Solat Orang Sakit

Didn’t know JAKIM had a PDF compilation of prayers for people who are sick and unable to pray the normal way.

In this PDF, JAKIM has describe in detail on how to take “wuduk” if you are injured, and type of prayers (solat) including sitting and lying down.

Ada di bincangkan secara perinci cara-cara mengambil air sembahyang, solat secara duduk atau baring. Bagus JAKIM!

Download it here - http://www.islam.gov.my/portal/tayammum.php

String of Bad Luck

Since this year, I had a string of bad luck. It’s amazing how I am still surviving through this.

• My HDD crashed. I don’t have a backup. All my personal stuff is in there. The cost of recovery – RM 4K. Forget it.
• I crashed my car at my condo at the first floor of the car park. I missed my brake and crash to the railing of the first floor. My car was hanging with the 2 front wheels at the edge of the condo. Luckily the concrete stopped my car from diving down. Cost of repair – RM 1.5K. Cost of repair to the condo – another RM 1K. Cost of live? Priceless…
• Saman – RM 30 - RM 100. Superb. I had no choice but to park outside as the LRT parking is full. Don’t this traffic police have other better thing to do than saman those sitting ducks? It’s not that I don’t want to pay parking, there is simply NO PARKING! One hand government say take public transport but another hand there is no parking? What the heck?
• My knee injury – this is the mother of all my bad luck. So far I have spend RM 4K on this. I am expecting to pay another RM 10-20K for the surgery. Superb! Can read more here.

It’s no doubt that I have been under tremendous stress lately due to my business. It’s been hell.

Being a new start-up, I have to juggle everything from the programming, management, finance, sales, accounts, HR, filing, banking and right up to delivery boy. My phone won’t stop ringing and my email won’t stop piling. I have no doubt this is all part and parcel of business, but working for 8 months straight without a break, took its toll on me. Surviving a near death experience was a wake up call for me.

I took a break recently to get away from all this. I left my mobile phone and laptop at home and ran to Malacca. Stayed in Holiday Inn. Nice place.

Unfortunately, it only helped a bit. One lesson I learn here is I am too dependant on technology. As a business owner, I don’t think we can escape from being part of the business. It’s like being the Borg.

Resistance is futile!

I just hope God can be a little forgiving and give me a break. Sorry God, I think I have to postpone my Umrah until I get well from my surgery.

Knee Injury

Its been sometime since I blogged. I have a very good reason. My knee was giving me a lot of pain and it got worst in the recent month. I decided to have it checked. 

I was referred to Apollo TTDI Medical Centre to a Datuk Dr. Selva. I was told to do a MRI after the first consultation. He suspected me of having a tear around my knee area. I did my MRI at Lourders Medical Centre in Jalan Ipoh. As feared, I have a Meniscus tear at the knee which requires me to do a ACL surgery. The doctor injected me with Synvisc to help with the pain, however I felt later on this was not necessary. I have this wobbly feeling now while walking. The cost of the injection was around RM 1.5K. I was charged a total of  RM 4K for the consultation. I am getting doubts about this treatment.

More or less, I have to do a surgery and my knee will not be the same anymore. I have to accept that fact. Now I am looking for a the best surgeon and physiotherapy centre. This is going to cost me a bomb, I hope my insurance can cover this. Guys, go easy in the gym. Injury sux and costly.

Tiger Wood had one of this surgery as well.

Tesco

Firstly, while I was trying to tweak the design for this blog, I somehow screwed it up. I am trying to find some time to fix it.

As usual, I do my shopping at Mydin. Yesterday, the road was quite jam than usual. When I finally reached Mydin, there were large number of Police vehicles and personnel. Then when I saw 2 UTK motorbikes, I knew there was some big shot in the Mall. Mydin was cordoned off.

Its amazing to see how much Police resources is used for  politicians, and they keep on complaining they don't have enough manpower. To me, they have poor resource allocation and management. Ever heard politician being shot in Msia before? Common man, even Dr. M walks around in the shopping complex with minimum security.

Guess who was in Mydin yesterday?

Well anyway, my wife decided to shop at Tesco instead since one my readers here suggest to do so. We went to Tesco Curve.

Generally, not all items are cheap. Selection of choice is sometimes limited. Aisles are not categorized in the same group. Aisle 1 -5 will be food and in the centre is clothing, toilteries and then follow by food again. I dunno, its weird to me.

Tesco has a lot of their own product brand. My friend swears by it. He just love to buy Tesco brand items. A good thing about Tesco is their trolley has baby seat and a partition. Good thinking. They also have a policy whereby they will open a counter for you if you have more than 2 trolleys in front of you at the payment counter.

