Happy birthday to my roommate Kenneth. Nearly all the Malaysians who aren't attending Midwest came for his birthday dinner held at My Thai, Shadyside. Eunice and I tried to find a nearby bakery but failed so we didn't have a cake during the dinner. But we picked up one after that and had an after-dinner party in our apartment. Photos will be posted soon at !http://crisab.homelinux.com/gallery



Welcome to the club, Kenneth. Your birthday is just a week away from mine and Eunice's.



Was very surprised to see the quality of shops at Walnut Street. There were many high-end boutiques especially those for women. I wish I live nearby. The houses there are mainly owned by the upperclass Pittsburghers like lawyers, doctors and bankers I think. The houses were really potray those lived by happy families like those we see on T.V.



My sore throat might get worsed. I finished 4 bottles of water today and I still feel slightly feverish. I need proper sleep tonight. Concepts homework waiting and this time it's hard.



Bo's leavig later at 3.45 am for his internship in Washington, D.C. Will not meet him after that for he'll be returning to Melbourne at the end of the summer. Good luck, mate

Finally I'm able to get blogger to reach my server via FTP. The problem was all about my ftp server not being passive. I went as far as asking help from Blogger's support group. They told me that blogger only support either secure ftp or passive ftp.



I fulfilled a long time intention of watching Day After Tomorrow yesterday. It was very similar to deep impact excepted no characters were isolated. The movie is quite entertaining in a sense that it conjured some wild possibilities. I don't know why moviemakers like to send disasters to New York City. This time, it was flooded and eventually became part of the expanded Artic continent. In fact, nearly the entire Northern hemisphere was swallowed up by snow. The U.S. government ordered its citizen to evacuate as far south as possible. Then, the reverse of reality happened - the influx of American refugees at the border with Mexico. The President announced that it forgave all Latin American debts.... everyone laughed in the cinema. The freaky part of the movie is the eye of the snow storm. The area within the eye will experience tremendous drop in temperature - 10 degrees per second. People froze to death that instantly so I think it was like spraying someone with liquid nitrogen. There was a scene on three Brith RAF choppers which froze instantly crash when they were on the way to evacuate the royal family at Balmoral Castle. By the way, the movie was also about the paleonclimatologist who modelled the climate change rescuing his son stuck in New York.



I'm having a sore throat now. Sucks..

Thanks to multiple problems with package installers in my Redhat box, I've neglected my blog for the past few days. Even my summer studies is put aside. Last night, I made a second installation thinking that some package might have been corrupted. Still, redhat hangs when I tried installing a new version of php using yum.



I'd like to thank my dear friends here in CMU who gave Eunice and I a treat for our birthday in Bangkok Balcony on Saturday night. Kenneth, Chern Yih, Ken Yu, Joo May, Ding, Wendy, Seng Keat and Bo.. Great friends I have here in Pittsburgh. Great friends who are in other places as well. Thanks for all the birthday wishes via ICQ, MSN, Shoutbox etc. Max and Rafiq gave me a call. Thanks, guys.



What a coincidence that Eunice aka Yau Nai and I share the same birthday. What is more suprising is that we're from the same pre-uni center in Shah Alam. Oh ya, I remembered during Orientation. The O.C.s were asking if anyone wants to get a copy of the placement test. Out of the large crowd of incoming scholars, Eunice and I stood up asking for it since we said we would do anything to get good grades. None of our friends remembered about that incident. Neither does Eunice.



The food during the birthday dinner was great. Thai food. Ah, our daily lunch now is Thai Food too.. from the food trucks. Quite pricey but the classy decor explains the bill. Not as fancy as P.F. Chang's but worthy to be called one of those upper-class Asian restaurants. Usually, Malaysians would hold birthday dinners here.



