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.