Dubbed ‘Operation malaysia’, the operation is seen as an international response towards the government’s recent announcement to increase internet censorship.

So far (4.13AM Malaysian time) 24 sites have been successfully exploited, according to this website which has been tracking the entire hacking operation.

I made some quick checks and holla! Those government websites ending with a “.gov.my’ are either defaced, DoS’ed (not responding), or temporarily shut down.

Check out these sites knocked out by DoS attacks:

Official Malaysian Government Website: www.malaysia.gov.my:

Malaysian Parliament: www.parlimen.gov.my:

Malaysian Treasury: www.treasury.gov.my

Information Ministry: www.kpkk.gov.my

Election Commission: www.sprm.gov.my

Ministry of Education: www.moe.gov.my

… and some that are switched off by their own webmasters and a temporary site down message was put up, such as the Sabah Tourism website:

Land Public Transport Commission:

Some other unluckier agencies’ websites are even defaced!

Such as the Social Welfare Department: www.jkm.gov.my

Johor Biotech Corporation: www.jbiotech.gov.my

Poor UiTM Penang’s website has a very funny birthday song!

The Sabah Tourism website is probably hit worst because not only did they hack the website, they leaked all the internal server information and private user information!

Peoples’ names and emails all laid bare!

So far, the three government ‘stronghold’ websites, internet watchdog Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (www.skmm.gov.my), Prime Minister Najib’s www.1malaysia.com.my, and state broadband provider (www.tm.net.my) are the only three survivors of the internet carnage, although the 1Malaysia site is already snapping under the HUGE amount of ‘visitors’ from DoS attacks and I have seen it gone inaccessible several times in the past one hour or so.

Check out this mineral water vending ‘machine’. It needs no electricity, no stall owner, no nothing to operate! Lowest operating cost ever.

All it needs is your amanah, and is therefore rightly named: Amanah Kiosk!

You take a bottle, drop RM1 into the metal box, transaction done! No one else even notices!

This stall was found in one of the residential colleges in UM, apparently the university students there are really quite amanah, because I predict that if a similar stall were to be deployed in, say, Cyberia (where most MMU students live), NOTHING would be left, besides the rack.

The stall even says thank you!

Next, is it just me or is this really so cutely weird?

A mini motorcycle! A grown man sitting on it is like shitting on a squat-only toilet while wearing a helmet.

Also check out what’s on the other side of this mineral water bottle!

Remember Fairuz Fauzy, the Malaysian F1 driver? if you’ve been to the cinemas lately you must have seen him in an advertisement where a lameass guy who doesn’t fasten his seat belt drives to the petrol station  and spots this Fairuz guy, who then gives him an autograph and asks him to fasten his seat belt, like ‘Eh, pakailah’… remember?

Well this time he’s here on the mineral bottle asking us to unite and support him with all our combined effort.

But something seems to be really ‘wrong’ with this guy’s attitude!

He’s rolling his eyes!

**********

Sigh… Aiming four flat this semester! No slacking! T_T

In fact, I’m still feeling unwell now, but I think the fever is temporarily under control by medication. Oh… I really hate these rainy days!

Last night, I took my medicine and planned to go to bed rather early; because the next morning my friend and her family were going overseas, and her father charged me with the task of following the family to the airport, driving the car back, and safeguarding two of their cars while they are on vacation.

A fun task, but challenging nevertheless. The car that I was supposed to drive back is a rather huge one – something that I am not that used to driving; and furthermore, it’s manual! I quite suck in handling manual cars, you know! Hehe…

Therefore, with such a task ahead of me, I had to totally get enough sleep, otherwise…

BUT THEN,

It seemed like my current house, which was already in a terrible condition – with annoying wiring and piping problems -, didn’t want this poor guy to get any rest!

Last night, the bathroom on the second floor, whose pipes were already severely blocked and pending repair, gave me a memorable Christmas present by overflowing and literally flooding the whole damn second floor common area!

*All the photos you see in this entry were taken after the major flood was cleared. Everyone was too panicky to take any photos before that! So the real situation was really much worse than what you see in the photos!*

I was preparing to go to bed so I did not notice the water creeping into my room through the slit beneath the door!

