Archive for September 2008

UMNO, give us back our country

anak You have been stewards for our country long enough. What you have vowed to protect, you are now keen to destroy. Instead of punishing one of your own for seditious remarks, you wag a finger at him and instead send the ‘tattletale’ who reported his words to your dungeons.

You want to talk about your racial rights? My own people have honoured their ancestors’ spirits on Aki Nabalu long before you even had kingdoms. But the Kadazan Dusuns have never tried to lord it over the other races in Sabah because we know that under God, we are all the same. We blame you for the myth of one race being superior over others. We’ve never felt entitled to anything so why do you have that claim?

MCA and Gerakan – you are an embarrassment to the people you claim to represent. No better than the ruling party, you keep rolling over and playing dead when they tell you. MCA president – do you know what nepotism means? Do you think your party members won’t notice all the special favour you bestow upon your brother? Cowards with no dignity, traitors who serve money and power.

MIC, of all the race-based parties, you have failed your people the most. 51 years after Merdeka and what have you done for the majority of your people? Why do so many of them live in squalor, resort to crime or commit suicide? Blame yourselves for the Indians often resorting to weedkiller because you, like the government, does nothing for them.

No more divide and conquer.

No more corruption and waste.

No more wasting our tax money on expensive trips, pricey cars and your wives’ shopping.

Give us back our country, Barisan. You’ve done too much harm already.

It’s not just the government. It’s us.

grief All the talk about changing our government and all the excitement about Sept 16 is worthless…if we refuse to see the bigger cancer in our society.

It’s not just the government. It’s us.

We who have refused to think for ourselves, but let the government handle things.

We who never questioned the policemen taking duit kopi.

We who never bothered mixing with people outside our own race, or never bothering to understand their beliefs.

I have Chinese friends who say that Islam is the problem with our country, and that it creates hate and fear. That Islam oppresses women. But it’s not their fault they meet bad Muslims and have to read Western media that makes all Muslims look like hard-line fanatical morons.

Then there are the Malays I know who believe that all it takes is a drop of holy water and they’ll be unable to make the profession of faith. Was your faith really that weak to begin with? Does your God not love you enough to protect you from the evil powers of holy water? Holy water isn’t an all powerful conversion tool, by the way. If it did work in that manner, rest assured the Vatican would have poured it into the water supply to save our souls. Trust me. (No offence to you Catholics but do you think the Pope would have passed up a chance to SAVE everyone? Heh.)

We have all failed our country by being selfish, by not embracing what it is to be Malaysian. To be Malaysian is simply to regard your fellow citizen as a Malaysian first. A Malaysian who just happens to be of a certain race or religion.

You blame the BN, you curse them for rising prices, corruption and bad governance.

But you helped put them there, didn’t you? By not voting or being silent about injustice, about saying such moronic Polyanna things like “oh, at least we’re not as bad of as Zimbabwe, Burma, etc.”

We blame the government for creating what we are now – a bunch of spineless, opportunistic, lazy, chest-pounding individuals with nothing to show for it but the bloody Petronas Towers.

Well, guess what? They created us, but we created them too. We raised children to grow up believing they had the right to drive like morons, pay off policemen and kowtow to fat, lazy politicians.

If you really want to be a real Malaysian, then do yourself and future generations a favour. Get a spine and change yourself, and not just aspire to changing the country.

So bad it’s good

Some things are just so mind-screwingly in bad taste, you just have to look. Mind-numbingly wacky choreography, Scandinavian blonde male with low-necked sparkly shirt, super-schmaltzy music.

For a real-life parallel, I’d compare the dancers to the members of Barisan National. No matter how horrible the choreography (party line), they blindly dance to it anyway.

So hopefully we will see the end of the status quo next week.

But never, alas, the end of bad choreography.

No, it’s not OK to steal

Remember A? Yes, we ended up having a heated disagreement on MSN about…game piracy. We both have strong views on many subjects, often on the extreme opposite views. Let’s not go into the verbal fisticuffs we had when debating war and pacifism. He’s all “Bush was right to send his soldiers to pre-empt terrorist threats”. I said, “Like hell he is!” You get the point. Fortunately we always end up just agreeing not to talk anymore about a subject when it gets too heated.

My stance is simple. Piracy is stealing.

But A’s stance is that he “has a right” to buy games for cheap and that pirated copies are just “liberated” for the use of all rights-loving people everywhere.

And when I told him that some game studios close shop because more people pirate games than buy them, or that huge teams of designers, programmers and their like work hard to create software, his answer:

”Well, that won’t matter to the man on the street.”

