I had one hell of a night yesterday, first of all at around 1AM I saw a very pissed off wife run outside the house. For those unfamiliar with Chinese customs 22nd Feb was the night where some special prayers would be done by some chinese.

And someone in our neighbourhood were launching thunderclaps NON STOP from 12AM to 1AM, and everytime one of those thing’s screeched through the sky, it’d wake up the dog behind my house, and more importantly it’d woke up my wife. So instead of letting her go postal on the people I decided to take it upon myself to find the source of the disturbance and take care of it.

I found the source which was a house a couple of blocks away from mine, there were 2 kids constantly setting off the things while their parents looked on. I appealed to their community spirit and asked them to stop. Luckily they complied, and I went back home to sleep.

Until I heard the dogs barking and someone banging on the window of the side room where my maid used to sleep in. Through the tinted kitchen window I saw a man walking around the back of the house. My father scared him off by screaming at him from behind the window, at which point I ran outside to see if he dropped anything and I found this in the drain.

At first I thought this was a condom wrapper from afar, but it turns out to be chewing tobacco according to friends who can read the words. Now I’m just afraid if the person will return and try to take any action against our house since we pissed him off..

sigh…

After how everyone who went to saw the movie was twitting about how great the film was, bla bla bla. I finally caught Avatar today and boy was I disappointed! I wasn't expecting cinematic gold here but I was so surprised when Dances With Wolves kept coming up in my head as I was watching the movie. As my brother mentioned this was from the "Go Native" formulae of the movie playbook. ie. Guy comes from one advanced background, joins up with native people, learns to love the land, love the chick, then choose to fight against his own people.

Ooops, did I just spoil the movie for you? It's not like you wouldn't have seen how the story was going to end coming from a mile away.

From my twits I can see how people keep talking about how great the graphics are, and how James Cameron DESIGNED AN ENTIRE WORLD to fit the story in. I play next gen video games so seeing entire lush beautiful worlds that have been DESIGNED for the story? I see them all the time.

Since the pretty pictures can't distract me from concentrating on the story. Here are my nitpicks following in the vein of my Star Trek nitpick post. Oh yeah... stop reading if you want to try and spot them yourself.

• The humans keep talking about how dangerous the planet and the people are. It makes you think that the humans have been fighting the Navi for at least 10 years. (one way trip to Pandora takes about 5 years) But considering the technology gap (We're talking poisoned arrows vs armour plating here) and the WAAAAYY too well equipped military force the humans have you'd have to wonder why the humans haven't already WIPED THE NAVI OUT!! ALL OF THEM!
• Since they were talking about how dangerous the Navi are... do we hear of Navi raiding parties on the mines? Do we see guerilla assaults on the mines by the Navi?
• It is mentioned the Navi are hard to kill, hmmm a few bullets seem to do the trick. When the humans were fighting the battle never once did you see this Navi that's pretty hard to kill actually getting an upper hand.
• Rape a dragon into submission so you can ride it... What a nice way to put it. (Why rape? Our censors spared it for us but think about the hair connector for a second. First time Sully plays with it Grace says "You'll go blind if you touch it" The act of connecting 2 connectors is called a link. If there was a way for 2 creatures to share a bond greater than physical, how do you think they'll have sex?)
• A venerable FLEET of flying dragons vs a FLEET of helicopters with vulnerable propellers, and the best tatic Mr Marine could come up with was slam into them and hope you can toss the helis aside? I was expecting death from above, rocks, tree trunks... Heck.. even the Ewoks tried to throw rocks at AT-STs! I can't believe I just said the Ewoks are better than something!
• "We are familiar with these lands" but instead of planting traps to try and entrap the giant mech suits approaching your hideout. You decide that the best tactic against mobile artillery with escorts is a cavalry charge? But you don't even have HORSE ARMOUR!
• Against an enemy that's holding out in an OPEN AREA, you decide that even though you have SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGICAL advantage against your enemies you'll just charge straight into their front door and BOMB THE PLACE TO HELL! Even though you know that that area is strategically disadvantages to you. You have SPACE FLIGHT capability, ever heard of Orbital Bombardment or heck just mere Kinetic Bombardment. You want shock and awe? Isn't a MESSAGE FROM THE SKIES shock enough?!?

