THREE DAYS OF TYRE PROBLEMS

I thought I would like to share this experience with you.

On Monday I drove my car into the city and noticed that my front right tyre was soft so I went to the petrol station and pumped it up.

While going out that evening I noticed the car pulling to the left and after I stopped for tea with a friend I noticed that the front left tyre was now soft, so I drove to a 24 hours petrol station and pumped it up, intending to go to the mechanic the next day to have it checked.

I was about to go out Tuesday afternoon and noticed that the  front left tyre had gone almost flat, so I jacked the car up and replaced it with the spare and went straight to the mechanic and asked his workers to check both tyres to see what was wrong.

They later informed me that they had replaced the valve of the left front tyre but found nothing wrong with the right front tyre.

Yesterday (Wednesday) evening I got a call from the secretary of my school alumni association to inform me that we had a committee meeting which was about to start. I was confused by the exchange of e-mails that the meeting was this evening so I had a bath, got ready and when i got to my car, I found that my right front tyre was almost flat but short of time, I drove slowly to a petrol station and pumped it up and then went looking for a mechanic but all were closed as it was past 7 pm, so I proceeded to the meeting and kept my fingers crossed that the tyre would not go flat.

After the meeting, I pumped up the tyre again and decided to replace it with the spare when I got home and stopped by a coffee shop for a bite on the way back and parked my car under some trees.

When I got back to my car, I felt a plop on my left shoulder and a bird nestling in the tree for the night had shat on me, so I quickly drove the car out from under the tree. By then, there was bird shit on my windscreen and car as well but I decided to go to a petrol station to pump up the tyre again before I went home.

FOUND A GREAT HOME FOR THIS PC

I had been trying to find a home for this Pentium III PC for a long time and by a happy coincidence I found it one of the best homes - i.e. a centre for autistic children.

I bought this old PC at a give away price of RM90 from a used PC shop in Amcorp Mall some years ago and enhanced it to 512MB of RAM, 80GB hard drive and replaced the ropey CD ROM drive with a working used unit.

It came with Windows XP but I soon got rid of that and installed Linux on it.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE FOR A CLEARER VIEW

On Sunday 18th of January afternoon I took a friend who was in pain to Assunta Hospital and waited for about four hours until he was admitted.

It was evening and I felt like having some of those delicious curry puffs at Raju's Restaurant, so went there and by chance met the director of an autistic home whom I had not met for several years.

Raju's did not have any curry puffs that Sunday but we got chatting about computers, etc. and luckily I had my netbook in my car, so I showed the director DouDou Linux for children and invited him to come by by home to view this Pentium III PC.

He came by that evening with one of their PCs on which they were having problems opening Word documents.

I fired up the PC which runs PicarOS Diego Linux especially developed for children in Spain and let him try it out and the director said that the games and educational programs were ideal for autistic children.

The screen cap below is old. Since I captured it, I have customised PicarOS Diego further to be in English as much as possible.

He then took it away and installed it in the centre the next day and informed me that the children loved it though the teaching staff found it a bit intimidating, since it is not Windows which they are familiar with.

Anyway, I am happy that I finally found this PC a very good home for it to serve out the remainder of its useful life benefiting autistic children.

TESS further spreads its wings worldwide

MSC Malaysia Success Stories
TESS Innovation
By Charles F. Moreira

TESS Innovation has established itself as a leading developer and provider of financial crime solutions in South East Asia, with plans to have at least one or two customers in each Asia-Pacific country by 2016. Beyond that, it aims to penetrate the Middle East and the US markets.

TESS CEO B.Y. Liew

Besides Malaysia where it has a well-established market presence, TESS also has customers in Thailand and the Philippines, already has partners in Indonesia and Vietnam, and is in negotiations with potential partners to help it penetrate the China and Taiwan markets.

TESS CEO B.Y. Liew (left) with Peter Ong, Chief Technical Officer and Executive Director (seated) and Y.S. Yap, Head of Research and Development

“Our vision is to make Malaysia a recognised model in Asia for combating financial crime”, said B.Y. Liew, its chief executive officer. He also wants TESS to be recognised as a supplier of anti-financial crime solutions and to be a leading anti-money laundering solutions providers in Asia and the world. Liew is grateful for all the assistance TESS received from the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), which has helped it in its long and ongoing journey to achieve great heights.

