The Art of Durian Eating...

It's been quite some times since I ate durian and over this CNY my parents brought me a souvenir in the shape of a durian from Sarikei. That's my hometown. Anyway i decided to take photographs to document the art of opening and eating a durian. So this is basically an illustrated story of sorts... Firstly a closer look of the fruit.




There it is, in its full glory. Mwahahahahahaha... Ok enough of the psycho durian man. On to the next step. Since I've only got a small little knife to help me in my task, I'm forced to make multiple cuts into the fruit to form one long incision. The picture below shows the incision I've made with the knife.




Finally after much slashing and jabbing, I manage to make an incision deep enough for me to pry open the fruit. Voila!!!




In the picture above you can see the knife used to cut open the durian. This warrants a closer look at the durian for any pests that might attempt to deprive you of this gastronomic delight.




Looks safe to me. Well on to the good part. Yummm... As you can see I only manage to devour 6 'seedlings' as I was rather full from dinner.




However you can always keep durians in the fridge to be eaten at a later date. And so I 'harvested' all the durians from its shell and all that remains is its shell.




Here's a sinful temptation for all you durian lovers out there. Doesn't it just look so goooooooood??? To tell you honestly, it taste and smells even better...




Ahhhhhh... Finally coming to an end to my durian journey. Unfortunately only your sense of sight was fulfilled in this journey. Bear in mind that the pictures above does not do justice to the taste and smell of the fruit itself. Even after washing my hands, the wonderful aroma of the durian can still be smelt on my fingers. *Sigh*...

Stuck in Miri: Part 2

Fuck!!! I hate this shit!!! It's fucking bullocks. The guy told me yesterday that me that he would arrange a early morning trip down to Brunei, around 8-9am. Called him this morning at 8am and he said he would only be able to go at 11am. Fuck!!! And I asked him if he could make it earlier and he said he'll try his best. Fuck shit yeah _|_ In the end he still called me back to say that it will be at 11am and that it will be one of his employees driving me back, and that was about 10am. So I waited till 11am and then his employee called me at 11am and said that there was traffic jam in town and that he will be late, 1 hour late. He said he'll make it at 12noon. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!! Shit, fuck, bugger, wanker, dickheard, fuckwit... No words can describe the anger and piss-ness I feel. I really don't feel like going back after all this but it's my last chance to see my friends and my brother before they leave Brunei for their studies. *sigh* Life's testing my patience. It deprives me of all luxuries and fucks me upside down inside out. If i had a car, I would be reaching Brunei just after 5pm, washed up and be ready for dinner by 6 but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fuck this had to happen. Aiks shit.

Anybody watched 'Desperate Housewives'? It's first episode was recently shown in Oz. It's some US show and it's up to its 16th episode there. I just downloaded the first episode out of curiosity and it's pretty engaging talking about the typical troubles within the four walls of houses in this seemingly perfect American suburb. No doubt I cannot be empathetic towards their problems, I can at least identify with some of them and somehow relate them to my own. I guess this is what most 'good' drama series is about. It protrays problems about real-life problems so that people watching them can somehow find comfort in the fact that their problems don't seem as bad or that at least there's someone out there who identifies with their problems. So go watch it. It might be a bit deep and dark for some people but I'm sure you'll like it. Since it's already in its 16th episode in the US, you can download the first 10 episodes from Bittorent. Here's the link for the Bittorent:

Desperate Housewives Ep1-10

It's a 3.4GB in size cos it contains Ep 1 -10 but you can choose to just download the first episode to preview it first. Use a program called BitComet.

Stuck in Miri for 1 more night

Fuck!!! The last day of summer school ends today. I was suppose to go back in the evening after my class but no the fucked up taxi driver forgot about me after I called him twice, once yesterday and once today. He was suppose to come at about 4pm and when I finally called him after waiting for half an hour or more, he said he was at the fucking immigration already. Like fuck man. So he said he'll arrange for a special trip back to Brunei tomorrow morning but that's like 1 night wasted. It's already a short enough period that I'm spending in Brunei and now 1 more night. Well there's nothing much I can do now except for wait.

Part of my anger also stem from the fact that if I did have a/my/the car here in Miri, I would even be home by 5pm but NOOOOOO. I can't be trusted with a car anymore because of my past sins. "Paying for my past sins by giving the ultimate sacrifice." That would be fun. Fuck. It's like everytime I try to make my life work here(in Miri), my past always come back to haunt me. Life's a test, a test of patience, tolerance, integrity, honesty and a whole load of other bull crap. And if you don't do well in those tests, it fucks you up and spits you out, leaving you more fucked up than you can ever be. Imagine now I've only been through such a short period of my life and already you're serving so much shit for your sins so imagine when you die, the HELL you will have to pay for the sins of your whole life. That would be even more fucked up I reckon. Shit!!!

Another issue that's always been on my mind ever since I was young was the afterlife. This stems from the fact that I've always been scared of death and would always have images of some character coming to bring me to the afterlife. From this obsession with death also comes the issue of religion because religion is the only thing that tries to define the afterlife. With Christianity it's trust in Jesus and you'll be on your express train journey to heaven. With Islam, it's blow yourself to pieces and you'll go to heaven with 21 virigins waiting for you. With Buddhism, it's do good deeds and maintain a good karma and you'll be reincarnated into something better or something liddat. Not so sure about the other minor religions but I guess they follow more or less the same line of thought. So it boils down to the question, Which religion do you believe in? I've been brought up as a Buddhist with both my parents being Buddhist but being around the world and sorta exposed to everything, I've just been really open minded and also exposed extensively to Christianity. That does not mean that I believe in Christianity though because I'm the sort of person who does not accept something easily and tend to question something based on my prior knowledge of things in general and also through my own doubt and reasoning. So in the meantime I consider myself a free thinker whilst waiting for the supposedly outer-world experience to hit me and shove me to take an alliance of some sort. I've even considered being a Muslim but I really love pork and I believe that if you're gonna believe in any religion, you need to be fully compliant of its rules. This also can be debatable with many olden issues of religion being debated in this secular modern world which we live in. One of the issues recently brought up by priests in Australia is that they wish to include married men in the clergy. This is due to the declining number of ordained priests due to older priests retiring and also of younger priests unwilling to take up service due to the issue of celibacy. So maybe in the future there is a chance of me becoming a pork eating Muslim???

