Pokku's nasi dagang party was certainly an interesting Saturday night affair. Just like at the gathering organized by Peter Tan the other day, I get to tie more faces to URLs (you have no idea how weird it is having to introduce your website's URL after your name) like Pak Adib, Farid, Bibi, Amir and Mack "Daddy" Zulkifli as well as Pokku's daughters Elida and Elisa among others. Jordan and wife Leen were also there. I even got toothpaste from her.

Now, Pokku has always been talking about his false teeth for as long as I could remember from the days I was in his Commodore Users Exchange group in the mid 80s and all of us developed a liking for it. So much so that it made the cover of our magazine in one of the issues! Since there was a dentist in our midst and I was already conviniently armed with a tube of toothpaste, I thought I could re-live those days by giving his detachable gnashers some good cleaning (The Coffee Hut at Rasta TTDI is a carwash by day so I'm sure there's plenty of cleaning apparatus around to get rid of the toughest stains) but sadly the dribbly dentures were nowhere to be seen last night. That's probably why the delicious keropok lekor we had were very easy on the jaws.

I hear that there's a Nasi Kandar party going on up north today, but I'm looking forward more to that certain "Nasi Minyak Party" (not mine... yet) in a few months' time...

Update (Jan 31 @ 2030 hours): Red406 has pictures of the party posted.

I sneezed 174 times today, beating my previous record of 139 in a day. In return, I got people saying "Bless you" 68 times.

Don't say I never count my blessings.

I've been holding off on building my new PC for months now but with the arrival of the AGP version of the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT graphics card on our shores, it has completed the list of parts I needed to build that sub RM3,000 PC. So off I went to everybody's favorite pirates' haven PC shopping mall to get the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 bit 3000+
• MSI MS-7030 K8N-NEO Platinum Edition (nForce3)
• 2x Corsair 512MB PC3200 DDR400 CL 2.5 (1GB RAM)
• Sparkle Geforce 6600GT AGP 8x 128MB DDR
• 120.0GB Western Digital 7200rpm SATA150
• Sony 52/32/52/16 COMBO CD-R/RW & DVD Drive
• 1.44MB Sony Floppy Drive
• iCute ATX Casing with 450W power supply

Like a kid being given a Lego set, I sported the face of a happy boy in that hour and a half I spent to assemble the PC when I got home. It must have been a good day too as I did not lose any screws like I usually do. Bliss was when it fired up without problems (i.e. did not cause any major blackouts) the moment I hit the 'On' button for the first time. I took my time installing the OS and other stuff the rest of the evening.

Granted, it's not really bleeding edge as far as the specs are concerned (notice that I did not accidentally ejaculate like I did when I got the iPod this time around). It also won't give anyone bragging rights amongst the fanboys. Still, I reckon it's quite a good platform to start with. It runs the Doom 3, Farcry and Half Life 2 game demos at good framerates and other applications like Office, Cubase, Firefox, etc. fast and zippy. It's hopefully future-proof enough for the next 5 years or so (especially if 64 bit desktop computing were to take off bigtime) with enough headroom left for upgrades. The last PC I built was back in 2000 and is still running good but I left it at my parents home now so that Mom can use it to browse the web (i.e. get those cheap AirAsia tickets fast), email and IM with some friends and do that occasional MIDI-ing.

Yes, it's disturbing how geeky traits can run upwards from child to parent in my family tree.

I just love offbeat stuff. Like this email reply I got upon ordering a CD from CDBaby.com:

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, January 19th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

My sincerest apologies to the people of Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Putrajaya, Johor, Malacca and Negri Sembilan. I plugged in an extra electrical appliance on a 4 gang outlet (making it "technically" overloaded at 5) to prepare my lunch and it just sucked whatever juice there was out there that would normally be consumed by six states. I didn't realize that TNB's power grid is so brittle and fragile these days. I promise I won't overload any outlets again after this.

Listening to: Crystal Method - Can't You Trip Like I Do

At least they put some kinda warning on the product webpage of the new iPod Shuffle this time around. If only they provided the same kinda warning when I purchased my 40GB iPod the other day. I sure didn't expect the iGasm that ensued.

'Cos these are the accursed pebbles in my garden hose. I could have been a gemstone dealer but alas, it was fated that I end up being a quarry. Anyways, as I said before, nothing says "I Love You" better than some bling-bling from the depths of the kidneys, especially when you get to pass them out on your own. Coming soon to a store near you as a novelty item this Valentine's, folks.

Hopefully that grossed you out. Now if you'd excuse me, I'm gonna make myself a sandwich and Milo... on the rocks.

If anybody were to make a case saying that I don't buy any CDs by local artists, think again. The last seven CDs that I've purchased have all been by Malaysian artists. Check it out: Teh Tarik Crew's What's Next?, Phlowtron's Hip-pop, Chakra Sonic's Kodi Kelviyin Bathil, Puteri Gunung Ledang's Soundtrack, Evo 04-01, Z-Chen, and Ning Baizura's Erti Pertemuan. It was a nice coincidence that it ended up being a muhibbah mix as well.