Network Down

All the network elements, such as mail server, internet and etc. for my company had been downed the whole morning. It was started since Friday evening. Staffs here always bemoan the downtime for our network systems are longer since the setup of IT unit. I was making a joke to one of the IT staffs before that. “You are the one who purposely created the network problem and solved it after all.” FP/ATM system is improved after switching to round-robin with preemptive scheduler. Probably, there are certain tasks that consume too much processing delay and defer the other tasks for too long.

Khai Loon and Liza came back from HK and Taiwan respectively on last Saturday. I just had a strange feeling that both of them were actually back from China. Is it a sensitive statement? I don’t think so. After all, we spent most of our time hanging around in café and restaurant before sending Liza to KL sentral. Later, watched the derby match and it’s a terrible performance by ManU. Time to change! Please pack up yourself, Ferguson! Ended up in Wakiki Bar in Petaling Club with Jinho (who manages to introduce this bar after a date with a German girl) and my old schoolmate, Kok Theng, same primary school, same secondary school and same university…..He said that he will marry soon since he is getting older. And Jinho met his neighbor who spent almost all the night playing pool. KT said that my life is almost same with him. Anyway, bless KT good luck….

Reunion dinner in Dema house yesterday. A “huge” number of UPM students attended the event. The agenda of the day was the sharing section for out friends who went to join the “Junk WTO” in Hong Kong. Get a book from K.Loon on “Football Analysis”. The author of the book is an associate professor in HK University. He wrote a very comprehensive view on EPL and also the relationship between football and politics. I can say that it’s much better than our local Chinese press but http://www.soccernet.com/ seems to have more detailed analysis.

Last Week....

43 dBm was a fake. The CPICH channel is actually transmitting only 33 dBm or 10% of the total power setting in the Basestation. Figure it out with the spectrum analyzer. So why are we feeling headache before that? Physiological effect, I think. Screwed up the system when configuring the system clock rate to 1000 clock ticks per second. It all because of the watchdog timer using 1ms timer resolution.

Suddenly, I found out that Teh owes me 2 or 3 can of 100Plus. I don’t know why we start to bet for badminton match. I think that probably because of Goi’s sister and lack of motivation recently. Went to the Bowling Center in Sunway with a group of “Crazy” ppls. One of them threw the ball to me while I was standing behind. Even the security guard behind us was shocked. But the most embarrassing moment was that I finished a game with merely 45 points!

Future Mobile Evaluation

Finished reading an article entitled “Future Mobile Technology: Lessons from China and Korea” by Department of Trade and Industry UK. DTI picked the two most promising countries in Far East as the study case to find out the future mobile evolution. There are some good points to be shared. Let’s look at Korea first,
- Korean companies put more focus on “R” rather than “D” to compete against the USA and Europe.
- Korea, positioning itself, through its national telecommunications research institute, ETRI, as an ally of Qualcomm to develop and deploy high risk and unproven wireless technology.
- Future infrastructure evolution, such as BcN, IPv6 and USN.
- Funding from governments: 15.5 billion won is directed to ETRI, and 2.4 billion won to three universities: Seoul Nat. U, ICU and Hanyang U.
- ~200 spin-off companies from ETRI work closely with IPR development.

Then, some interesting points extracted from the report regarding China,
- Promoting its own TD-SCDMA as a base and direction towards 4G.
- Use a very low cost services and technologies to accelerate the development in rural area.
- Universities and Research Institutes are divided into 2 major groups, FDD and TDD.
- CATR carries out the fundamental research as a state research body on Telecommunication.

Both countries have spent significantly on research and development and enable a rapid transition to demonstration. I predict the same model should be used by our country. The same theory had been applied to semiconductor field previously. Heavy investment on the state research body Mimos but it is hard to see any significant outcome that our country can proud of. Perhaps, just the all Malaysian 16 Bit RISC Microprocessor.......

A New Year to Come

What were you doing during the last moment of year 2005? I was lucky enough to watch a football match from year 2005 till year 2006. This was the first experience in my life after living for 27 years. You are correct! Manchester United again… I used to tell Zimin that I would like to take up the job as a staff in Old Trafford in the future. But first of all, I have to get myself a ticket to Old Trafford, the Theatre of Dream… Hmm, this year is the World Cup year. Still remember those days in Mimos when we stayed in the “secrete room” watching our favorite teams. So, 4 years had been passed! I had been in the Olimpia Stadion, the venue of World Cup final, in a wrong timing, 2 years early. It’s indeed a beautiful stadium, a very simple and straight forward but realistic architecture. I still keep the tour ticket in my wallet and promised to myself to be there again. Still remember how to take the Bahn there…

Decided to clean my room yesterday. It looks like a huge project for me! A Markus mug was placed beside my bed for almost 2 years and I simply don’t aware about it. And many other things to be found out…. My brother came to pick up his motor and we had “cendol” near my home. All of a sudden, the rain was pouring. It’s quite common in Klang area these day!

