First astronomy lesson
After the TV, I went to lock the outer gate. The sky was clear and I could see the full moon and many stars. I saw the brightest star twinkling on the lower left corner not far away from the moon. I guessed it was Jupiter. Jupiter is the largest planet and one of the four outer gas giants or Jovians in our solar system. To be sure, I checked with Stellarium on my Mac and confirmed it was Jupiter.
Then I called the boys and mom to gaze at the sky and told them it was Jupiter the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet in our solar system. I told them that Jupiter would take about 11 years to orbit the Sun compare to one year for our planet earth. The two older boys responded with a big “Wow!” Nik was rather excited and very vocal.
We could also see some other stars and Ara, Triangulum Australe, Libra and Virgo constellation. They were magnificent.
The kids had their first astronomy lesson and so did I. I learned that Pluto is no longer the ninth planet in our solar system. Instead, the International Astronomical Union or IAU has reclassified Pluto as one of the four dwarf planets together with Ceres, Makemake and Eris.
I will reconsider to acquire a telescope soon. I almost invested in a Meade’s ETX-90PE in 1998 but for some reason I did not. I will consider a larger model, ETX-125PE.
I became interested in astronomy when I was first introduced by two persons. One was Dr. Ghaffar and Khoo. Dr. Ghaffar is a nuclear physicist and Khoo is my ex-classmate and a mechanical engineer. Both of them were very involved in star gazing. Khoo had even built his own 12″ diameter Newtonian Reflective Telescope.
I almost invested into one as mentioned earlier but I didn’t. At some point, I became very interested in astrophysics. Writing software to model celestial body can be interestingly challenging. Perhaps I should go get a Ph.D. and become an astrophysicist. Or, perhaps, one of the boys will become a renown astrophysicist.
Durian, durian, durian
It is durian season. Last night when we were at grandma’s place, she and grandpa asked D if he liked to eat durian. We had been talking about durian feast since couple of weeks ago. So, tonight we decided to buy some durian to give grandma and kids a treat.
We drove to Bukit Baru to source for durian. Finally found a Malay stall opposite SRJK Kek Seng. Bought 9kg of durian and proceeded to grandma’s. The kids had not been to grandma’s place for months. The kids were really enjoying at grandma’s place. We stayed until 2330. The kids will definitely wake up late in the morning. They usually sleep early but once a while we allow them to sleep during weekends so that they can adjust to adults’ timing. They must be sleeping soundly by now.
A great Sunday morning
Yesterday, we took two bicycles to the town for repair. I hadn’t been using the bicycle carrier since 2006. In the evening, we took the bicycles to the park. After dinner, we went home and the weather seemed like to rain. Actually, I thought of taking the kids and the bikes to the park again the next morning. But it started to rain before midnight. We changed the plan, no bike but jogging at the park.
This morning, the weather was so cool because after the rain and was perfect to go fill up the gas tank. So, we all woke up early and went to the petrol station to fill up the tank. After that we went to the park followed by breakfast.
We went to the old part of Melaka China town near by the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple for dim sum. This restaurant is Melaka most famous and oldest dim sum restaurant and one of the very few pioneer. My dad used to bought us buns and glutinous rice in lotus leaf. They were delicious 30 years ago as I could remember. That was one of the bad dim sum we ever had. Actually, the taste not too bad at all but certainly was not a good one. The service was very bad and not really kids- or baby- friendly. We quickly had some and left. When checking the bill, it was quite expensive. I will definitely not recommend that dim sum restaurant.
Forget about the bad experience at breakfast. Anyway, we all enjoyed very much today. At night we watched movies at home.
Increased productivity
After solving the post-commit hook script problem (read here), I am a happy software developer again. I am able to receive post commit emails to help me keep track of changes in my development work. I have been experiencing the same level of efficiency and productivity before this problem struck me.
I guess I am happy of the whole week of activities and I am signing off to bed.
Dmitry is slowly becoming independent
We have been co-sleeping for years. When Dominik arrived, I have to move out of our room to make space for him. Last year, it was time for Dmitry to sleep in his own bedroom. We bought a double decker for him and Richie but it had not been used for a while until recently. Read more
Dmitry doing dishes
After the lunch, Dmitry offered to take my dishes to the sink and started doing dishes. Read more
Food prices are going up
Today, I could notice traffic volume had decreased quite substantially at some busy junctions. Tonight, when we were out to grab some groceries, we noticed the streets were quieter than usual. Guess this is the after effect of fuel price hike.
