Dry throat weekends

Had a weekends of dry throats.

It started on Friday. Somehow I woke up with it.
I could feel the pain when I was teaching in the lab. It was Project 2 due date for CES105, so it was a busy session. And I had to restrain myself to eat only a small piece of the Apple Strudle when we celebrated Jason and EJ's birthday.
[More on Corica's apple strudle on asia1 and makansutra]

Saturday I went to the AMWA meeting at the Malaysia consulate office. AMWA stands for The Association of Malaysians in Western Australia. It's established just last month and now in the process of growing and forming sub-committees to provide services to the Malaysian community in WA. I'm really glad to meet the committee personally and voice out the need of young adult Malaysians here.
The committee really want to make a difference to the Malaysian community here, and most of them seem down to earth, open to comments and criticisms and not like a bunch of bureaucrats. Hope it'll remains like that. :)

On Sunday I was supposed to go to a friendly service at ShihChing's church at 9am, however, I woke up at 8am (after 8 hours of sleep) and still felt a very dry throat, so I thought getting more rest instead of going to the service was a better choice for me then. So I had another 4 hours of sleep after letting Rina who offered to pick me up know. And I did feel a lot better after the good sleep. :)

In the afternoon, Rongxin invited us out for drink and dinner to celebrate her upcoming birthday. So we did. We went to Chopstick (重庆美食家) for sichuan steamboat. It's a double soupbase steamboat (鸳鸯火锅) such that there are two separate compartments in one steamboat, the inner one is super spicy hot and the outter one is normal soup.
For my throat's sake, I had to only dip into the outer soup... It was good. :)

We had a couple of games in Timezone and had a good 2 hours of "Truth or Dare" game in Annie's place before we headed home.
The "Truth or Dare" game I learnt today was worth elaborating. We all pick a card from a deck, and the winner (who got the biggest card) gets to ask the loser to choose between "truth or dare". For "truth", the loser will be asked a question and have to answer it with ultimate honesty. [It is such a great way to get to know each other, asking something that you never get to ask in normal conversations.] For "dare", the loser will be asked to perform some act that is not usually seen. [It's also a great way for a person to express some part of themselves that's not usually expressed. To push through some embarassment/comfort zone]
I personally feel that such a game if played with respect, encouragement and authenticity, can be a great way to build friendship. But if it's directed to embarass, insult or dig out the dark secrets will be rather harmful and uncomfortable.
I think we played it the good way, lots of encouragement for 'dare acts' and respect for the 'truth' questions & answers. I really enjoyed it - I got to know my friends a lot better and had heaps of fun, can stop laughing to see the unseen talents.
It actually surprised me because I was a bit worried it'll go towards to crazy/sick path when we started the game. I'd love to play it more. :)

That is it for this weekends of dry throat. Hope it'll be good after I wake up 8 hours later. Good night.

Ah Long @ Bukit Beruntung

Not enough $$ in Malaysia?
Ah Long @ Bukit Beruntung has their advertisement to help you.

Watch this hilarious Malay song clip:
Ah Long Bukit Beruntung .

*Ah Long is a slang in Malaysia, means the gangster who illegally give loan to people with high interest rate...

Little me

I got this photo in my family email circle. The little boy looks very much like me when I was that age.

Then this old photo came out.


And I decided I have to blog this! Yes the little boy in the middle is me.

Enter the Danno

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Congratulations Druce for getting his paper in ACCV!!

I have developed a way of tracking with no fixed camera position"

Jason's be-earlied Birthday Party at Adam's place

Jason's birthday is on this coming Friday. But we had an earlier celebration.
BBQ @ Adam's apartment. Sausages, onion, fishballs and capsicum. (I love to see the fishball pops on the grill)

It's mainly the CS postgrads and the Tuesday night church discussion fellows. Also, I finally get to meet Cat, who I heard for a while from Adam. :) Cute!

We BBQed and then stayed for some boardgames. A fun day.

