Ahfook’s Story

DTD Music Fest is going to blast next weekend. This is a big music & art event for local indie music and art scene. From rock bands to electronical groups, from illustrators to photographers, from T-shirt artists to comic artists… All of them will gather at Central Market, The Annexe, next Saturday from noon till night, to share their innovative ideas with you.

Before the event, let’s take a look on the event’s promotion clip, created by Phang of Citizen of Icecream:

More info: Dong Tai Du blog

Today April 22nd is Earth Day, a day that reminds us about the bad condition of the Earth after massive developments in past decades. However, how many of us in Malaysia aware of this day? Or I should put as, how many of us aware that our Earth is in danger?

From day to day, we can see a lot of people not aware that what they are doing is actually bringing disaster to ourselves. It is us, the human being that who bring the danger to Earth, not Aliens, not Martians, not even the one who told by our ancestors.

In movies, novels or TV series, when the Earth is in danger, we have super heroes appear to save us. But who can be the heroes for the damages that done by us? We are! We are the saviours of the Earth, and it’s simple, not need to be a super hero, no need save a cheer leader.

These are simple things that we can do to make sure the damages are controlled, or at least our children won’t blame us on not taking care the Earth and give them a Earth like macrowave and lack of clean water.

• Recycle. We listen this word since small, but how many people doing it well? Execpt recycling aluminium tins, we also can recycle papers, glasses, plastics, cloths, stationeries… As long as not throwing them directly into waste bins, and try to collect them and send to recycle centers, or someone who can reuse them. One more thing very important is recycling plastic bags. Try to avoid taking plastic bags from cashiers, if the stuffs you buying can be taken by hands, or you are going to eat soon (for example the sandwiches you buy while walking to office every morning). Try to buy from those shops or markets giving out biodegradable plastic bags. Although now biodegradable plastic bags is not 100% environmental safe, but at least the damage is not as serious as traditional petrochemicals plastic bags.
• Save power. Turn off the lights when nobody in the rooms or wash rooms. Use those power saving electronic appliances. Turn off the PC monitors during lunch time. Turn off the air-cond when not using, or not necessary (more heat more air-cond, more air-cond even more heat). Better still, unplug the power when not using. This will reduce the comsumtion of coal, and reduce the amount of CO2  (which causes the global warming).
• Save water. Frankly speaking, we are lack of clean water. Everyone saving a little bit on everyday will make big difference!
• Throw to the right place. There are things that we can’t recycle, and can bring great damage to Earth, for example batteries, electronic appliances. Try to send them to dedicated collection centers(too bad in Malaysia we are lack of these). And don’t throw your rubbish into river, only uncivilized people do that.
• Reduce the usage of transportation. Walking and bicycling are the best ways, or taking public transportation like buses and trains. However, the weather is too hot in Malaysia to walk, and public transportation (or the road systems… Samy Vellu…) sucks, I understand, but just try your best, at least don’t drive to next street in beautiful weather. If can’t live without car, try to get a fuel efficient car and drive green.
• Eat less meat. Rearing live stocks produces a lot of greenhouse gas. In many places, forest cut down to open farms to rear live stocks. Try to be vegetarian, hahaha…
• Buy locally made products that require lesser transportation energy (aka Petrol or Diesel).
• Don’t buy a thing that you not really need (people buy things they not really need, weird, but happen everyday).
• Education. Bring up the awareness of global warming to your friends and family, or ask them to visit my blog, hahahaha~!

I’ve metioned few steps above to help reduce the global warming. I admit that I not yet adapt with all stated actions above but I am trying to. And if you noticed, most of the steps have direct connection to “saving money”, so, saving the Earth, will save your money too

Try to do something before too late, even a little bit would help.

This is my all time favourite music video, “Star Guitar” by The Chemical Brothers. See if you could find out how the visual relate to the music

I am helping Dong Tai Du to sell their music festival tickets. Tickets selling at RM25 (pre sale price). RM25 is not only for entrance fee, it also comes with LoFry magazine issue #2, included a CD and sticker. I am based on Ampang at night and weekend, while KLCC area at weekday day time. Please do contact me if you are interested, thanks.

You could contact me via Live Messenger (aka MSN): jasaon at hot mail dot com

10 years ago, end of March, 1998, I started to step in to Information Technology field, with the commencement of my college course at APIIT Kuala Lumpur. Until today, a lot things had happened, especially in IT field that changes almost everyday. Let’s have a flashback on how IT field looked like 10 years ago:

• We connected to Internet using TmNet or Jaring dial up connection, the speed was 36.6 kbps, downloading a 3MB MP3 taking up around 30-45 minutes, if the line dropped in middle of download, we needed to start all over again
• Winamp was the main MP3 player, because the Windows 98 built-in Media Player couldn’t play MP3
• Xing Mpeg was the main VCD player, because… same reason with above
• Obviously, we were using Microsoft Windows 98… XD
• Chinese Star and NJStar were the main tools we needed to view and write Chinese characters
• Yahoo! was the top search engine, Jerry Yang was the proud of Chinese
• Hotmail was not belong to Microsoft, providing 2MB mail space
• Netscape was the top browser, but Internet Explorer was taking over, until now Netscape is died
• ICQ was the hottest instant messenger
• We searched and knew friends from mIRC, then we met them after chatting for few times
• Forums were generally known as BBS (Bulletin Board System) that time
• You could earn quite good money with simple and plain HTML-designed web pages
• There were damn a lot of Titanic-themed websites
• Mobile phone was an expensive accessory, I couldn’t afford to own one until my first job. At 1999 when Nokia 3210 launced, it was a hit, we borrow classmates’ 3210 phones to play the popular Snake game, tried to record down our own highest score in them
• Scanner was the important tool to produce a photo’s softcopy, because digital camera was a luxury accessory (actually did anyone has one at 1998?)
• Display card, sound card, modem, network card were not part of motherboard
• All cards were plugged on motherboard’s PCI and ISA slots, while expensive VooDoo 3D card plugged into AGP slot, which only available on expensive motherboard
• Creative sound blaster 16-bits sound card was damn popular
• CD burner was expensive
• Quantam BigFoot hard disk with the width of 5.25″ was popular, having a 4.3GB hard disk was already hugh
• We were using EDO RAM, 64MB RAM was amazingly big
• Imbi Plaza was the main point for IT gadgets