Being a typical Malaysian, I get glued to the TV every evening for a serial drama. I was introduced to the Jewel of the Palace by my wife and ever since then, 8.30pm every weekday has been blocked out for the serial.

The serial is about a dedicated female individual, despite all the odds and hardship, strive to become the leading physicians of her time. The story was based on a true historical figure in Korea during the Chosun Dynasty. What caught my interest most, was the character’s perseverance in overcoming somewhat seams to be an endless trail of odds. After overcoming her life long enemy and uncovering a trail of conspiracy, she has to overcome the social stigma of her gender.

Her endurance and perseverance is truly inspiring, reminding that in our daily lives, a little hardship is nothing compared to what some others go through. If we can’t even overcome these small hardship, how can we overcome far worst in the future. Her character reminds me of Tolkien’s Frodo and Xuan Zang (a Chinese Buddhist Monk from 623 BC who traveled to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures, an inspiration to the popular Chinese story “The Monkey God”), they all overcome hardship, against odds that have little to no chance of success, but through endurance and perseverance, prevail and became a legend at their own time.

Today is the last of the 70 episodes that will be aired by 8TV and for sure, I will be glued to the TV from 8.30pm to 9.30pm to catch the epic ending.

For Those who could not get enough of the series or have questions or would like more resources, you can visit a forum at the link below, created for fans a like?.

Jewel of the Palace Forum
Dae Jang Geum Theme Park
DJG Blog

Recently I had an opportunity to visit Singapore. As I have always wanted to experience AirAsia to Singapore, what an adventure I thought it would be. The journey will take me to Johor Airport and then cross the border to Singapore and make my to the hotel with the public transport there. My purpose was to experience how it would be like, and to find out if it would be worth it to undergo such mode of transport. In the end, the experience was valuable and many lessons learnt.

Senai Airport
The total flight time from Penang to Senai Airport was approximately 1hr and 10 minutes. This is rather interesting. The flight time from Penang to KL was also around the same time, but Johor was so much further away. I guess trying to be economical is the reason for the PG-KL flight to be so long. The Senai Airport is smaller than the Penang airport, about 1/2 of it’s size. There are not that many shops around, and shops are mainly food stalls. There is one malay food shop right infront of the arrival hall, they serve very nice “kuih” and at a very affordable price too, RM 0.60 per piece. The departure/arrival gate looks rather futuristic with tall glass wall, stretching from ceiling to the floor. The flight that I was on was delayed for 20 minutes because of the incoming flight.

Senai to JB Connection
Because of the flight delay, the plane arrived at the minute where the direct (non-stop) bus to JB took off. The next bus was in 30 minutes time. There are only two mode of transport to JB, either this RM1 bus or RM40 cab. The bus journey takes about 30-40 minutes depending on the traffic. There are no direct connection to Singapore, unless you are willing to take the cab. The bus is yellow in color and docks at the far end, close to the check in counters. The tickets to the bus can be bought at the Airport information counter, which is located right in the middle of the airport.

Kota Raya to Kranji MRT
The bus goes to the Kota Raya station in JB. And from there, it cost another RM1 for the bus to cross the causeway to Kranji MRT Station (Red Line) in Singapore. The entire journey from Senai Airport to Kranji only cost RM2. However, the journey may be 1.5 hour or more, depending on if you made the connection in time and also how much time you spent on the causeway (customs).

One Way
The total time I spent from Penang to Singapore is aprox. 4 hours. The flight is about 1.5 hour and from the airport to my destination (orchard road) is about 2.5 hours. I have computed, the best case, without any delays and making all the connections, it would take me about 2.5 hours from Penang to Orchard Road. For the cost and time spent, it is still cheaper than other flights and significantly faster than any land transport. It is still worth the money to take this flight, especially if budget is a concern. The down side is that only one flight per day from Penang to JB and back, thus, if you are planning for a weekend getaway, this may not be your choice of transport unless you would want to take extra 2 days of leave.

Return Trip
The Return flight (JB-PG) is not as friendly as the PG-JB trip. This is mainly because of the flight time. The flight departs at 10.30am in the morning. This means that I need to check in at about 9.30am. And factoring in 2 hours of travel time between Singapore to the airport, I need to leave my hotel at 7.30am. Instead, I left at 6.50am and still could not make it to the Kota Raya connection bus in time. I had to take a cap from JB to the Airport.

At the Kranji station, I was looking for the same yellow bus that I came with, “Causeway link”. I waited for 20 minutes before the first bus arrives. At the same place, there are many other bus companies that also operates to JB. Since the bus only says JB, I wasn’t sure if the bus will go Kota Raya or not. Not only after I arrived at the border, I found out that these bus also goes to kota Raya. Thus, any bus can be taken from Kranji station, as long as they said JB, it should be fine. Right after the Singapore customs, there are a few buses that goes to Kota Raya. You will have to pay another dollar there, but if it means for you to catch the flight? then it is ok?

Because I was a little late, I made the mistake of taking a cab from the border straight to the airport. If I had gone to Kota Raya, I would have found out that the flight has been delayed. Kota Raya has all the flight informations and also AirAsia counter there. I could have saved a whole lot more? Nevertheless the lessons are important and I hope travelers could benefit from my experience here?

In the article below, it claims that Intel has released its new Dual Core processors today and OEMs such as HP or Dell starts to sell new PC with dual core today.

This highly anticipated core is expected to give a performance boost compared to the current Hyperthreding technology. I wonder if these dual core processors have Hyperthreding in them, we could potentially have 4 virtual cores all together.. Now wouldn’t that be sweet?

Article from San Francisco Chronicle
Desktop computers that contain Intel Corp.’s new dual-core microprocessors, which are like having two chips in one, will go on sale today.

Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and other computer-makers will sell PCs with these chips starting today, Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson said.

One of the first thing after setting up a blog is to set on the design of the site. This is achieved thorough the template/styles/skins section of the blogging tool. Majority of the design is achieved through CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), however different browsers adopt different standards of CSS and resulted to plenty of headache for site designers. By not having a single standard, a site design for Firefox for instant, will appear differently on Internet Explorer. Take my photoblog for an example. If you view the site through Firefox or any Mozilla based browser, you can see a nice round curve at the corner of the photo frame. If an IE is used, the corner curve turns to a sharp edge.

This is a small problem compared to making a site design that fits into all blogging or content management software. Imagine, having to learn all the different software tags and where to put them. This task usually needs a group of people who understands his/her tool well enough to make the modifications.

This is exactly what happen to the famous “Kubrick” Template. The design was originally done for WordPress and soon, the popularity of the design grows and now a community of bloggers have ported the design to various blogging or content management tools. I believe this is the first site of it’s kind where a template / design is treated as a software commodity with upgrades and cross platform portability.

Nevertheless, thanks to Michael Heilemann and the group of selfless individuals, we all can enjoy this wonderful template on our site.

On the way home today, this rider manage to catch my attention with a “1/2″ written on a bucket. If only he has the other “1/2″, then the bike would balance up? hehe?