I think today hope was restored in many around the world when Barack was elected. Not simply because he was black, although if you read his acceptance speech the significance of a black man ascending to the White House did not escape him:

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can. At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can. When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

Yet above all that, he just represents a different kind of politics. Following his meteoric rise, from the keynote speech in Illinois that started it all, key speeches that shaped what we know of him - his “Call to Renewal“, an appeal to the religious right; his honest look at race relations in “A More Perfect Union“; the presidential debates, and of course the acceptance speech above that gave me shivers when listening to it - it simply seems to have been such a long time before we’ve seen such a politician.

Gracious as McCain’s concession speech may have been, it didn’t make up for the huge negativity and blatant lies told by his campaign - among the worst offenders being a campaign ad portraying Obama as the Anti-Christ, painting him as a terrorist attacks made 40 years ago.

Ridiculous as the accusations against Obama may sound, I had my fair share of friends and relatives who actually think he might be a secret Muslim or terrorist - I’m hoping I don’t hear any Anti-Christ references on Sunday.

It’ll be very hard for Obama to do as badly as Bush did, but I somehow just have the feeling that he’ll go beyond that, somehow. It’s change we can believe in :).

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.

I finally watched it last week, probably just before the screenings ended. I think it’s so good that I’m not going to bother with spoiler warnings; if you haven’t already watched it you suck :P.

The really impressive thing that put Wall-E above and beyond the previous Pixar films is how it intertwines two different stories seamlessly. On one hand there was the silent-movie romance between the two robots, and on the other was the tale of humans who had fallen to decadence but still redeem themselves in the end. It’s definitely Pixar’s best film, better than Nemo was, even.

The one thing that let me down though was the ending. At first I was mindblown - wow, what a daring move from Pixar to have Wall-E end on such a tragic note! What were the philosophical implications of showing Wall-E’s “memory” reset?! Could it be that even as we say that one is “only human”, here Wall-E is, in the end, but a robot? “This is epic“, I thought, as my heart welled up with emotion.

And then we cut into the Disneyfied ending. Man.

Still an excellent movie no doubt, but Dark Knight is firmly the best movie of the year for me. Maybe I’m just a sucker for tragedy…

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

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.

Briefly, LGE opened with a flurry of accusations, touching on 5-6 “land scandals”. As the night went on though they focused on one particular scandal, the “40 million loss” related to the awarding of land to a private quarry contractor.

Koh managed to defend himself very well imo. His points were:

- The root cause of the confusion was a slipup made in the land dept 40 years ago.

- He had not met with the government privately to discuss the issue as they were constantly “going public” with new claims of “land scams”

- The “40 million” figure was merely the court amount. The contractor is apparently willing to settle for 1.5 mil.

- He had not fired the individual involved, as he had ordered investigations not once but twice against him but there was no concrete proof that there was criminal intent involved. The new government had not fired the official either.

- He had not gone public as the case was in court and he would be committing subjudice.

LGE made glaring errors in the debate:

- During the cross, Koh pointed out that the contractor was willing to settle for 1.5 mil; presumably the new Govt knew this as well. He asked why the 40 mil figure was constantly bandied about when the case was still being contested in court. LGE didn’t answer the question but did some pandering instead.

- Koh pointed out that the new govt had earlier accused of having come into an empty office with the state documents missing, but in fact while the office of the CM itself was free of documents, they could all - “thousands and thousands of them” - be easily found in the private archives on the same floor. LGE didn’t respond directly to this.

LGE did a lot of pandering to the crowd, which I thought was a waste of time. It made him look as if he were running for reelection. The constant tirades against the old govt instead of focusing on the topic at hand made Koh’s points seem more valid.

Koh on the other hand only focused on the 40 mil issue. Although he handily rebutted LGE’s accusations on that issue and definitely came out looking good, I would have liked to hear about PGCC.

For my part, the debate did a lot to convince me that the current govt is going down the wrong path in constantly going after the old administration. I remember after Koh’s gentlemanly concession in March, they were initially planning to consult him on governing the state. Gerakan was once an opposition party, and recent events hint that some within the party are dissatisfied with BN. I’d try to build bridges, not burn them.

[update]Lim Guan Eng also made an extremely bold statement during the debate: that his government would eradicate hardcore poverty in Penang within one year. That’ll definitely come back to bite him if he doesn’t deliver.

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.

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!