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.

Popularity: 32% [?]

I would like to apologize for any disgust caused by having to put this picture on my blog (man he’s ugly isn’t he?).Unless you are utterly clueless I don’t think I have to inform you what happened so let’s just jump to my take on it.In one of the earlier Star reports I spotted this: 

A visit by The Star to his house in Taman Robina in Butterworth showed that his luxury bungalow, complete with a swimming pool, had been torn down. Letters were left uncollected in the letterbox.It is learnt that Ahmad and his family are now staying at a penthouse in a guarded condominium in Tanjong Tokong, pending the construction of his new bungalow. 

If you have followed the issue closely enough, you’ll also note that Koh Tsu Koon had stated that Ahmad has had a personal vendetta against him since 2006, when KTK refused to bend the rules and reappoint Ahmad as an MPPP councillor after he had exceeded his four-term limit. Not only that, but it would have been a major conflict of interest, since Ahmad had close links with the PORR project.Further digging leads to some old posts [here and here] from Chow Kon Yeow ( the new Tanjung MP )’s blog. Ahmad had been declared a bankrupt in 2006, in fact it would seem that KTK had had to cover his sorry ass for him back then! A rough chronology is found here.

Rags to riches in 2 years

My question is how the effing hell does one go from insolvency to not one but two luxury bungalows in 2 short years? Dear Ahmad, if you could teach your method to all the Malays out there we would no longer need the NEP. 99% of the Chinese that you rant against don’t even come close to matching your wealth. Why accuse us of hijacking the economy - it’s either a) evident that a Malay can easily make it rich, or b) you are corrupt and the only way you can drum up support is to play up religion and race.If you have read the Malaysiakini article, take the time to read the full press statement he made - chock-full of references of him and “umat Islam”, as if this issue had anything at all to do with religion other than him dragging it along!

Gerakan screwed

The real loser out of this is Gerakan unfortunately. There is simply no way they will ever win back Penang without UMNO support - in the unlikely event that PR screws up enough. Honestly is they really wanted to serve the country they would merge with PR.

Step up la you dumbasses

God, Pak Lah and Najib, time to grow some backbone already. If Ahmad is not sacked tomorrow then it’s clear that you have lost all control of BN.

Popularity: 58% [?]

Well now seriously. When Khalid Ibrahim made his suggestion for 10% of UiTM placements to be opened up to non-bumis, who did you think he was looking out for? The non-bumis? When was the last time you heard Chinese or Indian students clamouring for UiTM allocations? A degree from UiTM is probably worth less than a good private diploma (outside the govt sector that is).

Yes it’s true that the majority of (private) university and college students are non-bumi - but the solution isn’t to cloister yourselves up in a bumi-exclusvive institution. Degrees are only worth as much as the university behind it: from the university’s own site, half of its “international achievements” come from those dubious Geneva exhibitions we heard about last year.

As Education Malaysia points out, it’s pretty hard to see how UiTM is justified as a university, aside from its name, when it’s non-selective and mono-ethnic. “Charity school funded by taxpayers” is a more apt description, or perhaps “Umnoputera factory”.

The political response is also telling:
- The Higher Education Minister Khaled Nordin reads the suggestion as an “insult to Malays”.
- UiTM vice-chancellor Ibrahim Abu Shah called Khalid a “traitor to his race” (Education Malaysia dug up an interesting profile on him as well ).
- “Prime Minister for all Malaysians” Abdullah Badawi vetoed it saying Khalid had “no power” to implement such a thing.
- Toothless MCA and Gerakan pay lip service to Khalid’s suggestion (or maybe not?)
- Malaysian Muslim Consumer’s Association director Noor Nirwandy Mat Noordin had the most insiduous comment of all:

“If something like this is allowed to happen, then there will be a worrying situation where many Malay institutions will crumble and be ‘Malaysia-nised‘.

It’s exactly 2 weeks before Merdeka Day. I find it hard to celebrate.

Popularity: 75% [?]

…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

Popularity: 60% [?]

Last week saw a landmark case - the (first?) recognized deconversion from Islam. From AFP:

Apostasy, or renouncing the faith, is one of the gravest sins in Islam and a very sensitive issue in Malaysia where Islamic sharia courts have rarely allowed such renunciations and have also jailed apostates.

