Category Archives: Geek

April Updates

Thousand and two apologies for the lack of updates; things happen, like:

Albert rediscovers the Dvorak layout.

I did that to a spare keyboard lying in the office. I noticed that my productivity decreased greatly and I was even more less (more less?) likely to load MSN or reply emails in standard Albert-ic bombastic English. Hic.

I am somewhat glad that when I type on my home’s QWERTY keyboard, I type D instead of E. A sign that I’m getting used to Dvorak! Interestingly, I type words that start with S with O instead, and mash up E and O often. I still have not gotten used to locating the rarer keys.

Then when I get home I’ve a project to work on so yeah, no blog updates. 😛

Beatallica

That’s right kids; this is the band that does Beatles songs Metallica style. They play Metallica excellently; they’ve got the guitar tone, the And Justice For All era James Hetfield growl, everything… but throw in what The Beatles do (unconventional harmonies and chord progressions) and a rock and roll beat, and you get an entertaining (and funny) result. Yes there are places you can download the songs.

Sepet

I borrowed Jason‘s original Sepet VCD. My mom the usual tearjerker-movie-sucker… didn’t cry. Neither did I. I thought it was alright though; the sound was alright despite reading complaints about that. I know someone so much like Orked in mannerism (and she’s even cute like her) and yet, I did not know if I could place her character in Ipoh. Then again, I don’t know Ipoh. Her family is urban in thought but it seems the rest of town isn’t. Some people criticize the movie for being inconsistent in the potrayal of the community, but we forget that there are urbanite bigots.

And now, on to time-based narration:

On Friday I met up with YK to buy more and more Transformers.

Treadshot seriously has style.

Planes in scale. Yes, this was Photoshopped and the planes are swapped. Standing from left: Skydive (Generation 2 recolor Aerialbot), Strafe (Generation 2 Cyberjet) and Treadshot (Transformers Energon Aerialbot).

We then headed to Bintang Walk to meet Syefri and Frus. Frus and I headed to The Loft, Zouk again to catch Twilight Action Girl. This time, we stayed for the dance floor.

It’s a bad thing when you don’t think that beer tastes bad anymore.

Perhaps I missed the chance to ask them to play something from the black album before they changed to early industrial and then something which was more techno than rock. “Is it too late to play any song from the Spinal Tap album?” “Oh chill lah, we’re changing back to rock now.”

When they played Gimme Some Money, a herd of rockers left. 🙁 How can they not know Spinal Tap?!? At least there were some who appreciated the song’s poke at The Beatles’ enlightenment era. 🙂

I also bumped into Iszie, who bugged me to come the gig she was emceeing the next day. Yes you will notice that I am now talking about the next day. Yes I am using present tense which is so grammatically wrong.

Amantle The Sea. Yes! For this blog entry I shall have a theme for all gig-related pictures; they will all be taken without flash, preferably in red, and without any levels or color correction, to celebrate the beauty of a ISO400, EV -1 manual setting.

Lucy In The Loo rocked. No that’s not Lucy, and yes, I cheated by sticking on the stickers from a picture taken with flash.

Citizens Of Ice-cream was cool. Heavy soundscapes and no vocals can only come from a combination of two Chinese indie bands. They even get different colored lighting for their Floyd-ish escapes! On the right was what seemed to be a tape loop.

The Times brought their scene with them; Roots And Boots members were seen moshing frantically. The vocalist had this Britrock stance which was cool.

Telebury finished the gig. Yes again I cheated on the right-side picture, using flash to bring out the nice blue Gibson Les Paul. I mean, have you ever seen one of those in Metallic Blue?

Longdrawn 3 was the name of the gig, with the biggest turnout I had ever seen in The New Paul’s Place.

Okay I’m hungry. Let’s take a break and stare at the new KFC curry chicken. It has the zing of their Tom Yam experiment, but without the Tom Yam flavor. May this gimmick last longer.

