Hello 2008 (a.k.a. Getting back on track)

It's been a funny month, December.

I quit my job as a journalist and got a job in a local games development company (though I'm only scheduled to start in the 2nd week of Jan). Being between jobs, this also meant that I've had much more time to myself than usual.

In the past month, I've been busy getting my life in order - running all sorts of errands and doing stuff I otherwise wouldn't have time to do while I'm working.

I've also had plenty of time to think, and to reflect on the many things that have happened to me the past six years or so (i.e. ever since I left university).

Forgive me if you've heard this rant before (click here for a refresher) but this post has a lot to do with my career.

Long story short: I went to university with a rather odd dream, an unconventional for the time. I wanted to make videogames, by becoming a games programmer. Then I came out of university, bummed around for 9 months while unsuccessfully trying to come up with some game demo to boost my employment prospects.

Then I got into a relationship (which necessitated a job - it's expensive stuff, mind you). After thinking for a bit, I ended up becoming a tech journalist. So yes, it was a detour.

A bittersweet one.

I loved the life of a tech journalist, getting to do all sorts of stuff I'd otherwise never had the opportunity to do (such as traveling all over the world, interviewing big names in the IT industry, meeting all sorts of characters and crashing an expensive German sedan into a field).

I loved the work environment too, especially all of my fantastic colleagues.

And all the while, I kept telling myself that this was what I wanted. I kept telling myself I should be happy - after all, plenty of people were envious of my job. Yes, I was happy, but I kept longing for my original dream.

I asked myself whether I was blessed or just being foolish.

But now, looking back, it was a hell of a journey but the path eventually led me right back to my original dreams.

In a chance encounter, I heard about a potential job opening at a local games company. I had long thought that this ship had already sailed, but then God decided to throw a curve ball and gave me a chance to get back on the right track.

What surprised me was how difficult a decision it would be. I was very comfortable in my job as a journalist and I would be giving up a lot to pursue a career in game development.

I cast my net and - surprise - it turns out that I'm qualified to be a game programmer all along! Of course, it probably helped that I knew the guys at this company from some previous interviews I had conducted.

The irony of it all was that all of my experimenting with Pocket PC and J2ME mobile game development was unnecessary. I had what it took all along. I was much better than I thought.

If there was one thing I learnt from my previous job, it was that I could punch above my weight and push boundaries. I learnt that my attitude towards work was different from about 90% of the workforce. I was more passionate and more eager to try out new things.

So here I am, about to continue a journey I had abandoned some 5 years ago because I thought I wasn't good enough. I'm finally getting back on track. I'm going to become a games developer :)

I'm both excited and terrified at the prospects of beginning this new job, though. I've got loads of catching up to do and so many new things to learn.

I feel empowered. I feel like I've finally gotten my life back.

I am blessed.

Here's to a cracking 2008.

Just a comic

I've got a bit of spare time, so I decided to draw a four-panel comic. Do pardon the shoddy artwork :)

If God drove a 4-door sedan...

...He'd drive this:

A Honda Civic Type-R FD2

I had the pleasure of trying out the new Honda Civic Type-R in Sepang Circuit, courtesy of Honda Malaysia.

Now, I've not driven that many cars before, but I highly doubt you'll ever find another FF (Front-engine, Front-wheel-drive) car that'll outperform this on a race track. Though it looks a lot like a regular Civic with some lame spoilers, skirts and air dams, it's a completely different beast.

The rear end will be a familiar sight on highways. There's a rear diffuser below the bumper.

Welcome to heaven. Check out the manual gearbox - when's the last time you saw one of these???
The 2.0-litre Honda K20A iVTEC engine churns out 225BHP at over 8000RPM. PHWOAAARRRR!!!!

The engine is super smooth and supremely powerful, the suspension is perfectly set up for track work so it corners with God-like amounts of grip and its 6-speed manual gearbox is soooo darn precise, you have to wonder why Honda doesn't include it with regular Civics (for that matter, I don't see why any car nut would ever one to go back to an auto box).