Penang Sharia Court judge Othman Ibrahim said he had no choice but to allow an application by cook Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah to renounce her faith and return to Buddhism.

“The court has no choice but to declare that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah is no longer a Muslim as she has never practised the teachings of Islam,” Othman told a packed courtroom.

“I order the conversion certificate to be nullified,” he added.

Siti Fatimah or Tan Ean Huang, 38, said she had never practised Islamic teachings since she converted in 1998 and only did so to enable her to marry Iranian Ferdoun Ashanian.

The couple married in 2004 and she filed for the renunciation after her husband left her.

Forgive me for being a bit crabby but OMFG it’s about time. The very idea that you can “prevent” a deconversion by Our relief would be tempered somewhat though by a depressing letter that featured on Malaysiakini last week as well, “JPN on the look-out for illegitimate Malay children”:

On the evening of April 7, a terribly upset young couple walked into my surgery. Earlier in the day, they had an altercation with the staff of the National Registration Department (JPN) at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital.

The woman was 18 years old and her husband 24 years old. On April 1, she delivered a baby girl weighing 1.4 kg. She was so tiny she had to be put in an incubator. On the day in question, they had gone to visit their baby with a couple of friends. After that the whole group went to the JPN office to register the baby’s birth.

The counter staff scrutinised their marriage certificate and after doing some arithmetic, publicly announced the baby was conceived out of wedlock. As such only the baby’s name and the mother’s name could be entered in the register.

In the space for father’s particulars shall be written ‘Information not Available’. In the baby’s MyKad identity card shall be entered baby’s name followed by ‘bin or binti Abdullah’.

The couple refused to register the baby. They were so upset and humiliated. The baby has since died of prematurity. She never had a birth certificate.

After enquiring from several JPN offices at various places, I learnt that the director-general of JPN had issued an internal circular on July 6, 2007 to the effect that JPN should ‘look out’ for illegitimate Malay children and that they be labelled, accordingly, ‘bin Abdullah’ or ‘binti Abdullah’.

From that day many babies do not have their father’s names on their birth certificates.

It was bad enough when they had upstarts from RELA tell us not to hold hands, but actually having people in hospitals slam this in people’s faces is just so…ARGH.

What conceivable good can come out of denying a father his name on the birth certificate out of spite and piousness? Surely the “solution” to premarital sex is not to oust the father and promote single mothers instead! If anything I’d actually congratulate the guy for sticking by the mother and taking the responsibility. Registration personnel should have better things to do than calculate when the baby was born!

Popularity: 62% [?]

99% of anything free runs on advertising. That much is true. I don’t have anything against adverts, heck I work for an advertising company and I go early for movies to catch trailers.

But intrusive advertising only serves to turn people off, a kind of reverse branding.

Straight to the point, from the newly redesigned (i.e. more space for ads ) Star Online:

Riots in Tibet? Time for DiGi!

Sunbear dies in zoo? Time for DiGi!

Two girls die in fire? Time for DiGi!

Heck it’s even in headlines:

Yes, it’s time for DiGi!

First of all, I am intensly against textlink ads in newspapers. I thought NST’s fullpage redirect ads were bad enough, but I call it unethical when you put text ads in articles. Yes you get clicks and views, but these are more likely to be from people thinking that they link to more information. Even the bare minimum of double-underlining ad links isn’t adhered to.

The algorithm is also positively inane:

Picking up “friend” and “family” is a huge stretch by itself given how generic the terms are. More suitable would be “handphone”, “phone call”, etc. But “1″, “5″, “10″? Are you freaking serious here?!:

God the person who did this should be shot. I have to say I’m not surprised Star found such innovative way to prostitute itself even more, and again it might give nice view rates, but hey so do flyers I find stuck on my parked car that I use to wrap fish with later. Where’s the link to that boycott group on Facebook again??

[edit]And yes, I am aware of the irony that the DiGi ad is on my NN ad unit at the time of writing.. but it’s not intrusive!!
[edit2] Forgot to mention that the fact that the algorithm doesn’t check for spaces or fullstops to confirm words reminds me very much of the buttbuttination phenomenon.

Popularity: 56% [?]