I have always been fascinated by different kinds of pop drinks.  When I saw this clip about soda pop obsession at Chow, I was thinking that only in US can find independent soda pop bottlers.  I was surprise when I came across this Melaka made soda pop from Long Chan.  There were 5 flavors, and all are not bad.  It does not have that much gas (carbonation) in it and was rather sweet.  My wife told me that this company have been around since she was small, and for this independent soda pop company to survive so long is amazing.  However, this drink cannot be found at restaurants, nor can it be found at hypermarket.  To get this drink, you will have to go to the local coffee shop (ah pek style and not Old Town style) or the local roti canai shop here in Melaka. 

The new Aeon Melaka Mall house the first Papa Johns Pizza outlet in this state.  With so many pizza shops in Malaysia, and having Pizza Hut, Dominoes and Shakey’s concurring almost every city in the country, I wonder how does Papa John’s fare in this crowded market.  My first impression was that this is another Pizza Hut like restaurant.  The restaurant feel and menu are also similar.  However, after tasting the fresh baked pizza, it is far from similar, infact, it rank 1 among  it’s competitors. 

Value for Money – Average

The prices of Pizza, sides and drinks are comparable with the other Pizza outlets in Malaysia.  During my visit, there were two promotion going on, first is Citibank Card 50% off for 9” pizza and Jusco Card RM5 for second 9” pizza.  With these promo, a party of 5 only spent RM80 for 4 9” pizza. 

Taste – Excellent

The pizza was great.  The dough was not oil soak like Pizza Hut, nor it powdery like Dominoes.  It taste fresh, and with the free fresh tomato paste, garlic butter & marinated chilli, eating the crust of the pizza was not as painful as the other pizza outlets.  I could taste the fresh abundance toppings, putting Papa John’s Pizza #1 among the competitors in Malaysia. 

Overall – Great

In comparison with Pizza Hut, Dominoes and Shakey’s Pizza, no doubt Papa John’s rank #1 in taste.  In term of value, it still trail Dominoes which has the royalty card that gives buy 1 free 1 large pizza.  To-date, nothing can beat this value. 

We were at Jusco supermarket shopping for Lamy abc that was on sale when I came across this new range of Unicorn Colors Notebook.  It first caught my attention with the range of attractive colors mini notebook.  Ranging from Bright Pink to Refreshing Green, all imaginable attractive colors are available.  I spotted the Black Large notebook that looked like a Moleskine.  Picked it up and the hard cover felt like a mole.

Currently I could only find this notebook at Jusco, despite my numerous attempt to contact the company Unicorn for more details, I dont seam to find this notebook being sold elsewhere.  The notebook came with an Expandable Inner Pocket like a typical style moleskine and it has an Elastic band holding the entire book tight.  The book has 96 plan 80gm paper and it responded quite well with my Lamy Safari.  There were no smear through at the reverse side, nor were they any bleed through to the bottom sheet. The notebook was priced at RM19.90, much cheaper than some of the competitions.

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The Komtar Tower viewing platform was previously the Tower Restaurant.  Only in recent years, when the restaurant closes, this place was open up for public.  Sad to say, the place was poorly maintain with a few chairs and tables close to the windows, and the rest of the floor was empty.  This is far from KL tower nor those tower view abroad.  The good thing was that we were the only visitor there, we got the entire floor to our selves, unlike we have to fight for view in KL Tower or in Japan.  I believe the RM15 entrance fee may have contributed to the lack of traffic. 

Once arrive at the 60th floor, we were greeted by a friendly lady which sold us the tickets and gave us a bottle of water and two postcards each.  I guess this is the management’s lame way of making up for RM15 entrance fee.  The place looked liken an abandon empty building and it display the management’s lack of commitment to truly turn this into a tourist destination.  There is a vast potential for such a place, look at KL Tower for one, constant flow of tourist from abroad and locals as well.  When I was in Tokyo, their viewing tower was located at their City Council building as well and was also packed with local and foreign tourist.  If the management lack the will to make this tower a tourist destination with complete facility, maybe the building management should look into tendering this out to other companies that has interest, if not, at least run it as a state own non profit org. 

The place certainly lacks a few fundamental items that are a must have in such viewing facility.

1. A map of what you are looking at, with names of the famous buildings (located at each window plane)
2. A free view finder to get a closer look at the city
3. A few souvenir shops to remember Penang by. 
4. A restaurant for tourist to chill and get lost in time. 