Founded on 22 March 2000 and now trading under the name TESS International, it initially developed Internet banking solutions and began marketing them but found it tough trying to convince local banks that a home-grown solution was as good if not better than the foreign ones which they tended to prefer.

TESS was awarded MSC Malaysia status in 2001 and that same year, it shifted its focus and adapted its Internet banking platform for unit trust management companies. Today, TESS' platforms are used by four of the five top unit trust companies in Malaysia, as well as a unit trust industry association.

TESS participated in a tender many years back to supply an Internet banking solution to a local financial institution and found that it was competing against 45 other companies offering the solution. Realising that this was a glutted market, in which competition was fierce and it would be hard to survive and grow, TESS made a shift.

We are not a “me too”

So in 2009, TESS decided to specialise on providing solutions to combat financial crime - a very niche market - and armed with RM1.2 million in funding from the MSC Malaysia Research and Development Grant Scheme (MGS Grant) - a matching grant which helped TESS develop CORAL iSEMTM (Intelligent Sensor for Money Laundering), its anti-money laundering solution, which it launched in mid 2010.

Enlinea aims be South-East Asia's leading portals operator for women

MSC Malaysia Success Stories

Enlinea

By Charles F. Moreira

The Wedding is one of the most important milestones in every young man's and young woman's life. It is the point from which they begin their lifelong journey together as husband and wife, have children, raise and educate them till they can stand on their own two feet in life, and in the mean time, also provide a suitable home for themselves, their children and perhaps their aged parents.

With that in mind, MSC Malaysia status company Enlinea Sdn. Bhd., aims to operate South-East Asia's leading  portals focusing on ladies, which cater to the three main stages of women's lives - namely their wedding, young motherhood and family home life.

Established  in early 2012, Enlinea initially developed high-volume, high traffic, electronic-commerce sites for many clients, including real estate agencies, hospitality service providers, airlines, banks, florists and others.

Later in 2012, the company decided to create and run its own electronic-commerce portal, so it developed Wedding.com.my to cater to the first main stage of women's lives, inspired by personal experience.

“And, today, we are fully committed to Wedding.com.my, which helps couples plan and coordinate all stages of their wedding, according to their likes, tastes and budget, with plans to expand beyond Malaysia into Singapore next year, and into Indonesia and Taiwan after that”, said Petrina Goh, Enlinea's Chief of Finance & Strategy.

“With the help of technology, the industry will evolve to be more transparent and will provide brides-to-be and new mothers the information they need when they begin the next stages in their lives.

“Our vision is to be South East Asia's leading female portal guiding women through the three important stages of her life, and we aim to launch our Motherhood.com.my online shop by early next year, to expand into other regions by the middle of next year, followed by portals catering to the third stage of women's lives - namely, home décor, living and lifestyle”, Petrina added.  

Enlinea, which means 'online' in Spanish, launched Wedding.com.my in beta format in September 2012, and patterns the site according to the wedding site TheKnot.com in the United States. Since then, the company has established itself as the premier and leading wedding site in Malaysia, and aims to reach eight out of 10 brides in Malaysia. It officially launched Wedding.com.my in 2013.

CONGRATULATIONS! TO VENEZUELA ON CANAIMA LINUX

Hello! Folks.

This Canaima Linux from Venezuela looks really cool and great, with its soothing and calming green and forest themes.

It can be installed in English and other languages besides Spanish and Portuguese and is running right now within an Oracle Virtualbox virtual machine, hosted on my PC running Linux Mint.

Canaima uses the Gnome 3 desktop with the classic look over here. Click on the images below to enlarge.

When you launch Cunaguaro, its web browser based upon Firefox, it takes you to a page honouring late Venezuela President Hugo Chavez.

It also comes with LibreOffice 4, which is great, since LibreOffice3 has some issues with retaining embedded pictures in documents after they were saved and reopened.

I am seriously thinking of installing Canaima native on one of my PCs but meanwhile, I'll continue testing it out within a virtual machine.

Congratulations! Venezuela on Canaima Linux.

Cheers

Charles F. Moreira
eSoapBox Mobile
http://aidmap227.blogspot.com/

IN MEMORY OF THE LIVES ON MH17

TODAY WE SADLY COMMEMORATE YOUR TRAGIC LOSS AND MOURN TOGETHER WITH YOUR GRIEVING FAMILIES, WHICHEVER LAND THEY MAY BE.

WE WILL CONTINUE TO SEEK JUSTICE FOR YOU.

