An interesting lunch

I always look forward to having a good meal over lunch and spending that time building relationships with my colleagues. Today was something unusual for me, we went and ate vegetarian food. Basically in Cyberjaya, there isn't any decent restaurant within a 10km vicinity and we always drive outside to eat some good food whether it may be chicken rice or even at McDonald's.

Not today, we went to the wonderful lego building located right next to the Shell building and next to the plaza square where companies like Maybank, IBM and Prudential are housed. From the image above, you can see why I call it the Lego building, well everyone here calls it that.

The food court located on the 1st floor in this building is not exactly the best place to eat in Cyberjaya, there are probably better places around Cyberjaya such as the Street Mall and the recently opened Old Town Kopitiam restaurant. But there is a ray of hope within it and it shines in the form of an Indian vegetarian restaurant.

As most Cyberjaya is basically an IT hub, most of the workers here come from India and most of them are vegetarian. Now if you know me well, I am a meat lover and for me to head over there for lunch is a surprise for many. Today was one such day which I went with a bunch of my colleagues and I found out that the food there was excellent. Plenty of dishes to choose from and fruits are available (yes I am still sticking to my New Year's Resolution which means fruits aplenty during meals) as well.

So if you are ever in the vicinity of Cyberjaya and you have no idea where to head out for lunch, try out this vegetarian restaurant, its located on the ground floor of the Lego building right next to the BCB-CIMB bank.

New Updates

Finally some new updates for this site. Yes I've changed the site layout a thousand times and the reason why I finally changed it again to one of the Blogger standard theme was because I was given a chance by Blogger to upgrade to their new version. Now I can update my sidebar with better ease and with more content.

Here are the new changes for this year, 2007.

1) New title and new theme

I've changed my title from "all in a nutshell" to "How Random". Why did I do this? Well mainly because I thought that things are becoming more and more complex as you grow older and as you begin to take more on responsibilities, you learn a lot of new things and life so happens to just give so much back to you in such a random way.

2) New page layout

As I mentioned above, this was to take advantage of the page customization tool which Blogger provided with their new web application.

3) Photobook links

I've just gotten a new digital camera and I would love to start sharing more pictures with everyone. I am currently in the experimental phase with a couple of photo sharing websites, namely myPhotoAlbum, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. Personally I like Picasa Web Albums because of the easy interface for photo upload using their Picasa software (free of course).

From my side bar you would probably see links to all of the web albums there. The newer photos are located at the lower section of the sidebar though.

4) New Chat bar

I ditched the old chat box and decided to go with Chatterbox. Why did I change this? I have totally no idea, I made a mistake by totally forgetting what I used in my old template and I really couldn't find my Javascript code. Oh well at least its new but it is missing the emoticon function which Boon did point out to me.







5) 1 Year Older

Yes, I've finally turned 25 today. Another year older and this can be considered a milestone for me. After 25 years I look back and then think of what I have achieved........My mind is blank for some part of it but I guess I need to look forward to another 25 more years.

It's Friday, time to review "Blood Diamond"

The end of the week is finally here but it doesn't feel like it really is. I guess that is because yesterday was a public holiday here in KL and PJ which means I had the entire day off to spend with my friends.

So what did we do? Well I decided to catch up on some movies which I've missed and one of them was "Blood Diamond" staring Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou. What is it about this movie that made me choose it?

Well firstly there was a statement which I heard from my colleague saying that Leonardo DiCaprio deserved to get nominated for the Oscars for this but the what made me decide was when he said that the supporting actor should be the one nominated, that got me curious.

Convincing my friends that it was a good movie was no easy task. The first thing they usually ask me is, "Who is the star of the show?". And when I answer, "Er, its Leonardo DiCaprio", they just get all freaked out. I guess that telling them that this guy here is the star of a 2 hour 15 minutes movie would probably put them to sleep.

And believe me, some parts of when he was talking did make me yawn a little but it was his supporting actor that made the show interesting. When I say that he could act, I really meant it.