Another night of FA Cup soccer, dilemmas and sleeplessness...

Well, just finish watching Arsenal defeat Wolverhampton 2-0, as expected. Many chances by Arsenal but finally only managed to score 2. Alas, my bets didn't come through as i expected. Won one and lost one. *sigh* That's life. You win some, you lose some. Although from an accounting point of view, you hope to make sure that your wins exceed your losses. Hehe. Oh well life's been a drag for me lately. Really missing someone dearly and being alone too makes it even worse. At least immersing myself in my uni work and soon part-time work will at least keep me busy for awhile.

It's always a dilemma to decide what to write on your blog. After all it's suppose to be a web journal and obviously being a journal you're suppose to update it regularly about the going-ons in your life but it being published on the internet also means that it's easily accesible. So, the dilemma here is to what degree of confidentiality do you write your blog posts to??? I mean I've seen some of my friends posts and the general tendency is to beat around the bush as you're trying to write about something personal yet you do not want to offer to much details on the blogs. Oh well every new thing has its flaws.

Anyway, this part time job that I'm going to be starting soon involves soliciting surveys from people of Miri. As some of you may already know, Miri is officially going to be a city on 20th May 2005. Whoopdeedo!!! A city that pretty much still a town. Back to the story, this organisation, Miri City Incorporated (MCI) is in charge of making changes to Miri to make it look more like a city and in order to do so they need to solicit feedback from both tourists and visitors as well as residents of Miri. To do that, they have appointed Curtin Consultuncy which is a private branch of Curtin University created to harness the skills of the various lecturers and other staff to perform consultant services. And thus students are hired as market surveryors and data entry clerk by Curtin Consultancy to perform these menial tasks of soliciting surveys from the 'wonderful' people of Miri. *cough cough* It's quite a tedious task and thus we are compensated a princely sum of RM4 per hour. Whoopdeedoo!!! So if you see me slagging my butt off in one of the 'many' shopping centres of Miri trying to survey people, please be nice enough to come by and help me out. Hehe.

One of the many questions of the survey asks 'What is the worst thing about Miri that you have experienced?' For me this would have to be the undercurrent of criminal activities that is going on here in Miri. Mostly they're associated with criminal gangs or triads or just loansharks. However with more developed countries, the underworld actvities goes on where it's suppose to which is underground, whereas in Miri's case it very often rears its ugly head in the public eye and thus affects the public in many ways. I guess that's one of the main problems that comes with development and becoming a city. A city attracts people from all walks of life and more often than not it too attracts people trying to cash in on the criminal activities in the midst of other legal activites. And because the police service is often not up to the task, these people are let to run wild in this metropolitan chaos. However I've seen good progress done by the police in Kuala Lumpur where before there were many pickpockets and other petty thefts and now the police has implemented various measures to curb these crimes and make it a safer place for both tourists and residents alike.

Being stuck in Miri without a car is like being stuck in the Sahara Desert without a camel. You're basically fucked... or at least close to it. It'll be too hot to walk and you're just stuck there rotting away. And that's exactly what I am now, rotting away in the desert of Lutong. Going back to the fact that Miri is gaining city status and the fact that it's public transport system is not even up to scratch (basically it sucks, you have to wait at half an hour for the bus and one and a half hour if you're not), speaks volume about they progress that needs to be done before it can even be properly considered a city. Oh well I guess Miri is like the Malaysian version of Alcatraz for me. Some of you may get what I mean...;)

To end of I would like to end with a quote from the blog of good friend of mine, Renald, which I think pretty much applies to my current phase in life. "Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat". Good night and say hi to your mum for me.

summer course is a bummer...

hi ppl, officially this is my 2nd post. after all all you ppl reading this will probably be wondering why write a blog. well, why not? after all i'm often personified by my frens as a lame ass person with lotsa crap coming out of my mouth. so to spare them the misery, i shall offload some of my crap here. at least then they will have the choice of whether to read my crap or not. well as of now, it's 4.11am in the morning here so it's a bit quiet. i'm doing summer course here in Miri. kinda lonely here. but i made this choice to do summer course to elevate the boredom of spending 3 months of holidays in brunei. come to think of it, maybe i've made the wrong choice cos i seem to be more bored here than in brunei. well at least i'm getting some knowledge from spending 1 month of summer course here and also quicken my course by 1 subject. well anyways it's a bore. the only saving point that i have here is the ultra fast adsl internet all to myself. although this leads to another problem. my harddisk is full. i need a dvd burner to burn all my crap to, which goes to show how often i'm associated with crap. sigh... oh well, can't wait for the official uni semester to start. then at least i will have more ppl to hang out with. well enough for my 1st/2nd post. i'll keep u posted if i have more important crap to write.

p.s. leyton hewitt is one step closer to winnng the aus open. damn. hate tat guy. has no sportsmanship what so ever... pissoff m8...

my first post...

my first post...