Malaysia's Biggest Practical Joke

or Petronas's desperation to milk even more ringgits from the poor rakyat? Hope both are not true. Couldn't resist being kiasu and succumbed to the rumours. Check out my fellow suffering countrymen here:





Massive queue at Equine Park's Petronas station. 11.30pm













Oi, suddenly got this Red kancil cut in front of me:))

11.45pm











Rupanya my housemate being more KL than me. Hehehe. Suffice to say, she got home earlier than me later:)

11.50pm









Finally settled everything by 12.20am. Great experience! (Am i sick or what???!!) Didnt dare take any more photos once I got to the front of queue. A lot of angry people around:P

Petrol Prices May Go up 30 cents tomorrow morning (28/2/2006)

Guys, this just in from a friend whose friend owns a Petrol Station (I know!) but price of petrol may go up 30 cents tomorrow morning, which is tuesday 28/2/2006. Take it or believe it! My RX-8 (BMW 320i as well) dream moving further and further away!!!

Irresistible Barcelona

Woke up at 4am last night to watch Chelsea vs Barcelona in the last-16 Champions' League round. One word: scintillating. Despite Chelsea playing with 12 men initially (if you include the Stamford Bridge pitch as a player. The pitch was horrendous), Barcelona was just simply a class above. The red card for the Chelsea player, Del Horno was a bit harsh but it was just a matter of time anyway since he was having a hard time containing that young Argentine player, Lionel Messi. It needed 2 own goals in the 2nd half to open up the game and it was finally settled by Samuel Eto'o, who was quiet for 80 minutes and then just suddenly popped out of nowhere to nod in the winning goal. Credit to Chelsea that they did not give up. However, Frank Rijkaard's side was just too good. Seeing how Barcelona play just emphasized how short of ideas the English teams are (Liverpool, Chelsea, MU, Arsenal). Rarely do you see them playing long balls up the field and just hope that they will catch the opponent's defence off-guard. No, this is an intelligent side, with crisp passings, accurate crosses and most importantly, the ability to hold the ball well. Watching Ronaldinho, Eto'o, Deco and Messi play just mesmerizes me completely. Worth the waking up and all. Final score Chelsea 1 Barcelona 2. First defeat for Jose Mourinho at Stamford Bridge since he took over. Cant wait for the 2nd leg in a fortnight's time.

I Started A Joke - Bee Gees

That in the end, had myself crying. Yup, joke's on me. Few weeks back, I played this joke on my friend who was on the way to Holland. Little did I know I was predicting the score for the FA-Cup 5th round between, yup even got the home-away thing correct, Liverpool and Man U. You can never laugh too soon:) But all in all, it was a good match. Liverpool were slightly better, especially in the midfield and they truly deserved to win. What a cup-tie. This is what FA Cup stuff are made of. It's also actually the first time Liverpool beat United in a FA Cup match since 1921. Congrats, all you Liverfool fans!

JC's piece on the Hard Work that goes on in the background to get Top Gear on air

Very nice piece of article from Jeremy Clarkson on what makes Top Gear, the show on BB2 Sundays so attractive. Loads of info and interesting "insights" for fans to digest. Amazingly, he only mentioned about Hammond's teeth twice. But we do know now that Hamster gets called gay pretty often:))

Petrolheads After Top Gear

You lucky Brits with TV licenses:) There's a new show on BBC 2, right after Top Gear. It's called Petrolheads where a bunch of, you guessed it, petrolheads get together and do some funky stuff on cars. Another new car variety show to "watch". Sneak preview on Top Gear's website.

First Podium for Malaysia in the A1GP at Indonesia

Alex Yoong has finally done Malaysia proud by securing a great 2nd place in the Indonesian A1GP feature race. He also finished 4th in the sprint race. Best results for Malaysia thus far in the A1. Just need to go one more place up after this. Well done!

Yes!!! English Premier League is well alive again!!!

Yes!!!! Middlesborough 3 - Chelsea 0. It's no joke. Steve Mclaren's team has done the unthinkable: giving Jose Mourinho's Chelski something to think about. Please, Portsmouth, West Brom, Tottenham and co, learn something from Boro, Man U and Charlton.

Remember 12th February

There will be a special Top Gear episode on the 12th February in conjunction with the Winter Olympics which will kick off on the same day. The theme of this episode? Winter Olympics, of course. Source from Times Online. Nice!