43 dBm RF Energy

Take up the job to bring up one commercial base station and conducting performance testing on it. But first of all, should concentrate on how to do the system commissioning. Spent the whole night to figure out the E1 link. It’s terrible to work on the driver in the operating system that does not allow you to do low level configuration. I just could not find any configuration on the adapter card resided in the WinXP laptop. Anyway, using the trial and error on the other end, still manage to get the correct configuration.

Next, it was to bring up the cell. The signaling messages to setup the cell using customized power level refuse to work. My colleague tuned the maximum transmit power level to 43 dBm according to normal setting for outdoor environment. Then, everything seems alright. Half hour later, I started to feel the headache *~~*. I was not too sure whether I was too tired today or exposed to the RF energy. After an hour later, I decided to leave the room. My colleague left earlier. Anyway, I understand from Kamal that normal mobile phone transmits 1W of energy. 43 dBm is equivalent to 20W of energy. Can you imagine that…..

An Unusual Christmas Gift

We had organized a Christmas party in Dema House on the Christmas Eve. Around 22 persons joined the party and majority of them are those who involved directly or indirectly with Dema activities before. It’s good time to chit chat with those who I haven’t met for quite a long time. Bought the Christmas songs CD to create the atmosphere!

Those who came for the party were asked to bring along a gift worth < RM10 for present exchange. Guess what I get? See the picture…. “How UNSAFE Is Your Mobile Phone”, a CAP (Consumers Association of Penang.) guide costs around RM2.50. But it is actually worth only RM2.25 for 10% discount. So, who is the culprit? My little junior from UPM, known as Robert (Kanghui), bought three CAP guides for a total cost of RM10. According to him, he thought that anything below RM10 was acceptable. After all, the main reason he gave was that he just had RM10 left in the wallet. Pity!

He used to argue with me and said that, “I paid 100% from my wallet, so how much you pay from your wallet for the Christmas gift?” Maybe, this sounds correct but I am not too convinced.

See another picture. Robert put the signature on the guide on behalf of Simon. By the way, the other two victims are Peini and Jinho!

Mid-week Review

It’s almost approaching the Christmas and indeed today is “dong zhi”. My mum kept saying that I would miss the “Tang Yuan” but I really don’t think so. After all, she asked me to buy it in KL. Alright, perhaps she just wants to remind me not to forget to back home! Still conduct the performance analysis on my FP/ATM. Need to collect more information regarding my code and identify the strategy of optimization. Using RTI tools to do the profiling, tracing and finding memory leak in my program.

Watched the Carling Cup on Wednesday at 3.40 a.m. in one of the restaurant in PJ New Town. Almost 80% of the waiters there are from Burma. Most of them are ManU supporter. ;-) I found out that almost all the time they will stay late for ManU matches. Hah, but probably they are betting…. Anyway, the first Asian player in ManU team scored a spectacular goal that night. But Jinho missed it! “1st goal in England”….. the headline title in the Korea Times! “South Park” becomes “South Korea Park” (pic). It looks funny… Awaiting the critical next week…..3 games in a row!

Heard that Khai Loon continues his position as ASA secretary for another 3 years. I thought that he will back to Malaysia to start his “struggle” here. Felt very tired yesterday after the badminton games. It seems that my stamina is really bad recently. Nobody else in the office now and the background music is “Canon in D” performed by Academy of St Martin. The CD which I bought almost 1 years ago in Amsterdam Airport.

Kim Deuk-Gu

Probably, many peoples who are not a fan of boxing sport will not hear about his name. Yesterday, watched the movie named as “Champion” after the recommendation from Jinho. I am not keen on boxing and always find that this sport is cruel. The famous boxer during my early childhood was Mike Tyson. But because of his behaviour, I can not withstand with this sport anymore. Back to the movie, this movie was a real story about a South Korean boxer, Kim Deuk-gu. He came from a poor family and worked hard to achieve the status as the 1st challenger to the Lightweight champion Ray Mancini.

