August 31st is Malaysia's independence day, and for some reason I decided to stop and take a closer look at my grandfather's World War 2 medals.

The descriptions you see in the slide show above came from medals.org.uk, I realize that it's very hard to manual focus on such fine details, not getting a perfect picture on the left most medal.

The medals aren't for any special acts of bravery or anything like that. It just shows that my grandfather, fought protecting his family and adopted homeland for much of his life. According to my mother he was severly wounded and almost got thrown out with the garbage on one occasion.

It's a pity while he was around I did not realize what he had gone through, I guess I'm embarassed that I never even asked about his past. It was only after he passed away and the medals were taken out of his drawers that I found out that he fought in the war.

He was an immigrant to this country, but he put his life on the line to fight for his family, and for his adopted home.

I just went to watch Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this morning. I decided to check out how it would feel to watch a normal movie on an IMAX screen, cause I *thought* they would be getting some nice proper IMAX prints.

I guess I should have noticed something was wrong went the trailers played and I noticed that everything felt blurred and stretched. Then when the movie started I had this feeling that the picture was just a *little* bit off focus, and then I noticed IT! There was VIGINETTING on the picture!!! If you don't know what that is, it's when the camera's lens casts a shadow over the picture in the corners. That's when I realized..

I DON'T THINK I'M WATCHING AN IMAX PRINT!!!!

It must be just a normal movie print and then they MAGNIFIED the image to be shown on the large screen. But the end result is like stretching a 640x480 image to be viewed on a 1280x960 screen, you just don't feel that the picture is sharp enough.

Damn I felt so disappointed with that, to think I went all the way down to Berjaya Times Square and didn't even get the intended results of watching the movie nicely on the big ass screen.

The next time I go to IMAX to watch a movie is when I can CONFIRM that the movie actually HAD an IMAX print made, if not it's just a waste of time and effort to have to go to IMAX just to catch a movie thinking it'd be special to watch a movie on the multi story screen.

As for the movie itself? Not bad, I enjoyed myself. It was nice how they decided to satisfy certain questions fan boys would have.

So there I was reading the morning papers, WZ was playing outside in the yard with Grandpa when there came a loud BOOM sound from outside. I rushed out to see what happened then I see two guys walking from a Maroon Land Cruiser, and looking up towards a tree in front of my house. One of them was holding a rifle. I don't know what they were shooting.. probably crows, but they left as suddenly as they came.

Not suddenly enough though... The problem with shooting crows is that, even though you're firing UPWARDS, dude.. remember.. your bullets have to come down somewhere eventually!

It was just announced, and there's no real code that's publicly available. But it's an interesting idea and I can't wait to try it out. So keep your eye tuned for more info on it... Microsoft Live Mesh!

I just went to Thailand for 2 days for a training session. I don't like going to places where they can't speak English properly. For one thing it's difficult to communicate with people on stuff like directions or is the training center 5 blocks left then 3 blocks right or the other way around? The kicker came when I was ordering some dinner at a MOS burger, I was tired from a day of training so I kinda zoned out a bit and I read the menu as "TXXXkatsu Rice Burger" along with some description in Thai, I didn't think too much of it and just assumed it said Torikatsu (Breaded Deep Fried Chicken)

So I placed my order and when the burger came, I sunk my teeth into it and instead of the feeling of chicken meat. It felt squishy... I pulled the burger away from my mouth and I saw the filling. It WASN'T chicken.. it was OCTOPUS or SQUID... one of them.

On the plus side though as I was walking through the shopping malls I bumped into a classic car show.. and I bumped into this little guy.

A Delorean!!! An actual one, not a modified prop!! It just looks cool with it's gull wing doors and rough stainless steel body.

I mentioned it before, but I'll just say it again. The biggest problem when you provide web based solutions is when something screws up on the network backbone where your server is sitting on.

The process of proving that it's not your application, your server or your network equipment to finally pin pointing that your network provider is the cause of the problem is just nerve wrecking!

Worse still if you have your client breathing down your neck asking what's wrong, why the system is down even though we have multiple redundancies?

Well... we do have a fail over cluster... but not a remote server duplicate sitting on another network of course.

Some people were asking how to get the web Live Messenger chat box like what I have on the site. And I forgot about the link myself! Luckily A quick Google search revealed the link.

http://settings.messenger.live.com/applications/WebSettings.aspx

Just go to the page, apply the settings, and then get the HTML to be placed on your blog.

I just came back from a 2 day trip to my in laws place over at Melaka, it was a nightmare!!! Not only did Maxis not have 3G coverage over at their house, there wasn't even EDGE connectivity available!!! And the GPRS signal was so crappy I couldn't even sign on to Live Messenger!!!

But... everything is fine now, I'm back home, and my next travel stop will definetly have broadband internet connectivity.

I hope I never have to feel so out of connection again! Maybe I should sign up for all the telco's datalines since something is BOUND to work that way. :P

Someone who I haven't talked to in a while sent me an IM saying "Hey is this you?" followed by a link to a page that looked like one of them profile shots.

I clicked on the link and what do I get? A download box asking me to download an application program.

Damn... almost got me!!

One of the things to look for in these chat bots is to see if the sender immediately goes offline after sending you the message. Cause they usually don't stick around to do so.

WZ's great grandma had a nasty fall that day and ended up with some very nasty injuries. From what I know, she has some spinal injuries and doctors required her to be warded for a few weeks. Also scans shows she has some minor blood clots in her head.

The shocker came yesterday when she started hallucinating and just totally freaked out my mother with her condition. Luckily it was just because of the pain medication she was taking, so they took her off that medication and well... she's in pain but she's aware. Can't say it's much of a consolation.

Then I found out through my mother just now that my dear old grandma called one of my aunts and kept saying "I'm going to die, I'm going to die" Needless to say my uncles who were in Ipoh rushed to the specialist centre upon receiving the news. And what they saw there was truly...

A fire broke out in the specialist centre (i'll append the name here once I get it) and they unhooked my grandma off her drip and asked her to get the heck out of there.

They asked an 80++ year old lady, who was on a drip, in pain, has spinal injuries to GET OUT OF THE BUILDING on her own power!

I understand that it's a hospital, there are probably many other critical patients they need to worry about but still... my 80++ year old grandma.. I can't believe it!

I hope her situation didn't worsen because of this, I gotta go down and see her during the weekend. Hopefully seeing WZ might cheer her up a little.