Top Gear Top Tip

Here's a Top Gear Top Tip. If you like Top Gear, go to FinalGear for its latest "news";)

Another Promising F1 Season in Store

So many changes will be seen in F1 2006. Amongst them:

• Biggest change is the engine step-down from V10 3-litre to V8 2.4 litre. This change even made Ferrari swap their usual chassis naming from FXXXX (where XXXX is the year of competition. E.g F2005 for season 2005) to 248 F1. The 24 represents the 2.4 litre and the number 8 represents the 8 cylinders in the new engine
• Qualifying format will once again be changed where there'll be 3 stages (2 15-minute sessions and 1 20-minute session) in the the 1-hour session. 1st 15 minutes will be see everyone go out in with any amount of fuel they like and do as many laps as they wish. Bottom 6 will then be knocked-out and take the bottom 6 places for the race the next day. Second session will be the same as well with 16 drivers competing and the slowest 6 be knocked out again. The 12 drivers who were knocked out are allowed to put any amount of fuel they like. The last session will see the top 10 drivers slug it out for the 10 spots with again, no restriction on the number of laps. The only condition is that they must enter the session with the amount of fuel in which they intend to start the race the next day. At then end of the session, they are allowed to fill up to the original amount of fuel. Nice!
• Tyre changing. Michelin-shod team fans wont be happy but Bridgestone fans will be shouting for joy. Drivers can change tyres once again during race. This should make the races more interesting.
• First race of the year will be at Bahrain. Australia is hosting the Commonwealth games this year during March. So the first race will be held at Bahrain (+3GMT). Will be interesting. New cars, lots of sand, new rules, rusty drivers. Nice!

So many things to look forward to. So many drivers I wanna see them do well (M Schumacher, Alonso, Raikonen, Fisichella, Button). I'm hoping that Schummi will win this season and retire at the end. He'll retire with glory with 8 championship wins and let the younger drivers have a go in future seasons. I would like to see Raikonen switch to Ferari in 2007 teaming up with Rossi or Massa. That's my hope. Well, you never know in F1. That's the appeal of it, I guess. All eyes will be glued to Bahrain on March 12 2006. Cant wait!!!!

Liverpool 1 Manchester United 0

Two things wrong about my title. First of all, it was played at Old Trafford. Second of all, the scoreline's the other way round. However, I sent this exact message through SMS to my housemate. What's the big deal you might ask? First of all, he's a big Liverpool fan. Second of all, he was on the way to Holland when the match was played. I could imagine his smugness when the first SMS he received was this score the moment he turned on his phone in Holland. Well, apparently this smugness was there till today (Tuesday) cause he didnt had the chance the check the Net. What a great housemate he has, isnt it.

Which brings me nicely to the enigma of the current MU team. In the 90s, they would always sweep aside all the lesser teams but fall victim to the bigger teams like Arsenal and Liverpool. However, the points they accumulate against the smaller teams would make them Champions by March or April. Well, the tables have turned, boys. Nowadays, it's the other way round. Dogged, determined and fantastic against Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool but dreadful against Blackburn, Middlesborough and Man City (of all bloody teams). Plus the scores of draws they accumulated.

What's lacking? Class and consistency. First half against Liverpool was atrocious and it's very obvious that the midfield just isnt working. Defending by Wes Brown and Rio Ferdinand (quite a "lazy" hero, according to that Sleazy Swedish Sven) was superb. Rooney and Ruud were trying their best. It's midfield that let MU down in the first half. I mean, it used to be Giggs, Scholes, Keane and Beckham. Come on, Richardson, Giggs, O'Shea and Fletcher??!! Doubt their names will strike any fear in any other teams. Second half performance was so much better when O'Shea was taken out and replaced by Louis Saha. Rooney's switch to the right-side of midfield didnt do much of a difference since he was everywhere most of the time.

And consistency. Great one match and grubby the other. The story of Manchester United 2005/2006. Wednesday's cup-tie against Blackburn at Old Trafford? Predictable? Not a chance, mate.