“Boxing is the fairest play in the world. Your opponent punches you 10 times. You can punch back 12 or 15 times as you want,” It all remembers me about a gangster who used to say that “the real man is those who can fight one on one but not as a group against one”.

Eventually, Kim Deuk-gu died 5 days after the match with Ray Mancini. Day before his death, he used to write the message “fight until you die” in the hotel room. It is indeed a self-motivation movie. Working hard, national pride, loyalty and never give up attitudes!

Actually, I just can’t accept that the referee allowed the match to go on. From wikipedia, I found out that after the match:
- Mancini went through a period of reflection, as he blamed himself for Kim's death.
- The bout's referee, Richard Greene, committed suicide in February of 1983.
- Kim's mother died four months later.
- WBC reduced the number of rounds in their championship bouts from 15 to 12. (Kim fighted until round 14)
- A tigh medical checkup for ensure fighter survival after the match.

It's a tragedy! I am pity to say that only tragedy will make peoples wake up!

The Matter that I Don’t Understand

It’s too much bad and sad news nowadays on the mainstreams. It’s time to switch to another alternative – Happy News. So, what is actually happy news? A different approach on publishing the news, no tragedy news…… ???!!!! My friend, Khai Loon who works in Hong Kong for an NGO is busy with the program to dump the WTO. Have a huge rally in the Victory Pak tomorrow. So, why dump WTO? Trade and investment agreements should not be used to serve the world’s most powerful corporation. Think about the peoples and environments! And then suddenly, our former PM, an outspoken one, talked about the internet must be used excessively as an alternative media. But I think that he asked us to stop reading Malaysiakini because of the alleged link to Soros.

What am I busy for now? Dealing with 1 and 0, for what….. for the sake of the national interest!

It’s Time for Change

Testing my RACH/FACH/DCH combination until 2 a.m. Watched the World Cup draw at 3 a.m. Followed my brother in laws and sister to Penang around 6.30 a.m. All happened on Saturday morning. Bought 2 DVDs with RM10 in Prangin Mall. The price is cheaper compared to Klang Valley. Here, it normally will cost you around RM9 per piece. The first movie was entitled “Kicking And Screaming”. This comedy story was surrounding a competitive father and a failure son. Benchwarmer!! It was all about how they coached two different “kids” soccer teams associated to their sons. I was touched when the son shouted at his father, ”I love you more whenever you scold me” and “I learned all the tricks whenever you put me on the bench”. Another movie was known as “North Country” but I haven’t had enough time for a look.

It is time for a change! ManUtd is going nowhere if Ferguson is still in power, No shape, no composure, no structure! Lost to Benfica! Knockout from Europe competition! Hold by Everton! A massive 12 points gap with Chelsea! Let’s forget about the pass histories. A manager who stays in a club for almost 19 years is not a healthy situation. He should step down and let the new comers to change the things around. ManUtd has enough talented players but Ferguson could not utilize them. He depends too much on Scholes, Giggs, and all the old folks. This time, there will be no Cantona to save you. If you talk about the transition period, then the manager should be changed as well. Step down, Ferguson for the sake of the club! You should regret that you don’t retire 3 years ago. This all make me remember my beloved prime minister. :-)

Penguins

Penguin.....What's for? Are you talking about Linux?

No…."March of the Penguins” the movie that we watched yesterday in MidValley. It’s all about the story on how the penguins struggle for their life and give birth. All those stuffs relate to human experience. It was filmed in Antarctica by a French Director. I just found out that the movie was the second most successful documentary in US box office history after Fahrenheit 9/11. Anyway, there were critics from some scientists. See the article. Sorry for Jinho because he thought that it was an animation. Anyway, thanks for your mum's kimchi. Xuzhuang mentioned that this movie was indeed a good motivation for those who struggle to live. Yes, I think so......

“Every week, the penguins surprise us”
So, do you think that Mr. Bill Gates with his families will watch this movie?

A Hectic Week…

A very busy week.... There were a number of commitments from my site and also on the ongoing project. First of all, have to complete the FP/ATM integration with the ideas of setting up several transport channels for UMTS networks. Functional correctness of the system has almost done and still need to study the performance issues. This is the trickiest part. Next, I had to draft a proposal. It’s not easy to find a way to do the explanation to those who are more concern on ROI. Ahh...had a short visit to Huawei Tech. to have a look on their products. They are going to expand their markets in Asia Pacific and Malaysia has been identified as one of the important hub. I always hear from my friends in China that Huawei is doing really well with the government support. They have a huge human resource with a very low cost that everyone will envy of. I bet that a lot of peoples heard this statement before.

