No review of any product is perfect, but the general consensus is that the best reviews are those that are independent and fully customer rated, based on what everybody wants like track record, existing or former customers’ feedback, affordability, reliability and techical support.

Webhosting providers are in the midst of a price war, what with an abundance sub USD10/mth offers. At the same time, customers are getting more demanding and discerning: they’d throughly research a web host and its product nitty-gritties before making a decision. A review site with comprehensive list of webhosting providers, with relevant information such as plans offered, even promotions / discounts and most importantly uncensored reviews by customers would have an upper hand over the rest.

…I haven’t double-checked, but they might well also do reviews on hardware that run onMac memory.

I had planned to balik kampung this afternoon, after attending the wedding reception a colleague, Kenneth at Foo Chow Hall.

As usual the weather was fine in the morning, just nice so as not to necessitate the wearing of a cap, but by 12 something it was already raining, not particularly heavy, but of course what really matters is how heavy the rain is upstream.

I knew the answer at 5 something.

First flood warning siren blared, quickly followed by the 2nd and 3rd (and final) warning. That could only mean one thing: 99% chance the river is going to overflow within the next 5 minutes.

The water level reached its peak around 9 something - mercifully not as bad as before, only knee-high downstairs.

…or even perhaps the decade.

Why so? Because a first cousin finally, finally ended his bachelorhood after most of us had given up hope of him ever settling down.

Being a much older first cousin (>10 years), he’s like a big brother to all of us, indeed one of his many nicknames is “Abang Besar”.

The following is my favourite photo: it’s 9.24am, the wedding mass is at 10am, a moment for reflection: selamat tinggal bujang? (goodbye bachelorhood):

After the mass:

Congratulations Alfred & Alice!

P.S. The groom being a successful insurance agent, their honeymoon options should include the beach homes via Outer Banks rentals…

At the very last minute, I decided to bring my daughter (who readily agreed) see Stacy AF6 in concert again, after the first time at Padang Merdeka on 31st May.

We arrived late (9 something), but luckily:
- there was still space at the car park
- tickets were still on sale. On one side of the ticket, the concert was billed as “KDCA Fundraising Concert 2008″, and on the other, “Stacy Comes Home: KDCA Concert 2008″.
- the hall’s only about half full (I estimate there were 2,000 there)
- I can’t remember if there were more expensive tickets, but you could sit as near as possible to the front of the stage using a RM20 ticket: no barriers were in place
- Stacy has not yet arrived
- just as we sat down, the lady I’ve been waiting for appeared onstage with Adam AF2: Jo-Anna Sue Henley-Rampas, who I thought was one of the best vocalists I have ever heard live back in November 2007. And yes, she impressed again, and to me is a better vocalist than Stacy.

Still, there’s very little fault with Stacy either. Powerful, my favourite kind of voice (rock-friendly, a little gravelly at the higher registers), down-to-earth personality, and a good dancer to boot. Not quite in the same class as Nikki MI, but still very good nonetheless.

Having said that, the organisation of the concert could’ve been much better. For a start, it was quite bizarre watching RTM’s Sabah VFM DJ Louis Chin as one of the MCs, because I’ve never heard him speak in Bahasa Malaysia before (he’s a DJ for the Kadazan segment). In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the other MC (a lady) is also from the Kadazan segment of Sabah VFM.

That took a while to get used to, but then their handling of proceedings left much to be desired. I think concerts like these need hipper people to be MCs. During some parts of the concert they seemed to be lost and didn’t know what to say. Case in point, they announced that a “kejutan” (surprise) was coming, but then the DJ played a birthday song, to which the crowd sang along. So everybody already knew what was ahead, but still the MCs kept repeating the word “kejutan”. The cake itself took much too long to appear. And as cute as it is, I don’t think it’s a good idea to pause a pop concert for that - it disrupted the momentum. If they could make it very quick, it would’ve been ok, but when the MCs started calling for the parents of Stacy to appear onstage, and suddenly a whole bunch of people came up, including the current Unduk Ngadau presenting Stacy with a bouquet, I thought it was going too far.

About birthdays, apparently Stacy’s going to turn 18 soon. That means she was just 17 when she won AF6.

Then the DJs: I always wonder why they never learnt their lesson all these years. It was a karaoke concert, hence the DJs MUST get their song selection and order down pat. But still, they made at least two horrendous mistakes. The first one was right at the beginning - Stacy’s first song: they played the WRONG song - Stacy had to point it out before they stopped it.

The second was one or two songs later during a duet on a ballad:

Click here to read the rest of the post

… or rather the 6th Ministry of Finance Sports Carnival, boasting quite a few sporting disciplines.

But the timing was certainly fortuitous. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics was held the night before on the now-famous triple-eight (8/8/2008).

So there we were early the next morning for the opening ceremony, complete with 12 teams, VVIPs, march pasts and oath taking.

Certainly felt like we were holding our very own little Olympics. But this little Olympics lasts much longer than the real Olympics - months in fact for the simple reason that competitions are done on weekends, usually not simultaneously among the disciplines.

Back to the event: after the opening ceremony, the action started with the badminton tournament. I was one of the 15 players in my team, not including the team manager.

If you thought this was beginner-level badminton, it was certainly not. There were a handful of state or ex state players in the fray, plus serious regular enthusiasts, so quite a lot of the matches were worth watching.