Yes.. I'm just disappointed with the flick.

ps. In case you're wondering I didn't lookup on anything about the movie before watching in. So I had no preexpectations of it.

This is a pack of instant noodles that is just so WRONG!

1. It's BAH KUT TEH flavored!!! How can something that's cooked with about 11 herbs and spices be distilled into powdered soup mix? That is just wrong!
2. On the pack itself it says it's SUITABLE FOR VEGETARIANS!! But it's BAH KUT TEH!!!
3. There's a HALAL certification sticker on the main pack (It comes in a pack of 4)!! That's just so wrong!!

But, the main question is obviously how does it taste? It doesn't taste horrible, and if you had a craving for bah kut teh in the middle of the night and you're too lazy to go out and get some. Yup... this will satisfy your taste buds.

It's still so wrong though...

Why do I have the urge to get more?

Must be the damn MSG.

What follows is a detailed list of the various plot holes in the Star Trek reboot movie, do not read if you want to watch the movie and not be spoiled.

I was testing a site on various other browsers today, and I needed the browser to present itself as FRESH to the web application, so with IE8 I used InPrivate blocking, and on Chrome I used Incognito mode. Both essentially works the same way, all cookies and browsing history information are discarded after the session, and no previous cookies are carried into the session.

Then I realized that all my ASP.Net Linkbuttons, and other places that required the Javascript method __doPostBack weren't working in Chrome's Incognito mode. Looking at the page's source that got sent to the browser I saw that the whole script definition chunk for the function was missing from the page. It was as if ASP.Net decided NOT to push the script chunk down to Chrome. But it was working fine in normal Chrome browsing.

There was no way this was a problem with Chrome or ASP.Net, but rather with Incognito mode itself. So I loaded up Fiddler and looked at the Requests coming out from Chrome Incognito mode. Then I realized that when in Incognito mode Chrome wasn't sending the UserAgent header that identified what browser was hitting the server.

Because of this ASP.Net could not determine if the client could properly process the script blocks, and thus decided to totally discard the delivery of the script chunk to the client. Of course, without said script chunk a lot of other things were affected.

After doing some poking around I found out that version 1.0.154.46 of Google Chrome seems to be the one afflicted with this issue. As this bug also stopped people from getting into Facebook and some Google sites, they quickly released an updated build 1.0.154.48 which fixes the problem. So update Chrome by going into Help->About->Update Now if you are having problems browsing some sites in incognito mode.

Though the automatic update system (which runs in the background even when Chome isn't running) SHOULD have updated the browser by now. But.. if you're having problems just update the browser and see what happens.

It's incredibly hard to go for something to eat early in the morning with WZ around, since mommy doesn't want to wake him up too early or stress him out by waking him and then immediately dumping him into the baby seat and then dump him in a baby chair while we ate. So I was lucky today that WZ woke up early enough in the morning that we could go have chicken rice ball in Melaka. Our intended destination was the errr... original shop, a Kedai Kopi Chung Wah located here.

But when we reached there...

Oh noes... it wasn't open!!! Because the wife knew that a lot of other shops have opened due to the popularity of chicken rice ball, we walked down the street and sure enough not far away...

There was another shop, called He Ji.

(This pic was taken AFTER we finished eating, luckily when we arrived there was no queue yet!) The shop had a pretty well operational procedure going, you queued up going into the shop where a lady would ask you what you want.

So she'll ask you how many people's portion of chicken you wanted, what drinks you wanted (from a choice of 3, barley, chinese tea and herbal tea) Then she'd tell you that they didn't have enough rice balls and thus they'll split your order between rice balls and loose rice. So what does that mean? It means this.