No one paid any attention to the loud sound of water flowing down the staircase, all assuming it was the sound of the rain – it’s been raining everyday!

Suddenly, we heard Sebastian yelling from downstairs – “OOOI…!!”

All of us upstairs thought his “OOOI…!!” would be followed by some typical “... create DotA lor!“ or “… yum cha lor!“; but instead, it was “… water coming out from the toilet upstairs ah?!“

When I looked at the direction of my door, I yelped – the door mat was already completely drenched, and part of the carpet was already infected by the eeeky, smelly, disgusting bathroom water!

Opening the door, I was completely stunned on the spot.

The common area between our rooms was filled with moving water! Moving water that was coming out from the abandoned bathroom and flowing down the staircase like a bloody waterfall!

Nick, who occupies the room opposite mine, had his computer sitting on water! (his CPU is on the floor!)

Moving our way downstairs, we saw in terror that half of the living room was flooded with yellowish water!

I half imagined Jon’s pet rabbits would be, like, floating around and struggling and drowning; but of course that did not happen! It wasn’t that serious!

At once we took action. We started barricading the doors with anything that we could find, to prevent more water from getting into the rooms.

It was also at that point when we realized that the internet router, the wire extension, an electrical port, and a jungle of wires were on the floor, drenched in water!

Immediately we switched off everything in the area and put those items on higher ground as Heng stepped into the super-duper disgusting bathroom with a bucket and started transferring the flood water into the toilet.

Apparently the bathroom floor drain and the toilet do not share the same pipe, and very luckily for us, the toilet pipe was not blocked!

You have no idea how disgusting and smelly the trapped water was!

Slowly, the water stopped flowing and we proceeded to the exhausting process of sweeping the water from upstairs to downstairs, and from the living room, out of the house.

It was endless – we kept sweeping but the water was so much that it took a very very long time to clear!

We actually planned to go watch Hitman at Mines that night but no doubt we had to cancel it – of course earlier that day I had already known I wouldn’t be able to go with all the headache and fever, but I didn’t imagine that everyone would be staying home together and clearing a house flood!

After clearing the water, a friend came with a huge pile of newspapers from his house and we put thick layers of paper covering the floor; as it was bound to stink considering that it was bathroom water that had just flooded our house…

… bathroom water, get it? Anything – solid or liquid – from anywhere could be inside! Ewwww!

After the floor became relatively dry, immediately we started washing the stuff that were soaked, including my doormat, some fabric, my bag and other stuff.

One of my new bath towels, which very unfortunately fell into the flood, was disposed of. I don’t think I would dare to use it no matter how many times it is washed!

Everything ended very late that night, and for the whole night we were anxious that it would happen again, while we were sleeping!

Luckily it didn’t!

This afternoon, the agent of our house asked a contractor to come and try to fix the problem, and guess what he said?

“Major blockage, might have to drill walls and stuff…! Err… Let me talk to Cindy first!” (Cindy is the agent)

And he left.

Let’s hope he comes back soon and fixes it soon, I don’t think we can survive the floods for more than a few times!

I just went for dinner at a branch in The Curve today. While the prices are a little expensive, you’ll always find Kim Gary Restaurants totally full; Apart from its nice and unique dishes, I think it’s also thanks to the uprising ‘yum cha‘ culture among youths in Malaysia.

I think there are 2 main types of ‘yum cha‘ places. The normal kopitiams – Where you sit by the road and drink teh tarik; and the ‘high class’ franchise restaurants – Brands like Kim Gary, Old Town Kopitiam, Wong Kok Char Chan Teng (Wong Kok Hong Kong Restaurant) etc.

Wierdly enough, apparently many of the second type restaurant owners are (or are pretending to be) from Hong Kong!

Just go around the city, and you’ll find ‘Hong Kong styled’ restaurants popping up everywhere! I don’t see a lot of ‘Singapore-styled restaurants’ or ‘Indonesia-styled restaurants’, why Hong Kong?

I also noticed that the so-called ‘high-class’ kopitiams are all adopting the same method for ordering food. Typically, you choose from the menu, mark your order on a piece of paper listed with the names of all the dishes, and a waiter comes to confirm everything and process your order.

