The Red Breakfast show was a part of my morning drive for more than a year (107.6 in Penang). I think I tuned into it by accident, and never changed the dial after that. Red.fm’s evening shows left a lot to be desired, but the Breakfast show had lively, quirky discussions and interviews.

If I recall correctly it started off with Tim and Will, then it became Shaz and Will a few months later. While other stations played the same “new” songs ad nauseum or did prank calls, the Red Breakfast show sported interviews with people like Tian Chua, Teresa Kok, and Lim Guan Eng; had “mini-series” like the Makan World Cup (listeners called in to vote for their favourite breakfasts), Madame Zorra and Ah Leong the Contractor; and discussions about current issues.

Of course the show wouldn’t have been what it was without Will’s hilarious impersonations of the Queen of England (he did Stephen Hawking and a Frenchman on occasion too). Those really made me laugh.

Shaz did a great job as the “straight guy” to Will’s sarcasm and quirkiness, and added a motherly dimension to the show.They made a really great team.

All good things come to an end, so they say :(. 1st December saw a revamp with both Will and Shaz leaving the show. On his blog Will signs off the show with a farewell post:

No, we’re not in Kamunting, eating eggs and Pedigree. No, we’ve not been fired for sexually harassing clergy. And no, we didn’t swear on air (although you wouldn’t believe how much we swore OFF air).

But there were a few issues here and there on both sides. Partly the fact that whoever is on won’t have to (or get paid to) do a sponsor blurb every 5 minutes. Partly the fact that Christmas leave doesn’t seem very sacrosanct to some people. Partly because you can only wake up at 4.30am every morning for so long before you decide to go slightly postal!

And partly because it was just the right time to do so. So don’t cry. Don’t lament. Don’t send vicious letters of complaint to the station threatening violence and damnation, etc (altho, if you really want to, I won’t stop you!). And don’t stop questioning what you read in the paper, what you hear on the news, what you’re promised by your MP, and what your boss tells you. Because, even though you won’t hear us, we still will be!

Sigh. I’ll have to find a new station now though. The “new” Red Breakfast show consists of the juvenile pair of J.D. and Dilley (cbf to find out their real names), who used to host the evening show. They were terrible then - the show consisted mostly of a single brain teaser taken off the Internet (or a book maybe). Their mediocrity spills over to the new show: it’s now 1 minute of show for every 20 minutes of music, and the main “draw” is a game where you identify a celebrity based on a single phrase played on the air. No one has gotten it right yet, unsurprisingly (do you think we sit around all day watching E! ?). Their suggestion today was that we should watch Youtube more.

Brickbats for the new show aside, thanks to Will and Shaz for giving us a year of quality entertainment. All the best!

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Somehow you elected Dubya into the White house not once but twice. Now people like Barack Obama don’t come around every decade, so do the right thing this time… please?

John McCain is just more of the same, more of the same - your run of the mill politician. But the real reason he’s going to lose imo is Palin. Nice going criticizing Obama for “not being tested” and then picking a running mate who only got her passport in 2006, and judging from a recent prank played on her by a Canadian radio station, doesn’t even know the name of the Canadian PM and is a complete bimbo.

Imagining her as the next President of the US (no matter what McCain’s doctors say, he IS still 72 and has undergone cancer treatment) gives me nightmares.

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They just arrested Teresa Kok. Malaysiakini says this might be Ops Lalang II.

I think what the government is forgetting though is this isn’t 1987.

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(This is an entry for this).

First thing I did with my first few months of salary was to finally buy myself a gaming PC so you’d probably know, I love games :). And not your average junkie too: I really love them, have played many many games, and find it puzzling why people can spend Ks on a gaming rig, or a car, or handphones, but find the concept of actually buying an original game - prices have dropped a little because of the weak dollar - completely alien.

That’s a discussion for another day though, since I’m writing this to share my favourite game of all time. You’d think it’d be a recent whizzbang shooter like Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, or maybe Half Life 2 - all fantastic games in their own right. After all graphics have improved to such realistic levels titles even a few years back can sometimes look positively outdated.