In fact most of the show revolved along his life and how he tried to make a difference by being what a true father should be, longing to be with his family and trying his utmost to protect his son from going to the dark side. Totally opposite of how Darth Vader ended up to be.

The movie talked about the whole issue of conflict diamonds in Africa. If you have no idea what conflict diamonds are, please read this first. But in short, it is basically diamonds that are harvested from countries to fund their civil wars. The show showed much of how life is in Africa from how villagers were killed or their hands chopped off by rebels to prevent them for voting for the government.

It is movies like this that makes us think how real situations like these are, and they are happening right now even as we go through our normal lives. Thousands of children suffer each day due to poor conditions or some even as young as 10 are thought to be rebel soldiers. In the show they mentioned that the word "Infantry" was derived from child soldiers, I guess it may be very true.

To be perfectly honest, I would rate this show 4 stars out of 5 stars. A very good movie which should not be watched by children as it may prove to be extremely traumatizing due to its violent (yet true) nature . There are plenty of action scenes as well as scenes that will touch you to your very core of your heart.

Random shots

Guess what? I've sold off my Canon S3 and went toward the dark side and bought myself a Nikon D40. Everyone was telling me that the switch is bad but I totally support my own move and the results are spectacular. I guess I can enjoy using a proper SLR now but of course there are a couple of downsides to it.

Anyway I shall let me pictures do the talking. Mind you, these pictures have been resized, I still have the full resolution pictures in my hard drive.

Here is a picture of KL Tower which I took when I was walking towards the Dang Wangi station from Sheraton Imperial.

This was taken from the Pasar Seni LRT station, it was about sunset and I was heading towards China town when I chanced upon this beautiful scenery.

Same scenery as the previous one but I zoomed in a little to avoid seeing the LRT tracks.

Of course, I couldn't resist not taking a picture of our beautiful Twin Towers, currently the tallest building in the world.

Over here are a couple of pictures which I took at Sheraton hotel. While waiting for the rest of my friends to arrive at the lobby, I guess my trigger finger was a little itchy. Totally random, I would say. It is just to test out the camera's macro functionality.

And last but not least, the chocolate cake which I do miss the most. So much to eat during training, that I must say. I think I can't fit into any of my pants anymore.

Overall I guess it wasn't so bad that I could actually bring my colleagues from Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Australia around and allow me to test out my new camera at the same time. Believe it or not, I looked more of a tourist compared to them.

The things in life..

Its great to work with a multi-cultural group of colleagues. One of the funny things that happened today during class was when we were playing a game of charades and the clue to the question was a movie theme. My Chinese classmate was trying to get us to guess that he was acting out "Mr. Bean" which was absolutely hilarious.

The best part started when our faculty started teaching us about Metrics and asked the class what was Metrics. Our sleepy eye Korean thought we were still playing a game and answered, "The Matrix is around us".

.............

Happy New Year

The New Year started out great with two days of relaxation and hanging out with friends. And for once, I think I will definitely take on a couple of New Year's Resolutions and see at the end of the year how much I have achieved.

Resolution #1:
Try to lose at least 20kg or drop my weight down to 85kg. That was my plan throughout the year but as the food gotten better, so did my waist size. Also it would be good to lose that double chin of mine, it definitely isn't that appealing.







Resolution #2:
To run a half marathon and to compete in another 10km run which I did last year. My target would be the upcoming KL Marathon which I will attend with some of my colleagues.













Resolution #3:
To properly save enough money and to follow the advice I've gotten from my personal financial management workshop which I went for last year. That means having at least 3-4 months of salary in savings in the event I ever lost a job and to continuously save more than 30% of my income.












Resolution #4:
To practice on my electric guitar and to play correctly and going back to the basics. This means I need to either purchase a metronome or download a digital version to work on my timings. Expectations would be to practice at least 3 hours a week.

Well so far these are the only things I can think of right now. Hopefully I might add in something else but for now, I guess I know what I need to achieve. Let's make the next check point at the next quarter.