I really wonder where are they copying it from! From my experience, they don’t do that in Hong Kong! Hmm…

Anyway, Kim Gary’s menu confirms that ARE Kim Gary branches in Hong Kong, so the boss is obviously not some fat local Ah Beng, whew! Here’s a photo of the menu page:

According to the information in the menu, A few Kim Gary restaurant branches in Hong Kong are called ‘Gary Cafe’, ‘Gary Restaurant’, and ‘Kam Gary Restaurant’. There is also a cute branch name called ‘Apple Restaurant‘, I wonder why…?

• Note: the following story is fictional. (In Case Kim Gary sues me! =)

Maybe the evolution went like this: At first the boss, named Gary, opened his own ‘Gary cafe’. Later, he thought that the word ‘cafe’ was not attractive enough, so he changed the name to ‘Gary Restaurant’.

A couple of years later, he found out that there were too many guys named ‘Gary’ in Hong Kong, so he added his surname into the restaurant’s name, and it became ‘Kam Gary Restaurant’. The Cantonese translation of “金” is “Kam”, after all.

Then, business was booming and Kam Gary Restaurant was expanding globally! Some investors told the boss that perhaps they should change it to ‘Kim Gary Restaurant’ since it would sound more like an international brand… And so ‘Kim Gary Restaurant’ it became.

— end of fictional story —

If the story was true, what do you think the next evolution would be?

I had no idea until I went back to Ipoh last month and saw this banner when I was driving:

I really thought that Kim Gary has finally opened a branch in Ipoh but something was wrong!

No! It’s SIM Gary!

I couldn’t believe it so I drove around looking for it, and I found the shop in a nearby area:

OMG… It seems that they even imitated the Chinese word design of Kim Gary… Copycats!

Stroll down any street and you’ll probably find a few common ‘stick no bills‘ signs on the walls or pillars alongside the street.

I guess the shopowners are just too tired of people sticking ads for sexual treatment pills, MLMs, and even Along (loan shark) services, on their private walls!

In my opinion, ads about Along services clearly dominate over ads about other services, Alongs nowadays are so professional that they provide all sorts of ‘offers’ like low interest rates, receive cheque instantly, and so on…! Their ‘marketing agents‘ made sure that you will always see their ads anytime, anywhere!

So, let’s say you own a mamak stall, and you want to stop people from wallpaper-ing your store’s walls with Along services and ubat jantan promotions; and they are definitely not going to stop just because you put up a ‘stick no bills‘ sign, what are you going to do?

Here’s a shopowner who did a very effective job in making sure that his walls are free of ads. Instead of just a ‘stick no bills‘ sign, he added a warning below:

It says: “Warning, do not stick any advertisements, wrongdoers will be prosecuted or beaten.’

Now that’s an extremely effective sign! You stick ads, you will be beaten up! It’s even scarier that being prosecuted!

A full bus means that you’ll have to stand for the whole journey, and it sucks.

Imagine you’re a working adult without a private vehicle, you’ve been working for a whole day, waited for the bus for half an hour (standing!), and finally when the bus came, you thought that you can finally sit down and rest a bit, but then you realized that it’s full and you had to stand all your way home! Really sucks, right?

Anyway, I went to 1 Utama and I happened to see this bus, I can imagine that it will be the ‘nightmare bus’ for most people, especially busy people.

*The words on the bus are NOT Photoshoped in, they were really there on the bus!

A bus that is SENTIASA PENUH!!! Dude!

If I were the working adult that I described just now and I see this bus coming, I think I would really cry!

For those who do not understand Malay, the bus company is considerate enough to have an English translation on the other side of the bus, so that everyone can understand!

Driver: Eh, don’t bother to come up lah, this bus always full 1, ok!

Perhaps they did that to prevent the disappointment that you might feel when you realize that the bus is full after you board it, by warning you of it the instant you see the bus approaching!

Just kidding lah! I guess it’s only that RapidKL is very confident towards their services! Good for them!

Damn, I really need a car!