“Huawei’s router software contains the same bugs as Cisco’s.”

They are labeled as “Copy Cats” same as the Japanese in the 70s and 80s. Anyway, I strongly believe that they are going to succeed with flexibility and bridging between its R&D and its customers. For your information, the 3G handset from Huawei Tech. will be launched in Malaysia next year.

Received a phone call from my friend, Chee Meng on Wed evening. He called me from his construction site. Guess where? Wembley Stadium!! When am I going to get an opportunity to work in Old Tafford? CM works as a civil engineer in London with a good salary. Just, the tax is relatively high there. If our government is transparent enough, I don't mind to pay more and let Malaysia to be a social welfare country. Announment! Liza, if you read the blog, please reply his mail….

While our local press is still busy with the “ear squat video” incident, it’s time for us to recapitulate this.

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Article 5 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Asian Cartoon Exhibition

Went back late yesterday. Woke up at 12.15 p.m. and had my brunch with my roommate. We were having a very brief discussion on the Pengkalan Pasir by-election on Dec 6. He had to conduct the survey on this issue. I believed that BN stands a good change by promoting “Development if you choose BN”. But I hope I am wrong. We used to have our banana leaf in Archa Curry, home-made style India restaurant. Cost me around RM8 for one fried fish and three vegetables. After all, I had to find my way to the Asian cartoon exhibition. I am not really crazy about manga. But the topic of this exhibition caught my interest.

I went to the KL library near Merdeka Square, only to find out that the exhibition is held in National Library. Ahh…..had to pay for the RM2 parking fee for nothing. Then, I tried to find the way there. Guess where I was this time? National Art Gallery Center….. Since I was there, “why not pay a visit” I whispered to myself. Then, saw a signboard writing [Work in Progress]. Never mind, just had a snapshot on the painting about footballer (pic. 5). After that, I had decided to walk to the National Library. Not far way from where I was.

“How’s IT in Asia?”

This is the topic for the 9th Asian Cartoon Exhibition. I managed to take only 5 pictures until the security guard said to me, “Camera is not allowed here”. The Asian countries that involved in this exhibition are Malaysia, Japan, Korea, India, Filipina and China.

“Soccer Game” or “Soccer”….
Youngsters nowadays prefer to play soccer on the computer rather than on the pitch.

“Dream to be a Singer” (pic. 4)
Anyone can become a singer with the help of technology.

“WWW”
World Wide Web but peoples are actually all alone.

........ ^__^

Overall, cartoonists from Japan seem to be optimism that technologies or ITs are helping our daily life. Others have made a point that physical human interaction will be minimized due to the booming of ITs. With the sense of humors by the cartoonists, it is worth to pay a visit. I recommend those who stay in KL to have a look by yourself. It’s not too late to do that!

Never Say Never

Switched on the radio in my car this morning and heard the phrase "Never Say Never". Forgot about what the DJ said. Straight away I was thinking about my favorite football club since my childhood time - Manchester United. David Beckham, a golden boy in Manchester football history once answered the question from a journalist regarding the possibility of joining Real Madrid. For those who are not a football mania, Real Madrid is actually another famous football club in Spain but not so popular compared to Manchester United. Not before Beckham joined the club! Beckham’s answer was rather simple. “Never say never in your life”. After all, we all know that he is now playing for this Spanish club. His performance is well bellow par but his popularity has helped this Spanish club to sell its merchandises. The financial income for this Spanish club looks healthier than before. Thanks to Beckham! Thanks to ManU! He is a famous football icon in the world, especially in East Asia. Anyway, not in United State which football is known as soccer. Just to let you all know, Real Madrid has not won any trophy after Beckham joined the team. But it hardly matters at all, the club is making money. Real Madrid is going nowhere after watching the match between them and Barcelona. Ronaldinho could not help you to sell the merchandises but he wins you the match. Sorry, talking too much about football. I just wonder “when and where” to use this phrase. Time will tell!

Attended two training sessions on 3GPP stack last two days. The previous training session using web conferencing was not good enough due to the voice quality and the damned slow power point presentation in Netspoke. I don’t have any idea on how the mechanism of the conference call works. But, you really frustrated with the voice quality when various echo and noise coming from all the parties. The Internet connectivity was also too slow and not able to support the Netspoke’s features. The switching of one slide to another took more than one minute and worse if the slide contains a lot of pictures. Perhaps, the only way to solve this problem is asking for specific amount of bandwidth allocation prior to web conferencing. Recently, I have experienced that a technical support web page took almost 10~15 seconds to access. I think that this is because the security features have been put onto the server. I was not patient enough to wait for this and showed my unsatisfaction in the recent survey form. If I want to complaint next time, I mind as well complaint to the internet service provider…..