Concepts and Stats 217 are really bothering me now. I find myself to have a very low sense of understanding mathematical ideas. Thanks to Kenneth and Eunice who explained the proof of Division with Remainder Theorem. I wish I can be as quick as them in grasping. My logic thinking is quite slow I must say.... Paokong commented my homework solutions today and that I should use the more proper way to prove. He took the course last semester and admitted that it was a course so rigid in writing proofs. I guess Maths' like Law. You need some structured way of arguing. It's different from problem solving.



Back to revising Stats 217... halfway downloading Fedora Core 2 for the other free P.C.Hope none of the problems with this first installation occurs there. Supposedly Fedora seems to be the more popular version of Red Hat now...

Yay! I'm 20 today.



Will not write much now. Need to sleep. Have been configuring my server for the whole night. Damn. Econs exam on monday and Concepts HW due!

testing. first try on putting the blog on my home server

Fuiyo.. Concepts (as in Concepts of Maths) was very not intuitive today. I feel so dumb compared to that math major girl who's taking the course with us. Prof. Grossberg introduced to us Well Ordering Principle (W.O.P.) to us. The definition seems infinitive and to the dumb like, it seems trivial. It states the existence of a minimum value in a non-empty set of numbers. Am I right? Correct me if I'm wrong. When he delved into proving the theorem that the Induction Principle = W.O.P, that's when I started to get dizzy. Suppose this.. suppose that...



I finally got the Indy machine running. Last Monday, Bo and I carted a free 19" SGI Monitor from the kind and helpful SCS Help Desk. This afternoon, the guy who donated the Indy to me came and resetted the root password and he taught a few basic stuff about Irix and Unix in generally. It's just a 166 Mhz machine built around 10 years ago but it is so well built that I can call it a product that has been over-engineered. The light blue casing is very solid. In fact, more solid than any PC casing I've seen. The CPU thin is thin too. The interesting part about this machine is its boot tune. When you turn on this Indy, you can here this tada sound.... I still have a lot to read about this IRIX. Apprarently, there are still user groups on IRIX 6.2 which might be helpful. Yet to set up the network as well. I intend to run this as a simple web server. Most probably this site will be hosted on that machine instead on my CMU Andrew web space.



After Arun left, I dashed to Hammershlag to help Seng Keat and friends move his things to his new dorm room at Morewood. Then I got a call from someone whom I'm borrowing a piece of software from so I had to leave Seng Keat before even meeting him (emm.. weird statement).



Then it started to rain heavily with the thunders and lightning.



This sucks. I'm stuck in Cyert waiting for the thunderstorm to go away. Killing time by writing a blog. Huh...

I was thinking about the war in Iraq and the involvement of other countries in sending military forces there. Looking at terrorist threats that the involved countries are facing, especially peaceful Japan, I understand why Malaysia refused to support the war. Although Malaysia can be said to a moderate Islamic country, there are some people who vehemently oppose the war and are willing to use terrorism. I'm glad that there are hardly any terrorist threats back home despite easy going immigration on foreigners coming in and out. In short, I think the government is doing the right job to avoid possible terrorist threats.



God bless Malaysia.

Download here

One evening early last semester, I had nothing to do. So I went up to a piano room in CFA and recorded something pure improv.

Webster 615 this summer will be home to a bunch of guys having homecooked Malaysian food for dinner. Thanks to the hiatus from the meal plan during the summer. For example, tonight, Dilo prepared a super-sedap nasi lepak that made Pittsburgh more like home. Don't perceive me as chauvinistic but I think guys these days take food more seriously than girls.



We insist on having proper meals instead munching off some raw carrots or candy bar for lunch or dinner. Our stomach may grow slightly bigger

but at least we stick to the conventional wisdom that has been passed down for generations that we should have proper meals for lunch and dinner assuming that we can afford to have them. I used to know a girl who eats nothing or at least very little when I'm around with her. However, strangely enough, her parents told my parents that she eats quite a lot at home. I tried to assume that she's in front of me but... no.. I don't think so.