The photo was taken in Seremban a few weeks ago when I was there visiting my friends. Placed outside the shops along the streets were small machines selling capsules with fancy toys inside, although the truth is that the toys that you get are usually not those that are being advertised on the machine. Really sucks, doesn’t it?

But I guess if any of you guys had a normal childhood, you would have at least bought once from those machines… Well, I did when I was young!

Anyway, here’s one that caught my attention that day, not because I wanted to buy it, of course, but rather the products that they are selling did.

Last time they were selling fake tamagochi and digimon figurines because kids were crazy over them. But now they are selling car logo keychains! Just answer this question: Does your 9-year-old nephew go crazy over cars? Will he run around saying how great the latest Lamborghini or Ferrari is?

Some might say “yes”, but I’ll bet most 9-year-olds will just say “…huh”?

Anyway, a closer look made me laugh out loud:

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing… the Fellari.

I think the Chairman of Ferrari will really have a heart attack if he sees this.

Ferrari, arguably the most famous sports car in the world, was being mispelled in the midst of all the competiting car brands surrounding it! You can almost hear the Mercedes-Benz logo beside it whispering: “Yo buddy, they can’t even get your name right, maybe you should just shove off!”

Let me clarify that I have absolutely nothing against Ferrari, just thought that you people might wanna see this. =)

But before that, please allow me to introduce:

The prestigious musée du Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, in Paris.

Image taken from visitingdc.com

The Louvre museum is the home for many famous historical paintings and arts such as the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, the Venus de Milo statue etc. It was a major scene in the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, written by Dan Brown.

Sounds interesting right? But if you can’t afford the flight tickets to France, I have a great recommendation, right here in Malaysia!

Back home, this is where I call the Louvre of Malaysia:

It is basically an underground pedestrian tunnel across a busy road, on which you are very likely to get hit if you don’t use the tunnel. Somehow it is the only way to cross the road, and as far as I know, there are no other alternatives.

So you walk through the entrance and voila! You’re in for some really cool artworks as it seems that here is the place where the greatest graffiti artists gather to show their talent!

This is the entrance staircase to the ‘galleries’. From here, you’ll start smelling an extremely sickening stench that could either come from rotten corpses or diseased water, it’s hard to tell.

Basically, it’s something like a scene that you’re likely to encounter in horror games like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, or Half-Life series.

Anyway, once down the staircase, you’ll arrive at the “art galleries”, and there’s no entrance fee! Yay!

Here are a few comparisons between the real Louvre Museum in Paris, and my own self-designated Malaysian ‘Louvre Museum’, I think you’ll find them strangely identical:

This is the Grand Gallery in the real Louvre Museum, Paris. It’s the place where many ultra-famous painting are displayed on the walls on either sides of it:

Image taken from davincicode.postkiwi.com

VS.

The Grand Gallery of our underground “Louvre museum” (the scary pathway of the tunnel):

Caution: Don’t look at this photo at after 12A.M., it looks like a photo in which a ghost might just appear in the middle of the pathway… >.<

Here, we can truly see the works of some of the greatest graffiti artists in Malaysia! I’m not insulting them, but I’m actually quite impressed by their artworks! But of course graffiti should never be encouraged, right?=)

In the Grand Gallery of the real Louvre Museum, rests the great Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci, with her famous and intriguing smile. Some people say that the smile has a hidden meaning in it…

VS.

Our own Mona Lisa with the great famous smile!

Yes, I know that is nothing too nice… But that’s just the opening! Here are some of the other artworks:

1) A vampire’s head, I presume. But with quite nice colours and tones.

2) A awesome dunno-what-is-it. But it’s really cool!

3) Incredible design, especially when it is done on a wall at such a large scale! But frankly, I really don’t know what the words are… =\

When it comes to art you always see these things =):

Those are the few nicer ones that I managed to get a photos of. Thats because when I proceeded to the exit, I finally found the source of the disgusting, horrifying smell:

A POOL OF BLOOD!!!

No la, I guess they are just some leftovers of the painting materials, plus some contained rain wate, all mixed together and unremoved for many many months, maybe years. And guess what? I actually STEPPED IN THAT DISGUSTING POOL!!