M has been advising us to stock up some food items with long shelf life. After reading news and considering Wall Street has begun to speculate on food prices, we decided to start stocking up some food items especially rice. I made some analysis based on Geography. The south-western monsoon season is approaching. The rice planting and harvesting season will end soon when the monsoon comes. Looking at the situation in Myanmar that was hit by typhoon Nagis, the future for rice supplies does not look optimistic to me. In addition, the price hike of diesel (RM1 per liter) has prompted transportation company to increase their transportation cost by 38%! This cascading effects will cause food prices to increase again very soon.
Just now, I grabbed 8 bags (80kg) of rice. That will last us for 16 months. Tomorrow, I am going to grab some more rice again for my mom.
Another good reason to stock up essential food items will be reducing the trips to hypermarket thus saving petrol.
Dmitry’s 6th birthday party
Finally, the party hour came. This is the day Dmitry has been waiting for: presents, birthday cake and guests. Mommy ordered a Spiderman birthday cake. I had no time to collect it from the bakery so we asked uncle BS to pick it up for us
Yummy bread!
LA baked another loaf of bread this morning to make garlic bread for Dmitry’s birthday party tonight. This is the second loaf of bread she baked since our Princess’s bread maker is back last Friday. LA baked a milk bread. The house was full of fresh bread aroma.
Beetle
This afternoon, when I was ready to go to customer’s place, Dmitry spotted a beetle on the ground at the car porch area. It was actually under the car and thank God I did not crush it. We became excited as it was not dead. I swiftly picked it up and put it on a brush and told Dmitry to hold it. And I dashed into the house to get my camera. Here are some photos I took. I put the beetle into a plant pot so that it would not dehydrate. I didn’t check if it was still alive. I hoped it would be still alive. I don’t know its name but I will find out later.
Dead twice!
Our Princess bread maker came back yesterday from Pensonic service center after almost 4 weeks of warranty claim. Read about the first warranty claim here. According to the service center, they had baked a cake to test if it was working. So, I went home with the bread maker happily. But when I was coaching half way through, LA called to let me know that it was not working. The kneading blades were not turning at all. Another waste of ingredients.
This morning I switched on the bread maker without any ingredients in it. It was not working. I left it turned on for almost an hour and it was not working. So I called the Pensonic service center and one of the lady told me immediately that their headquarters called them to get the unit back to have the circuit board replaced. They offered to collect from my house. Hmm… otherwise I would have the chance to shoot them.
Anyway, Pensonic service vehicle came to collect after noon. Next time when it comes back, it better works. Otherwise, I am going to take this to consumer court and have them to reimburse the material wasted.
If you are planning to buy a bread maker, don’t buy Princess bread maker! I hope Princess will be reading this blog. Beef up your quality, Princess!
Our Princess Bread Maker is dead!
WTF! It is only about one month old and LA had only baked 3 loafs of bread and the spinners was dead! She got it on February 11. Read here. She discovered that this morning when she was trying to bake a loaf of bread for her mother and all of us.
We chose Princess among other brands like Kenwood and Sharp. We chose Princess because it was better (solid) built (and look nicer) and the pan was bigger. But it is so fragile and of low quality. It is dead for just one month and baked 3 loafs!
I will send the unit back for warranty claim this afternoon. I will demand a new unit swap. No repair is acceptable by my standard.
Our Princess Bread Maker
LA has got her Princess bread maker on February 11. She had made a few breads and they all tasted very good. Today she made another one after she managed to buy some special ingredients for bread making. She made a wholemeal bread with the wholemeal flour she bought from PJ. Here is the photo of the Princess bread maker and the delicious fresh hot wholemeal bread.
Dinos are down with flu
Oh dear! Three dinos are down with flu again. CNY is just around the corner. This is what LA and I fear about. I took them to the clinic nearby to get some flu medicine then took them for a spin at downtown. In the car while waiting for the light to turn green, I taught Richie the word “downtown” and “uptown”.
We went to the town to see some CNY decoration. The decoration is not as beautiful as 20 years ago. Partly the reason is lack of sponsorship. Shops are not willing to sponsor as the local government does not care to participate in the CNY decoration.
I hope I will have some time this weekend to go downtown for photo shooting. I always wanted to do it but did not find time for it. I hope this year I can find some time for it.