I think people always think of me as me as a cold, unfriendly, serious and perhaps fierce person. My observations of new people I meet seems to be that they are have that fear in getting to know me. Close friends told me that I do have a serious face. Am I getting this from my parents who also fierce-looking people?



Btw, being fierce looking doesn't mean being selfish, snobbish or unkind. It's just the way facial muscles are structured.

Sheesh.. this week has been going very slowly. Typical of a first week of class. Econs seems easy but the material requires a lot of thinking especially what goes up and what goes down. For Concept of Maths, it's not really intuitive. I asked quite stupid questions today in class coz I honestly don't understand. Calculus seems easier to grasp.

Decided not to drop the 217 stats class. back to original summer plan.

Switching from the 217 stats class to diff eq. Hope it works.

I try my best not to think about you



For the past 2 days, I felt dreadful of my upcoming summer classes. Somehow tonight, I became enthusiastic about the three courses I'm starting to take tomorrow - Priciples of Economicds, Probability Theory and Random Processes and Concepts of Maths. I know I will working my ass off again especially when materials are covered at much greater paced. I just pray that I can cope with the intensity. The Spring semester is now over. My grades are out and it's time to move on.

Nothing to hope for in her



Spent the night browsing friendster after a hiatus from the activity since the finals week. Found quite a number of long lost friends. One of them is Khairul who used to sit next to me in Form 4. A soccer playing dude who takes the game seriously. I used to play with him back in lower secondary. I can't believe that I would wake up at 7 (afternoon session) and made my mum drive to school just to play soccer with Khairul's team. There was Alif too, Fadzli's cousin, a very quiet person whom we always smilar as 'Alif Tatau' to differentiate him with Haliff, another buddy of mine who's doing medicine in Gajah Mada University, Indonesia. I'm looking forward to find Haironiza on friendster. She was my classmate since Primary 1 till Form 3. If it wasn't for her dad's job transfer to Mukah, we would still be classmates till Form 5. I knew how much she hated her new place from the number of times in a year she returned to Bintulu. I thought finding her was easy since she's Alif's girlfriend. Apparently not. She was nowhere to be found Ali's list.



Talking about long-lost friends, can't believe that my dad has a long long half-brother. Quite a story behind it. Anyway, grandpa and relatives were saying that they look very similar to my dad. A spitting image of him. This thrills my dad since he is the only son. For me, it's quite unbelievable. All the while, I've been looking at my dad as the man of the family. I guess to me my dad is a very special person indeed. So, when I'm back this August, I'll most probably meet up with half-uncle of mine. Unforunately, he is not as lucky as my dad to escape the ruralness of the Sarawakian interior and obtain some decent education. What causes the thrill also is that I am a spitting image of my dad and if that man looks like my dad, so I can pretty much say that I'll be seeing myself in my uncle. People always say that I'm a xeroxed copy of my dad which of course, gives a sense of relief to him...haha.



Btw, the blogging gets longer recently since I pissed someone off...



I can't believe how many free stuff that we've gotten for the apartment today and in the past week when graduating seniors are leaving. Now, Webster 615 has quite a complete kitchen... appliances wise I mean. Coffeemaker (brand new one), blender and toaster as well as the rice cooker and microwave that Kenneth and I bought.

Heh, topcoder.com is not for me at the moment. Tried my luck in today's noon competition and I failed miserably. There were 3 tasks. Level 250 was a simple one and yet I failed the test case. Too lazy to test it beforehand. Level 500 was to write a game similar to black jack but instead of a ceiling of 21, it's 31. Didn't complete it because the many possibilities of Ace of having to carry 1 or 11 points. Level 1000, needless to say, was to code some kind of hard disk utility. I gave up.





