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end of year

How time flies… it’s already one year. Okay, only in a few days the calendar will turn the leaf to a new year. But it was around this time 360+ days ago that I sat down thinking what I wanted to do for 2008. Now here I am, doing the same thing for 2009. Right now, it feels as if I was about to figure out what to do with 2008 and it’s already going to be 2009. I just blink blink and it’s a whole year just passed by.

On January 1st 2008, I joined with innumerable others in Flickr doing what we call The Project365. In short, it’s about taking a photo a day, for the whole year. It was supposed to be a self-portrait for the whole year. It started quite well initially, but after a while I got tired taking photos of myself… then I changed to any kinds of photo for that particular day, then back to self-portraits and the cycle repeats till today. So what’s next for 2009? Am I going to start the same thing again – no way! :-)

For 2009, I’m still not sure… will have to think about it. I’ll start it when January 1st comes.

But for now, since in Islamic calendar it’s already the new year then I would like to wish everyone Selamat Menyambut Maal Hijrah 1430H and hope all wishes comes true and prayers granted.

…till next blog, next year.

nature fights back

Around the area where I live, there were almost 10 landslide incidents since early 90′s. The gap between each is roughly 2 years. the major one claimed 48 lives, 15 years ago. The next biggest one happened yesterday morning which claimed 15 lives, as of today’s count.

Since Highland Tower incident, a few things were done by MPAJ and State Govt to “watch” over the hills, structural developments that are affecting hillside areas, geological monitoring etcetera etcetera… but what does all that mean?

From my own daily observations since I’ve been living in this area, it’s all just passively “watching” any recurrence of landslides (which are mostly minor ones, not enough to scare the shit out of them) and then quickly clearing the affected area before everyone wakes up for work. Some of the small landslides were cleared so fast, I didn’t even notice it happened when I passed by the area.

Other than that, pretty much nothing was done to prevent it. Ok, maybe I don’t know what they’re doing behind closed office and perhaps they do have plans etcetera on this kinda thing but I believe even if they do, the executions is so slow that it’s almost nonexistent.

Newspapers were reporting that the abandoned construction area was one of the major cause, some were saying that the latest construction on the hill top, some says that it’s just an act of God, etcetera. I say, it’s a result of poor planning, badly executed management and too busy with politics rather than actually managing the area.

In this country, preventive maintenance is not something that many people appreciates due to the fact that they don’t really see the benefits first hand. It’s not only the State Govt or MPAJ to be blamed, the public too because whenever any plans are proposed, there’s always a group of people objecting to it or criticizing it as either an act of corruption or a waste of public funds. Be it from widening and making the sidewalks accessibly beautiful to more complicated stuffs that maintains the stability of soils for purposes to prevent incidents like this.

Since we Malaysians like to bitch and moan to just about everything, then if we’re to blame anyone, then it should be everyone. Though the higher margin of blame goes to the politicians that likes to mince words from every directions whether proposing or opposing any plans, they’re the ones that always have the last say whether any thing can or can’t be done.

lost it.

I’ve lost it. I just don’t feel that I’m a *nix geek anymore. one of the reasons why this blog is called what it is called now and no longer by the name it used to be.

I am now what the sysadmin often calls as “the error between keyboard and chair”. I can’t even get the simplest things through, the commands were all just lost and I’m dealing with syntax error more than anything…. can’t write a $#%@&! damn thing anymore be it awk, perl, javascript or even the stupid bash scripts.

I can’t even understand all the scripts I myself wrote a few years ago.

Mac probably would be disappointed at me… but I’m sorry bro, really am turning into one of those who plan things on the surface rather than doing the actual geek stuffs.

#/sbin/shutdown -h now