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A couple of days ago I was informed of a possible delay in the project I’m working on. Yesterday it was confirmed and therefore I will be allowed to return KL. I have never been out overseas this long before, so it will be nice to go back, chill with friends and family, and recharge. Sure, I can chill in Japan too while waiting for all systems to be up again, but they wouldn’t like to pay me everyday just to ‘chill’, right? If the delay is substantial then it’s actually economically-wiser to fly me home, and send me here again when everything’s resolved. Unless of course during this period I’m assigned to another project.

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I want to thank you all for the kind birthday wishes last month. I got most of them one day late, even though they were sent between 0000hrs and 0100hrs on my birthday. That’s because I didn’t have telco coverage at that time. We were somewhere outside Tokyo Bay. I received a birthday cake from the company too, which was pretty cool. I and another American engineer both celebrated birthdays on board the vessel together.

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I noticed that many people usually take photos of the view from their office windows, especially if they’re overseas for work or business meeting or something like that. I, too, have decided to post up some of mine…view from my ‘office’, pretty similar throughout the day. Heck, even throughout the month (for those of you who know, yeah… it’s been that long).

Yes. That was taken during good weather. Usually it’s only the sea, and sky. 65% of the time (since we’re not too far off shore), you get to see land. 0% of the time though, you get to see whales and dolphins.
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For many of you who’ve stepped foot on Japanese soil before, I bet there was one thing that you didn’t do while you were here. It’s something that most of us are not accustomed to. It even borders on absurdity. And I know that if I tell this to some of my friends back home, they’ll say it sounds a little wrong as well. While I’m sure you can find similar practices in other parts of the world, in my case I experienced it right here in Japan. It was a culture shock of sorts. I don’t know what we usually call it back home (because it’s so uncommon nobody actually bothered to come up with a term), but here they simply call it ‘public shower’.

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To a certain extent I think I’m lucky to have taken up Japanese 5 months ago. Although I’m still far from fluent, I imagine it would be much more difficult to communicate with the locals here, who speak little English (and a lot of Japanese, despite knowing that you can’t understand much of what they’re telling you anyway).

Yes la I censored my bookmark-cum-namecard!
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I feel like running head-on into a punching bag now. I was composing an entry when I got an MSN message - which was, by the way, nothing but a virus-infected URL - and like always, I wanted to close the window. I didn’t realize the window wasn’t maximized, and I accidentally closed my Firefox instead. I have decided to block the contact. Serve me right for not blocking her earlier, because everytime she came online, the same message would appear. Whatever happened just now has got to be the last straw. If it affects my blogging - which I haven’t been doing much lately - it affects me badly!

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Do you like jungle-trekking? How about doing it without touching the ground? Introducing SkyTrex Adventure, where you can challenge yourself to a series of obstacles, suspended at about 3 to 17 meters above the ground. You basically need to move from one tree to another, and the entire course takes around 1 and 1/2 hours to complete - depending on your physical fitness and agility!

SkyTrex Adventure is located inside Taman Pertanian Malaysia (Malaysia Agricultural Park), Shah Alam, which is about 30-40 minutes drive from the KL City Center. If you have been following my blog since last year, you’d probably have read about my cycling excursion in that park with some friends on a Sunday morning. I didn’t know about SkyTrex Adventure back then.
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As we couldn’t take our own cameras along during the race, all photos shown here in this entry except for the last two - were taken using the N82 itself. During the race, we could only use one phone for uploading photos (SIM card provided by the organizers), so a little bit of strategy had to kick in here. Two in-car phone chargers were also provided for obvious reasons. The topics for the race were announced only around 5 minutes before the actual flag-off.

There were 8 Nissan Cefiros that were used as race vehicles - one for each team. We had to get back to 1U (our finish-line) in 5 and 1/2 hours’ time, and we wanted to cover 5 locations! In each car, there would be a driver, a cameraguy, a race marshal, and the two team members. Our cameraguy’s name was Desmond, our race marshal Eve, and our driver was Mr Ibrahim! Mr Ibrahim was an excellent driver because he knew almost the whole Klang Valley, including short cuts and all.
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The announcement of team members was made shortly before the phone handover ceremony at the Hibiscus function room in One World Hotel. I was indeed very lucky to be paired with Pinkpau, cuz I knew she could write very well! She could come up with just the right descriptions for our photos during the race.

You can say that I had it easy - I practically skipped the whole description-writing part and left that to her. She also went around interviewing people (-.-”) in order to get more background info and stuff. We’ll come to that later…
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I knew I was gonna volunteer for a charity event, but I didn’t know it was actually in conjunction with World Parkinson’s Day on Friday (11th April). Anyway, I picked Duncan up at his crib around 7 in the morning, and we headed straight to where the balloon was at.

Feel proud k, volunteer for charity!

Organized by the Malalysian Parkinson’s Association, the event was aimed at giving Parkinson’s disease sufferers an opportunity to go on a hot air balloon ride, at Astaka fields, PJ.
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