Today is the 29th, Which Means...
Yeah, the rumours are true. Sila was their third anniversary present.
Which was infinitely better than a card or a gift certificate, so it seemed.
Yeah, the rumours are true. Sila was their third anniversary present.
Which was infinitely better than a card or a gift certificate, so it seemed.
The Day The Tyre Died, Again
Thursday night we went to pick up F from MIAT.
We arrived at 2200. But we left at almost midnight. What was I doing two hours in MIAT? Changing the tires of the car, that's what.
Full Circle
Once upon a lifetime ago, I used to repair helicopters. The job wasn't at all glamorous. All you had to do was to follow the manual, observe regulations and ensure the paperwork was correct. Everyday you had to perform scheduled maintenance.
Then one day I quit and left it all.
For five years, I worked in various other fields gathering knowledge other than helicopter maintenance. Because the aviation industry here was close-knitted, there was no way I would be returing to reparing airplanes...
... or so I thought.
Last two weeks have been weird and almost surreal. After a call from one of my former colleagues in the helicopter offshore company, I've since met the most number of former colleagues in the last 10 working days than I've ever met in the last five years.
The short story is that a bunch of them has started a new company and the need someone with an IT background to help them start it from scratch and run it. I accepted. Why, after all these years? Because it looked to me that in my absence my former peers have put themselves in a position to change the landscape of the industry here in the country. Out with the old and in with the new, gradually.
And I like the way how things are going with them in charge. So here I am back to what I started fifteen years ago, in a full circle.
Happy Birthday Ain
Some cards were sent. A blueberry cheese cake was eaten. Irfan sang the Happy Birthday song. Ain also made a pot of fried noodles. And because Kak Nor also had the same birthdate as Ain, both sisters celebrated here on our little round dinner table at our house.
However, I forgot to charge the camera batteries. Tee hee.
Opah Irfan's Wayward Purse
We only noticed it when Ain got off the car to buy some drinks in Kuala Kangsar. It was on Ain's seat, hidden beneath her when she sat. It was a small coin purse labeled Adamas Goldsmith. Wondering when Ain bought the purse, I took it. Irfan saw it and said, “Opah punya.” And within it was Opah Irfan's driver's licence and identification card!
A Writing Gig?
I submitted the text for the Net.Guide to Spleens to the person in charge and hoped for the best. After a flurry of e-mails, I was tasked to write 2 articles for a book which will be released next spring. The tone of the short write-ups would be akin to that of the Twilight Zone or Twin Peaks, or like Grant Morrison's The Invisibles (A great comic. Go out and read it if you haven't.) The job isn't a earth-shattering one, nor does it pay much but it would be my first professional writing gig, and as they say my foot at the door.
The company I'm writing for is Abstract Nova, publisher of the Heaven and Earth RPG. Here's hoping I get more writing gigs.
Spectral Visitors And Other Matters
Some time last night, I was told she woke Emma up, trembling with absolute fear. It seemed that she saw an apparition gliding by where she slept and disappeared out through the iron grilled window. The ghostly figure wore white and its head and face was a mass of long black hair.
It might have been night terrors (though I doubt it), it might have been a dream, it might have been a fear-induced hallucination, or it might have been the real deal. But that was the story told to me this morning by Ain.
Meanwhile in other news:
- Battlestar Galactica was renewed for a third season, and there was much rejoicing. (Just get on with "Resurrection Ship" already)
- It was Alan Moore's birthday yesterday. He wrote a bunch of excellent stories.
- Painting a dragon can be very difficult without a proper reference, and here is the result of many revisions of it.
- According to the subtitles of the Willow Special Edition DVD, the magic word "helgafel" in the movie is spelt exactly the way thought it would be 17 years ago. Struck out for the other words though.
That is all. Thank you very much. You've been a great audience.
Home Sweet Home, After A Fashion
But it's home sweet home.
The computer is set up just the way I like it so that when it was activated the setup felt so welcoming. Irfan is quite literally swimming in his books (which he rummaged from his book table, much to Ain's chagrin), and, to anyone who understands what this means, Ain had a fantastic hour sweeping the floor of the house.
It was a great holiday, now it's back to work for all of us.
There might have been a lot of worthwhile lessons that we've learnt over the last week and a half or so... but the only one that sticks to my mind right now is that when I started strumming the guitar at Abah's house, Irfan interjected happily:
"Serenity!!!"