Now teleport back to Paul’s Place, this time on a Wednesday, for Troubadours, the biggest singer-songwriter bigshot gig I’d ever seen. Pictured is a floating magnetic toy; a little invention by Paul (who used to design exhibits for the National Science Center!)

Ronnie Khoo was first, with some mellow-dy.

Izzy and guitarist Jeremy.

Warren Chan and Abigail. He had some interesting chords over more mellow stuff. Who from KLue doesn’t sing in falsetto all the time?

Ariff Akhir and Shahril the bassist. Now Ariff’s got the voice and the chords, but Shahril marginally draws more attention with his extremely fluid walking (and perhaps playing a game of Twister) basslines.

Peter Hassan Brown and Shahril the bassist.

Opie from Indonesia. She had soul, yo. It manifested in her diva-like vocals. And hey, that guitar is way too familiar.

Meor from Central Market. His aggressively-strummed blues were fun to watch.

Kartini which I suspect is also from Indonesia.

Kelvin from Singapore. Superb stuff; he shredded the blues to the intermission music. (Other bands would play the tuning song.) He then made a song on the spot about this here country. I have never seen a guy sing with more conviction; he strains, beats and dries the words that he sings.

Reza Salleh the heart-melter crooned over jazz guitar.

Sadly, I did not get to see Ben of Ben’s B***hes or Azmyl Yunor play as I had to leave. They would have been interesting.

In other news, Ed has lost it again; this time he has a 48-hour blogathon. So? 49 48 51 45, I say to him. 🙂

Metal Matters

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William and I caught Latte@8 at Sunway Pyramid’s Starbucks last Thursday.

We were pleasantly surprised to find one of the guests as Sharifah Amani, co-star of the acclaimed-by-everybody except-me-because nobody-is-able to-watch-it-with-me Sepet.

Frequency Cannon. (That’s who I was here to see.) You don’t see it, but Yuri seems to have contracted Siva’s detaching-guitar-strap syndrome!

So I may have bumped into Becky, a famous blogger, and not had the guts to say hi and make the world a better place by letting a famous blogger know that yes, a famous blogger can be recognized just like any other form of celebrity should.

I honestly like the Proton Gen 2 design (and most of the colors!) I think it’s sleek. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, someone adds to it!

I bought this second-hand from DJCS. On the left, a Sparkle GeForce 6600 GT (500/900) 128MB AGP card; on the right, my old Powercolor Radeon 9600 Pro (200/400) 128MB AGP card. The Radeon 9600 Pro would replace the GeForce 2 MX I bought from Syefri on the Athlon XP 1800+ machine; the GeForce 6600 GT would sit in my Barton XP 2600+ baby. Rates? Here goes techie numbers quick: UT2004 Flyby, 165 fps; botmatch 57 fps; Doom 3 High Quality 67.6 fps; Quake 3 Max Quality 228 fps; 3D Mark 2005 3185 marks; 3D Mark 2003 7089 marks; 3D Mark 2001 13043 marks. Quick go out and buy lottery numbers. Yeah 3D Mark 2001 was disappointing; 13043 marks was something a Radeon 9700 could do! However, its performance in 3D Mark 2003 was leaps better than my Radeon’s 2589 marks.

Heavy metal guy would consider this torture. Heavy metal runs in my veins, baby! It makes for my magnetic personality!

Presenting the new Calzone, from Pizza Hut – pizza on the go. A regular-sized pizza folded into a handy taco shape. Pizza Hut is under the same stingy company that hold Ayamas Roasters and KFC, but they do not suffer from food miniaturization! Shown is a AA battery in scale. No I do not eat batteries. I am not a robot. Do not eat batteries, even if you think you are a robot. Batteries will corrode your tin can soul.

Speaking of robots, here the Autobots gang up on a Decepticon I couldn’t resist getting as it was fresh on the shelves.

Barricade, the center piece of the Transformers Energon series combiner Bruticus Maximus poses, terrified.

He is an excellent, well-articulated tribute to Onslaught (that Transformers Generation 2 yellow dude), original center piece of Bruticus.