Alright, till now. It's time to back to my work…

Presentation in IEEE Conference

Did my first presentation in the IEEE MICC-ICON conference which was held in Berjaya Time Square, KL. The paper is related to “802.11 MAC implementation using SDL”. Not much scientific research contribution in this paper, but just to highlight the design methodology used by our research team. SDL has been widely used in the Europe, especially Germany and Scandinavia, but not so popular in Asia, except East Asia. It is particularly useful for modeling distributed and real time system, and a lot of protocol specification by ITU-T is written in this language. Another language, known as TTCN, is useful for testing and verification purposes. Few peoples in Malaysia heard about this…

There were more than 200 papers in the 2-days conference and hence it’s hard to put high expectation on this conference. I have been assigned to chair my first ever session in a conference. One of participants from Iran did not satisfied with too many parallel sessions at the same time, seven in a time! Able to meet new friends in this conference… Guillaume (Pic. 1) from French, asked me to bring him to Chinese Restaurant. So, we ended up in Nam Yong in Petaling Street and he bought the Chinese tea for his “wife” or more precisely "special girlfriend". Claus (Middle in Pic.2), a German who speaks fluently Mandarin after staying 5 years in China, kept asking me about alaysia during our dinner time. He amazed that majority of the Chinese here speak in Mandarin and condemned those Chinese in Singapore who give up their mother tongue language. He actually criticized a lot. He even said that “Fxxx off, Bush”. Ah, fyi, he is now working in California…. Met my seniors as well, Sum, who studied in Niigata University in Japan. He came back for the conference cum vacation. We spent our coffee time in Starbuck located in the Boarder Bookstore. See the picture!! A “pig” was surfing the Internet and looking for AV using his stylish VAIO…:-P

A birthday party for Siew Ling and Xu Zhuang on Tuesday night...... a small farewell for Jinho on Thrusday night as well! We all expect the girfts from him on 3rd Dec... Alright… it’s time to back to my FP/ATM work on 8260 board.

The Future of Telecommunication

Yesterday, attended the technical talk entitled "The Future of Telecommunication - Technologies and Disruptions" by Roberto Sarraco, Chairman of European Center of Excellence in Telecommunication of Italia. He is one of the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. Yes, this is again part of the IEEE ComSoc activities. The whole technical talk was mainly emphasizing on the necessary of service provides to change their paradigms. To survive in the future, the service providers should put efforts on improving their value chains instead of just attracting more subscribers. I wonder whether the cellular providers in Malaysia have aware on this and do something to improve their services. They seem to keep on manipulating their subscription fees by offering plan A, plan B ….etc. but without any improvements on the services. I also frustrate with the advertisement of our local cellular providers that mislead our consumers. They keep putting the promising advertisement on 3G service, but I doubt the capabilities of them to deliver what they promise. Mr. Roberto also insists that telecommunication service providers have the wrong perspective regarding the broadband communication. Broadband communication is simply increasing the capacity or offering a big pipe to the customer but nothing to do with the speed. I think that majority of the consumers actually don’t care about what is broadband. They just want something that satisfy their needs and if possible, free of charge. “It’s free, so why I bother!” Overall, this was indeed an interesting talk.

For those who are interested in his talk, click on the following link:
http://www.comsoc.org/socstr/memprog/dislec/tut/saracco/saracco.html

A conversation between a 5 years old girl with her 60 years old grandmother:
“Maria! Your mum wants to talk to you. Come!” the old lady shouted.
“Coming now! Grandma,” the girl picked up the phone and started walking away.
The phone fell down and broke. The old lady scolded the girl.
Then, the girl asked, “Grandma, why you tie your phone on the wall?”

Engineer Rules the World

Sent my car to the nearby workshop in Petaling Jaya. The service center is known as Tayaria, which is quite famous in Klang Valley. I have sent my car to this service center for almost two years. I found out that there are different approaches between mechanics in Tayaria compared to those in my hometown, Penang. In Penang, the mechanic will use all the hard way to “fix and repair” the parts in your car whereby the mechanic in Tayaria always said to you, “We need to “replace” the XX since it has spoiled already”. At the end, I have to replace my spark plug and air filter every three months. Maybe, replace with a new one is easier and faster compared to fix and repair. Or maybe, mechanics in Penang have to first consider how to reduce the cost of services otherwise they will lost their customers.

