Next month, proceeding the pre-training webinar I attended last week, there will be a big event that my company needs to attend to. It will be held at Hyatt Regency Bathesda somewhere in Washington DC. That’s like the other part of the world from where I’m standing. Here’s a view of the place taken from Google Maps:

Hyatt Regency Bethesda

Yesterday I just got myself a passport for me to go out from the country. My last time boarding a flight was 11 years ago and that was just a 45 minutes domestic flight. I’ve heard that to go to Washington would take 27 hours in total of the flight trip. I hope I’ll survive that..hehe..

I’m not really certain of whether or not I’m going for this business trip. It is up to my boss to decide (which I currently an influence over that) but at the moment I’m currently on a standby mode at the moment. I’m currently in the process of applying a US Visa. My brother went to US last year’s November but only got a 3 months validity period for his Visa. Everybody else gotten themselves 10 years which kind of puzzling everybody that time. He’ll be re-applying for his visa together with me since we are going for this trip together.

In my next post, I’ll be writing a post on how I got my Malaysian passport on the same day. I need to get myself prepared as well.

It has been a while since I’ve attended any seminars. The last would be during a conference my company sponsored a table top. But that doesn’t stop me from attending seminars. Nowadays, you can even attend a seminar from the comfort of your own office desk or even your bedroom with the creation of Web Seminar or better known as Webinar.

Armed with only your flash configured browser or special software and a decent broadband internet connection, you can attend or even held a webinar. So on the 5th of March which was last 2 weeks, I attended “MarketingProfs B2B-2.0 EXPO”. Since the webinar was hosted in the US, it was almost midnight from where I live but I was still at my office doing some last minute assignment. Here are some screenshots of the webinar I’ve taken during the webinar:

B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Main Area

Since this webinar is using flash, it requires a little bit of download time and also consumes most of my underpowered Intel Celeron M notebook processor. It does kind of annoy me especially when my so called broadband internet somehow drops in between.

B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Booth

The booth are not the kind of booth you see at normal tradeshows and seminars but at least you can get information easily by just clicking and it automatically insert information inside my virtual briefcase. The only thing that I don’t like is how the sales chat is handled, it was so slow to load.

There’s also some free gift in a form of free PDF information download and stuff. Well, I did download some of them but it’ll just add more collection to my PDF junk inside my laptop. They did follow up by sending me e-mails but I won’t really bother on their offer and stuff since I’m not seriously in need of such services yet. I’m just there to gain a new experience.

Pre-Training Webinar

Last night, I attended another webinar. This webinar is supposed to be done at my office since it’s related to my job but I had the permission to do it at home since the webinar is held after my office hours. Furthermore, I need to make a recording of this webinar to be shared with my team mates so I need a stable internet connection. Apparently, my internet connection at home is much more stable than my office.

I missed 10 minutes of the introduction to the webinar because I misunderstood the instruction which required me to call a toll free number in the US. The webinar was held on Microsoft Live Meeting and I thought the audio would be included. I then remembered that I can use Skype to make phone call to the US and lucky it went through since its toll free anyway. Check out the video below to see the webinar live in action inside of my own bedroom:

I’ll have more events going on the next following weeks so I’m looking forward to that as well.

My inner self was yearning to write this blog post but was held back by my busy work schedule. I can of course write it during my most productive hours which apparently are during my working hours but that wouldn’t be ethical right? I guess I should have use the ‘Timestamp’ feature and pre-write most of my blog posts and publish it on a timely schedule. Then again, it’s not really a critical thing to do.

Last week’s Saturday night after the national voting period was over, it was a hectic night for my family where we camped in front of TV until almost 2am just to check on the poll result. I also checked the most updated poll count online at the online version of the local online newspaper vendors. I guess everybody did the same as I did which was to click on the refresh button every now and then and received a 500 server error. It seems like my local online vendors are not designed to receive such spike in web traffics.