When I point out that games are pretty much non-essentials or luxuries even, he says that no one should stand between his ‘right’ to play games for an affordable price.

That’s like saying because I can’t afford eggs, it’s fine to steal them from my neighbour. Or buy them cheap from another neighbour who stole those eggs.

That’s one reason innovation fails to thrive in Malaysia – we want everything good and cheap. But people won’t bother giving good service if they know they won’t be fairly compensated.

What disappoints me most is that A is a writer. If someone plagiarised his work or paid him less than his going rate for mercenary work, he’d likely never shut up about it. Then, why shouldn’t gaming companies ensure their rice bowls are taken care off.

I can pay a plumber RM35 to fix my leaky toilet. A plumber in the UK would charge me twice that, in pounds.

To get my wisdom tooth extracted with some minor surgery involved, I pay less than RM200 at the nearby dentist.

In the U.S,, I’d be lucky if I don’t have to pay more than a grand in a private clinic.

I am a PC gamer; have been since I was seven. Kingdom’s Quest on an old IBM – ah, those were the days of simple pixilated graphics.

Now, I get full 3D experiences, realistic sound, online collaboration or whole worlds where I can interact with players from continents far removed.

And all that costs money. I don’t mind paying for it. If by chance, I buy a dud game then it’s my loss. I take it and remember the damn studio who came up with the piece of crap. At least, unlike gambling, the risks involved don’t mean I risk bankruptcy, my spouse leaving me or loan sharks trailing in my wake.

So if you love gaming, then love the ones who sweat and toil to bring them to you. Game programmers aren’t rich people by any means, neither are game designers. And game music composers? There’s a special spot in heaven reserved for their martyrdom.

Unsure whether to get a title? Wait for the reviews. Try the demos. Then if it’s worth it, save a little dosh and play it. If the game looks anywhere near dodgy, give it a miss until the full consensus comes out.

If you buy pirated games, then that’s your choice. Just don’t make it out like you’re entitled to cheapening others’ hard labour. Piracy is stealing – at least respect the game companies enough not to pretend it isn’t.

Oh, denizens of cuteness

sporelings

Spore!

Or the game that gives you the choice of creating eminently cute beings or scary behemoths that eat babies.

I chose the cute route. See those Princess Leialike orbs on my creations’ heads?

THEY SPIT POISON.

Very cute game, but I like that I can play it for a bit, save, then get back to whatever work I was doing.

Back to work.

The new M2U: Impressions

m2u

Banks and bloggers? Not the kind of combination you’d expect but that’s precisely what I got when I stopped by the preview event of the new Maybank2U.com. I was just one among the band of whom I call ‘the usual suspects’. Suanie, KY, LiewCF, James of FriedBeef, Chooki and…if I name anymore, I’ll sound like I’m namedropping. Let’s just say the bulk of the PPS horde showed up at Delicious, Marc Residence.

The site’s undergone a massive revamp in terms of content, layout and functionality. I can say that from the brief test-drive, it’s quite an improvement over the current version with a slickness to it that I’ve yet to experience from any local site.

That wasn’t what impressed me – what did was knowing that Maybank had conducted a rather extensive usability study, going so far as to involve around 1000 people. Which makes sense; this is a site that sees roughly 30 million transactions per month.

Maybank’s pretty much pioneered the whole ‘pay your bills from the comfort of your home’ shtick. They started first, though I remember all the teething problems from its earlier days. Like when it wouldn’t work on Firefox, when a TAC request would take half a day (if it went through at all) and other niggles that made me wonder why I persisted.

All of those little niggles have been fixed with time, but soon M2U was lagging behind the online presences of banks like HSBC. Time to play catch-up and from what I’ve seen so far, the new M2U looks promising.

Pluses:

  1. Streamlined, intuitive interface with a WordPress-like start page with shortcuts in neatly lined-up boxes (KY pointed that out, I totally missed it)
  2. Less cluttered, compact start page. The current version just has so much going on, my eyes tend to dart all over the place.
  3. My personal favourite: the Payments page. I like how the interface is very intuitive and how M2U is very accommodative of paying bills with OTHER credit cards – consolidating non-Maybank credit cards under one shortcut is to me an act of genius! (Considering as all my credit cards are not Maybank-issued. Heh.) Sneaky, rather. Instead of logging into Bank ABC’s online site to pay bills from there, I can pay all my bills with any credit card with the new M2U! Sweet.