And thanks to its advanced LSD (that's a limited-slip differential, not the hallucinogenic drug), it's almost impossible to induce understeer in hard cornering - even if you've got your foor buried on the throttle.

Speaking of which, the pedals in this car are perfectly positioned for nifty heel-and-toe downshifts, aided also by a well dampened clutch and superb throttle response.

In a nutshell, this car provides so much feedback and is a delight to the senses - you can feel every corner and push harder and harder towards the car's limits, unlike any other FF you've probably driven.

I tried Mercedes' entire 2005 AMG range (apart from the SL55, which I didn't get a stab at) at Sepang Circuit a few years ago and even though all of those cars sported much more torque and horsepower, none can come anywhere close to providing this much excitement and intimacy.

The only problem is, I only had four laps in the Type-R (after three in the regular 2.0 Civic) and was just starting to get comfortable with doing four-wheel drifts before running out of time.

Heading out of the pits

Whatever it is, I'm completely smitten. For less than RM200k, this is definitely the best car in the world. Buy one now! NOW! If I could sell a kidney to finance one of these, I would. After the session, I was giggling like a little girl for a good 10 minutes :)

(I hear the waiting list goes all the way to 2009, though - and I might not last that long sans a kidney. Also note that Malaysia is the only country outside of Japan to have this Japan-spec Civic Type-R officially available).

How the mighty have fallen...

Honda's ASIMO - former million-dollar stair-climbing robot...





...now reduced to secondary PDA cradle support:

Where's that little robot?



"Me want to climb stairs instead!"

Morgan Freeman = super

Spotted the following DVD in the a local video store:

Morgan Freeman: The Movie

At first I was wondering what the hell it was. But upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a compilation of Morgan Freeman's best movies on a few discs. Cool.

The clincher, though, was this little gem at the top-right corner of the cover:



Super black film star... :)

Cheryl calls room service...

The wedding dinner just ended. It's past midnight, and we're hanging out in Thomas and Amelia's bridal suite, having drinks and basically having a laugh.

And then, we ran out of ice. And Colin took it upon himself to call room service for more ice. However, his alter ego took over...

Oh, and I'll post up photos from the wedding (on Flickr) once I've gotten some work out of the way. This was the first time I've been involved in both pre-wedding and actual day photography.


Me in action

It was bags of fun... :)

I killed a fruit fly today...

I'm back at the office today. And it turns out that the little insects that have been terrorising me here were fruit flies (see post "We're being followed"). And I killed one of them!!!

I rock!


Extreme closeup

While not exactly fast, these little buggers are really small and my eye-sight is shit. So yes, I'm quite happy to have made it dead.

Now if only some of the other pests in the office could be dispatched of as effortlessly...

Selling out to the man...

From Her World magazine or something like that.

Quote: "This fragrance gives me the confidence I need to help me get through the day"

Indeed... :)

Click on the image for the full-sized pic

We're being followed...

I had a nagging suspicion all day that I was being followed by insects. Everywhere I went, i could feel something crawling around my scalp, skipping across my neck. Inside my shirt and moving underneath my socks. Sometimes I even caught a glimpse of something small flying in front of my eyes.

Bzzzzzzz...

It even followed me in my car when I went to the camera equipment store in SS2. Kit was telling me that it's just my imagination - my hair getting into my eyes or something like that.

But when I got back to the office, it turns out that everyone's been bugged by little insects all day too.

So yes, I'm not crazy, but a small colony of insects may be building a nest in my head. Which means I've got cooties. Cool.

The joy of Fax...

As I was sending a fax to a hotel in Bali the other day, it suddenly dawned upon me how satisfying (on a physical, psychological and emotional level) it is to send a fax.

It all begins with typing out a document with ultra sexy formatting and using words like "Attention:", "Re:" and "To whomever it may concern". The document must fit on a single A4 page yet contain all of the necessary information, which means that some revisions are required to make it all much more concise and wonderfully elegant.