Orders All Done!
We received an order of 11 hampers from KL last Saturday. After 3 days of sleepless night, finally we had all the orders done up and ready for delivery tomorrow. LA, especially, has 3 sleepless nights. She did not sleep at all last night. I just done helping her to get the last two hampers up so that she can wrap them up in the afternoon and go to bed early tonight. I will go to bed early tonight. It will be a busy and hard day tomorrow to delivery to various locations around KL. I will be traveling alone tomorrow as the car will be a load full of hampers.
IP Flooding
I am experiencing IP flooding on my router. It notifies me by email about this attack. Right now, I have identified the source and hopefully I can nail this attacker soon. This is not the first time I experience IP flooding. I have received quite many email notifications in the past 3 weeks but I was out. It is coincident that I am still at my computers solving some server problems.
SVN setup
I’ve finally found time to setup svn at my home net after so many months. My svn server was down when my previous Linux box was down with a dead hard disk last year. The setup was quite a brisk. I had everything installed and configured last night. The test for remote access using a url was successful. I could import, checkout and check in. Because it was already late, about 1AM, I felt rather tire and went to bed.
This morning, I hacked some codes to provide a rather informative post commit email notification. All are done except the check in will stall. It takes a long time (and possibly hang!). I have yet to fully test before I begin my development project again.
Snake!
I like snake but I never touch one before. Today, I came to a close encounter with a snake. My telephone and DSL fritz again. I could not make a call from my house telephone so I went to mom’s house to report a faulty line to Telekom. When I arrived there slightly before noon, I saw a snake sliding on the electrical cable on the wall of the neighbor’s house. I saw its tail moving and sliding into the crevice between the wall and electric cable. At first glance, the color of the snake was black. It could be the venomous cobra. I could estimate it was about 3 to 4 feet long!
Without further delay, I called the Bomba (Fire Department) to help capture the snake. I waited at the front of mom’s house to keep an eye on the snake while waiting for the Bomba to arrive. After some minutes, they came in a fire engine.
They checked the crevice but could not find any sign of a snake. I told them that I really saw its tail about 2 feet long and that could not be a lizard’s tail. One of the guy inspected further under the crevice and he saw something and confirmed a snake was hiding in the crevice. He used a thick cable to reach into the crevice and the snake fell out.
I was right! It was about 4 feet long. Black but with some green and black cross hatching. They said it was “ular daun” (literally translated leaf snake).
The photo (click for larger view) is not so clear to confirm the species of the snake. But it could be Chrysopelea ornata or Chrysopelea paradisi (paradise tree snake). This tree snake could fly and often called flying snake or flying tree snake. Watch the movies how the snake “fly” here. This is a website of Jake Socha, a hepatologist from The University of Chicago. Very interesting.
Back to the snake. We thought it was dead or passed out because it was not moving. That’s why I went closer (but not too close) to take the photo. After a while, it became lively again and moved swiftly under my car. The Bomba men were trying to surround it but it moved too quickly and finally it found an exit and disappeared into the bushes in front of mom’s house. I saw it moving swiftly into the bush and I was closest to it. I could have picked up its tail but I did not have the gut to do it. Not like my karate grand master who is so quick that he can catch an Okinawan Habu snake with his bare hand. The Okinawan Habu snake is a very venomous snake on Okinawa.
The incident also brought two schoolmates to meet again. One of the Bomba guy, asked me if I was from St David just before they left. We exchanged some information and he appeared to be Khalid from 5A2, same year as me. What a happy ending. The snake did not die, two ex-schoolmate met again. Really happy ending.
Bamboo Blinds
Every year around this time, the sun will shine directly at the window at our master bedroom without fail. It heats up the room considerably in the afternoon until in the evening. When we remodeled our garden in July, I asked the contractor to have a small area built up to about 1 foot higher in front of the window. My idea is to have a small area for some leisure activities such as drinking tea in the afternoon or evening. The only thing which I have not done is to install or build a roof to cover that area.
Until the roof above the area has been built, the sun will still shine at the window at this time of the year. I got an idea about installing blinds after building the roof. I prefer bamboo shades or blinds which give the Zen favor.
SelectBlinds gives 25% off everything until this Sunday and free shipping with FedEx or UPS. They guarantee delivery before Christmas! Should I get something for our home this Christmas?