I misplaced Onslaught’s original cannon accessory.

No, Barricade isn’t that short when his cannons are folded out.

He is also the same size as the powerlinking Transformer Energon series. Spot the Decepticon!

“Here is the armless, legless wonder of the 20th century!”
As center pieces, Onslaught and Barricade are vital. You just can’t buy the arms and legs and superglue them together.

Barricade makes a pretty totem pole.

Barricade is really my new favorite Transformer Energon figure. He’s not limited in articulation in any way compared to other Energon figures which had niggling features like legs that can’t bend at the waist, or shoulders that can’t extend… Barricade also has a solid look and feel, and every joint and flap locks into place. RAWR.

Eat Eat Eat

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The sunlamp probably made this duck’s hair expand upwards.

Frus and I met up in Low Yat to look for hard disk-based MP3 players. Since I had 19 Gigabytes of MP3s and 4 Gigabytes of pictures, I’d love to have a 40 GB MP3 player/picture viewer (and perhaps hackable to view videos). The perfect one would be the iRiver H340, but that was nowhere to be found. Its smaller 20 GB brother, the H320, was around though.

Other options?

The RM1650-costing Wealper Multimedia Viewer II (in shops it was sold under the brand Pendrive). It could view pictures and videos, plus it functioned as a card reader too! My only gripe with this was that it was 20 GB! I could transplant a 40 GB hard disk in it, but it would have to fit in a 1.8″ case. Otherwise, I’d be loading from my camera straight to this and watching re-encoded Transformers episodes.

There was also the Pendrive X’s Drive Pro; that used a 2.5″ hard disk (not included) and if I was to add a 40 GB hard disk, it would total less than RM700. Sadly, it was bulkier and did not have a color screen.

Still, all these had more features than an iPod of the same price, so eat that, brand fashionistas!

Speaking of eating, we then went to Steak & Goreng for dinner where my Teh O Ais Limau (Iced Lemon Tea) had an interesting deformation at the straw. I then realized that this was intentional! Such geniuses. Ever drank your Teh O Ais Limau slowly because you were afraid to suck up seeds? This straw crease prevents it!

We also found the black album – the soundtrack to This Is Spinal Tap! I didn’t even know it existed. Now I’ve gotta get speakers that go to 11. Unlike Metallica’s black album, which had a snake, this was really black. How much more black can it get? None more black.

I’m going on a search to locate the other albums (in the bottom-right inlay). Sadly, no lyrics were included.

If you are a rocker and do not know of this legendary rock band and their rockumentary, you should swap your leather pants for baggy jeans.

Side trivia: I didn’t know that double-bass-playing (it’s a double-neck bass with the exact same neck… geddit?) Derek Smalls also did many voices in The Simpsons!

More Than Meets The Eye

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The Sony Ericsson k700i is the new Sony Ericsson T610. The same crowd bought it.

GSC Cinemas open in Berjaya Times Square! There, at the third floor.

I am now the proud owner of a Mazda RX-8.

Gotta love the mesmerizing taillights.

Okay, so it’s a left-hand drive but heck, I got it cheap.

Oh, and it’s small for a Transformer Alternator.

Of course, considering that the Rubik Cube it sat on is the biggest, at over 150% of an originally-sized cube, it isn’t that small after all. From left: Corinne got me this early birthday present; the normal-sized cube, the 133% sized cube, and the 150% super-sized one.

What a poser. I mean, literally, with superb articulation and detail.

Meister, really, is Jazz in a rebranded disguise.

This, an 8-in-1 card reader, and the excellent Power Of Soul: A Tribute To Jimi Hendrix have satiated my purchasing tendencies for this month, I hope.

Seasons Greetings

I Queue

1 Reply

Click on the image to take the test. Don’t steal my GIF file mmkay.

It’s a bit different from the real thing I took a while back; while it is Advanced Progressive Matrices, this one has patterns that don’t just go by row and column. The real thing also only has 5 answers while this has 8. The passing mark here is 148, not 130. The deviation may also differ from the Malaysian one. I can’t remember my Add Maths (A2 was a fluke I swear!)

