On Sept 7, 2007, the family was sadden by the departure of Johnny Ang, my Jolly and much loved cousin of 57 years old. He is survived through his wife and 3 children. The news came to the family in a shock, as he was still young. He has been living in Ipoh for all his adult life, Ipoh was his home.

The world is saddened by the news of the passing of Tenor Pavarotti yesterday. I remember him most as a great musician who not only excel at his genre, but also in cross genre music. In his annual charity concert he collaborated with all kinds of artist delivering something new to the music community. Spice Girls for instance, in 1988 “Pavarotti and Friends for the children of Liberia” concert, he collaborated with them on their “Viva Forever” song. Viva Forever Tenor Pavarotti, you lived forever through your music..

[audio:viva_forever.mp3]

In the course of my trip planning, I found Answers from yahoo to be absolutely indispensable. I searched for a few days on how to get from Gora (where I was staying) to Kamakura. I could not find any bus linkage nor train linkages. Guide books and online travel guides only touches on popular routes and this is an abnormal route. As a last straw, I posted a question over at Yahoo Answers and whoala within12 hours my question was answered. It was not th exact answer i wanted, but I got an hint that lead me to what I wanted. I asked if there is a direct bus connection. A local guy ask me back, whey I want to take bus, while I can take the train, taking the Tokaido line. With this Tokaido line, i was able to search the train time and cost. Yahoo Answers are for anything, and there are many odd questions there. It is not that user friendly and fall below my expectation as a web tool. in fact, Yahoo web tool, apart from it’s mail, all fall below expectation on user friendliness. Trip Planner for instance, do not have easy sort features, and the ajax are not dynamic. Every time i change something, i have to wait for the entire page to reload. However, there are no other web applications like it, so Trip Planner is still the only one that gives a good flexible trip planning capability. Back to Yahoo Answers, each users are given points, to encourage participation. You can only asked this few questions with the given points, and if you want to ask more, you need to answer other people’s questions or vote for the best answers…

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Coming home late, there was not much time to cook for dinner. We decided to buy fried fish from a local Chinese Restaurant nearby to supplement some of the frozen food from my in laws. The restaurant I went to was filled with people and the kitchen was somehow on the side of the restaurant giving the patrons a full view of the kitchen, helpers and cook. After making my order, I loitered around the kitchen area watching eagerly on the fist I ordered. After a few minutes of attention, I gave up and start to wander my eyes around the restaurant. After getting bored of that, I put my attention back to the kitchen. This is when I start to notice something different about the cook. Chinese food are about wok, and frying and the cooks have two layers of wok to work with. There were 3 cooks and the oldest was the left most followed by a middle age guy in the middle and a young lad on the right. The left most cook, whom I presume to be the master handles 4 wok at a time, while the middle cook handles 3 and the right most and the youngest cook handles 2. The kitchen assistant prepares all the ingredients behind them, and inform the cooks on what are the order. The master chef will use one wok for deep frying, and then 2 more spare wok for all his frying. He puts my fish into the deep fry wok, and then start to work on some stir fry dish. While on that, he would take the work and put on a staging area and take an empty work and stir fry something else. Once done, he would return to the other dish, and move on to other dishes. It was like an orchestra symphony, working synchronously he juggle between the food he cooks. The same goes for the other two cooks. The 3 of them work like a full orchestra band, all employing their skills to serve the hungry customers waiting for the fill. I counted 4 dishes while frying my fish, talking about efficiency. The food was quite good as well and speed did not degrade in quality.