They'd give you rice balls... and errr... rice. Cause, well... they were low on rice ball supplies because there's too much demand for the precious balls and they needed to ration out the balls supply. That sounded all nice and dandy until I chomp down everything and my wife asked for more balls.

Lo and behold, extra balls were dropped on our table without so much of a word of how we're deriving the precious balls supply from other people wanted to taste the local delicacy. I just have no idea why the heck they said they had to give you loose rice in the first place if there's no problem asking for more balls anyway! It's really a WTF moment. And WZ agrees!

Overall it wasn't a bad meal, everything tasted ok. Though my wife insists that the original Chung Wah one has better tasting chicken.

After eating some bad food, (my money's on the hotdog.. but I can't be sure) and passing water out of places that shouldn't be passing water for 2 whole days I'm back in action... If only I can get my weekend back..... :(

What happens when you duct tape a Creative Vado to a paintball marker? You get a nausea inducing clip of what the marker sees during a paintball match. If any of you puked during Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield… better not to watch.

Here's the 1st round of the day.

Then the 2nd round in which I actually managed to get to the flag and score a win.

Still having problems uploading the 3rd round's videos. So here's the fourth and final round.

I joined a few of my fellow MS MVPs and a few people from the MS Malaysia DPE team for a friendly little game of paintball. This was the 2nd time I played paintball and I was pretty sure my experience playing FPS games would come in handy.

Getting to the paintball arena was an adventure by itself. While there was a sign in front of the steep stairs which took you down to the foot of the hill where the arena was.

It's a small banner situated quite a bit away from the road, which itself was already in the middle of a small residential area.

 

Then you need to walk down a little path down the hill.

Passing what seems to be one of the playing arenas.

And up another path

To get to the registration area and also where the hillside arena is.

As we walked in to take a little tour on the hill which we'd be fighting on I saw this

Hmm.. maybe they need that to do some map editing when necessary? There were 2 flag bases one at the bottom of the hill.

And one at the top... and the guys at the bottom will have to run all the way up the hill to get their flag. There was a little platform in the middle of the hill.

But no it's not a sniper tower and players can't climb it. From the top of the hill everything looks simple enough, have a better view of the people coming up, advantage of gravity on your side sending paintballs downwards.

Should be interesting. After the tour of the grounds our little group was given the Things You Need To Know So You Don't Loose An Organ Or Worst... Kill Someone talk.

After the talk I also plans for my Creative Vado, and a roll of duct tap.

During my last paintball game I tried sticking the Vado to my chest to take combat footage, but that didn't turnout too well cause I usually run around crouched behind cover, I told myself it would be different this time!

This time it gets strapped on the gun! So at least it'll be pointing at the general direction of where the gun is pointing. Well.. it worked.. But I don't think the gun's POV is any more exciting than the chests view. I'll put up a clip or two and all those of you without motion sickness can check it out. If I ever play paintball again, I'm gonna put on a helmet and mount the vado on it!

Anyway.. it's paintball and there are always injuries in paintball.

It's funny how I got hit in the same place I got hit the last time I played, I guess my hand's the only target when I blind fire off cover. I also receive three hits and bruises along my left arm, and one in my back as I was switching cover.

Final score? Guess the MVPs win cause all games ended in a timeout except the one where I capped the flag!

In summary, while my FPS gaming experience thought me well like how to roadie run, use cover, blind fire, flanking/avoid being flanked. I'll stick with games for one simple reason. I don't get TIRED playing games, DAMN.. my thighs are burning cause I was pretty much crouch running all through the game!

For they were left without a voice. Majel Roddenberry has passed away. I wonder if she had the chance of seeing how Gene’s vision and story is raped in the new Star Trek movie? But then again… Brenna and Braga did that a long time ago anyway!