To some of you, I am not the smartest, and I admit that. Or maybe the great formulas have already been invented.

The site also says that the Intelligence Quotient is 100 X Mental Age / Physical Age. Since the site doesn’t ask for your age, I assume it does not take into account my youth. Therefore, my mental age is 135 X 21 / 100 = 28.35!

Southern Anna Log

Eleven Days

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I shall add numbers to these days.

My router has been blinking for a week, refusing to connect, hence my lack of updates.

Wednesday 20

I went to The Backyard Pub, a pub somewhere off Sri Hartamas to see Justin Guber rock out at the Tribute To Jairus Anthony. This wasn’t your regular pub – it had a pretty modern-looking website! While waiting for Triple 6 Poser to perform, you could hear good ol’ classic rock playing. Stairway To Heaven and the like.

Dammit, Justin Guber has a Danelectro! Sweet.

The next band played mostly Beatles covers. The bassist had pretty bad harmonizing. Eep. The guitarist broke his Telecaster’s B string. Could Justin Guber save him? “Mine’s left-handed sorry.”

SWV was way better; the guitarist did Santana spot on, and during soundchecks he was soloing. They did danceable 70’s and 80’s hits.

Thursday 21

Avenue K is a new shopping mall right next to KLCC. It was barely occupied, with long tunnels to lead the imagination astray.

There was even a Kim Gary there! Mmm condensed milk on toast. Unfortunate it was that dinner was already at home, so I did not go for the one chance I would get to eat at Kim Gary without waiting queues like at Midvalley and Sunway Pyramid.

That’s a first for a mannequin pose.

Friday 22

KFC’s Ramadhan combo was cun. The chicken soup tasted like liquid mashed potato! It went surprisingly well with the rose syrup.

Monday 25

William took a picture of this; doesn’t it remind you of the Half-Life trash can?

Tuesday 26

I watched Shark Tale. It was cool. It was funny. Problem was, it didn’t have the emotion of Finding Nemo… it was all about Will Smith in 3D, spouting cliche hispanics in self-parody. It also parodied the mafia (how ironic that Martin Scorsese would voice Sykes…)

Mafia: If you understand what I said, nod your head.
Will Smith in 3D: *gulps and nods his head*
Mafia: Okay. Now tell me, did you nod your head?

Wednesday 27

I forgoed this week’s The Backyard Pub gig to meet up YK and Hannna. I then found Warm Paw instantly, upon picking out her distinctive voice amongst the Kayu Nasi Kandar SS2 din.

Thursday 28

I got myself the BenQ DVD DD DW1620 DVD burner; it was loaded with 16x DVD+-R, 4x DVD+-RW, 2.4x DVD+R Dual Layer, and 40x24x40 CD speeds. However, it didn’t have support for DVD-RAM unlike my LG GSA4040B (which has gone on a long vacation.) If the LG ever comes back, I shall be able to turn practically anything. 🙂 The TDK burner I wanted to get mysteriously disappeared from every shop I asked; that one was faster, at 48x24x48 CD speeds. Oh and I saw the jacket-less DVD-RAM in the big computer hypermarket up one level from the main shops in Low Yat. What timing.

I forgot if I ever mentioned that I had a GeForce 2 thanks to Syefri. My brother and I can finally race in Need For Speed: Underground.

Saturday 30

After passing Jenifer the-phone-forgetter her phone, I reloaded my Touch N Go at the Kelana Jaya station (which said it was down.) I then headed to Taman Bahagia LRT station. It was 6:30pm.

I decided, out of total nothing-to-do-ness, to walk to Uptown.

By 7pm, I had reached the “I” shape of SS2. I asked Tracy for directions to Restoran Murni, thinking it was near Kayu Nasi Kandar… alas, it was in the SS2 “square” instead, which I already passed! Ah well. I walked back on the highway and Jasmine spotted me as I crossed at the traffic light. How cool is that? I figured that it would be wayyy easier to bump into someone on the LRT than on the road… but it’s not the first time; Cara has called me as she zoomed past in Masjid Jamek. Maybe Klang Valley is that small, just that some of you are too sleepy to notice me crossing the road.