Anyway, I'm sure well Sir Alex is more aware than anyone of this midfield problem. Just hope the Glazers still have some small change to buy one or two good central midfielders despite the 500 million pounds debt they have by buying MU. MU fans, don't hold your breath unless the Glazers struck oil in Tampa Bay's stadium:P

Football Sites

Wanna start by sharing these two sites which keeps me occupied everyday (except days when United lose. In case you don't know what team I support, just look at the screenshots below). Everything you wanna know about football are in these two sites. Transfer deals, "rumoured" transfer deals, results, tables, fixtures, injuries. You name em, they got em.

Soccernet:

Ever since I've started using the net for soccer news in 1996 (in fact at that time, it was the only reason I was using the internet. Pathetic, i know), Soccernet has always been my source of information. Run by ESPN now (used to be maintain by British fans or a British company, hence the emphasis on EPL, supposedly the most exciting league in the world), it loads very fast, has very up-to-date news and has all the information a football fan needs. I like the bit where you can customize your favourite team so that news about that particular team appears in a separate column (great for quick scans on your team's ongoings).

Drawback:
Created with Microsoft ASP and runs on IIS. Therefore, rendering of pages on non-IE browsers can be very screwed-up. In fact, you cant browse the pages with Apple's Safari browser at all due to the way it handles redirection.


Teamtalk:

If Soccernet doesnt fulfill you, head on to Teamtalk. Teamtalk is more news-centric, they seem to pick up more details on nitty-gritty stuff. Just like soccernet, they have dedicated pages for each team and these pages seem to have more stuff on your favourite team.

Drawback:
Always loads some Java applet(s), which in turn runs the Java Runtime Environment if you've installed it. This eats up loads of memory and CPU. Especially with Firefox, where you tend to open many pages in multiple tabs at once. But nice about Firefox is that disabling Java is also straight forward: Tools-> Options-> Content->Enable Java (untick this). Do this and Teamtalk loads without any problem.

I'm sure everyone has their own favourite football sites. Please share them if you will:))

New Focus

Suddenly felt that my blog is very directionless. So, from now on, I wanna go fulltime into 2 areas, which I feel extremely passionate about. Football and cars (hence the new blog title:) ) . Will be posting stuff about these two stuff only. I really got a lot to say about these two things since they consume a lot of my attention. Of course, occasionally, I'll still blast about something totally out of the topic;)

Why Art Thou So Slow, Apple Malaysia

Apple US:



Apple Singapore:


Apple Malaysia?


One of the many reasons why I think I'm Stuck In Malaysia;)

Another Feather On Jeremy's Bird's Nest Cap

He has been known to make one's blood boil (think Transport Ministries, environmentalists). He has been known to destroy, annihiliate cars (think Perodua Kelisa, Nissan Sunny, Bugatti Veyron(well initially, at least)). Well, he's got another achievement now besides that honorary doctorate from Oxford. Read more about it here. And it's all due to my careless YM broadcast:))

The World is Watching the MacWorld

Hours before Steve Jobs monumental keynote at the Macworld San Francisco 2006. Got this screenshot of the Apple Store:)


There's also the new MacRumorLive page created by MacRumor specially to cover MWSF. Neat! Rumours are flying hard here and there on other sites as well. Stay tuned!

All Your Wall Are Be Projected

Found this interesting projector from Viewsonic through Yahoo's Consumer Electronic Show (CES) roundup. The PJ106D, "One-Pound DLP Projector" (for more effects, imagine Russell Peters announcing it in his Hong-Kee accent:P) is a battery-powered (rechargeable battery supposedly last 2.5 hours), lightweight (obviously, 1lb without battery, 3.6lb with battery) portable projector. Nice!

Be Cool

If you havent watched Be Cool, you should cause it's so blardy funny. John Travolta is cool as usual, Uma Thurman is hot hot hot as usual with dam funny antics by Vince Vaughn (Flea Diddy) and The Rock (gay actor-wannabe). Even Steven Tyler gives a cameo appearance and mocks himself. Full of funny quotable quotes as well, if you know what i'm saying, when i'm sayin it. Y'all dig that!

Aston Martin Rapide

If you always wanted an Aston Martin but dont want to look like a pimp for child prostituition when you bring your kids out, well worry no more....cause we now have the Aston Martin Rapide, a 4-door version of the lovely, absolutely fantastic Aston Martin DB9:


Photo was taken from Top Gear and article on the Aston is here. Beware, Mercedes CLS, Jaguar XJ and the lot. Here comes Aston Martin's winner.