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.

It’s the National Election day tomorrow which only happen every 5 years. I missed last 5 year’s election because I didn’t register at that time. I only registered myself last year while walking around in at Plaza Alam Sentral, Shah Alam. This morning traffic wasn’t so bad. I arrived at my office 15 minutes earlier than usual. I thought the traffic was going to be bad but it was only bad during my journey back home. Probably because people will only travel back home during the last minute.

Anyway, comparing to the last election held, this year was a bit toned down from before. I am not politically incline to any party. I prefer to be neutral but then again, I still need to choose between one tomorrow. Mmm..tough choice. While having some evening snack at my nearest ‘mamak’ restaurant. I saw this:

Flying BN Flag at Equine Park

Here’s a zoom up of the flying flag.

Flying BN Flag Close Up

I think I’ve saw this kind of sport on TV some time ago but I forgot what it is called. I do know that ‘Jet Pack‘ such as in the movie Minority Report is now available if you are interested. I assumed that the cost is also sky high too.

I went home late yesterday night. My team and I had to finish up a few important documents based on the system that our developers have been working on for the past couple of months. The problem arises when things needed to be done or change in the last minutes. That’s when everybody started to jump off from their comfort zone and disregard their working hours to finish off their main objective for that time in order not to have a pay cut. Of course that would include me as well.

I realized one thing, after indulging my own work for quite a while, it is so easy to forget that not everyone knows what you know. I’ve been keeping a lot of stuff that might be beneficial for someone else to know and utilize. I also realize that when you are used to digest a lot of stuff related to a specific task, you will know every single short cut that would enable you to finish off something a lot faster than the rest of the people. It’s time to give back what I know for the benefit of others.

Being in a web developer shoes, I know that bulk data might overwhelm a lot of developers or data entry personnel. This normally would lead to a lost interest of the work you have thus decreases your productivity. It’s a tedious job but someone has to do it. There is however a few tricks to overcome this challenge and one of the tricks when you are constantly online is to use the search engine to find a solution. Still you need to know what are the stuff you are looking for in order to acquire those tricks. I’ll cut the chase for you. One of my system developer needed to resized a batch of images to the same size in order for the system to display it properly. There wasn’t much time left so I helped her out in finding a way for this. I soon discovered a free software called Picture Resizer 2.0:

Picture Resizer 2.0

It took me a few minutes to familiarize with this new tool. After that, a resizing job that would take a batch of 50 images maybe an hour or so to get it done is now can be completed in just under a minute. How cool is that? Then comes another challenge, in order not to replace the origninal files, the software created an extension name to differentiate. After moving all the new resized files into a new folder it’s now time to rename all the files back to what it was before to avoid another job for script editing inside the developed system. If it would be done manually, it will take the same amount of time just as resizing the images manually. I found another software tool for that called Bulk Rename Utility:

Bulk Rename Utility

Now this software may seems complicated at first because you see a lot of buttons and fields to fill up. Our objective is just to removed 4 characters extension and we’ll be done with it. Check out the screenshot above on how to do it or try it out for yourself.

Now here’s an interesting point of view. From a management stand point, I’ve already saved a few valuable hourly pay for my employer for not hiring data entry personnels if they have to do it manually. Secondly, these softwares are free so the company saved some money from buying commercial softwares. Since all this can be done faster and automated, a lot of the existing data entry personnel/system developers would like it since it makes their lives a lot easier. However, it might be a threat to their job position if that’s the only thing they are doing.

That’s my friend is how the management think! Be Productive Everyone!