All my grades are out early. Did well in all except a B for Physics II. It was a course Rozana and I worked hard for. She got an A since she worked harder than I did. I was off by 2% from the 84% cut off grade for an A. I did quite badly in the final. Yeah, the final was tough especially on the wave question. I need another 12 points of 200 to get an A. Easily could get it if I think little bit more on that question. Anyway, quite satisfied with the semester of 6 courses.



Summer classes start next week. Hoping to work hard and do well.

She's gone for the summer



Another holiday spent shopping. Without a car, nothing much can be done in Pittsburgh although bus rides for us college students are free. The only reasonable places to visit are the shopping mallls and no clothes were at the reasonable price range for me to buy. Yesterday was Monroeville while today's waterfront. The Punisher that we watched was a good one I think. A Marvel comic turned movie. Thomas Jane looks like Hugh Jackman and for a while I thought I was watching another Daredevil or X-Men. Lots of smart moves by The Punisher. I like what he did to frame Howard Saint's wife and his right hand man.



I think I got into a near-death incident this evening. Irwan, Kenneth and I were cooking dinner for 11 people. The fried chicken was not really cooked so Irwan threw them back into the pan of oil. When we though the chicken was done, I took one out and quickly cut a small piece of chicken and shove into my hungry mouth. The chicken was just out of the boiling pot of cooking oil so you can guess roughly the temperature when oil has a higher boiling temperature than water and its bigger heat capacity. It did not feel that hot first, chewed once and decided that it's cooked. I swalled the piece. Next thing I could feel was a buildup of heat along my esofagus. I though it's the normal heat thing that I used to get from eating food that was just out of pot. My chest became hotter and hotter. I knew something was going wrong so I quickly opened the refrigerator and looked for something cold to drink. There was no pitcher of cold water in sight. Neither there were my usual supplies of mineral water from excess meal blocks. The only thing I could think of then was a half-full bottle of juice. I have no idea who it belongs to. Either Irwan's, Kenneth's or Diong's. Drinking it really helped. There was an immediate cooling effect. The juice was nice too so I drank till the last drop. Sheeshh...I could have just drank from the kitchen tap but I guess I was panicking that I couldn't think properly then. I just wonder what would happen if I didn't do anything. My esofagus might have punctured due to the excessive heat that are killing the cell walls. Hey, doctors and doctor wannabes who are reading this, please give some comments on what might happen if such thing happen and nothing is done to cool down my body.



The Computer Science Help Desk did an extraordinary for me today. They are giving me a 19" SGI monitor with 13W3 plugin. This will help me start that SGI Indy workstation that I got for free on Monday. Can't wait to cart it back tomorrow!

test

On the left is this Silicon Graphics (SGI)Indy workstation that I picked up from a kind Ph.D student in Biology who gave it out for free. It's a 1994 model that at its time cost $5000. Specs: 2 x 1GB SCSI hard drives, 64 MB of RAM, 166 MHZ Mips Processor, 13W3 monitor port, and a web cam. Installed inside is an IRIX. Yet to find an adapter for the monitor. Might scour for parts around Wean tonight. Wanna learn UNIX with this machine.



As I write this, my Uncle Benjamin back in Kuching might browsing through my blog, commenting who earth would read my blog and who the hell thinks of a dying computer mouse.



"What's wrong with your generation?", he asked hinting the stupidity of my eulogy



I have this feeling that my family members including my uncles are thinking I'm overworking here. I suppose my dad would tell them that their son/nephew here are work night and day. Uncle Christopher did not believe that we have that much work. Uncle Benjamin told me that I should join give a visit the Opus Dei center 1 mile down 5th Avenue. Btw, Opus Dei is a Catholic organization for non-priests and nuns so that they can live the life of doing God's will in whatever legal/honest profession they're in.



They tell me play some sports because they are superb atheletes back in their young days. Hello, I'm not like them. Physically, I have my Kayan genes and my Kayan side doesn't play sports. We play music. Music is equally as good as sports! I tried playing soccer and fail miserably on the pitch. I can't run 6 times around the track without stopping 100 times every 10 meters. I even lost to my younger brother (4 years younger!) when we took swimming classes together in primary school.