Back to the today’s topic, engineers rule the world. Do you think so? Almost all leaders in this world are coming from the social science educational background. I still remember that one of my lecturers told me that engineers will always be ruled by those from arts stream. So, be prepared to work under them. However, there is an interesting fact which can be good inspiration for those who studies engineering and would like to become the leader of a country. For the first time ever, a country with 1.3 billion peoples and GDP per capita USD 5600 has its technocratic leadership in the highest tier in the only ruling party. Yes! It is China which is believed to go to shape the future world’s economic.

List of members in the China’s elite Politburo Standing Committee, the highest tier within the Communist Party.
- Hu JinTao, President of the People’s Republic of China, TsingHua University, Water Conservacny Engineering.
- Huang Ju, Tsinghua University, Electricl Engineering.
- Jia QingLin, Hebei Engineering College, Electric Power Engineering.
- Li ChangChun, Electric Machinery, Harbin Institute of Technology,
- Luo Gan, Freiber University of Mining and Technology, Germany.
- Wen JiaBao, Geology and Minerals Engineering, Beijing Institute of Geology.
- Wu BangGuo, Radio Engineering, TsingHua Univeristy.
- Wu GuanZheng, Power Engineering, TsingHua University.
- Zeng QingHing, Automatic Control Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology.

Sound interesting!! China is pushing hard towards science and technology development. So, it’s much better to have those who have the knowledge on “know how”. Besides, I think that it is also to ensure the China’s society is still remained under the control of the only communist ruling party in the world now. They need those who have the knowledge on applying Internet censorship. Who would like to help them on this? US, the country which has the most sophisticated and centralized network infrastructure…

Finklstein:
“The Internet considers censorship to be damage, and routes around it. I say, what is censorship is in the router?”

"Peaceful" Gathering

Managed to sneak out the office around 10.30 a.m. to join a “Peaceful” demonstration in UPM. Just to show the support for the students who advocate "fair student election". They were going to attend the trials today. But, I’m not too sure that we should call it a trial. Do you think that the students will escape from punishments? No way! There will be no opportunities for the students to defend themselves from the beginning. Students’ rights are long been tied due to the notorious College and University Act (AUKU). Anyway, I believe that the universities’ authorities have acted smarter compared to my uni days. At least, they allow some “peaceful” demonstration or gathering to go on. No direct confrontation with the students. Simply ask the Special Agents to take the photos to create the physiological fear amongst the attendees. "Are you going to be caught next? Be prepared" Oppss….actually my old university were also doing the same last time. No different !!!

Small picture this time. Sorry.... So that there will be no more victims.

Restore Our Student Rights!

Please sign this petition and circulate the news. We need a pro-active and dynamic society.
http://www.petitiononline.com/poll2005/petition.html

Raya Break

A 6-days break last week. It was quite a long time since I last enjoyed such a long break. Back to Penang. Went to visit my colleagues, Syed and Aziz for Raya celebration. And thanks to Jinho. I had the opportunity to visit flea market in Batu Ferringhi after 27 years! Then, revisit Langkawi again. The only time that I visited Langkawi is 5 years ago. Flashed back to that time, those guys on the trip were Ah Kai, Choot, Sze Khian, Ah Puh and etc. Can’t remember all!!! This time, those on the trip were Jinho, Siew Ling, Chui Qing and etc. Then, the route was from Kuala Kedah to Langkawi, instead of Penang to Langkawi. I was “asked” to drive from Penang -> Kuala Kedah -> Langkawi -> Kuala Kedah -> Penang. It was my first experience driving in Langkawi and also driving a van. Ten peoples were brave enough to gamble their lives on me so I don’t mind to have a try. Just to remind you all, shifting from 2nd gear to 3rd gear of an “old” van is not a pleasant experience. It is much easier to shift the gear straight away from 2nd to 4th! Hmm… staying in the same beach resort… viewing the same scenery… experiencing the same journey in Langkawi… So, has my life ever changed since then? Or only keep on repeating the same thing again and again? Maybe nothing changes for me but just the peoples surrounding me.

Pic. 1:
Exactly the same seaside view 5 years ago but manage to capture the view this time. Why? I had already bought a Digital Camera!

Pic. 2:
New looks. Why? Meet new friends and getting older!!