Accidentally of course!

All my mood of photographing left me instantly and I just wanted to get out of there to clean my shoes. Sigh!

But before we got up, I managed to get the photograph of a cute sign telling you the direction of the exit! How considerate of them!

Exit this way up….!

Well there you have it, my self-designated Louvre of Malaysia! I know there might be some other graffiti arts sites with better artworks than these, but anyway… *shrugs*.

Before I end, I must stress that it really really STINKS in there! If you ever need to use the tunnel try to wear a gas mask or something… I nearly fainted standing there taking these photos!

I’m sure most of you have heard of the popular TV series Early Edition. If you’re not familiar with the storyline, do have a look here.

Staring kyle Chandler, the series is about a man who receives newspapers a day ahead of time; in simpler words, he receives tomorrow’s newspapers today! With the knowledge of what’s going to happen tomorrow, he then did a lot of extraordinary and heroic stuff like preventing disasters and saving people.

A very interesting TV series, but unfortunately, it is not real.

My experience, however, is REAL.

This morning I bought 3 different issues of the Malay newspaper, Seleksi, because it contained some special information that I needed. I never read Seleksi before because I usually read English newspapers. In case some of you might not have heard of Seleksi before, here’s a photo of the main cover:

Well, nothing much special about the newspaper besides the fact that it reports news that are really out of the ordinary. Things that you can never find in newspapers like The Star or NST.

As I said, I bought 3 different issues of the newspaper, and they are, respectively, issues of the 1st December 2006, 15th December 2006, and 15th January 2007.

Wait a minute, something didn’t sound right, I thought today is only the 8th January 2007… Then I checked the date on my computer, and sure as heck it is! What the hell is next week’s newspaper doing here?!

Here’s a solid proof that I received next week’s Early Edition of Seleksi:

This photo of the said issue was taken beside the webpage of www.timeanddate.com, which displays the current date and time of a particular area, as in my case, Kuala Lumpur. You can check out the webpage Here.

If you can’t see the date clearly, Please Click Here to see the enlarged image. Which will clearly prove that I’ve got a newspaper issue 1 week ahead of time! Yay!

And it’s not merely a front page misprint, ALL the pages inside are labelled 15th January 2007!

Wahahahaha… I am NOT going to prevent the disasters from happening as Kyle Chandler in Early Edition did!

Future news selling at $1000 per news! Any takers? =p Nah, just kidding, there might be lottery results in there, not gonna let you guys get it.

*The images below are taken from Chinese restaurants in China by their respective authors, the words in the images are original and are neither added nor edited*

Feeling Hungry?

Imagine you’re a person who couldn’t understand Chinese at all, and you arrive at this cute little chinese restaurant in China where you decide to have lunch in. The Chinese waiter politely hands you the menu, and waits silently to take your order.

Opening the menu, you see a lot of Chinese words that you don’t understand at all, but ahh.. luckily, there’s the English translation:

Let’s see, there’s soup and… sand?! And… wth?!

Err… I think I’ll have some cook sand and a the chicken hates the soup of because they… emm…. sound delicious.

Anyway, maybe the main course menu is more comprehensible…

Chinese waiter: Sir, which pick would you like to pick? We have a special promotion on the Milan pigs this week!

No wonder Napoleon of France won so many battles, probably because he knew how to fry the idea powder! If only the Russians knew it…

Wow now even joss sticks know how to cook…

Here’s a meal for the Americans: The cold cow in the special grade west of the United States picks the meal!

Countries for sale! Grab one and rule!

The company directors over at Ovaltine and Horlicks must be very pleased to have their products renamed as “The farmland of” and “Good the Gram of” respectively!

What?

The above menu does not suit your taste?

Perhaps you’d wanna try these…

Beware, nowadays not only do people fuck; shrimps, turnips, and joss sticks fuck too!

Well, I guess the chinese word ‘gan’, which means ‘dry’, also means ‘fuck’ in Mandarin… And they translated it directly…
*sighs*

I bet a foreigner who only understands English will really freak out in this restaurant. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t fancy any kind of food served with joss sticks.

Joss sticks