness so much that they remained in the dark for an additional half hour after.

3- Demand never actually returned to their 'normal' level even past midnight. Some people enjoyed it too much or just too occupied to turn on the lights perhaps.

So, what's your take on it?