Nevertheless, the view from up the tower was breath taking and provided plenty of opportunity for tilt shift photography or post processing tilt shift. 

Offline – This feature enables your browser to download your mail box and makes it available offline.  Before this feature was available, I can only access my mailbox while I am online and I am forced to use third party mail client such as Outlook,  Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, etc.  I’ve tried them all and end up using the gmail web interface for performance and I have also got used to the way the mails are being group together.  

Tasks – This is the one feature that I have been waiting for.  Before this, i have to use “Remember The Milk” through Firefox with addon.  The thing with Firefox is that it is slower than Chrome, and it has been bugging me for quite some time.  Now the labs are enabled on Google Apps, I have start to use back Chrome as my primary browser.

Message Translation – Now, this is one feature that I don’t really need it, but for the occasions that I receive mails from our China CM or Japanese customers, this pay prove to be handy.  It has yet to prove its worth, for now, I am enabling it to try it out.

Advance IMAP Controls – This is another feature that I seldom use, this is because I seldom access mail with Outlook.  The one particular feature that I like with this advance Imap control is the ability to choose which label to be shown through Imap.  This will help to reduce the load speed.  I usually only use Outlook to download mails to local drive to be archived in PST format.

Forgotten Attachment Detector – This is one important feature to have.  I have many occasions forgot to attach documents only to resend the same mail with attachment immediately.  This feature will help me to avoid such embarrassment in the future. 

Custom Label Colors – Immediately when I started to use Labels, I was craving for this feature.  The colors provided were fairly limited and was hard to find enough contrast of likeable colors to fill the mail box.  With this feature, I can customize my own colors, and enable me to fill my mail box with my own gordy colors instead of those created by someone else. 

Send & Archive – This is another productivity tool where it helps to reduce one step after I response to the mail, archive it.  I usually have to use the keyboard shot-cut to archive, now this helps me to save one step. 

Undo Send – Not that often, I have to recall mails due to no attachments, and due to some error of information.  This helps, if I notice that I should not send out the mail just yet within seconds of sending it.  I am trying out this feature to see if it is effective in saving me face..

Inserting images – This is one feature that elevates one primary frustration with gmail, that is the ability to attach pictures into the mail to illustrate important points.  Now I can explain better through mail.

Google Calendar Gadget – This helps to put my day in a single window and without having to open the calendar in a different tab.  This feature brings Google Apps – Gmail to be close to what Outlook offers, thought it could not match it, but atleast it put more functionality into gmail. 

Now I feel more complete with Gmail like never before and I can start to be more effective and manage my work more effectively.  Goodbye third party apps. 

The dog never failed to pull the family together, nor stop helping the family and friends out.  But Akari, the lead character who have had the dog for so many years, that she started to feel the burden of her commitment as she outgrew her teenage years going into adulthood.  Even then, the dog never fusses her and keep being her friend until the day the dog died, just in time for Akari to realize her 10 promises to the dog and what’s really important in life. 

In one of her promise to the dog, is to cherish the time they spent together as the dog’s life is shorter than the human life.  Not just the dog’s life, we humans always forget that our life has an expiry date in it, and sometimes this expiration date comes much earlier.  If we don’t cherish our times together now, it might be too late when we finally realize it. 

The movie was slow in pace to begin, but once the story picks up, I find myself glued to the screen.  The climax comes towards the end, where everything plays out, and we realize the essence of the move.  5 star rating from me and I recommend to watch even if it bores you in the beginning. 

The A6 Monologue sketch book has been sitting on the dining table nicely wrap in its original packaging for a few days.  The small sketch book was calling to me and finally today, I decided it was time to rip it’s plastic appart and deflower it.  My first sketch was using my fountain pen drawing the waves of sea in a hot sunny day.  The cream paper was a little rough, and it did not settle well my the foutain pen ink.  You will notice a little smear.  So, for this sketch book, its either pencil or ball pent for me, atleast till I do water or poster color, that is if I ever do that.  The A6 sits well with the palm and easy to carry.  The soft leather skin has a nice feel to it too.  The band was at the right tension and was not too tight.  The only draw back for the band was that it was hard to pick the band, when I use my nails, I dig into the leather, maybe it was inexperience in using this kind of book.  Overall I like the built, and can’t wait to deflower the other monologue that I bought over the weekend.  Now, what should I draw next?

