Ladies Toilet

In the morning I had to go someplace to manage a few things. It was quite early and after a few cups of tea went to the toilet to take a leak. I was quite sleepy and yawning - that what happens when you sleep late and wake up too early. I had only about 4 ½ hours sleep which may be enough for others but definitely not for me. I need at least 6 hours deep sleep if I am to perform at my optimum.

Anyway, as I was doing my job, I noticed the colour of the tiles were pink. “Stupid colour- like a girl's toilet," I thought.

Then it suddenly hit me. I was immediately alert and all traces of sleep left me: “Was this the ladies toilet?”

I am sure that the sign on the door was like the usual one used to represent a man. Or was I?

I was about to rush out when I heard someone entering. This was definitely not my day. I quickly went back to the stall and waited, listening carefully. They were definitely women. Oh shit! What have I gotten myself into. They were talking about something irrelevant but I can’t recall what.

It was quite cool today, after yesterday’s rain but I was sweating like an ox in heat.

What if they discovered a guy was hiding in the toilet. They would think that I was peeping tom. Would they accept my explanation? Several negative images passed before my eyes - of me getting kicked out of my comfortable job, people pointing fingers at me, etc., what would my parents think? Would my wife believe me.

Then I pulled myself together. I would wait it out and slip out after the women left. A few minutes (seemed like hours) passed but these women were not leaving. They kept on talking about their families, children, and other random stuff. Please go outside and talk. I would think that a stinky toilet is not a conducive place for conversation but I guess I am wrong. And it seemed like they were going from one cubicle to another, flushing them. When they reached mine and they tried to open it – I gave a little cough, trying to sound as feminine as possible. I think they were quite shocked as one of them let out a curse – something in Kedah slang. After that I heard them leaving the toilet. I gave it about 2 minutes before rushing out of the cubicle, out the door without even washing my hands.

Waiting outside were these 2 “mak ciks” – giving me a strange look and smiling. They were the cleaning ladies. I don’t know why but I was slightly relieved. They apologized saying, “Maaf Encik” “we didn’t know you were inside.” I was puzzled and looked back at the door…..



It had been one of the most terrifying moments of my life but I was actually IN THE GENTS.

After the wave of relief, I alternatively felt foolish and angry - with myself, with the as------ who had designed this toilet (everyone knows pink is for girls and blue is for guys) and to people who let mak ciks clean gents’ toilets.

Printer n Earthquake

No, there's nothing related between the two items in the title.

If I had known that buying a printer would make my life much easier I would have bought it much earlier. In order to print something in my office, I have to copy the document or any other file into a diskette and then take it down to the main office. Open it up from a computer there and then print it out using our office printer. We used to have a network connection but printing over the network was stopped after a few technical problems – the printers would go on printing junk endlessly wasting a lot of paper. The experts said that it was due to a virus but I am not so sure.

After putting it off for a long time I finally bought a printer for myself- the Xerox Phaser 3121 from the Mac City outlet at Amcorp Mall. It’s a monchrome (only prints in black and white ) personal laser printer and costs RM599/. The output is quite fast, printing 16/17 pages per minute. The 600 dpi resolution is nothing to shout about but good enough for /most of my printing jobs which are MS Word document files.



They also claim that it is compatible with Samsung laser cartridges, which by the way much cheaper than Xerox’s. I checked out the Samsung site and realized that the Samsung ML-1510 was an exact copy of my Xerox printer. I was in quite a hurry and forgot to ask them to chop the warranty form. So far so good and hope nothing goes wrong in the future.

I guess everyone is blogging about yesterday’s earthquake. I wasn’t even aware of it until I read about it in Kah Soon’s Blog. I was still working last night when the Earthquake happened. I suddenly felt dizzy and decided that it was my body’s way of telling me that it was time to rest. I had also gone swimming in the afternoon. And I promptly drifted off to sleep.

Really feel sorry for the family of those who died.

New Firefox Build

It was not that long ago when I downloaded the last Firefox build (1.0.1). I just found out that they have come out with a new version 1.0.2 (the latest in the aviary branch, in Mozilla lingo). I am not complaining. This is expected when you have so many loyal supporters and developers trying to find bugs, security issues and others coming up with ways to fix them.

Expect some more changes when they come out with version 1.1 (expected by June 2005).

Get Firefox!

Ikea With Rahil

This friday, went to the Ikea store in Damasara (again!!). I suddenly realised that we had made 3 trips to the store this month alone. This time we were here to get the matress pad. I guess we are the kind of people that marketers love.

However, this time we made a mistake - that of bringing Rahil along with us. It was her nap time and she was really cranky. By the time we reached the kid's section, she was throwing a really big tantrum - screaming to the top of her lungs and crying with tears streaming down. The thing was that she wanted to run around and didn't want to be held. We put her on top of the trolly and quickly selected the Matress pad (Sultan Timan, which cost around RM500) and went as fast as we could to the checkout counter.