But, I am still sticking to Mydin. Better choices and better pricing (although not always, price tends to fluctuate monthly). Although I wish MyDin could train their store helpers to be more HELPFUL!

The Launch of MuscleZone

I am launching a blog on fitness. It's called MuscleZone - http://musclezone.blogspot.com.

It's been there since Jan 2008, but I kept it idle. To meet my 2009 resolution, I am resuscitating the blog.

I have been writing about fitness for sometime in this blog, but it's time to have a dedicated blog on it. This will be a newbie centric blog and my crazy struggle in trying to achieve a life long dream of Greek-God-like physique minus the steroids.

 

Mike O'Hearn

I will be moving some fitness related articles from this blog to the MuscleZone.

The Taste of a Real Burger

The food of heavens has been bestowed upon us. I have finally tasted the real juicy delicious burger. Its called Carl's Junior!

 

This burger is 100x better than McD. You people are being conned by McD by their slick happy-happy advertisment and al-cheapo crap burger. Forget the clown restaurant. Be a man and get this burger. Its better than Burger Kings as well.

If its good enough for Paris Hilton, its good enough for me..

A Wendy Senario

I tried out Wendy's today at Sunway Pyramid. I bought Grilled Chicken burger and my wife bought Fish burger. Both burger tasted mediocre at best. The burger was so salty. Another advise at the washroom, the tap has hot and cool feature. Unlike other restaurants where they only fake the hot part, this restaurant, the hot water is really scalding HOT!

I am sticking to Burger King. Ohh yeah, its been more than a YEAR since I had a McD burger ever since I joined the Hate McD cult. So people it is possible to stop eating fast food.

 

For the first time in my life, I paid movie tickets for a Malay movie - Senario The Movie Episod 1. From the trailer, it looked really funny, so ok lah, bagi can.

Within 10 minutes into the movie, I regret paying the RM 22 and vow never to buy tickets for any Malay movie. I will just watch it on Astro.

The comedy and the slapstick joke is so lame. The worst part was, all the best part in the movie has already been shown in their trailer. So what is there more to expect? The crowd although laughed at all the dumb jokes, I just couldn't get it. How can you laughed at the same jokes twice? You already know what will happen next.

Talking about the crowd, they acted and laughed as if they were watching in their living room. Out of the blue there was a shoe on my shoulder, the guy behind me decided to extend his leg and watch the show. Such a rowdy crowd. Dumb ass!

I really like Malay and Indonesian movie, but this movie is really sad. The only time I laughed during the movie was when the "Makcik" was doing the drift.

My all time favourite is still "Jutawan Fakir". I have watched it to the umpteenth time and I still laugh. Apek, ur the best!

 

Nabil, you are good too! During Sahur, I never missed watching "Lu Pikirlah Sendiri" show by Nabil. Funny guy. Apparently he has few movies lined up - "Sifu", "Shh... Dia Datang Lagi" and "Lu Pikirlah Sendiri de Movie". Hoping to catch those... err.. but I will wait for it on Astro.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri

Hari Raya is just around the corner, which means Ramadhan is ending quite soon.

Plagiarized from http://dungun.blogspot.com

This year's Ramadhan has been quite meaningful to me. I have learn a lot in terms of spiritual and the fact that God is ever forgiving. I am happy Raya is coming, but sad that I didn't fully utilised Ramadhan.

I would like to share with everyone on this very useful and intelligently done website. Its an online Quran. It has translation (English, Malay and Urdu) and audio of Quran recitation.

So everyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, now you have the oppurtunity to learn about the Quran. So before you label every Muslim to be turban headed and a gun trotting terrorist who loves to blow up people with planes, lets try to learn about the Quran and its true meaning.

 

Quran Explorer - Interactive Audio Recitations & Translations

 

This year Raya will be the first year without my dad. I will make a visit to him after my Raya prayers. Raya this year will be low key, "baju raya pun tak beli lagi..."

Selamat Hari Raya to all my readers... although only handful of you. You make my day each time you place a comment. Thank you very much. If I have written something that might have offended you, please don't put me into ISA. "Maaf Zahir Batin".

Bali Trip

 

I am suppose to update on Day 2, but its has been sometime now that I have forgotten what I did. All I can remember now was that I had a bad food poisoning after Made Warung.

 

I remember getting up around 6 AM, my stomach was rumbling. After that the entire 2 days was gone and I spend most of my time in the loo.

 

On the 3rd, we transferred over to Bali Island Villa for 4D3N. I had to go to the clinic. The staff brought me to the clinic nearby and waited for me - very nice of them. The charge for some diarrhoea medicine - RM 200 ++! What a rip-off!