Why do we all have to live to expectations? Why don't we live to prove people wrong?

I'm done with my finals! and I'm done with my freshman year in college. Never felt so free.

Carnegie Mellon freshman Physics courses are tough. Yesterday's Physics II for Engineers final was tough. Hmm.. maybe it was not tough. Maybe I was careless. I overlooked a lot of things. I carelessly measured the changing area of a triangle as the changing area of a rectangle. I wrote a travelling wave equation for a standing wave in its harmonic frequency. I don't know what other careless mistake I did. I think I'm getting a B for this course. Again, not after a B for Physics I. Hard to believe that I feel tihs way after mad studying for it for the past 1 week.

My mouse went dead last night. I always eat as I use the computer so that mouse that had served me since I got my old laptop in 2002 turned oily. I brought it to the bathroom, rubbed some liquid soap on it, rinse it with damped toilet paper, dried it with towel, plugged it back it and there was no red LED light at the base. The mouse has served me well. I would still use it if it didn't get electrocuted last night. A generic, two-button Logitech, it's an example of fine Swiss engineering although its made in China. With no mouse, I had to spent Friday night at the cluster but thanks to Ding, I got to borrow his extra Microsoft Mouse, an optical one.

On the way back from campus last night at 1 am, a white dude talking on his cellphone came up to me and asked my name.

"Hey buy, what's your name?" he asked.

"Why do you need it for?" I stammered.

"Anthony? NIce to meet you Anthony. Do you live around here?" "

Hesistantly I said yes. The next thing he did was running across the red traffic light at the PNC Bank junction. I realized he was drunk from the way he ran. He hailed a taxi but couldn't get one.

I have programming today. I just hope everything will go fine. No mental blocks. No hard methods. No null exceptions. I HATE NULL EXCEPTIONS.

Summer Breeze

The DLINK wireless router arrived yesterday. I think it's not just hub but a swtich so that explains our wired connections went up to 100 mbps. It's a LAN now unlike with the hub which assigned specific comcast IPs. Now, the router holds a comcast IP while the three of us, dilo, kenneth and i, have IPs specific to the LAN. We are able to share files across the network but we could only see each other's machine. Can't browse the shared folder. The wireless runs well. I realized that there are around 5 other routers throughout the building. Apparently, for mine, I set the network key so others outside couldn't use our connection. I can't wait to pick up the free p.c. from the frats.

It's my Physics for Engineering Students II Final tomorrow. I'm ABsolutely nervous, worried, anxious etc. Phobia finals this week since my last sem's final was a wreck. For the past four days, most of things that I read were on Physics. The materials will be very much important for my next three years of engineering especially on waves.

Praying for the best.

The Chem E final I just had was so freaking tough. I guess all 12-unit finals are tough. This evening's one had me leave out quite a number of stuff. I'm unsure on some questions that I did. Mole balance, mass balance, etc. Even the first question took me a while to tackle. The good thing was Prof. Powers was very nice to us. Since yesterday or the day before was Cinco De Mayo, the Mexican celebration of its Mexico's independence during the batlle of Puebla, he told us that this time's 10% extra points will be on that holiday as a theme. I printed out a Mexican flag and glued it on my shirt. It was okay but the cracking sound made by the paper is slightly annoying. Prof. Powers brought in Mexican food and drinks for our exam "half-time". A coursemate brought in an array of homemade Tortilla dips. But sorry to say that the food didn't ease the trouble that we went through, or at least what I went through. I nearly panicked at one moment. I did thought of hanging myself if I do badly in this exam. Yeah, I actually did.

Anyway, with my performance in the first two hour-exams, all I hope I'll get an A for this course. God bless, Professor Powers for his kindness and generosity to us, his students, throughout the entire duration of this intro course. Thanks Professor!

