Deadeye's Lair

batu2pahat

Merry Christmas to all and have a happy new 2007!

batu2pahat

Jeffrey managed to wake me around 5.30am. So groggy. A warm shower helped. We all had a leisurely breakfast. Jeffrey drove his car aside from ours to bring us to Desa Waterpark, since I am hopeless with directions. When we made it, there were already almost 50 other cars there! PDE2300 was already there. Kenny quickly found us and gave us our Philips goodie bags and shirts. We changed and tried to paste the Philips stickers and decals on our cars. But Time Out had gathered us for a quick briefing, so we quickly rushed to listen to the short pre-departure briefing, which wasn't much. We'd drive straight to Ipoh and start our hunt there. What the-??  Waste my time to drive to KL!!!!

Once briefing was over, we scrambled to help Jeffrey to paste the decals on my car. A little bit shoddy but it'd do the trick. Jeffrey then only left. I owe him one. Anyway with that done, they were calling for our cars to drive past the flag-off. BlueSnow didn't wait for us and already drove off, so Fun Cheong had to play a game of catch-up. Damn it. We rushed so much that Kenny missed the a tulip which led us to drive along a wrong turning on to the wrong highway. Interestingly, there were others who drove along with us too, hehe .... all lost together. But fortunately Kenny knew the way out, so we could still find our way to the PLUS highway ... haha cool!  

I pushed JET1171 to the limit to catch up with the other team but KC kept pushing to the max, too.  Finally we asked them to stop at Tanjung Malim R&R for breakfast and a quick refuel - otherwise I'd never catch up with them, and JET was registering high heat levels. There was also a worsening haze OUTSIDE of KL, though.  Ironic that the haze had went further up. BlueSnow ate in the food court area but Fun Cheong went into the Dunkin Donuts area and bought donuts/bread, to avoid the haze. I didn't want a layer of dust on me food anyway .

After that, we continued to Ipoh, finally together. We joked using walkie-talkies for most part of the journey, but YM and Sin Yue dozed ... damn .... leaving me to stay awake.

Upon arrival into Ipoh, everybody got up and the anticipation started to build up.

Next up: Competition Day One Part II

batu2pahat

We faced a new foe which threatened to cancel the whole trip: haze!!!!

Each team member received discouraging news reports from Klang valley, "resplendent" in horrifying images of haze thick enough to restrict visibility to less than two blocks. A colleague joked about me getting a near-fatal asthma attack while my brother called and warned me against going to KL. It even drizzled acid rain, though it was not too severe. Half of the team didn't feel like going anymore, while I was torn between going for the hell of it and staying away from trouble. Ultimately I called for a vote via E-mail; the result was inconclusive. We had a stalemate.

In the meantime, Kenny went straight down to KL to prepare for the briefing on Friday evening; he'd be the only representative for us all so he had to be there. He had assumed that we'd go anyway. Man he has such faith in us.

He was right   We went anyway.

I had some Map Day class from 3 to 5pm, after that I drove home. I first went to pump my car up with air and petrol, then sent it for a wash. Yeah that sounds stupid considering I'm heading into a hazy area, but not when you want your car to look its best in the camera! By the time I got home and prepared, it was already almost 6. Sin Yue drove over and parked her car outside my apartment. Realising how late we were, I drove double-time to YM's place. While waiting for YM to come out of his aptment, Sin Yue found out that my camera, the trusty old Powershot A70, had some damage and couldn't take any shots at all, even though I could still view pictures. Damn it!

By the time we left, it was 6.30. I almost took a wrong down to Bayan Lepas instead of the usual way to the bridge and got honked  Traffic was very heavy but we made it across without delaying too long. Susan called and asked if the way to Auto-City Juru was towards Alor Setar .... luckily they asked, or they'd be way off course  We picked up Wen Wen and got over to Auto-City a little bit later than KC/Susan. Time was 7pm. We ate a quick McDonald's meal, and then proceeded to drive off after exchanging walkie-talkies. Shin Guey also came to my car as we had arranged before. YM .... umm, briefly put, needed some persuasion to change car, hehe! He must've never read the mail that he would be with the other car to Kenny's place.

To cut things short, we drove at a fast pace (exceeding speed limits) almost all the way down; we went through some haze around Ipoh, but it wasn't too bad. Shin Guey slept while Wen Wen tried to sleep (yes, I knew you weren't asleep!!). Sin Yue chatted with me to keep me awake. We stopped at Tapah for a much needed break. YM called Kenny to get directions to his house in Setapak, and then we drove off and seperated along the way, since PDE2300 was heading to Kenny's.

We were amazed; there was hardly any haze around KL! The street lights shone brightly and we could see the lights of KLCC in the distance. Our spirits were instantly buoyed

This time, I took the right layover from the Bkt Lanjan expressway and drove down KESAS to Bukit Jalil. We first went to buy some breakfast (which was mostly bread) from the 7-Eleven at Arena Hijau, and then only drove over to Jeff's. Jeffrey had parked his own car outside so I could park in, and then we met him at his apartment.

End of Day Minus One. Actually, it was already 1am when we finally arrived at Jeff's .... but what the heck, it's close enough 

Next up: Competition Day One.