But yet I feel the best game of all time is Baldur’s Gate 2 (and its expansion Throne of Bhaal ), released a full 8 years ago in 2000 by the now-defunct Black Isle studios.

Granted I’ve always leaned towards RPGs rather than FPS. The former tends to be more story-centric and involving, rather than a twitchfest - although the lines are beginning to blur nowadays. But I think BG2 was one of the few games to have a perfect combination of action, gameplay, story, setting, and even decent multiplayer.

The freedoms given in the game, set in the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms setting, still puts many later wannabes to shame. After an intriguing introduction where you fight your way out of a dungeon and watch as a childhood friend is kidnapped, you are free to explore Amn and its surroundings as you please, though the game reminds you about your main quest every now and then. And no mere Fed-ex side quests these; the game throws at you pirates, vampires, werewolves, djinni, liches, and even dragons! Indeed, it’s been observed that the second chapter of BG2 is practically as fleshed out as the entirety of some other games.

And when you finish with that, you find out that it’s just the beginning as you travel over the seas and into the Underdark.What completely separated BG2 from other games though was its gameplay - due mostly in part to its Infinity Engine. I still haven’t seen an engine, 3D or otherwise, that has been as able to capture epic, spellslinging battles as Baldur’s Gate did. And these battles were hard too, even on your second or third time through, which gave you all the more satisfaction as you finally downed that dragon or mind flayer.

It was also one of the few games - then and since - which had interesting companions, all of whom would change your party’s playstyle, and how you experienced the game. All had their own storylines and subquests and there were more enough combinations for multiple playthroughs.

In 2001 came the expansion Throne of Bhaal, and it brought the game to dizzying heights of epicness - up to that point most studios had never done a DnD game with characters levelled so high. And somehow it all still worked, timestops, comets, devas, fire giants and all, and it still captured the adventuring spirit of the series.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played through BG2 (4? 5?) and I find that as I write this I’m tempted to pick it up and try a new character and party build :P. I’m not alone either: there’s still a thriving mod community centered around the game. If you like RPGs and have never played this, you aren’t a true RPG fan :).

That’s it for my favourite game of all time!

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…getting a girlfriend/boyfriend - it seems as though all the good ones are either taken or don’t play in your field (if you know what I mean).

Seriously though I didn’t think it could be this difficult. Could it be the quality of our universities?

The first question I always ask in an interview is “Explain to me what a Unix timestamp is” and I have yet to have a local - some headhunted, some from Jobstreet - are unable to answer this question.

I get the “Oh I don’t know the answer but I would just look it up” waffle a lot - there was even one guy who was Googling during his phone interview - but there are some questions you can’t just shrug off. I don’t claim to be a programming guru, but the Unix timestamp is the base of every time-related function in PHP, MySQL and Linux; if you are a “Web developer” who doesn’t know what it is, you have either never used a single date-related function or you have been cut and pasting code without knowing what it does - I’m not sure which is worse. And if you marked “Advanced” for MySQL or PHP; or “3 years of experience” then there’s not much to say.

/rant

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I’d actually heard of gold dust and teeth making an appearance way way back but I didn’t know it was making a return to Charismatic circles until I heard a sermon about it on Sunday. A lady went up after and said gold dust had appeared on her during the sermon.

My first thought was “why gold fillings or gold teeth?” Heaven is supposed to be paved with gold - now why would God fill your tooth with pavement? Why not just restore the tooth? Aren’t gold teeth status symbols of the rich? Strange that what is termed a “spritual revolution”; faith in the unseen, makes great weight of teeth bring turned into gold or gemstones appearing from nowhere. From several accounts, the people had specifically prayed for teeth fillings to be turned into gold - why pray for something of zero practical value, and something that could have been easily put in by a dentist?:

Skeptics can also point to Dick Dewert, president of CJIL-TV in Lethbridge, Alberta. Dewert claimed during a fundraising campaign that God had given him a gold tooth. But he retracted his claim March 25 after his dentist, Jack Sherman, reminded him that he had given him the filling 10 years before.

