Swordie Bloggie

Manage to capture this spectacular clouds formation moving in unison on the 7 September 2008.

While driving from KK to Penampang, I saw it at the horizon. It was not like this, it was much different… I wanted to stop at the road side and take photos but I did not.

Penampang is experiencing heavy rain at every evening for the past two or more weeks already… This one was capture around 6.30pm on that day. As you can hear, the rain noise is getting louder as the clouds come near… the rain was very heavy but not that long. Manage to collect some rain water to replace my aquarium water too 😀 My fish loves rain water 😛

My journey from KK to Lahad Datu to Kunak to Semporna to Tawau and back to KK from Monday to Friday was great… well it’s more like this… KK – LDU – KNK – LDU – KNK – SPN – TWU – SPN – TWU – KK

Stayed 2 nights at Lahad Datu and another 2 nights at Tawau.

I wanted to update my blog every night… at least, but I can’t until today. It’s all because of my notebook.

On Thursday, after returning from Semporna, at King Park Hotel, Tawau around 4.00pm, when I switch on my notebook, it went berserk…

The mouse pointer has some kind of square shadows… I refresh it by pressing F5, the shadow gone… then it appears again… then I press the F5 again… nothing happen… then press once more… the screen went blank… I can’t shut it down… I end up forcing it to shutdown.

When I switch it on back, the screen is still blank. Then force shut down it again. When I switch it on again, the LEDs lights up but nothing happen… hard disk is not spinning… the hard disk LED just flicker for a while and gone.

Crap… I realize something very bad struck my notebook…

I called my colleague in another room to send me the tools… I want to open up the notebook. I took out the hard disk and shake it… damm… click click click click…

I have not backup my hard disk for the past one year… yes one year… and now my hard disk… click click click click…

I wanted to throw the notebook through the 3rd floor window.

I just pack it back and went to sleep, waiting for my colleague to call me for their ‘buka puasa’… or ‘sungkai’. I did not even bother to go down to take my lunch… my last meal was my breakfast.

Back to KK on Friday… non-stop from Tawau around 10am and reach KK around 5.30pm.

On Saturday, I went to my friend’s workshop… to see if I can recover my data. Before that, I went to buy some tools to open the hard disk screws… although my friend said he has all the tools. It cost me $25 I think… can’t even remember how much it was…

I told my friend I want to open up the hard disk… he advice me not to do it. I said it got click click click click… Well, he said most of the notebook hard disk is like that… but my Hitachi click click click click… is very loud.

To be positive, I trusted him, I did not open it… thinking the click click click click… must be the hard disk’s crash protection mechanism…

I connect the hard disk using a powered USB cable. Switch on the borrowed notebook and connect the USB cable. After ‘some’ time, the notebook detected the hard disk.

I open my most important folder first… My Documents… it warns me I have no authorization to open it… I just proceed… After a very ‘long’ time, it shows all my files… to make sure my files are not encrypted, I open one of the text file… phew… it opened.

Lucky I did not enable Bit Locker on my notebook… else I will face more major serious problem.

I slowly backup all my data…

Now, I’m crawling without my notebook… next week our destination is Keningau areas… without the notebook, it will be hard for me to do my work… just like a mechanic without screw driver.

 
While waiting for my stuff to be back-up, I read the Stuff magazine.

In 16 September 1963, 45 years ago, a new country, MALAYSIA, was born… Happy Malaysia Day, PEACE…

2.30am… woke up to go to eat here at Tawau 😀

We checked out from Executive Hotel and proceeded to our Lahad Datu’s office. Around 10.20am we took off to Kunak.

Reach at our office in Kunak around 11.35am. We did our task but faced the same problem… telephone service.

In our initial planning, we will go straight to Tawau. But since it is only 12.40pm, we decided to stop at our Semporna office to send our equipment so that we don’t have to unload it at our Tawau’s office for safety.

We reach at our Semporna office around 1.25pm. We barely missed our district’s boss. We talk just for a while since he needed to attend his task outside. We drop our stuff and headed to Semporna town to see what they have here. This is the first time I come to Semporna.

My first impressions about Semporna… small towns but busy with petty business… a lot of stalls selling all kind of stuff like cloths, food, etc… like ‘night market’ in the afternoon.

Then he headed to Tawau around 1.40pm and reach there around 3.30pm. Check into hotel and I had my lunch at the hotel restaurant around 4pm. Then I slept until my colleague called me just before 6pm. They’re going to ‘buka puasa’… but I decide to continue sleeping. I did not have my dinner since I’m still full with my late lunch. And since my room has two breakfast, I can take both the ‘sahur’ and breakfast 😀

Around 7.30pm, we went around Tawau town and had some tea near the hotel. We invited one of our colleagues here to join us. Went back to hotel and slept 😀

Had ‘sahur’ with my colleagues… it is 4.33am now… going to sleep then going to take breakfast after that… and off to Semporna around 8.30am later…

Count how many small vehicles you can see?… 99% are 4wd! It’s not just a sign of wealth… not just because of wealth, but more on necessity.

More than 400km from home… while in Lahad Datu… now more than 500km here at Tawau.

I thought Danum Valley is off limit from logging…

 
 
 

Today woke up around 3am. We wanted to go find food around 11pm last night for my two colleagues ‘sahur’… but I fall asleep.

I SMS both of them, got reply, they also just woke up. So I called asking whether they went without me. Both of them also fall asleep… I guess everyone are too tired with the long journey.

