WTHiBM 2: Hokkien mee

Here is the 2nd sequence of 'What to have in BM' - going to have to abbreviate this as WTHiBM, since its kinda a pain to write this over and over again. This is a place my family frequent from time to time on Sunday mornings.

For those familiar with BM area, it's the open air restaurant right opposite what used to be the Cheok Sah cinema. This cinema is one ancient musuem and have preserved its grilled gate, large painted billboard styles from the late 80s till now. Of course it's no longer operational anymore. I remembered I went to the cinema once with my aunt in this type of ancient cinema where you have vendors selling hot peanuts (yes, you read it right) using brown paper cone cup.

Opps, I'm getting out of topic eh?
Back to the main thing here. Here is one good place for hokkien mee or what people down south here calls 'har mee' aka prawn mee is at this restaurant called 'Yoong Kee' that I would recommend.

The stall operates from morning i guess after 8.30am till well, the material/stock finishes. Never been that early bird to find out when exactly they start rolling their stuff. But try to be there before 10.30am cause sometimes when we arrived at ~10.40am the stall is already done for the day since they are out of materials (jeez, typical attributes you see on food stalls with good business).

Here, you get the authentic hokkien mee, without the loh mee gravy. The sweet and juicy fishballs are always a welcome which complements the noodles taste quite nicely. These are optional but recommended :)

Another thing i really enjoyed here is the 'cham peng' in local or what is more known a 'yinyong' in different places in Malaysia. It's basically a mix of 'teh peng'
(iced tea plus condensed milk) and coffee. The thick consistency is what i like here, as i always get the right mix of both ingredients which does not get diluted by ice.

Last but not least, here is the location coordinate: 5.362841,100.460851 somewhere around Jalan Pasar. You could not miss it with the old Cheok Sah Cinema building still there and an open air car park beside Yoong Kee.
Note: This place is a stir fry restaurant at night, serving good traditional Chinese steamed fish with ginger.
Chiaoz.

N symptoms of neighbour/housmate from hell

At one point of our life, we would probably be away from home, be it working or during uni/college times. So I put down these symptoms based on what I've seen or heard.

It goes something like this.
You have 'neighbour/housemate' from hell when:

a) your housemate starts washing floor mats using the shared washing machine.
b) turns your living room into their makeup trash bin
c) turns the house into their private karaoke room
d) the washing machine starts running at 2am in the morning
e) you've got maggots crawling in the rubbish bin for god knows how many days
f) you find hangers, peanut shells, papers and all sorts of things on living room floor
g) you got internet access cut off twice in 2 months and when you wonder what's worse, you got your electricity cut off. yup. real case, the houseleader is away for 2 weeks, so it's 2 weeks with no internet & 1 week with no electricity
h) you entered the washroom and saw someone's poo poo in the you know where repetitively
i) your roomie starts wondering around the house in his underwear only. (i'm not kidding)
j) your roomie keeps his cooking pots in the shared room for weeks. washing is not needed cause, same pot is used for the next cooking session..
k) your housemate extended her room by turning using part of the living room as her private area
l) your housemate does her first house chore in 9 months and demanded that you do your part now
m) it's 12.30 am and your housemates are talking loudly and doing karaoke in the living room
n) due to many reasons you need to have a set of everything. Cooking wares, dustbin, pail etc..
o) the housemates complained that the electricity and water bill is so expensive while they stayed at home the most (compared to us workers) and does laundry once every 2 days.
p) one particular housemate hogs up the whole internet bandwidth by downloading and PPS streaming 24/7
q) there are strangers brought back to the house on a consistent basis. It's up to your imagination on what's going on.
r) there's blending machine's noise every night around 11pm. But then you realized later that it's not really a blending machine, but a neighbour trying to clear phlegm from his seriously blocked respiratory system.

That's it for now.
I did also experienced stays with surprisingly good housemates but let's not get off the topic this time.

Feel free to comment/add into the list :)

What to have in BM: duck egg fried koay teow

Several weeks ago Low asked me what is nice in BM. So this is one of my favourite place in my hometown: Duck egg Fried Koay teow.

As its named suggested, its fried koay teow but instead of using normal chicken egg, duck egg is used. What's really different, i guess its more to the way they fry it. With duck egg you get more content and a subtly better taste. Sufficient fried pork fat is used to fry the koay teow over charcoal fire. So yes, sorry, this is non-halal.

The stove fire starts by 8pm and by 10-11pm they place is a crowd. I always thought its like a funeral night for the Chinese with most seats taken up till 1am+.

Here is the google coordinate location 5.355118,100.469483. It's below the big tree just by the main road going up to KKM straight ahead or along the opposite side of the main road off Shell.

Just another work day

Sometimes we see bizarre things happening in our life.
So here is just one of them.

I guess the quote 'a picture is worth a thousand words' rings kinda true.
The picture speaks for itself.