“The media tend to hit on the ones that are questionable, unfortunately. But this is why we want to move carefully, and to seek medical verification,” says Rev. Dr. John Roddam of St. David’s Anglican Church in Tsawwassen.

There was also the usual scoffing at skeptics who would rather question than believe this phenomenon; I wonder what the reaction is then for the “miracles” seen on the other side of the demoninational divide, e.g. visions of Fatima , or statues weeping tears of blood, or Hindu statues lapping up milk (I spotted posts on Catholic forums mocking this as “theology for gangsta rappers”).

Reactions from Christians themselves range from the amazed to the cautious, and the outright disbelieving. An observation I found stood out in my mind, and pretty much summed up my last thought on the matter as well:

Questions are raised in our minds about God’s goodness and open-handedness when, on the one hand, he seems unwilling or unable to prevent Auschwitz or the contemporary tragedy of Kosovo, but seems both willing and able to adopt the role of a modern dentist and provide not only cosmetic wonders, but phenomena more in keeping with the Fortean Times than the Bible.

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Today was the big day for Cheryl and Alex! Not their actual “big day” though, they already had the ceremony in AU and were having this dinner here just for us.

Coincidentally, it was also the first time I got to try out my new camera: a Panasonic Lumix FZ-8 which is an old model but came with a good price :). Well OK not really a coincidence, I kind of rushed the buy so I could take pictures. My sister broke my old camera a few years back and I’d never bought one since.

I think Macy summed it up pretty well in her short speech when she said that knowing that Cheryl was such a careful, cautious person, Alex must be really some guy to make it all the way through; the longer part of the their relationship being long-distance nonetheless! It was both funny and nice to seem them “glammed up” in their wedding photoshoot pics as well.

I got only one really good pic with my camera tonight - well OK I have to admit my sister took the pic but someone was blocking my view…

I think some of us who knew her through the years were wondering if she was thinking “Am I filling the glasses symmetrically?”

Her sister Debbie performed a cute number with her bf on guitar, for the life of me I can’t remember the song right now but I was humming along to it then.

Dinner was Cheryl-worthy I think. Forgot to take pictures but dessert was something I had never seen before - soya bean milk with quail eggs. It was an interesting combination. All the aunties in the hall were shooting warning looks at the uncles though (quails’ eggs have high cholesterol).

Anyway all the best in Australia Cheryl… we will all miss you :( keep in touch!

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w e n ** will you , now? says:
john williams isnt he a composer

w e n ** will you , now? says:
u mean indiana jones song no lyrics one?

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Before the Flood, there was a canopy over the Earth. This canopy protected the Earth from harmful UV rays. This canopy protected the Earth from harmful UV rays. During the Flood, the canopy fell onto Earth as water, meaning that after the Flood there was no longer a protective canopy.

As a result of this, life on earth is exposed to UV rays and the harmful effects of radiation. That is why we have genetic diseases today, e.g. Down Syndrome and homosexuality, as opposed to before the Flood when man could live for nearly a thousand years.

One of my earliest articles was the Just World effect, also known as victim blaming, where man reasons that misfortune occurs because one deserves it - or inversely, that if something good happens to you, you must be a good person.

The quote above illustrates the other side of the spectrum and it’s not exaggerated - it was recited to me with a straight face. It sounds like Calvinism’s total depravity, only more depressing and more irrational. Taking the Flood literally is already pretty shaky, what more trying to whip up science from a time when people didn’t know what the water cycle was! The same person declared there would have been no sicknesses or deaths if not for the Fall - I asked what would happen if a flu virus invaded the body, and from the response I got, I gathered virii and bacteria must be the products of Sin too.

I really felt like I was in the twilight zone for a moment. It has to be pretty depressing thinking you’re living in such a damned world.

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Apparently it should be called Anagrams :(. I still think Grabble is a better name!

I miss those days…

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