After our favourite noodle breakfast at Bukit Cina, we were already thinking of lunch.  It was already 10am after all.  Muar came from my brother in law.  Muar? isn’t that like Johor = far? Its only an hour away max he exclaim.  Well, why not, since we have nothing much to do.  Coming from Penang, I would love to check out the food scene in Muar, especially the hawker fare.  So, we set out to Muar from Malacca just after noon.  To my surprise, it was not that far, there was this one road that we took, direct and looks like a highway, but it is free.  Muar was only less than 50km, and it didn’t take the hour mention by my brother in-law. 

The fist thing I notice in the drive in was the 30ft TV Antenna.  Almost every home has it, watching Singapore programs for free.  The city was decent, clean and was well kept.  It has the rustic feel of an old Malaysian city, but with fresh coat of paint.  Honestly, this city looks like more well kept than Penang, even though I love Penang much.  So, after some left, right, right turn, we came to this hawker section of the town.  My brother in law recommends the wantan mee, I like the ones in Penang better.  The pork satay was good, it was tender and tasty.  Otak Otak was spicy.  Liang Teh was nice.  The Ham Chim Peng was also very nice, it was soft and sweet.  The Muar Chee was ok, like any other muar chee. 

After filling our stomach, we went to the riverside.  I realize that Muar has quite a number of colonial buildings.  I was wondering what were the colonials doing here back in the days? Was muar a port for them to go Singapore and Penang? Nevertheless, the riverside was well kept and nice.  The scenery was also nice and cooling to rest under the huge trees that lines up along the river.  After a few minutes there we went to the famous Muar 434 coffee shop.  The Sai Kee White Coffee Espresso Special was great.  Rich like all other Malaysian home brew, and you can feel the caffeine effect for a while.  The coffee was great with the Ham Chim Peng.  The ambiance of the restaurant was also unique.  You have loads of pictures on the wall, one with Mona Lisa holding the 434 coffee packet on her hand.  Marble tables and wooden floors.  Softly air conditioned with ceiling fan giving the feeling of a cool afternoon breeze.  After having our fix, we head back, and that was our escapade of driving interstate for lunch. 

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The songs selection are good, I enjoyed the beats most of the time.  As the game are currently in Beta, I expect to see some minor tweaks in the near future.  Currently, the game seams to load in segments over broadband, so if it is not fully loaded, you can expects to pause once you have finish the segment.  This disrupts the game.  I guess sometimes the loading speed is not that fast, and people may get tired of waiting, that is why they allow you to go first.  I have been addicted to this game for a couple of days and now tired of playing alone.  Come join me with the invitation below.  Just click “Join Jamlegend” and it will bring you the sign up page.  You will automatically be my friend.  Train up and challenge me.  Oh, the game is free, forgot to mention that. 

Join JamLegend

During the movie, there were moments that I felt free, to let go all the woes and rekindle me with my younger days of less worries and carefree.  This is what a great movie does, stirring up emotions unexpectedly and shows you how life can be different by just change your mind or the way you think.  This was a fun movie, the actors were visibly seen having a ball of their time.  The location were also lovely, especially towards the end, where the wedding were about to take place, a little chapel up on the hill, with lanterns grazing the entire pathway, it just bring awe to the entire audience.  Luckily I am already married, so my wife just say “when you want to bring me to a Greek Island” rather than, “I want a wedding like this”.  Oh, maybe the latter was cheaper.. haha, Reality of marriages where the guys wants a cheaper wedding so that the money can be spent on the honeymoon, the girl on the other hand, wants it to be a day of remembrance for the rest of her life, ie. grandeur. 

I saw 5xMom Lilian there, and I dont recognize any of the other Penang Bloggers.  The girl behind me brought her teacher (I suspected), and the guys was hilarious.  He smuggle food into the cinema, and keep saying that this was smuggled food, also he was saying that this was a ploy by the government to capture all bloggers into ISA.  I thought he was a funny chap. 

Its a must watch movie, something light, fun, and feel good to take you away from the current political and economical issues.  It will make you dance, sing, and talk about funny scenes after the movie.  If it does not do all that for you, then there is always Eagle Eye, which is coming soon.  Thanks to Nuffnang for the tickets.  Now, where is my old Abba CD?