Getting back on course here. Last week’s Sunday, LV came back her hometown after casting her vote and brought back a pair of complimentary tickets to enter the Malaysia International Space Adventure (MISA). I am always a big fan of science fiction, I love watching space series such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Star Trek. A couple of week ago, I watched last year’s movie Sunshine. It’s a movie about re-igniting the sun which sounds ridiculous however the movie still managed to gross almost USD32 million worldwide.

Theoretically speaking, space adventure requires a great ordeal of patience simply because travelling is time consuming. Just imagine this, sunshine itself needs almost 8 minutes to arrive on Earth and light speed is 3×10⁸ metres per second. My country’s recent space visitors, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor (I met his father in a personal development seminar 4 years ago, a very enthusiastic old man I must say) although the International Space Station (ISS) is just 400km from earth, it takes about 2 days for the space shuttle to dock onto the space station eventhough the space shuttle has a lot of acceleration power. Not to forget that the ISS is moving about 5 miles/second orbiting the earth.

Enough space talking here, let’s move on with my visit to MISA. I’ve documented my visit using my Sony Ericsson W810i Camera Phone:

At RM38 (25% Discount for MyKAD Holders) for a normal entry ticket, I must say that it is rather expensive. If not for the complimentary ticket, I don’t think I’ll even consider coming to this exhibition. Most of the exhibition halls are uninteresting, the interactive exhibition toys are all either damaged or doesn’t work anymore. The most interesting part that I found is the 4D theater which only lasted after 20 minutes.

This exhibition has its last day today.

Today is a very significant day. It was my very first time to vote for my country. I’m really not into politics but one vote can be a deciding factor for the fate of the country and since I’m already a registered voter, so it’s a responsibility for me to do so. I’ve been living in the Batu, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur Area for the past 12 years. My grandparent house is just 5 minutes drive from where I live. They migrated from the nothern region and came here in the 1970’s and stayed here since then. Not to you all about my personal life, this blog is where I write about significant thing that happened in my life, so today I’ll write about the reality of what I’ve experienced during today’s historical event.

The Area Where I live

I never really knew who is actually going to represent my place. My area is also listed as one of the Malaysian Election Hot Seats. So it might be interesting to see what will the outcome would be. It was just this morning I did some Google search to dig some information about who am I going to choose. Typical last minute habit that is kind of engraved inside of me. I’m not going to write anything or any comment on the recent election campaign, however I’m interested to get to know who is actually buying in for the area where I live. Here are some list of link that I’ve found out about the candidate for my area:

• Wilayah Persekutuan P115
• Batu - Bruce Lee Vs Justice Bao
• Tian Chua, it’s time he is an MP

I don’t want to stuff my brain with more information anymore so I think that’s enough information to make a deciding factor. I know it’s not fair to just have information that might not be true, but then again why waste more time and energy when you can do other productive stuff. Let’s move on with my voting reality walkthrough:

My Voting Information Note

This piece of paper was given to me by my mother. My IC address is located at my grandparents house because previously I don’t really have a permanent address.

Barisan National Booth

I skipped and walk by this booth because I don’t want to be associated with them. Better be on the fence, I think it’s much safer..haha..

Keadilan Booth

For some strange reason, this booth was deserted. It was rather peaceful during the entire time I was there.

SPR Check-In Area

The policemen and the SPR official ushered me to the check-in booth first before proceeding.

SPR Check-In Station

I handed my IC and the vote information note to the official and they gave me a number for my voting station.

My Voting Station

I then walk to my assigned place. Each voting station has a policeman guarding the place.

Restricted Area

Instruction were placed at the classroom door.

Waiting for my turn to vote

Inside the room, I handed over my IC with the vote information note. The station master would then read my name out loud and then I was given a piece of ballot paper.

My Voting Ballot

I only had to choose between the 2 but I can’t tell you who I voted for. It remains my secret of course. I know that the SPR needed some kind of tracking mechanism to smoothen their operation but I wonder why there’s a serial number at the ballot paper itself. The school classroom got me nervous when I was entering my ballot paper inside the transparent voting box. It reminds me of my examination moment during my school years. I never liked exam.

All in all, it was a great experience. I’ll definitely be doing this again 5 years from now. Looking forward for the result announcement tonight.