Smooth Yogurt
Many of the local brands of yogurt are heavily sweetened and I don’t really like them. Certainly, we don’t like to give them to the kids. All these local brands including imported brands of yogurt are really smooth. All the while, I enjoyed smooth yogurt. This becomes the opposite not long before I read in Purely Random about yogurt. LA has told me about stirring yogurt some times ago.
Don’t stir the yogurt! All the yogurts on the shelf are stirred and blended with bits and favors of fruits to enhance the taste. In the process of adding fruity favors and bits, the yogurt has to be stirred. Stirring breaks up the solid texture of the yogurt.
The Sunglo’s all natural yogurt contains all the solid texture. It tastes great when mixed with fruity jam!
The price of the yogurts are getting more expensive now. I am thinking of making our own yogurt. I will write about our experience making our own yogurt later.
Garden remodeling
LA and I love plants. I have been searching for some appropriate garden decor. Since we remodeled our garden portion in July, we have no soil ground for any plants. The remodeling is necessary for the safety of our children. Before I left for my sabbatical training on Okinawa, I saw a baby snake crushed to death by a car in front of my house. The remodeling would make our garden neater and safer. The soil ground became a cement ground. No more planting on the ground. We managed to keep some potted plants and we decided no more potted plants so to keep the spacious ground for the children to play and I can train in the garden too.
We love plants. Some ideas sparkled in my mind. We can have the plants hang on the garden wall as well as on the roof of the car porch beside the little garden. The hanger must be stainless and weather proof. I came across this site selling wrought iron garden decor. It has variety of wrought iron garden hooks and plant hangers which I am looking for. I prefer classical design.
With the holiday seasons coming, Wrought Iron Heaven offers discount. Perfect to make a great Christmas gift for LA. I found a hidden back door of how to get great discount while surfing their website. Go to the home page, scroll down half way until you read “Our Store now has over 1,300 home & garden items for you to choose from.” Click on the (,) comma to get your discount.
Termites Infestation
We had termites infestation in our home more than a year ago. In our area, swamps of alates can be seen every time before and after raining seasons. I noticed some trails from the window frames above the air well at the kitchen side and in the middle room.
There are many types of termites. Subterranean termites are the most common and economically important wood destroying termites around the world. Their nests can be many feet underground. The worker termites come up from the creeks on the walls to reach to any structures like wooden door frames, cabinets, roof as their food source. Termites need moist to survive. They build many tunnel networks underground and within the brick creeks to reach for any moisture and food.
Common household insecticide like aerosols are useless in termites control. They often kills those termites come into direct contact. The smell of the aerosol will deter other termites and these termites will move away and burrowing into other part of the house.
There are two type of termites control available in the market. One is a bait type like Sentricon and Exterra. The other type is Termidor which is liquid. Termidor is injected into the ground via a drilled hole on the floor. We treated our home with Termidor.
It is important to protect your property with regular termite inspections.
Dmitry is typing!
While I was working on my MacBook in the living room, Dmitry asked if he could type. “Dad, can I type I love my dad?”, he asked. “Sure, you can.”, I replied. I launched a text editor and let him type. He typed:
I love my dad
I love Richie
I love Nik
I love mum
I love Dmitry
Of course, he was typing with one finger.
Metal cabinet storage
One of the things I hate most about having wooden storage cabinets in the kitchen. When water or oil is splashed onto the wooden finishing surface, it will soak into the wood. After some time, the finishing will peel off and in worst case, the wooden part will expand and starting become crooked and peeling off too. I always disagree installing wooden cabinets in the kitchen where food, oil and water are the common items we work with in the kitchen.
I’ve look a few cabinets and found some metal cabinets made of high grade stainless steel. It is easy to clean and maintain if compared to wooden cabinets. And it lasts longer too. I think it will be the time to give a facelift to the kitchen.
High Tech Baby Sitting
LA needs to do some shopping and it’s morning nap time for Nik. She has to leave Nik at home and I will be baby sitting Nik while she and the other two dinos go shopping!
And I have some work to do. What now? An idea sparked in my head.
I have installed a web camera on the Windows box in the living room for her and D to use so that they can communicate with me through video Skype. The main reason was to communicate with me while I was away for a month to Okinawa for my karate training.
Hmm….
So, I Skype LA at the living room and I can have the video in my working room. Nik’s napping soundly in his wonderland while I am writing this post. What a high tech daddy! 
Adrenaline Hack
Wow! I’ve done it! Yes! Yes! Yes!