By the end of the weekend (around 4.30 pm on Sunday) we’d finished third after defeating the State Treasury 3-2. Ministry of Finance, boasting several state players and more excellent players, as expected became champions for the umpteenth time, overwhelming Sabah Credit Corporation 3-1 (if I got that right).

So you can say that I’ve had a very sporty weekend, indeed it was very enjoyable and a great demonstration of team spirit.

The only question now is whether I’d be fit enough to work on Monday…

Anyway, congratulations to all those involved, with special mention to Yussop and Kamal who endured a tiring doubles match to haul us back into contention.

Ad: one of the bad things about the parking lot of the Likas Indoor stadium and the nearby jogging track is the rampant car break-ins. On Sunday, as we were all going back home, there were at least 2 cars broken into. I wonder if cheap auto insurance also covers break-ins as well as auto accidents?

Last month, as I usually do while making my way out of Kota Kinabalu International Airport after a business trip (no, I don’t deal in auto parts franchises), I’d stop by one of those duty-free shops in search of chocolates.

That time I decided to buy this:

But when I opened it, the chocolates inside only took the following area:

The taste was ok lah, not spectacular.

Worse, I bought them in a bundle of 4, and cost me RM31+, meaning almost RM8 per box. Supposedly duty-free, locally made, 137g per box of chocs for almost RM8, you think this was reasonably priced?

As reported in The Star on 19th June 2008:

Sex VCD exposes wife’s lesbian affair

A HUSBAND suspected his wife was having an affair with another man. He was wrong. To his shock, he discovered a VCD with explicit scenes of his wife having sex with a woman.

Harian Metro reported that the woman was the wife’s office colleague and the affair had been going on for the past few months.

The paper said the man grew suspicious when his wife came home from work with love bites on her body. He thought she might be fooling around with a male colleague.

He confronted his wife, who denied having an affair with any man.

A whole new light was thrown on the affair when the husband found the hidden VCD and discovered that his rival was a woman.

…I guess some of the hanky panky were also performed on office chairs…

Source

By kampung I mean places so remote that it’s more than likely you had to spend the night sleeping on the floor or in a car.

I’ve had a few encounters like this over the years, in places like Kg Morodobou (Kota Marudu), Kg Libang Laut (Tambunan-Ranau border) and Kg Talantang (deep in the jungles of Kiulu).

One of my most memorable experiences is helping to carry musical equipment, including heavy amplifiers, guitars and loudspeakers through miles of muddy and mountainous jungle paths to a relative’s wedding reception in a remote village. Yes, people who live there definitely don’t need to purchase any strength equipment at all: you’d get your weight training whether you like it or not. Definitely no electricity there, had to use a generator. The “stage” was a bamboo floor simply put onto the ground. To top it off, it was raining heavily throughout the reception, the tarpaulin cover was leaking (rainwater was dripping onto the instruments!) and I slipped and fell at least once on the slippery ground, ruining my clothes. Truly Woodstock stuff.

Then at another reception several years later, I gingerly made my way downstairs after trying to sleep through all the chatter, only to find the stairs almost impossible to go through.

The latest kampung wedding reception I attended was last month, although it was not as extreme as my previous experiences.

At the usual receptions held in halls, restaurants or hotels, you probably won’t find the following:

The JKKK Chairman himself barbecueing wild boar:

Extremely loud band playing right next to the newlyweds’ bedroom, but this boy couldn’t care less:

Then I witnessed, for the first time ever at a wedding reception, the band performing Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”. I only had a mobile phone to video the momentous event, but you get the idea:

Click here to see the video

Of all the supposedly 1,000 crocodiles at Tuaran Crocodile Farm, this one fascinates me the most:

According to the label on the wall:

Name: Bujang Sukau
Age: 70 years
Length: 19 feet
Weight: 3,000 pounds [this guy definitely doesn't needPhentermine, he's naturally massive]
Profile: Killed a man in Kinabatangan River in 2006 & bit off the leg of a man in February 2007.

Here’s another view of that guy:

Now I am having nightmares of accidentally falling into that pit.

On Wednesday the 9th of April, 2.50pm, a Sabah Railway train (locomotive and 2 coaches) with 41 passengers and 3 staff, including driver Jividol Thaddeus, 49 left the Tenom station for Beaufort, a 49 km journey. About 15 minutes later, with Tenom 3km behind, the soil holding the track gave way, and the train plunged 20m (some say 20ft, some say 10m) into the Padas river, famous for whitewater rafting.

It had been raining continuously in that area for days.

As a result, two were killed and 39 injured. Those killed was Taminah Sikin, 51 who was believed to have drowned and Tukiman Misapan, 60 who was pinned underneath the wreckage. Taminah was found quickly but the Tukiman’s body was only extricated 3 hours after the incident. As for the other passengers, 3 were seriously injured, 17 had minor injuries and 19 were unhurt.

On 12th April 2008, Sabah Railway Department director James Wong was reported to have revealed that his department’s technicians had done their daily routine maintenance checks along the rail tracks between 2.35pm and 2.50pm that fateful day and found nothing amiss: no warning signs of instability etc. Still, half an hour later, the worst happened.

Sabah’s 134km railway track is unique in that it is the only railway service operating in Borneo.

Here are some photos - courtesy of a Little Bird.

Click here for more photos