 

Below is the snippets of the entire trip:-

 

Day 2:-

• Toilet
• Massage in Samaya, was OK.
• Seminyak Town - short lived journey
• Toilet
• A romantic beach side dinner. It was really nice eating by the beach and listening to the breaking of the waves. Check it out.

Beach Side Dinner

 

Day 3:-

• We transferred over to Bali Island Villa. I was really reluctant to move over from The Samaya.

Bali Island Villa's Pool

 

 

Bali Island Villa's Living Room

• I initially choose Bali Island because of the pool, however I have since regret it. Samaya was much better. Hotel reviews are at the bottom of this post.
• Dinner Cruise - Initially it was boring, since there were large group of Korean and Chinese people. The band sang songs dedicated for them which we didn't understand a thing. There is nothing much except for the boat leaving to the sea and eating buffet.
• There were some interesting entertainment and my wife and me got invited to do some rather "erotic" game. Ohh God...
• Finally we meet a large Malaysian group from Celcom - Apa khabar?
• Towards the end, there were some sexy dance, see below.

Sexy dancers

 

Our Cruise Boat

 

Day 4:-

• I have recovered from my food poisoning. I ask the villa's driver to sent me to Kuta Town. Remember, although not compulsory, but I had to tip the driver each time. My total tips for this trip cost me nearly few hundred Ringgit.
• Kuta is full of people trying to make money out of you. We did manage to walk until Kuta beach and Hard Rock cafe. Its full of people. Reminds me of Pattaya.
• We visited Tanah Lot and another temple (can't remember the name now). Tanah Lot is full of shops and you will need to bargain up to 50-70%. Good stuff.

The Temple

 

Tanah Lot

• Once we return to the villa, I had a surprise waiting for my wife. A romantic candle light dinner beside the pool. Check it out! Ain't I romantic?

Candle Light Dinner by the Pool

 

Day 5:-

• An interesting day. We had our breakfast in the villa. Sadly, the breakfast is disappointing. We were too spoiled in Samaya.
• We had our massage in Tanah Merah Spa part of Bali Island Villa. In my years of getting massage, this is the best massage I ever had. It's not the spa, but the masseur. She was really good! I could feel my entire body went into deep state of relaxation.
• Next was Uluwatu Tour and Kechek dance. On top of the hill, there is specatcular view of the ocean.

View from Uluwatu Temple

• I really enjoyed the Kechek / Kecak / Monkey dance. It's about a story of Rama and Sita taken from a small part of the Ramayana epic story of 50,000 lines. Audience were given the storyline ahead so we could relate the dance sequence with the story. I am big fan of history, so this excited me.

Kecak Dance

 

The Script

 

A fiery scene

 

Kecak Dance

 

Kecak Dance - Some comedy sketch

• After the dance, we were ushered to Jimbaran Bay for some beach side seafood dinner. Yes, more dinner. Call me romantic, after all this is my honeymoon trip.
• Due to darkness, this is the only valuable shoot that I could get.

Beach Side Dinner at Jimbaran Bay

• After the dinner, we come back to find the bedroom was flooded. Apparently there was a leak from the toilet and it spilled over to the bedroom.
• Soon, we had an uninvited guess. Hermit the Frog, decided to have a beach party in my leaking toilet. Gosh...

 

Day 6:-

• Time to go home. Before the airport, we stopped for a 2 hour spa treatment.
• Could not compare against Tanah Merah, but we did have a pretty good spa treatment including body scrub. Place was nice and clean.
• Back to airport, flight was delayed - nothing surprising.
• I just couldn't wait to come back home and have a proper shower. Somehow I feel the showers in Bali are mixed with salt water.

It was a good trip however we didn't do any water sports activity at all. Maybe the next time but definitely in a group of friends.

 

 

For more reviews on the villas that I stayed which I have posted at tripadvisor.com, surf to the links below:-

The Samaya

Bali Island Villa

I am 30!

25th July 2008 - I am officially 30 years old. Yup, I have reached the big 3-0. I feel so old now. Honestly, I started to feel old since I hit 20. 

My good friends threw me a nice birthday party at Las Carrestas. The year before TGI, and the year before that Sunway Hotel. I have such wonderful friends.

It was very nice dinner. They made me wear a Mexican hat! Aya Caramba! Food was good although a bit pricey. A very delicious chocolate cake from Suchan. What more can you ask when you are around with good friends and good food? Thank you so much guys! 

After dinner, we headed to our one of our friends new house in Puchong. She has a nice house on top of the hill which has a very spectacular night view of Puchong.

Right now I am 30 going 31. I just hope when I am 40, I have achieved all my goals in life. I get really envy when I watch ETV. They aren't even 25 and they are millionaires. Damn rich kids. 

I means its sux to be 30, but since life begins at 40, I guess I still have 10 more years to fool around! Age is just number, Ganee.....