They wanted to go to the hotel’s coffee house since there was a message pasted on the lift that ‘sahur’ is serving around that time.

They went down first. They called me from the lobby… hotel is not providing any… coffee house is closed! I said… huh… the hotel lied to us. I suggest we go round-round to find food.

So we went round-round on car… and it was drizzling. At the end we landed at one of the shop… which is not very inviting… we had fried noodles with chicken… but there is more chicken’s skin than chicken meat! I followed them taking coffee… which I don’t take… I prefer tea.

Went back to hotel around 4.30am… but I can’s sleep, must be the coffee.

So today at our Lahad Datu office, we completed our task early… but we can’t test what we installed coz we are having problem with telephone service.

Then we decided to continue to Kunak… which we supposed to go tomorrow. We just want to send our equipment and see the place first. Since it is only 12.30pm, we decided to go to the hotel for a while. I took the opportunity to take my lunch at the hotel.

Around 2pm we took off to Kunak… reach at our Kunak office around 3.15pm, then went back and reach Lahad Datu around 5.30pm, just in time for them to ‘buka puasa’ at 6.11pm.

Tomorrow we are going back to Kunak to complete our task there. Then we will proceed to Tawau to sleep there tomorrow.

Took more pictures today… but too lazy to post them…

Today, I started my journey to tour around Sabah… official… a.k.a working. It’s going to take 5 weeks altogether. But since there will be weeks which has public holiday like Malaysia Day (yahoo… 16 September) and Hari Raya Aidilfitri, my journey is extended to 7 weeks.

This week we will cover starting from Lahad Datu, Kunak, Semporna and Tawau. I’m doing this entry at my hotel room in Lahad Datu. Thanks to my Sony T200 camera, I manage to temporary ‘exchange’ it with my friend’s Celcom Broadband 😀 I modified the broadband modem a little bit by adding extra antenna… with it, the signal is more stable… well, it looks stable enough to me… and I’m connected with HSDPA… inside the hotel room here at Lahad Datu 😀

We started this morning from Kota Kinabalu around 10am. I had my breakfast before 9am at Taman Cantek, Penampang. Since both my colleague are ‘puasa’, we did not stop for lunch… we stop at Shell station to take a leak and I took this opportunity to have my lunch around 2.50pm.

This is my lunch… 😀

Arrive at our Lahad Datu office around 4.30pm. Then our boss here brought us for ‘buka puasa’ at the town.

Some photos along the journey…

Mount Kinabalu without its TOP… coz there are too much rain lately. See the white lines… they are instant watefalls. Imagine, Sabah will never runs out of water… as long there are clouds.

Roads are quite expensive to maintain here coz they are running through hilly slopes… that’s why Sabah badly needed the extra Oil Royalty…
 
 
 
 

Do u know ne gud webhosting? I want 2 start blogging wit my own domain…

I received this question from a friend through SMS recently. My first reaction was like… Huh???… errr???… errr???… errr???…

Seriously, with that question, I don’t want to be liable if the webhosting I suggest goes bad. I did not reply immediately… I don’t want to, I must have my fact correct first.

I did my search on the net and found something useful… in fact truly useful. It was a site for reviewing and rating webhosting… “Web Hosting Reviews & Rating – Best Web Hosting 2008”. That’s it… this is the answer I’m looking for… I really like the Customer Hosting Reviews section… very useful.

Then, I just reply the SMS… “u going 2 start blogging? cool… go2 webhostinggeeks.com & don forget 2 backlink 2 my blog ok :D”

I will start posting my TechEd SEA 2008 trip… 10 – 17 August 2008… slowly…

My trip started on the 10 August 2008 at KKIA. My flight was at 12.15pm. The flight was slightly delayed because someone decided to come late… then never turned-up. We only started moving slightly before 1.00pm… damm. And imagine, because of the fuel price, I think they decided to save cost by reducing the air-cond power. I was a bit sweating… waiting whoever was it to come into the aircraft. I noticed lately, the aircraft  reduced their air-cond power while waiting for passenger… You will only feel the cool air after the aircraft is on air…

I stayed at Melia Hotel… again like last year TechEd SEA 2007. Why?… because it is situated at Bukit Bintang area and next to the hotel is the Imbi Monorail Station.

After checking in… the first thing we did is to attack food. We decided to have our late lunch at Jalan Alor… I had a can of Coca Cola and ‘sasau kai fan’ 😀

  
View from inside the hotel’s bubble lift… infront of Hotel Melia is Berjaya Times Square… and the Imbi Monorail Station.

 
The place we eat at Jalan Alor.

If you are fade-up with IE or Firefox or whatever browser you are using right now… probably this will make you happy, especially when this one came from none other than the big G… GOOGLE!

Yes, Google will be coming out with their very browser… CHROME.

Chrome is build from scratch… built on the best elements out there.

They said Chrome will runs today’s complex web applications much better. Each tab will be isolated from each others ‘sandbox’… no more tabs crashing other tabs.

You can read more about it at A fresh take on the browser or download the beta at

Of all the craps our satellite TV Astro repeats on the tube all the time, I would say today (31 August) is different… I don’t know why, maybe it is because of the National Day… the block buster movies they shown at least filled up my evening. While writing this, Die Hard 4.0 is showing on the Star Movies channel.

Today, they repeated all 4 movies of Die Hard continuously. It started with Die Hard (1988) at 3.45pm then Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990) at 5.55pm followed by Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995) at 7.55pm and lastly Die Hard 4.0 (2007) at 10.00pm.

It is great to watch all over again all the actions on the movies.