I reached Uptown at 7:30pm and had McDonalds. It was still torturously early for the Halloween gig at Paul’s Place; its specified time was 9pm, but they started at 10pm!

Spungy Funggy played, with Azmyl on drums, to be replaced by Ben the b***h (look I don’t wanna get on the bad side of any office’s website filtering system) on the last song.

13 Voices In My Head, or 90 degrees out of 360 Degree Head Rotation, played next, with some mellow screamings coupled with a beautiful 12-string.

Kawowski was less depressing. He did a killer cover of The Verve – The Drugs Don’t Work.

Frequency Cannon broke their good-boy image with Kua Chee on the didgeridoo.

(Red) Indian versus (Jamaican) Predator.

Kua Chee the Siamese Cat. Aww c’mon man you know you don’t need contact lenses to be cute. 😉 His shirt just makes me wanna go DUDE! and do that hand symbol with him.

For all their effort, I’ll post up a double-sized picture of their Halloween effort.

From left: Azrul loses massive chunks of weight, Ape man reveals his secret identity as the Tak Nak! poster boy, Siamese ca… dude, funky Jay Kay, and peace-loving rocker Predator.

While all those costumes could’ve been bought at Toys’R’Us, the next band, Ciplak, brought true shudders. Ronnie of Furniture shows us he can get even more experimental, making anti-music, where they make sounds that must not sound musical. The drummer was excellent; first he became Ben’s b***h by running up to his crotch, in complete garb (satire anyone?) and then he drummed most dramatically. Amusing act indeed, though others didn’t think so, and where they go I shall follow, missing Ben’s B***hes and Thundercoffeeclub.

I politely declined a coffee at Starbucks because well, uh, my urine smells of caffeine after that. I found out I wasn’t the only one! Perhaps our bodies did not process the caffeine (which explains why coffee doesn’t work for me anymore.) It wasn’t always like this.

We then lepaked at Uptown.

An apparently closed shoplot.

Or apparently not. A guy spoke over the walkie talkie, saying he couldn’t find a Size 10 Adidas.

Kua Chee then sent me home, and on the way, two racers cut us. His quick reflexes saved us from a deep shave.

Oh and I’ve updated my links in About Me! – check out Ian, Tech and YK.

Starbucks. Sunway College. Hoobastank.

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Friday was with William and I headed to Fathima’s Bangsar for cheese naan. Of course, due credit is to Ledwina for telling me about it. With the right salty bits sprinkled on a creatively-cut naan, this would be another place to sing praises of.

We then walked over to Starbucks, Telawi area, Bangsar for the second-last KLue Chillout Series.

Kevin Teh or Broken Scar, singer/songwriter/newest-addition-to-John’s-Mistress, doing some interesting instrumental jazz stuff in between hearty acoustic songs.

Jerome Kugan sings soul so damn well, it’s scary… and this, over electronica.

Hardesh and Az make up the Dalcha Duo. I finally got to see Az with a worthy match; they took turns to do acoustic maestro fills, climaxing at an Arabic/neoclassical song which had all the WHOAOHMYGIDDYGUITARPPLAYINGNESS of The Eagles, when they both played the same solo to perfect rhythm.

Er, Nabila reads.

Peter Hassan Brown and Markiza Brown end the gig on a happy note.
On Saturday, I walked from Sunway Pyramid to Sunway College for Isabella‘s gig. I met some KLue people there, and on the drink-getting detour, I bumped into huggable Britney Fan #1 Zahra and partner-in-crime Priya. Aiyeee nonstop hugs. 🙂

Back there, Flatline was on. Look at their pretty, shiny glossy guitars! (I missed Sgt. Weener’s Arms when I went for lunch.)

This Body Broken came on, but their set was broken by:

Rain. We all ran to the tents. I wonder what that says about their singing. And I was just thinking, “dammit it’s a hot day and I’m thirsty.”