Photos here

Wow! Certificate for the team!

Three months ago, I had this Certificate, I folded one unit of protein.

Now the UWA team (just me and Shih Ching) has folded 100 units.

A milestone to celebrate!! For our useful computer idle time... Haha!

Malaysia Prime Minister's wife passed away this morning

Malaysia Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi's wife, Endon Mahmood, passed away at 07:55 this morning.

My deepest condolences to Pak Lah and family.

More on Jeffooi's Screenshots.

Dinner and Games @ G.Dunn's place

Angie and Chris came back from their Europe trip, so we had another dinner & game night.
Food wise, we prepared so much! I made sour & hot Thai Vermicelli, Angie made Lamb curry (with apple & sultana), Adam made pizza and Tiramisu, Rina prepared a good fruit platter and Tone brought some freshly baked pizza biyanka(?). It's so great the food! Adam's pie/pastry/pizza always amazed me, this time it's the crispy pizza, :)~ The lamb is so tender, and it's sweet, it's very very nice. My vermicelli was pretty good too, I like it with more chilli. hehe!
After the main course, I was very full. But the rest were still good enough to erouse my tastebuds. :D

We played quite a few games on the night. The highlight was on Shadows over Camelot. It's a very different boardgame that all players play together as a team to defeat the 'dark forces'. So there's a strong sense of "For the glory of XXX", "I'll sacrifice to defeat the evil"... A lot of fun! :D

Photos are here:

Multicultural week Food fair

It's Multicultural Week (MCW) again.
I went to the Spring Feast organised by UWA ISS and the famous Curtin Pasar Malam
Heaps of food stalls, mostly asian.
The UWA one has mostly student foodstalls. The Curtin one has many stalls run by actual business, it's way bigger, and has live band performing Chinese, English, Indonesian songs.
However, performance wise, I still feel that the International night of UTas has so much better performances! Check it out here: http://www.utas.edu.au/mcw/.

The photos of the food feast are here:

Opera or Firefox?

Just yesterday I found out that Opera Web Browser becomes another FREE browser. A big competitor to firefox.

I haven't used Opera myself before, but I've played with it and it's fantastic! It's probably the best (yes, better than firefox) but it was not free before. So I went with Firefox.

Hmm.. I'm now at the cross road. To Opera or not to Opera?
It's good and free, but it's not Open Source! Oh well, I may use a dual system in the mean time to test them side by side.

However, because Opera is not Open Source, it doesn't have heaps of great plug-ins (or extensions) like Firefox does. I love the foxytunes, adblock, StumbleUpon and Googlebar (which I just used to one-click blog this).

Royal Perth Show 2005

It's the last day of the Perth Royal Show I decided to go and have some fun. There's a Malaysia - guest nation exhibition there and that added to my inclination to chaeck out the show this year.

So I asked my housemates, he asked his friends and eventually Derong, Rongxin and me decided to go.

It was fun! Heaps of interesting things happening. We kept being distracted on the way when we decided to go to a certain exhibition/place.

The highlights for us: car stunt show by Holden, lots of cool drifffffts, fly over broken bridge; friendly/funny clowns on the street; animals animals and animals, so cute, so cool; rollercoaster games, flying high up in the air, stress releasing scream, I was a bit dizzy after the ride though; Win-soft-toy-look-easy-but-actually-hard games, got sucked into a few of those, looks very doable, but it takes some precise skill to play well enough to get the prize; Pig racing and diving, cute pigs, great fun to watch.

The biggest highlight is the finale fireworks. It's bloody fantastic! We sit on the side of the oval where it's set off. The whole view is covered by colourful lights. Woo Yeah!!

On a side note, I also get to meet the committee of the newly launched Association of Malaysians in Western Australia (AMWA). I'm very surprised to know that there's no such association in place before this one is launched so recently! I shall learn more with them and contribute to the community.

Took some 150 photos too.