As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, MMU has broken quite a few records in the Malaysia Book of Records as well as the Guinness Book of World Records. Some of the latest ones are:

• Longest Kebab in the World
• Most Number of Rice Arts
• Playing Congkak 30-hours non-stop
• Longest Non-Stop Martial Arts Punching Relay

While some students think it’s a ‘university pride’, ‘healthy normal activity’, or simply none of their business,

a group of students are openly criticising and strongly protesting against, what they call: “the breaking meaningless records frenzy”. Click here for their website.

(Added on April 19th: Click here for an article about them on the Chinese Newspaper Sin Chew Daily.)

Since the formation of the group, numerous posters, flyers, and even banners were pasted and hung all over the campus, including toilets, public tables and tutorial room whiteboards!

Banners are even found in places far from campus!

• hand-drawn banner beside the road.

According to the group, the huge amount of money spent on ‘breaking records’ is nothing but cash shoved down the rubbish bin; and the records broken are merely, quote: “records that can be easily achieved by just throwing in money”.

The website also said that the RM24,000 used to break the world’s longest kebab record could have used to aid people in under-developed countries, followed by showing pitiful videos and images of starving children in Africa.

The group’s actions has no doubt created fierce controversy on whether or not the records created by our university is justified. Students are beginning to think and debate whether records with the tens-of-thousands of Ringgits per unit price tag is really necessary.

• The logo of the group. Taken from records-frenzy.blogspot.com

Well, in my humble opinion, achieving records is a good means of promoting university publicity, improving students’ understanding and experience towards the subject of the record being made, as well as inducing a sense of love and pride in students toward our university.

However, care has to be taken by the organizer to prevent ‘a bad investment’ – more money/effort spent than equivalent reputation/experience etc. gained!

Records are very meaningful when they prove how strong we are in terms of effort, determination, and speciality; not in terms of finances. I hope and am quite sure MMU will have more records that display the former coming up in the future =)

I’m not sure if any of our existing MMU records are ‘bad investments’, for all I know the records might have heavily benefitted us in ways that were not significantly displayed to our eyes. Well, who knows?

Why not try something like having the ‘largest campus in Malaysia’ or ’smartest student on Earth’ record, or something like that? =)

Apparently there are more James Chows on the internet than I thought!

Have you wondered why I’m using James-Chow.com (with the dash in the middle) instead of JamesChow.com as my domain name?

Actually I REALLY wanted to register JamesChow.com as my domain name because instead of simply saying that my website is at “James Chow dot com,” I have to

“Hey, my website is www dot James DASH Chow dot com, remember the dash in the middle ya!”

Which is very long and annoying to say

But there’s nothing I could do… If you google search for “james chow” you get a movie guy James Chow, a doctor James Chow, an author James Chow and many other MEs!!!

Simply go to www.JamesChow.com (without the dash) and you’ll even wonder what the hell that page’s for… But no doubt the guy has his reasons. Sigh…

Of course some of you might say I can use other TLDs like .org, .net, .biz and so on, but guess what? Even JamesChow.net and JamesChow.org are registered to someone else leh!

So the remaining ones are .biz, .name, .info and the rest. In this case, I would rather stick to the “Hey, my website is www dot James DASH Chow dot com, remember the dash in the middle ya!” than having to say:

———

“Hey my website is at www dot James Chow dot biz.”

“Dot what ah?”

“James Chow dot biz, biz stands for business loh.”

“Huh… ? Dot bis? Got such thing meh, never heard before la!”

“Got lah, actually there is such a thing. “*swt*

“It’s not a real website hor?”

“Of course it is, I just gave you a URL, didn’t I? ”

“Eh I thought websites ends with .com 1?

“Err… Not necessarily 1, actually…”

“Ok, I will go back and see see la!”

———

… And then he/she goes back and types www.jameschow.bis… =.=” Which doesn’t exist at all!

Actually this may really happen because I know a few friends who really think that websites only end with .com!

But maybe I should be happy with my www.James-Chow.com ler, cuz it’s quite easy to remember and identifies myself accurately! Not bad also mah… Just that next time…

Remember the DASH in the middle ya!”

(WARNING: Kinda long entry ahead)

James-Chow.com was SILENT for more than 1 month!! What really happened??

It’s a long long story, but I guess I should explain a bit about what actually happened.

At the end of February, one of my other websites had an error. That was due to an accidental PHP script misconfiguration , or simply put, I accidentally screwed up part of that website. Woops…

I, not being an IT student nor a person with any specialized IT education before, tried to fix it myself. And the problem became more and more severe… (Hey, I tried to fix some codes before, and they worked… Those times!)

AARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!

The error was so serious that in the end I had to rebuild the whole website and reinstall the programs that were in it. (But thank God the database was not seriously affected and was recoverable). I know you experienced webmasters out there will be saying that I should have just restored the site using the backup, but guess what? I screwed up the backup copy as well!

What? Cannot meh? =p

After most components of my websites were restored (although some of them are still under construction today), my friend was telling me that my website was so damn slow, saying stuff like loading pictures take years la, how our University’s website is 100 times faster than mine la, and basically browsing through my site makes him old la, or something…

I tried to explain that my hosting server was in the U.S., so of course accessing it might be a bit slower compared to locally hosted sites that are mostly housed in MSC Cyberjaya, which is like less than 3KM away from my University, but he countered me with stuff like “Yahoo also US company la, Google also, why they so fast 1″?

So after that incident, I decided that I should once-and-for-all upgrade my websites to a better, faster, and more reliable host, to hell with the economy factor, I guess it’s always worth to trade cash for connection speed! After all, that’s what Streamyx is all about, right? Everybody is willing to pay MORE just to move FASTER!

So the rest of the month was wasted on finding and comparing new webhosting companies, signing up and settling payments, transfering files and exporting databases, configuring and personalizing the new server account, resetting-up all the websites and components within, testing and fixing bugs, and all the while trying to cope with the never-ending sea of assignments, tests, reports, and stuff from my course. =( *huh huh*

I didn’t dare to post anything up before I was sure that the website is completely stable because I didn’t want to risk posting anything and get deleted anymore! Had a really bad experience already, don’t wanna repeat it!

So now you have it, 2 days after April Fool’s day, my newly improved website! And it is surely as hell worth the money and effort! At least now the connection speed is (I think) almost as fast as Yahoo and Google, and with less downtime too! Yay!

So that’s what really happened during the last month. Really sad. A lot of things happened last month but I couldn’t blog about them because of this problem. Our University even got ourselves another name on the Malaysian Book of Records AND Guinness World Records for making the World’s longest Kebab! The Kebab was 2.016 Kilometres long! Wow!

Anyway, I will try to keep this website updated from this day onwards. It’s going to be a long month ahead of me, because this is the final trimester of this academic year and next month I’m gonna have my final exams! I need your support, visit this site often and it’ll be really encouraging to me! =)=)