Hey… this dude looks familiar. Implications galore.

You may be able to make out his face. More implications galore!

Furniture, the post-rock band formerly known as RUSH.

That, my friend, is a post-rock setup.

That, my friend, is how you play in a post-rock band.

Zoltan!

Note the bandage on the left-handed Fender Mustang.

I won prizes! The mousepad leaves a funky smell on your wrist though.

I finally got to see Duan with his band after hearing his intimate session with the guitar. There was one particular song I liked more on the acoustic, because of the interesting guitar chords… though I can’t say whether he is better solo.

Ham fiddles with effects.

Syarul of Love Me Butch looks like he just swam off an island.

KLPHQ, or Kuala Lumpur Post-Harmonic Quartet; we anticipated a very post sound and were not disappointed. I pronounced them as kelepak.

This is what made his vocals sound haunting – I don’t know what it is, but it sounded like reverb/delay drawn out till everything was one long howl. For all you know post-rock bands probably have a stompbox simply called Post.

It could not get any cooler than this.
Oh, and I shook hands with the inverted-right-mouse-hand of the Quake God, and the picture-taking Just.

Sunday was just about Hoobastank. I bumped into Jamie, Caryna (who’s got some nice shots on her blog) and Mystery Wolf. The crowd was dare I say comfortably less. Less elitist rockers and all round sweaty shirtless rockers. More nubile international school chicks for me!

I’ll link the review when it’s up. Yeah, that’s the end of the pictures… I didn’t bring the digicam, as it was too much hassle. That explains why I gave the media pass to Sara so she could take pictures with her camera with optical zoom. Oh, and despite the complimentary tickets that Syefri and I got (we love you Shaz and Universal Music) that had the complimentary drinks cancelled out, we got 2 cans of Coca Cola anyway. 🙂

Heck, we tried to enter the VIP area without any fancy tags, and security let us in without any fuss (one said to the other “ini dah cukup umur niii…”)

It ended prematurely, at 9:50pm. Bummer. Sara‘s parents were so kind as to give me a lift to Hartamas, where I found out what a small world it could be on one table. The cab home costed less than RM5. Joy! Oh, and the About Me! page has been updated with more links.

210 GOTO HELL

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I installed Catalyst 4.9 drivers for my Radeon 9600Pro, overwriting the 4.4’s. Or so I thought. Error. “Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup.” I uninstalled the drivers and rebooted, reinstalling… this time, it could not find the file specified. That was merely the start of a descent into driver hell.

Reboot. My video card driver was dead, and it was replaced by a VGASave driver. After much research on a very slow Streamyx connection (downloading drivers at below 10kbps) and a night of rebooting, going into Safe Mode, using Driver Cleaner, disabling the conflicting NVIDIA nForce2 AGP Host to PCI Bridge, and not having anything aforementioned work, I found the solution, to my problem, at least.

The driver installer extracted installation files into a folder first. I peeked inside and installed CPanel/Setup.exe. That worked! Thus, the next step would be Driver/Setup.exe – while it did scare me a bit with a “Zero Display Service” error, it did ask to reboot, as customary after a successful driver installation.

Catalyst 4.7 was installed! I then installed 4.9, again, with the “Zero Display Service” error, but at least it worked! (Yes my driver hell could’ve been because I jumped from 4.4 to 4.9…)

Now before Nvidia groupies bash my head over, this problem happens with Nvidia cards as well, on nForce2 and VIA chipsets. And yes, I never did figure out the damn GeForce4 TI4200 128MB 4x AGP card that insisted on being in PCI mode. Hurrah for a 3dfx Voodoo3 16MB PCI card too, running incompatibly in Windows XP.

In a way, that escapade was hell on my computer. I went through all this trouble for a smooth walk in hell on Mars. Yes, the pretty Doom 3. Prettier than Far Cry in some parts, but geeking out there will be saved for a proper article.

Glaring Notebook

Pressed For Words