By the time i get used to this, everytime i get a SMS, i rolled my eyes and thought to my self 'Another "call me"...'

Well, it's just another day at work.

Emergency fund

Horlic investment is also one of the blogs i follow frequently.
One of the latest article is about emergency fund.
It's a good read and what we should have in mind since >90% of us are employees.

Here is the link.

Basically its about how much we should have as a contingency.
What if I lose my job today?
How long can i survive till i find my next job?
Do i have any monthly commitments?
Car/house loan installment, electric/water/phone bills?
Am i the sole breadwinner of the house?
How many people depend on me financially?

Source

The answer kind of varies with each person I guess. What I think is we need a minimum 3 months of our monthly expenditure at least. In the best case, we should have about half a year of our monthly expenditure handy as a contingency or so-called emergency fund. Think about a plan that will work comfortably for us individually.

709, a milestone towards a new Malaysia

Finally got connected back. And miraculously fast since my houseleader just got back.
Was back to my hometown, Penang during the weekends and there was this historic 709 Bersih rally going on.

Plucked this from one of the facebook post i saw.
Incredible roadblock statistics during this historical event.

Road closure on Saturday, 9 July 2011.
• Lebuh Ampang
• KLCC
• Bank Negara
• Dataran Merdeka
• Sogo
• Chow Kit
• Menara Sultan Ismail
• Masjid Negara
• Jalan Raja Chulan
• Jalan Ipoh
• Sentul
• Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman
• Jalan P.Ramlee
• Jalan Bandar
• Subang Jaya (Near Segi)
• Sunway Pyramid and Subang Parade
• The Federal Highway
• LDP

Other than that there was also rally all around the world. See this link.

One more thing to remember to do is, register as a voter :)
And also please check whether we are registered as voters at the right district/location here.. Recently there has also been an upgrade to the system where we can add number of voters per an address here.

But i digress, why do we need this upgrade?
Wouldn't this cause even more chaos during election? More space for errors?
Shouldn't we simplify the process instead of allowing users to add an IC to their home address and vice versa.

Imagine house A have 5 people but they never add anyone to the address. Then house B have 3 people but only add 2 people as voters whilst the last person wasn't added.
Now i really wonder why they would want this feature. It seems to add to the complication here.

Well, I guess at the end of the day the people's message are quite clear. They just want a clean and fair election through Bersih 2.0.

Been late. Gotta signoff now.

The road not taken

Quite old school, in fact was taught when I was in secondary school. Putting it in here as a reminiscence of the past.


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And
be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it
bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear Though as for that the passing there Had
worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh,
I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads onto way, I doubted
if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence; Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made
all the difference.
Robert Frost(1916)

Who moved my cheese in a nutshell

A while back i during my final semester of my studies, I did some readings on a few different books. Here is one of them, the classical 'Who moved my cheese'.

Which better place to keep it than in this cloud space :)
This is a classic one, worth keeping the summary.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Source: http://gohlikim.tumblr.com/post/106372876/who-moved-my-cheese#/

Parts of All of Us are:The Simple and The Complex
The four imaginary characters depicted in this story —the mice: "Sniff" and "Scurry;' and
the Little people: "Hem" and "Haw" —are intended to represent the simple andthe complex parts of ourselves, regardless ofour age, gender, race or nationality.
Sometimes we may act like Sniff Who sniffs out change early, or Scurry Who scurries into action, or Hem Who denies and resists change as he fears it will lead to something worse, or Haw Who learns to adapt in time when he sees changing can lead to something better!
Whatever parts of us we choose to use, we all share something in common:
a need to find our way in the Maze and succeed in changing times.

Source: http://www.mindmapart.com/galleries/thum-cheng-cheong/

Having Cheese Makes You Happy.
The More Important Your Cheese Is to You, The More You want to hold on to it.
If you do not change, you can become extinct.
What would you do if you weren't afraid.
Smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old
Movement in a new direction helps you find new cheese.
When you stop being afraid, you feel good!
Imagining yourself, enjoying your new cheese leads you to it.
The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese.
It is safer to search in the maze, than remain in a cheeseless situation.
Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese.
When you see that, you can find and enjoy new cheese. You change course.
Noticing small changes early helps you to adapt to the bigger changes that are to come.
Move with the cheese and enjoy it!!

At the age of 25..

This article is a really good read.
I think this goes for all you guys out there, especially those already at 25.
releventmagazine_article
I read this kind of quite late. But there are quite a lot of stuff being written in there that's quite a good thing to know. Sometimes we are just to busy focusing on one point of our life that we missed out all the things out on around us.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/some-shocking-news-about-wireless-electricity/2007/06/08/1181089277018.html

Been quite a week with electricity cut off after getting the my rental place internet access cut off few days ago.

This event also helped me realize that we are already too dependent on electricity and technology. I'm not even sure how long people of this current time can last with no technology and electricity.

But then again, it's more like a pain in the ass than actual survival i guess.