Minuses:

  1. It’s still in beta stage so the site is slow. That will likely be fixed once the site goes live.
  2. Limited Buy Online options. I do love the phone credit top-up service but a few more choices wouldn’t hurt.
  3. I like the stripped-down no-nonsense feel of the site but at the same time, it feels a little too stripped down and bare. But that’s just me. Adding a personal touch to a banking website is probably a bit of a tall order.

Want the URL to the beta site? Sorry, you’ll just have to wait with the rest of the public later this month, when the link to the new site will be placed on the site for you to give the new M2U a whirl. It’s worth the test-drive.

Sometimes, everything can break your heart

Stress and expectations don’t bother me.

People do.

I hate sometimes, when I hand over my trust, when I say, hey I believe that you can look after your own shit. You’re capable. You know what you’re doing. I trust you.

Or, I care about you. I want only the best for you. I hope you feel that way too.

Then when you find that trust betrayed, what do you do?

You remember that it’s OK to trust people. It’s not OK to put your trust IN them.

Because people are people. They’re fallible. They make mistakes. They say things they don’t mean, they’re hurtful to you when they shouldn’t be, they’ll carry a grudge against you without even telling you what caused the grudge in the first place. They let you down. They lie. They turn their backs on you. They hurt the people you love most, which hurts you too in the bargain.

Because, for some unfathomable reason, hating and treating each other like crap is easier to do than caring or being good to them. Now I don’t equate being good with being nice. Sometimes, when my friend needs a frank verbal slap, I give it. Or when a guy is clearly interested in me and it’s unrequited, a hard letdown can sometimes be kinder than being nice and unknowingly leading him on. Like a friend of mine who was heartsick over a girl who was too chicken to just let him know “I am not, and never will be interested in you.”

It hurts to be let down. But it hurts more to nurse each grievance, each slight, each failure.

Because at the end of the day, you want the people you hurt to get past what you did. To forgive you. So it just makes sense to give that privilege right back.

“To err is human. To forgive, divine.”

And maybe, maybe I just want to feel a little godly sometimes.

WOW vs WAR

orcs.jpg

I shamelessly stole the image from The RL Update.
Am torn – do I get the new Sims 2 expansion or do I plonk down serious cash for Warhammer Online?

Retired from WOW (you will always be my one true MMO love) because the 6k ping was too much to handle. But Warhammer will have servers based physically in Oz! So they’ll be closer and not be quite as laggy as playing on a US-based server.

But I’m not all that invested in the Warhammer Universe the way I am in Warcraft’s. 
Perhaps I’ll get The Sims 2 Apartment this month, and wait to see what the general consensus is about the Warhammer Universe next month. 
Nigel thinks I should go back to WOW. eBola would agree but then he’s too busy to play too. Remember super tight-fisted A? He thinks COD is better than any MMO. Smartass.
MFM and David Lian would be bad choices to ask. Both of them still play Baldur’s Gate 2. Suan would say “I only play DOTA”. And the Sunflower would insist I join her in SL instead. 
My NaNoWriMo muse would just say…”OI YOU HAVE A NANOWRIMO KICKOFF MEETUP TO ORGANISE NOT OBSESS OVER SOME PRICEY GAME!” 
My NaNo muse might just win this round.

No, I am not proud to be a blasted elf

So I’m unreasonably excited about Warhammer Online dropping this month.
I’ve always preferred Warhammer Fantasy to 40k (sorry, David Lian). So I decided to take this quiz.
Oh, I am mortified at the results.
High Elf Badge- Prima Games Warhammer Online Class Quiz
And I always thought the High Elves were rather poncy. I fancied playing a Dark Elf instead.
But I suppose it’s my own fault for dressing up as Arwen once upon a time.
ears.jpg
Damn you, karma. Damn you.

Why I’m not using Chrome

I have four browsers of my PC.

Do stop snickering about my dorkhood.

IE, FF, Opera and now Chrome.

After deciding that switching between many browsers is a mighty pain in the behind, I’ve decided to choose one, and one only to use.

And I’ve chosen Opera.

IE is constantly plugged with security holes, FF crashes on me often, even though I have less than five bloody extensions and Chrome? Well. I’m still a bit mad at Google at trying to monopolise the Web. “Don’t be evil”, my arse.

“But Opera doesn’t have AdBlocker!” Who needs AdBlocker when all you need to do is right-click on content to block it.

And Chrome’s shortcuts to the sites you most use? Opera did it first with their Speed Dial. And they’ve Bittorrent integration. And mail. And chat.

Though I mostly love their widgets. How could you not love a widget like this one:

viking

I am awed by the cuteness. Now I must go and smite some CSS…oh, and by the way, one of Opera’s founders also happened to co-create the CSS protocol, dontcha know?

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