4 months after passing the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) in February, I went for the EC-Council Certified Security Analyst / Licensed Penetration Tester (ECSA/LPT) course 23-27th June 2008 (you need to pass CEH first before going for ECSA/LPT).

This is the most expensive training I have ever attended, at well over RM7,000 for 5 days.

My instructor was Semi Yulianto, senior technical trainer/ consultant, EC-Council’s Instructor of the Year 2008 for Asia Pacific and a regular feature at hacker conventions in the region. He’s got one of the longest certification lists I have ever seen (23), including MCT, MCSE, MCDBA, CCNP and CHFI.

Semi was born in Pontianak, Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The exam’s held Friday afternoon, takes 2 hours, 50 multiple-choice questions (A to D), online via Internet. Hence if Internet down, can’t take the exam. I passed the exam at 98%.

It seems that EC-Council Phileo Damansara Time.com internet connectivity is rather unstable, some innocuous sites appear to be blocked.

There’s no exam for the LPT, I was informed that I need to pay USD500 (not included in the ECSA training cost, renewable yearly) and submit my CV and letter of confirmation from the police stating I do not have any criminal record to EC-Council USA.

Apparently Malaysia has less than 10 ECSA/LPT practitioners now.

The market rate for LPT work in Malaysia is RM2,000 per day.

For those budding hackers out there, turn your passion into a career. Being a trainer can be a lucrative profession. Semi mentioned that he works 2 weeks a month and gets minimum RM14K per month. If he does other work, that’s extra. Plus he gets to travel frequently to countries in the region.

Spotted at The Gardens at Mid Valley City, Kuala Lumpur, a high-end shopping centre (read: everything is expensive there, hardly any people).

At first glance, there seems to be 2 types of urinal in the men’s public toilet:

But looking closer, the ones on the right are not urinals at all:

Could’ve been easily mistaken for one though, don’t you think?

Therefore, I think these types of sinks should never be installed at places where one would partake of the amber liquid…

Many bloggers have mentioned the second Kota Kinabalu Jazz Festival which was held on the 21st of June 2008 at 1Borneo, that “Largest Lifestyle Hypermall” in Borneo, the 3rd largest island in the world.

It was a great event, and amongst others, the Aseana Percussion Unit showed how to please the crowd. First, get down from the stage and play your instrument among them:

Then take it one step further: give the audience members your instruments, get them up on stage and let them play, in essence let them be temporary bandmembers:

Surefire crowd-winning tactic.

Echoing what others have said, one could’ve seen the concert without even paying anything, and the view from the first floor’s even better than the RM50 seats. Heck, freeloaders had a better view of some of the performers than those in the most expensive seats!

So, for the third festival, you know what to do…

Anyway, on the same level as the concert is surely Kota Kinabalu’s most expensive public toilet, the so-called Platinum Club VIP Toilet, where you had to pay RM1 to enter.

Sure enough, there are aromatics and LCD screens inside, and sinks in every room:

One complaint: it ran out of toilet paper…

Spotted this on the afternoon of the 9th of June 2008.

Now I am not sure if Ferrari paid the owner of the car to display its name on the car, but I think the answer is most likely no.

Of course there are quite a lot of people who like to “decorate” their cars like this.

Perhaps without us realising it, we’re giving the relevant companies free advertising. And in many cases, we even bought the stickers to be stuck on our cars. So not only are we giving free advertising, we are paying for it!

Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

If Ferrari pays me money to advertise for them via my car, I would gladly envelope it with their stickers.

Grace Point, or perhaps more popularly known as Double Six, is an open air eatery in Kota Kinabalu with a difference, which some people have described as “a high-end hawker centre.” It’s also located a stone’s throw away from the Double Six memorial.

There are many varieties of food to try, and the place is very clean and parking is free as at the time of writing. There’s a playground for the kids too.

This eatery also probably has the city’s most high-end free-to-enter washroom, boasting undisputably the city’s most interesting urinal:

Yes, it’s the infamous urinal with a garden, and that’s right, you can see through from the other side of the glass, it’s not one-way

A common sight in Western countries perhaps, but in conservative Malaysia?

This urinal has taken at least one person aback.

1947: I read in The Star online, posted 1727 that it’s all mere rumour. However, it’s true that stations will not be accepting credit cards “for the time being,” due to the service charge issue. Well, if that’s really true then there’s no point of getting a new card and doing a balance transfer. Anyway, according to the paper, rumour has it that gas kiosks are closing for 3 days from Wednesday because “kiosk dealers nationwide were demanding higher commissions following the recent fuel hike.” The paper further said that officials from Shell Malaysia and the Sabah Petroleum Dealers Association has confirmed that no such closure will happen and that a Sabah Shell spokesman said that their retail stations nationwide will continue with normal operating hours. However, it seems that people were not taking any risks, with even Keningau seeing queues as long as 2 kilometres! Well, if it really is, news sure travels quickly these days, doesn’t it?

1920: Got a forwarded email from a friend that said: “Just got the news that the Petrol Dealers Association has asked all petrol station across Malaysia to stop selling petrol/diesel on Thursday
(6/26) - close their station. The Ministry has called them for a meeting today to avoid all this but so far no news yet. So if possible fill up the tank on Wed.” So probably it’s best to avoid the madness now, and fill up tomorrow if necessary. Most likely the association and the relevant ministry will come to a compromise and everything will be back to normal come tomorrow.

1818: A senior member of the local media informed that gas stations owners are asking for additional commission. If not ALL gas stations in Malaysia are going to close for 8 hours on 26th June (Thursday).

1755: A brother informed that there are long queues at all gas stations in Tuaran and Tamparuli.

1702: A friend informed that he’s been queuing for 45 minutes at a station in Kota Kinabalu: rumour has it that gas stations are not going to sell any fuel starting tomorrow, for reasons as yet unknown.

1629: A brother informed that he heard many are filling up: rumours are making the rounds that gas station workers are going to stage a boycott. 4th of June 2008, déjà vu?

1438: first of countless blog entries on this matter featured on giuk.net appears

Do the names Max Martin or Jorgen Elofsson ring any bells to you? If you want to make it big in music, but away from the limelight, learn from these people. They are truly reference standards in pop songwriting today. And perhaps by sheer coincidence, they are all Swedish.

Martin Karl “Max Martin” Sandberg (above), 37 wrote, or co-wrote, the following worldwide smash hits:
- Britney Spears - …Baby One More Time
- Backstreet Boys - Shape of My Heart
- “Oops!… I Did It Again” by Britney Spears
- Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way
- Bon Jovi - It’s My Life
- Backstreet Boys - Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely
- Backstreet Boys - Quit playing games with my heart
- Backstreet Boys - As long as you love me [one of their signature songs and to me the undisputed pop song of the year in 1997]

Click here to read more

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.

Source

TV Smith went to Sabah recently and took breathtaking photographs, then published them in his website, including a stunning photograph of Kota Kinabalu’s sunset, taken from his hotel room.

Being a fan of sunsets, I don’t think I have seen one better captured on camera. Talking about sunsets, I think we need to slow down more and appreciate these amazing, huge “paintings” in the sky that lasts only a few minutes every day; I don’t think even Michelangelo could match these great frescoes of the heavens. In fact, on Sunday around 6.30pm while at Grace Point I saw this on the sky:

OK back to TV Smith: he also took some street photography that ranks among the very best I have ever seen, including a photograph of whitewater rafting in Kiulu while being watched by a buffalo.

Heck, he even managed to make Kampung Likas look beautiful!

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