Post Script: I had also received shocking news on this day. I had turned on my laptop when I was at home, around 6. I had not received any news on Fab 7 at all so I assumed I had crashed and burned, so I thought I'd pop an IM to KY that I've failed and I'll go back to being a good Broadwater boy. Then I turned off the laptop and moved out.
Just moments before I was leaving to meet Sin Yue downstairs, KY called my handphone. The important part of the phone conversation went more-or-less like this:
"You thought you failed the Fab 7 process?"
"yeah, uhm, because -"
"But that's not what I heard, actually."
"Huh??" 
"Ok, what I heard was that you have been accepted."

I walked to the lift with one of the most muddled minds I ever had since I decided to leave ASEAN ....

batu2pahat

I gathered a troop of would-be treasure hunters and went on the Philips All Xcess Challenge last Saturday (13th Aug). It was a worthy experience for these green troops, and another enlightening moment for experienced troopers like me.

And what an enlightenment!! Fun mostly, intelligence lacking .... 

We had faced many challenges en-route to joining. First I could hardly find enough team members; when I first proposed it, only Kenny and YM were keen. I managed to gain the interest of Kai Chong, Susan, Wen Wen later. But the competition strictly asked for 4-person teams, no more no less. What a bother, they probably just wanted the money. Anyway I managed to get Sin Yue to hop in too; I was a bit doubtful but it turned out superb. I had almost gave up on finding the last team member when later Wen Wen rounded out our teams with Shin Guey, her UTM friend in PDC. He came in just in time; I was getting discouraged and feeling that it was a mistake. His timing was nice enough to make me commit to carrying on with the rest of the event.

So there we have it: 8 players! I had quite a few problems faxing our entry forms to Time Out but Kenny helped me settle that. The money was even tougher; I had to fork it all out and bank it into HSBC on Saturday morning. Luckily the rest paid up quick, otherwise got to live up to my name of tai yee long and claim my money back by the hard way  

We had a few discussions during our lunches and dinners together in Intel (without Sin Yue though) and finally I arranged for a meeting at Chopper Board, Tesco. It was more of a face-to-face meeting only and we just threshed out a few small details. Once done, we decided that Kenny would go down to KL first on Thursday night and attend the briefing on Friday 6pm. Then we'd travel to KL on Friday night and stay in a hotel for that night.

Alas, when I tried to book a hotel room at Vistana Hotel in Setapak, I was treated roughly by the receptionist - she simply cut me off after confirming I wanted two rooms! I had to call back to ask the rates I was being charged. RM170 per night was way over my head. I cancelled the booking. Kenny said he would stay at his own place. So I asked Jeffrey for help. After that I set it as such: Wen Wen, Sin Yue, Shin Guey and I would stay at Jeffrey's and the rest bunk with Kenny. I initially wanted Susan to follow me, since she knew KL's roads (nobody else but KC and her was good at KL), but apparently she wasn't so keen. I opted to rely on Sin Yue instead. Fair enough.

Next post: Competition Day Minus One.

batu2pahat

This is taken from WinXP News, EDITOR'S CORNER Vol. 5, 21 - Issue 177

Interesting stuff, I feel pretty much the same.

I get over 1000 e-mail messages on many days, hundreds of them from WinXPNews readers (those are just the ones that make it through to my mailboxes - our spam filters catch literally thousands more). Maybe that's why I'm not very tolerant of anything that slows down or interferes with my ability to quickly process e-mail. Of course, one person's annoyance is another person's favorite feature. With that in mind, here are a few of my pet e-mail peeves:

• I hate read receipt requests. Yeah, I know why you do it; with all the spam filter out there, you never know whether your message made it to the recipient. And I don't have a problem with using it on truly important documents, but it annoys me when a person requests read receipts for everything (and read receipt requests on spam are particularly annoying). Maybe I don't want you to know exactly what time I read your message. My response should be enough of a read receipt for you. Please confine this to time-sensitive messages that will result in a financial loss or other disastrous consequences if your mail doesn't get read.
• Speaking of important mail, another feature that's way overused is the "Urgent" flag. Some e-mails truly are urgent (and it can be annoying when the sender invariably doesn't flag those). But most of the messages that I get with the "Urgent" flag are basically requests (or demands) for free work (i.e., three pages of "this is how my network is set up and this is the problem and I need to know what to do by tomorrow morning). I troubleshoot readers' problems here in the newsletter. I don't do private network consulting via e-mail for free.
• Then there's HTML mail, which is a great way to send relevant embedded photos, diagrams, etc. And I have a high bandwidth connection, so I don't mind a nice background or a pretty font. What I don't like is singing, dancing, flashing e-mail that screams for attention. It gets my attention, all right, but not in a good way. And I'm not crazy about its low-tech variant, typing the message in all caps, either.
• People who don't know how to use a subject line shouldn't be using e-mail. Messages with blank subject lines go right into my Spam folder. Sorry, but if you can't bother to give me a hint as to what it's about without making me preview or open it, it can't be all that important. On the other hand, I also hate the habit some people have of putting the entire message in the subject line and leaving the body of the message blank. And please, if the message is part of a long correspondence thread and the subject has changed, change the subject line.
• Don't send Web links without some explanation of what the site is about. I have a dear friend who has a not-so-dear habit of sending messages labeled "take a look at this" or something equally vague, with nothing in the body but a link. I'm probably not going to click on it; I have no incentive to do so since I haven't a clue what it pertains to.

Okay, those are some of my top e-mail annoyances.