After a successful hack to receive a server-push JPEG stream from a video server (more story here), the next challenge for me was to display the JPEG in a GUI window.
I have been trying to get Carbon binding to work with gnat 4.3 on xcode but I am forced to abandon it for a while. I switched my target to GtkAda which will require X11 on Mac OS X. One plus side is that my application will be platform independent if I use Gtk/GtkAda. That means my application can be compiled and run on Linux, Solaris and Windows with the platform-independent GUI. More business may be and hopefully.
I was working to get GtkAda to work on my Mac since yesterday but I had corrupted some of the files I installed with Fink. Fortunately, I have a backup (actually I copied) on my MacBook but I guess I won’t need it anymore since the Gtk+2 and GtkAda are working on my Mac Mini. I will delete the copy on my MacBook later and install it with the working Gtk+/GtkAda.
I spent the entire morning and noon to write a single window, stripped down application to display the JPEG image I downloaded using the application I worked on earlier. I could not get the result. After many hours of hacking, I finally got it to work!
It is so rewarding to see it happens and I have got a good dose of adrenaline today. The feeling is difficult to describe. So it is difficult for other people to feel the excitement and the rewarding state of mind I am into.
The next challenge is to write an experimental application to continuously receive multiple streams of JPEG images and display them in multiple frames in a window, the last and toughest task with parallelism involving socket and GUI. After this, comes the serious software development by integrating all these experimental applications into a nice GUI application.
Grandpa’s 75th Birthday
Today we celebrated grandpa’s 75th birthday. We did not celebrate his birthday last year as we were busy with Dominik’s arrival. Mee’s return coincides with his birthday and she has not celebrated with him so many years.
Nik’s 1st Chinese Birthday
We celebrated Nik’s 1st birthday again upon request from granma and aunt Mee Hong. We celebrated Nik’s 1st birthday on August 21 before aunt Mee Hong came back. Today was Nik’s 1st Chinese birthday so we took this opportunity to celebrate again. LA baked a cake for Nik and D got a basketball from aunt Mee.
Isolation
What am I doing in this wee hour? Well, I can’t sleep. I have had too much sleep. So, I am thinking of writing a post and an essay for my Sensei. But I guess I will leave the essay for later.
I have fallen ill due to a strong virus. It happened on Friday night when I finished practicing, I jumped into my car with AC on to go pick my sister, Mee, at Melaka Mall. When I reached there, she wasn’t there and first thing struck my mind: The bus could be late due to long holiday traffic on the highway. It always happens when a long holiday over the weekend. So I parked my car and got down and went inside Melaka Mall. The AC was cooler there. She did not appear and apparently, she got on a different bus which used a different route and she arrived at the terminal. I rushed down to the terminal to pick her up.
When arrived home, I began to feel cold. I guessed I had caught a cold. My body started aching and shivering. After Mee finished with the gifts she bought for the kids, I took some paracetamol and went to bed. I felt better the next morning.
Last evening, I collapsed onto the couch after coming home from Jasin class. I was so tired and I took a rest. At 1900, I got up and took a quick hot shower, took some bites and off to City Church class. When I arrived there, I started to feel cold when I stepped out the car. I began to feel sick during the class but I managed to close the training by 2200. After the class, I felt really lousy.
After returning home, I took some paracetamol again and went to bed. Everything was fine until Monday morning when I started to feel some irritation in my throat. I took more paracetamol in the afternoon but this time it did not work. I began to shiver. At last, I went to see a doctor and she prescribed me some antibiotics and some other medication. My fever was 39C. It was another strong virus attack since July 7, 2006.
After the clinic, I went to buy some masks and wore the mask at home and began to isolate myself from the kids. Dmitry and Dietrich were looking at me lying on the bed with a mask on. They must be curious what happened to daddy. This is the first time I isolate myself. I got a feeling, when both of them looking at me pitifully and curiously, that I am a weird and horrible old man in isolation waiting to for his time. I felt weird.
I hope the isolation will minimize the chance for transmitting the virus to them.
Cold Soba
Besides karate and yoga, I learned to make Sushi rice ball and cold soba during my first trip to Okinawa. Actually, the one I ate on Okinawa was not soba. I can’t remember the name of the noddle but it was white in color. I learned to make the dishes from Sumako sempai.
Today, I prepared the two dishes for the kids and LA. They loved it so much!
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