I'm trying so hard to concentrate studying Physics. The laptop, the music, the tv, the kitchen are all sources of distrations. They make jump out of my task chair and start walking around. I wish there's a drug that keeps me focused. I heard some students in Cornell take this. I don't know but I wish I can have one.

This girl X I thinks like this: picky on getting a bf but once she gets one, she won't be commited.

comments, avid readers & visitors?

It was 3.30 a.m. and I had enough of sitting my desk so I asked Irwan outside whether I could borrow his just-arrived Runaway Jury DVD. Juri Yang Melarikan Diri.

I never realized the existence of a bunch of people called jury consultants - highly-paid people whose service to trial lawyers is to advise them which juries to pick. That only happens in the American legal system I suppose. A Malaysian judge or magistrate does not have them to help him decide the outcome of a case - at least not for the criminal court but I know the juvenile court has "accessors" - people who give opinions on whether the convicted young man should be sent to Boys' Home or not. My grandpa was one for quite sometime after his retirement.

So, this movie is about a civil court case involving the widow of a shot stockbroker and the gun industry. She was suing them for being the cause of his husband's death for the reason that the gun industry promoted the use of guns. The widow hired an honest but reputable lawyer (Dustin Hoffman). For the gun company, it's not the lawyers who actually runs the show but a charismatic professional jury consultant who's more like a jury fixer (Gene Hackman). What makes this guy look cool is the people working for him. They are young college grads, fresh from tech institutions (at least MIT was mentioned) who run the surveillance for him. Flat panel TVs surrounds their workspace in a rundown New Orleans building. The other thing that was impressive was how the jury consultant anaylzes probable juries during the jury selection. Yeah, damn, the lawyers can choose the juries. Sounds like half-bribery to me. The gun company's lawyer had hidden microphones oddly placed behind their ears. With hidden video cams on their briefcases, they would choose which jury according to what he tells them on through their earpieces.

They ran into a mistake by choosing Nicholas Eastor (John Cussack) who is secretly running a similar jury fixing business but within the group of juries. He's a jury himself! He and his girlfriend offered a bid on fixing the trial. $10 million if either side wants to win. So, cat and mouse chase began between Eastor and the jury consultant but not with widow's team. It was typical of John Grisham's plot - the climax was a race against time. You know, some people chasing for something when a decisoin is about to be made. Anyway, the gun company lost as they tricked by Eastor and his girlfriend. In turns out that Eastor's girlfriend was in revenge for their lost in a civil case against the gun industry many years ago for the shooting of her sister back in high school. The couple actually tricked the jury consultant of $15 million. I guess the gun company's ceo would be mad at his hired jury consultant for being too cocky that they could win the trial.

I like the scene in this movie. New Orleans Very not typical of an American city. I thought it was some city in Spain or Southern France when the first few scenes rolled out. Must visit it one day. Maybe during the next spring break.

Today, for my ears, I fed them with Rob Dougan's 1998 album Furious Angels. I first heard of this artist way back in 1999 when his Clubbed To Death is a very inspring soundtrack in The Matrix. Again, his Clubbed to Death 2 made it the Matrix's sequel. Oh ya, Furious Angels was in too. Anyone with Napster 2.0, Penn State people especially, I recommend them to listen to his songs. It's a mix of symphonic music and techno. I imagine him performing with all his synthesizers and drum machines, a headphone on one ear, backed up by an orchestra. Power sial...

Castro maintained that Cuba -- a one-party state -- is the most democratic country in the world because it looks after the social rights of its people, with free health and education.


Literacy is higher in Cuba than in many industrialized nations, and infant mortality lower than in the United States, where 44 million people do not have medical coverage, he said.


The average age Cubans can expect to live to will rise to 80 in five years, Castro said.

Catro did visited the United States by it was in 1959. Click here to read the article.

What are the chances of a girl to be freaked out when her guy friend asks her out?