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Getting zonked out every 24 hours

Been very busy with lots of things.

My schedule just fills up as quickly as toilet cistern. Whenever it is empty something just fills it out without asking. One of the madness that is currently consuming my wife and I in our toilet cistern life is our addition to the TV series “24”.

We’ve been watching the seasons 1 to 4 on DVD. Can’t really bother with the free-to-air Astro broadcasting because –

  1. i keep forgetting the schedules
  2. i cannot commit my time to the scheduled airing times
  3. one week is too long to wait for the next episode
  4. if I miss one episode, I’d be frustrated
  5. censorship

The thing about 24 is the pacing is incredibly taut. Excellent stuff. Each episode ends with a cliff hanger, and the speed the story moves is frantic. Imagine getting home from work at 9 or 10pm and catching 2 or 3 episodes a night. I wake up in the morning like a zombie.

It doesn’t help that work is sometimes equally mad… like meetings that start at 0830hrs and end at 2130hrs!

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Tested my Rotax 125

Yesterday, Munib and I went to the USJ Elite kart circuit for a few rounds on our Rotax Max.

I can concluded 3 things:

  1. I don’t know much about karting technicals
  2. the track is very bumpy and physical (ouch!)
  3. need to improve my fitness *sigh*

The chassis is an Arrow 2004 ax5-125 chassis. Not sure whether that is correct. The handling was alright, although the bumpy USJ circuit did not help the relatively stiff chassis. A few times the bumps caused my foot to either fly off the pedals or on to it! Imagine going round one of the fast (& bumpy) corners and having the left foot accidently hit the brakes… that was a bugger moment for me.

Luckily for me, the kart was set with a bit of toe-out (1mm), thus making the kart less likely to spin under braking. Still, I felt that it made cornering a bit less compliant. Perhaps a bit more neutral toe setting. May want to experiment with a bit of toe-in as well.

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my-KART updates: these guys are getting fast!

Jules at IC3 2005

To round off 2005 for my-KART we kicked off with an Inter Company / Car Club (“IC3”) Challenge. We even had a newspaper coverage in The Star recently. The participation was very encouraging and I have had a few enquiries from companies and car clubs about wanting to participate in 2006. The Star article did help a lot – I received several phone calls that day. Problem is I may need to think of how to manage an entry list of more than 12 teams….

Anyway, I am pleased that the 2005 my-KART activities has been very good. The last round of the race was a key & successful one for me. We also opened the 2006 KART series last Sunday the 8th of January 2006. The rain forced us to postpone the race by one from the scheduled 7th January date. Still the participation was very competitive and encouraging despite the initial wet weather. My co-founder Azlan found it enjoyable too.

Since the various articles and increased word of mouth, many Klang Valley (and some from outside the Klang Valley, as far as Melaka) are joining my-KART events. Some of these guys are very quick drivers. One thing’s for certain – there are many keen racing enthusiasts around.

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Stumbling around on the web

I have not updated this blog in a while.

Things have been quite busy for me of late with family matters, karting and work (yes, I DO work!). As for work, the year end is always a hectic time for accountants like me. Lots of accounts reconciliations to do, data cleanups etc. My finance team at work has been working especially hard as well, with Mr Murphy making sure his laws are being followed from time to time. Now we are getting prepared for the annual audit. *sigh* That is life and we all have to cari makan.

In between the hectic schedule, I had been stumbling around just to take a break from things. Stumble is cute timekiller. Essentially it works by a community of people recommending various websites by topics, and you would stumble from one recommendation to another. What a great idea… and more so being community driven. My guess is a lot of future tech will be community driven like this.

Anyway, in my stumbling I came across various neat sites from the history of Albert Einstein to really cool stuff like website tutorials for photoshop artwork.

Let’s stumble together – you need the excellent Firefox web browser though.

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Taking a break at Cyberview lodge

 

Holiday for the Fazz family is a pretty modest affair. Given the five kids we have, a holiday would usually mean a local destination. Since last year our family holidays is a trip to Putrajaya / Cyberjaya for a weekend away from town.
 
This time round our stay is at the Cyberview Lodge, in Cyberjaya. Booked two joined rooms for the family and basically left the cares all behind. The kids were pretty happy except for our youngest who still insists that we should have gone to a hotel… her definition of a hotel is a skyscraper, and the Cyberview Lodge most certainly isn’t. The kids get to enjoy the swimming pool morning and evening – which is good enough for them.
 

The place is pretty quiet and peaceful as the room / resident density is fairly low. The rooms are pleasant and of a nice size – big enough to fit a large family such as ours. Cyberjaya itself is not a happening place so night time activities are non-existant which suits us fine.

But I’ve had a surreal experience – perhaps the first time in my life. Last night, I dreamt having a chat with Siti Nurhaliza. This time, unlike many dreams before – I remembered quite a bit from my dream. And strangely enough, today my kids had a chance to meet non other than the star herself by the poolside. Later, I found that she was staying in the room directly above our chalet. Weird. I wonder if I’d have a chance to find out how I managed to have a major coincidence.

Let’s see…