Along the way, I did pick up other stuff, like mirrors, pillows and a side table. After my wife had paid using her credit card, we quickly went down to the parking lot. I left them near the drop off space and went to fetch the car. To my horror, I couldn't find the car with fears rising. I ran around quite a bit with Rahil screaming "Baba, Baba" in the background.

I suddenly realised that we were on the wrong floor. I had parked the car at the lower parking PII. My wife was a bit cross with me as she was having a hard time with Rahil. Rahil finally calmed down after we started the car and went off to dreamland.I didn't even have time to pee even though I was about to burst and held on till I reached the house. She slept for nearly an hour.

A good lesson for both of us : never bring along Rahil when it's her nap time. She can get really cranky. However, it's a normal phase that a toddler goes through as she develops.

US Malaysian Relations

Warning: Long (Boring) post ahead

I was discussing my future plans with my colleagues today during lunch and I casually mentioned that I would like to do my PhD in the US. Initially we started off debating the pro and cons vis-à-vis studying in the UK and Australia. However, our discussion moved to the problems that many Malaysians faced while traveling to the states. I guess it is not restricted to Malaysians and that people of other nationalities have to face the same hassles, including long delays before obtaining visas, strip searches at the airports and so on. A friend joked that anyone with a Bin (meaning ‘son of’ in Arabic) in their name (that means almost all Malays) will face some short of problem in the US.

I was wondering whether Americans are that stupid. I am sure they know by now that having a 'bin' doesn’t mean you are related to Osama Bin Laden. However, the fact that many in the west, still refer to him as Bin Laden makes me think twice.

Anyway, I just recalled a recent visit to our office by a Councilor, Economic Affairs from the American Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. His talk was quite an eye opener.

Despite some rough moments (some of you may recall the dinner speech to the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum on 16 October 1998 by the then US Vice-President Al Gore supporting ‘Reformasi’) and differences on certain issues (Iraq invasion) US-Malaysian relations have remained fairly good. According to the Prime Minister, Malaysia's current relations with the United States are "the best we've ever had."

At present, Malaysia is the United States' 10th largest trading partner and its 16th-largest export market. On the other hand, the US is Malaysia's largest trading partner and the top business destination. The two-way trade in 2003 amounted to a total of over US$36 billion. The US had invested an estimated US$29 billion here and American firms employ some 100,000 Malaysians. This includes my friends in Intel and Dow Chemicals. In fact it’s a win-win situation despite the fact that the balance of trade in favour of Malaysia. It should be noted that US trade with Malaysia supports nearly 200,000 jobs in the U.S. A large part of the trade is also intrafirm trade. For example, the Asian Composite Manufacturing (ACM) facility in Bukit Kayu Hitam in Kedah makes advanced composite panels for the wings of the Boeing 737, 747, 757, 767 and 777 aircraft.. (BTW, ACM is joint-venture with 4 partners, namely,
Boeing, Hexcel Corp, Naluri Bhd and Sime Darby Bhd ). Another interesting information was that more than half of the Dell computers sold in the US are made in Malaysia.

I realize that many people here don’t actually like the US. It’s not like they hate the Americans. It is quite funny considering that we like watching Star Wars, sing rap songs, wear Levis jeans and Nike, drink Coke and eat at McDonalds and blog on a Dell PC, using MS Windows on Blogger.

I guess there is a lesson here but I am not sure…

Ikea Mattress

My wife called me up this morning and told me that she was just preparing to leave for her office. It was around 11 am. She told me that she woke up late today. I was a bit worried at first - "Maybe she has a headache or something" and asked her whether everything was all right. Then I found out the reason why she woke up late - our new mattress.

I once read somewhere that we spend half of our lives on bed and it is absolutely necessary to invest in a good mattress. However, when we were about to get married, since we were on a tight budget, price was the major decision factor and we decided to go for a bargain. Wrong choice and after 2 years we finally felt the effects – back pain, restless sleep and so on.

We finally decided to get rid of our old bed and last Sunday, went down to Ikea store in Damansara. After going around trying out and literally sleeping on the various mattresses, we decided to go for the firm FängeboFORESTAD foam mattress (Queen size). It set us back by RM 995. This is excluding the RM60 delivery charges. Since we didn’t have any space to keep the old mattress, we had to pay the delivery people an extra RM30 to get rid of the old one.

The Ikea mattress is our choice because of 4 main reasons:
- Reasonable price
- Trusted quality
- 20 years warranty &
- Green rating from Greenpeace (I guess that's good).

It was delivered yesterday. No wonder my wife couldn’t wake up this morning.

Rain Finally

It looks like the dry spell is finally over – or at least here in Kedah. Yesterday it was a bit of a let down. Only a light drizzle, after a lot of thunder and lighting. And just now it finally poured. I am stuck in the office and I might as well complete my work. Just hoping that the power doesn’t go away.

Oh Shit! Just remembered that I washed my clothes today morning and had left them hanging to dry.

BTW, I was looking at my Blogger dashboard, trying to find out how many post I had made so far. Mine seems to be stuck at 146 for quite sometime now, even though I have been blogging like almost every day.

Are any of you facing this problem?