MAY YOUR SOULS REST IN PEACE

Don't throw away a good PC

Many moons back, I bumped into a friend who was sending some old PCs to be recycled and he gave me two to play with from the boot of his car.

I installed Linux on one - a first generation Intel Pentium 4 machine and it's working OK now. It's motherboard is rather finicky though, it seems to be only compatible with ROSA, a Mandriva Minux-based distribution from Russia.

The second PC had been dropped whilst my friend was passing over a wall to the neighbour, or something like that, and it emitted an alert sound like a police siren when switched on and as a result, would not boot up.

I put this one aside from months but last night I decided to take a closer look at it.

Its motherboard hss an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor and an ABIT gaming motherboard with a cylindrical blower fan atop the processor's heat sink and I noticed the fan was not turning when the PC was powered up.

At first, I thought that the fan was thermostatically controlled and would kick once the processor gets hot enough but upon closer inspection, I noticed thatrgere was no power connected to this fan.

After connecting this fan to the PC's power supply, the alarm stopped and the PC worked normally.When I block the fan from turning, the siren sound comes back and the PC shuts down.

So this is a protective measure which shuts the motherboard down to prevent the processor from overheating. Remember, this is a gaming motherboard optimised for high performance graphics and multimedia, and AMD tends to make processors which cater to the PC gamer market.

I then booted up the PC from a CD, as there is no hard drive in it yet and it ran.

Anyway, this now is is a working platform to play with, thanks to my friend.

However, it's a pity how many people these days dispose of still perfectly workable PCs just because its Windows OS is infected by a virus, is corrupted, it runs an earlier version of Windows, they've got some new PC or something like that, when more often than not, any PC can be repaired, refurbished and restored.

Of course, time could be limited for those who know how to fix PCs, whilst  unfortunately for the less savvy, the guy at the shop will tell you to buy a new PC, rather than fix the old one. Instead, you should go to a PC service & repair shop, not a retail shop.

Anyway, without further ado, click on the link below to see a short video clip of the problem and resolution. Pardon me for the poor lighting and please note that towards the end, what you see in the screen is from the PC referred to here, not the one standing idly to its left.

Cheers

Charles

An art and science of making that personalised cuppa

“Let's meet up for coffee,” is a familiar refrain we often hear today as an invitation to meet to discuss business, work or just chat in the many international and domestic branded franchised chain cafés dotting the major cities and towns across Malaysia and much of Asia.


The operations of many of these popular coffee outlets are based upon industrial supply chain, distribution, production processes, delivery practices and standardised products, to optimise on purchasing costs and high labour costs in the brands' home countries.

As a result these outlets and their end products regarded by some to have a rather standardised, cookie cutter look, fell and taste which lacks individuality and the personalised touch.

However, the Coffee Ritual café, formerly located on Jalan 14/20, Section 14, Petaling Jaya is unique, with its display of coffee making paraphernalia, bags of coffee beans from around the world, coffee-themed paintings by a local artist on its walls and its its unique colour scheme and décor.

One also can't help miss the rather ritualistic manner in which cups of what it calls “single origin gourmet coffees” are individually brewed  manually by its manager Chung Yeh Chin on its front counter using equipment which look more at home in school science lab.

Jaya Supermarket Collapse 28 May 2009

This is a little bit of history - i.e. The Collapse of Jaya Supermarket in 2009

 

 

These videos were captured using a Sony Cyber-shot F707 in .mpg format.

Lolen and Muzza at Online, Damansara Kim

Rediscover Malaysia's heyday of live rock music as Lolen of Bonfire fame and his son Muzza (19) belt our golden oldie rock numbers from the 1960s and 1970s with covers of bands such as Free, Bad Company, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Nazareth, Whitesnake and more at the Online Pub and Restaurant in Damansara Kim, nestled inconspicuously between the huge developments of Taman Tun Dr Ismail and Damansara Utama.

Rockers don't ask for much and but a venue to play and entertain their fans in a spirit of fraternal brotherhood.

Both playing acoustic guitars, dad and son complement each other in perfect symbiosis to entertain their fans, while willingly welcome others to join in the jam.

Located at No. 32, SS20/10, Damansara Kim, Petaling Jaya, Online has been long bypassed by the new road to Taman Tun Dr. Ismail but it retains the nostalgic spirit of its 1980s simplicity and back to basics appointment and still reasonably priced beer at RM10 per mug of Tiger, though Guinness and Kilkenny draft are also available. Tel: 03-77280532