Ramadhan Activity Updates
It's already almost the last week of the month and it's the longest time ever before I actually checked how many days were left before Aidilfitri. There're only two more days before I'm out of town until after festival season. Tomorrow is the last exam of the mid-term season, and on Saturday it's balik kampung time.
The itinerary is such: Saturday (Oct 28th) we'll be driving back to Pasir Mas, Kelantan. There we will stay until Deepavali on the following Tuesday (Nov 1st), when we head on down to Sitiawan to spend the last days of Ramadhan. It's been a while since we did long distance travel (more so this year, since money is tight) and I'm very excited about it.
Irfan really can't wait to get to Sitiawan to play with a train set and a bus that his grandparents bought and showed off to him in an e-mail. He's been asking to go balik kampung all week.
So will there be any posts while I'm away? Of course there'll be. Both Ain's and my parents homes have the internet.
In the meantime, I'm finishing up the final round of illustrations for Future Players' Companion 3: Tomorrow's Evolution for The Game Mechanics during this period, which means I have to bring back the graphic tablet along. And finally, I've learnt that Tomorrow's Evolution's cover has been illustrated by Weta Workshop's Ben Wootten, who was a designer in the Lord of the Rings movie.
Passing of the PM's Wife
Datin Seri Endon Mahmood, the wife of our Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, passed away at 7.55am this morning, after succumbing to her battle with breast cancer since being diagnosed with it in 2002. Condolences to the PM, and make he take comfort in the fact that her passing occured in Ramadhan, the holiest of months.
Our prayers will be with her.
5 Years Ago...
It's been a great 5 years, with hopefully more to come.
It's Ramadhan
I have an idea for another book, after looking at a random picture on deviantArt... it would be about kids spending the night camping, and the whole story would take place at night. The blues and the grays of the picture I saw was compelling. Now to come up with an actual story, suited for kids. Childhood camp-outs are awesome.
By the way, I updated some large artwork into my deviantArt page. Yeah, I have a deviantArt page. I left it untended for exactly a year and a month. I'll be uploading large-sized images there and link them from there, or elsewhere, to save on bandwidth, since I'm such a cheapskate.
Blog Glitch Fixed
First I couldn't log onto the backend admin section with my correct password. (Even Sila couldn't do it with her user account.) And after 10 tries my own blog banned my IP. Brilliant, eh? I went to the Pivot Support Forums for help. Griswald there, told me to download the pv_cfg_settings.php file from the server, remove the 2 IP addresses in the php code and change the installed variable to "0". That done, I had to register myself as the Superadmin first, then try to sort out the rest later.
Later, it seemed that the database files of each blog entries weren't being detected by the index.php file. The center column was empty. The Recent Entries block was empty. The Last Comments block was empty. What was wrong?
Checking the admin section, I found out that the Categories had reverted back to 'default' and 'linkdump'... the others such as 'family pics', 'friends' and 'misc sci-fi' were gone. I tried recreating them, but they wouldn't appear, even after chmodding related files to 777.
I tried the solution prescribed in the Pivot forums earlier, with several variations, but it was all for naught. So I contacted the forums again for help, and again Griswald gave a simple solution to the problem. Just re-upload the backup pv_cfg_settings.php file.
I followed his suggestion, using the raw untouched file, which put me back to square one. I registered our user accounts, and then I found out I could finally recreate the blog categories. I did so, one by one, and allowed the 'Hishgraphics' blog to access all the categories.
*Click* Recreate all files
*Click* Recreate index file
*Click* Recreate frontpage
And everything was fine! It seemed like the glitches never happen. Many thanks to Griswald of the Pivot Support Forums. And if any of my 3 regular readers discover any errors in any of the pages which might have slipped under my radar, please e-mail me.
Future Player's Companion: Tomorrow's Hero
The Hishgraphics Gallery can be found at http://www.hishgraphics.com/gallery.
In the meantime, here are
He Seems To Be Developing A Sense of Style
Then he was standing just behind the front seats between them with his elbows resting on either seat. I glanced at him and there he was... wearing a pair of sunglasses I've never seen before, looking all badass.
It was an awesome moment.
Best Wife Ever
It was the best pot of lemon tea I've tasted.
Now the tea's finished, my throat feels much better (no pain and coughing less) and it's time to go to work on the drafting table.
Thanks, sayang.