Category Archives: Personal Life

Personal Life

Spidey All Tied Up

Leave a comment

My wife and I have been experimenting with putting videos up on YouTube. Unfortunately since we’re only taking them using our old digital camera, the results aren’t really great, and they seem to be darkened after YouTube finishes with processing them. Here’s a video that we took when Spidey was smaller.

One of our worries about leaving for Kuala Lumpur was what to do with her. We wanted to put her in a dog boarding school here in Kota Kinabalu but didn’t have enough time to arrange for that. My wife’s parents happened to be here so we had to let them take care of Spidey instead. As expected, Spidey had to sleep outdoors for most of the week. She was naturally delighted to see us when we got back, but we discovered that she had developed some itchy sores on her belly.

The local vet here wasn’t open due to the Hari Raya holidays but we managed to call him and he said it might be a fungal infection. Since she’s back to sleeping in the room with us, the sores have dried up a bit, but we still need to be careful that her belly doesn’t stay wet for too long.

Personal Life

A death in the family

Leave a comment

I’ve been away for a while due to a death in the family, the exact details of which are too private to elaborate on here. Suffice to say that the treatment of groups of people like the disabled, the infirm and the mentally disturbed in our country serves as a stark reminder that for all of our gleaming skyscrapers and highways, Malaysia remains very much a third-world country.

2008 has been a very tumultous year for me so far. I started the year by basically getting fired, having to adapt to a new life here in Kota Kinabalu (though that was on balance a positive development), having my investments pummelled in the current market climate and now this. I daresay that this will be a year to remember in history as well. Between the Chinese Olympics and the devastation of the earthquakes in China before that, and the ongoing blood-letting in the U.S. markets with the U.S. presidential elections still to come, there will be plenty to remember this year for.

Personal Life

Spidey

5 Comments

My wife and I have been in Kota Kinabalu for three months now, so I thought that it’s time for a quick update. Notably, the inclusion of Spidey, our dog, into our lives. We bought her at the Gaya Street Sunday market about two months ago. At that time, the seller told her that she was two months old and lied to us that she was actually a male puppy, presumably because most buyers would be more hesitant to buy a female puppy. Yeah, that means both my wife and I did a terrible job of checking up on the puppy’s actual gender. So much for being dog lovers huh?

After we got her home and got to know her a little, we couldn’t bear to give her back so we decided to keep her anyway. We’d actually picked the name “Spidey” for her when we thought she was a male puppy, but we decided to keep that name as well. As you can see from the above photograph taken just a day after we first bought her, she looked so tiny, with her body only slightly longer than the length of a hand. She was also very timid and somewhat lethargic on the first day. My wife said that she’d heard that some sellers keep their puppies tranquillized while selling them so they wouldn’t look too naughty or difficult to handle to potential buyers.

Continue reading Spidey →

Personal Life

My New Gaming Rig

1 Comment

Hey, look at what the postman brought me! As you might guess, I finally have a gaming rig of my own again. It’s a fairly modest Dell XPS 420 with the following key specifications:

  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
  • 3 GB RAM
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
  • 500 GB SATA Hard Drive

This is nowhere near the current cutting edge of course, but with just a 20-inch LCD monitor to drive, it should be more than enough to meet my gaming needs for a while. The included speakers and subwoofer aren’t anything special, but they constitute probably the best sound system I’ve ever owned.

Continue reading My New Gaming Rig →

Personal Life

Living in Kota Kinabalu

2 Comments

Well, I’m been offline and out of touch for a lot longer than I anticipated, but I’m back online now. I’m working in Kota Kinabalu and will likely be staying here for a while. KK turns out to be a surprisingly vibrant, yet picturesque little city. As my brother-in-law says, you can get nearly everything that you can find in Kuala Lumpur here, but there are plenty of stuff here that you won’t be able to find in the Klang Valley, such as great beaches, clean air and fantastic scenic views..

The place I’m staying at is near the University Malaysia Sabah campus towards the north. It’s some way off from the city centre, but that’s more than made up for by the mountain views available here and the fact that the newly opened 1 Borneo, the biggest shopping mall in East Malaysia, is within walking distance of where we are. Mount Kinabalu is theoretically within line of sight from here, but it’s always covered in clouds so it’s not actually visible. Even so, the sight of the mountain covering the whole horizon is mighty impressive, especially so when the sun shines directly on it.

Continue reading Living in Kota Kinabalu →

Personal Life

Visiting Singapore

2 Comments

dsc00201_reduced.JPG

I haven’t been able to update my blog or even do much of anything connected with the online world since I’ve been in Singapore for a job interview for the past few days. The job thing didn’t turn out so well, though I’m still holding out some hope that I might get some freelance from these folks Still, since my wife and I had planned on it being a short sightseeing trip as well, at least it didn’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. As always, whenever I visit Singapore, the most striking thing is how orderly everything is. For example, even pedestrian footpaths closed for construction have signs saying, “Footpath closed. Please do not walk on the road. Use the footpath on the opposite side of the road instead.” It’s as if every little thing in Singapore, no matter how small or insignificant, is filed in a huge database somewhere and assigned under the responsibility of a specific bureaucrat. It’s an amazingly efficient way to run things, but in a way, it’s also a bit scary as well.

On the other hand, because we stayed in a dingy hotel in Geyland to save money, we got to see the seamier side of Singapore as well. I’ve known about Geylang’s less than savoury reputation of course, who doesn’t, and I even warned my wife about it and told her that we could pick a more expensive hotel if it bothers her to stay in a red light district. All the same, I was surprised, after having checked in to the hotel and going out in the evening for dinner, to see dozens of scantily clad prostitutes lining the road right in front of our hotel. I expected something, but not that many of them wearing so little clothes standing so brazenly out in the open.

Continue reading Visiting Singapore →

Personal Life

What I’ve Been Up To (Part 2)…

1 Comment

dsc00165_reduced.JPG

One of coolest things my wife and I did over the past month was attending the Mayday concert at Genting on 19th April. This was the second time that we’ve been to the Arena of Stars for a concert, the first time being a Jonathan Lee concert during my holidays last year. As with last year, our main consideration was finding any concert that was being held during the one month that we’d planned we would be in Malaysia. If we’d known that we would be in Malaysia longer, we would probably have opted for the Emil Chau concert later in May. As thirtysomethings, Emil Chau’s songs are a lot more familiar from our school days than us than those of Mayday, about whom we barely know anything.

As it turned out, we’re both glad we went to the Mayday concert instead. Both of us had never been to a real rock concert before this, and the electrifying energy of the performance, combined with the wildly enthusiastic response of the audience, turned it into a truly eye-opening experience. It’s a testament to how out of touch I am with the music scene that I didn’t realize that Mayday is probably the biggest rock act in the Chinese-speaking world today, though the many Mayday songs chosen by my nieces when my wife and I took them to a karaoke earlier that month gave me a clue as to how popular they. And yeah, you know that these guys are popular alright when every little gesture made by a band member is greeted by a earsplitting uproar.

Continue reading What I’ve Been Up To (Part 2)… →