This is, of course, incredibly gratifying as I stare at the screen, alternating between "print preview" mode and editing mode whilst making little adjustments here and there to tart it up.

And once I'm done typing it, I print it on my inkjet printer, with the print-quality settings set at "Ultra High" and on high quality 80g A4 paper.

This Ultra High quality mode causes the print head caress the A4 paper ever so gently and with more passes per row of text as if laying more coats of much thinner paint to produce a fantastic finish. Or in this case, crisper text.

With printout in hand, I march towards the beckoning fax machine, sitting idly in the corner with a dim red glow emanating from its LED power indicator. I slot my A4 paper into its feeding tray (face down, of course), dial in the fax number and watch as the fax machine gently whispers cryptic modem strings over the telephone line to the fax machine on the other side.

And suddenly, the fax machine springs to life, sucking my A4 printout into its gigantic (yet wafer-thin) orifice while it hums. It's a low pitch hum. While it's almost inaudible from the outside of the house, it strongly resonates throughout the halls and corridors within, as it transmits bit and bytes across the copper wires - sending my lovingly crafted document to an eagerly awaiting receptionist on the other end.

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...

And after the climax, the humble fax machine pipes down, ejecting my A4 printout from its nether regions. It lets out a faint beep and tells me that everything's ok through its LCD panel (to be precise, it says "Send OK").

I take my A4 printout, having served its purpose, crumple and toss it into the waste paper basket. While I've satiated my hunger for now, it'll be about 30 minutes before I long to send another fax.

hummmmmmmmmmm...

----------------------------

The problem with holidays is that you suddenly find yourself with a lot of free time and not much to do.

Silence, it can be stunning.

I was driving home just a couple of hours ago (around midnight) when it occurred to me that my car was being uncharacteristically silent. You see, it's normally a hell of a noisy beast when on the move - the slightest of surface undulations would normally send the car flying off at a tangent, resulting in all manner of squeaks, creaks and very worrying, metallic sounding "Clunk!" sounds. Oh, and they seemed to have forgotten to attach the suspension when it was on the assembly line.

So yes, it's put together like a typical Italian car. Which meant that it should've been really noisy considering that most of the roads leading to my house are dotted with small craters attempting to pass off as potholes.

But no. There was absolute silence. It was like a magic carpet ride.

The reason, of course, was that the potholes were no longer there. And the reason for that, of course, is that the roads have been paved. ALL of them.

And the reason that ALL of the roads have been paved is because the general elections are just around the corner and the federal government needs to show that it's actually running the country properly.

And to show that it is indeed running the country properly, they've decided to pave all the roads with glistening, fresh, black tarmac. Mmmmmm...

Never mind that the crime rate is soaring, that inflation is slowly turning my 50 ringgit notes into small change, and that for some reason, it has become socially acceptable for you to thrust a sword into the air during a political party general assembly while screaming some sort of battle cry - as long as our roads are paved, we're happy.

Now this is actually a good thing. I recently spent over 600 ringgit repairing my suspension (turns out there was one after all) after several years of driving into inverted speed bumps.

Want better roads? Vote for this guy!

But here's the thing.

The roads are only paved about once every five years, which coincides with the general elections (held every five years or so). Which is a problem because the roads normally deteriorate into the rut-infested variety after two years, which leaves us with about three years of shitty roads.

This means, of course, that unless we have general elections every two years we aren't going to get freshly paved roads every two years.

Which means, of course, that we must somehow get the government to hold general elections every two years.

And to do that, we must... must... erm... well you know. Yeah.










Sorry, but that's about as far as I thought. I do like the freshly paved roads, though.

World's greatest comb-over

Going bald? No problem - all you need is a hairdryer, a hairbrush, some hair wax and shitloads of patience (i.e. about 40 minutes of your time) to transform yourself from spud to stud...



Brilliant stuff, this.