News of the recent nominations of the Ijok state seat suddenly reminded me of people staying there whom are close to me. I have been there when my cousin got himself married. I still remembered the wedding ceremony as extremely wacky!

The one thing inseparable from chinese weddings is the opening of the door to the bride’s room. For those who are not familiar with this culture, this is where the fun comes in for both the bride and the groom. One can see where the corruption in our nation comes from. From the moment the groom reaches the bride’s house in his car, he will have to “bribe” the bride’s brother before the door can be opened. Once he reaches the door of the house or the room, more ang pows are given. Most of the times however, the groom need to do myriads of other embarrassing and awkward “stunts” before he is allowed a passage.

In my cousin’s case, after the mandatory angpows were given, they were still not satisfied. We have exhausted all ideas, so we had to trick them. I forgot what exactly was the trick, but the door was opened slightly. Seeing this chance, all of us pushed on the door! There was like 7 or 8 boys there, all big and muscular. We were confident of getting entry this time.

WE COULDN’T BE MORE WRONG!! As soon as the door creaked open about a foot, we felt the door being pushed back in! We were literally being pushed away like little puppies!

After that, the ladies were furious, and made sure that we dried our wallets before they allowed us inside the room. And there lied the answer. A tall, humongous girl was inside. We had another cousin with us, and he was at least 6 feet tall. This young lady is at least half-a-head taller than he is! Dun play play!

Ijok has a history of coming out with very weird eccentric individuals. This guy comes from there (or that area) and he’s a bit cuckoo. Now this is the kinda guy I’d like to see run Ijok in the next election! Once elected, I can foresee some vast changes to the sleepy town. He’s make roads out of stringbuilders and house are instantiated from the bungalow object.

Here’s a toast to Ijok!

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I got myself a 430EX last month, but I needed practice on an assignment before I can be assured of my skill. Therefore I offered my service for free to a friend who is attending her prom night.

I read all about using a flash unit properly, I even made a DIY diffuser by binding some styrofoam papers onto the flash unit like this:

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Is this the end of the road for our trusted friend, the Windows XP? Is ol’ Bill so cruel as to cut the line for our beloved operating system once and for all? What used to be “X-perience”, could well be “aXed-Project”.
Does it affect me? To a certain extend, yes. I still run XP under virtualization in Ubuntu. Should Micro$oft decides to discontinue support and patches for XP, I can always restart the virtual XP from a clean state whenever I encounter glitches. No big deal.
Ubuntu has a shorter life-span (18 months) than Windows (XP lived an amazing 5 years before the Vista came out, considered very old in the fast-paced world of software). But this is a blessing, trust me. It only means that a new operating system is born every few years. The latest Ubuntu re-incarnation, the Feisty Fawn is due on 19th April. Can’t wait to download it! (Yes, Micro-Softies may not be familiar with the mode of operation in Linux world. We download EVERYTHING without guilt. =)

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I once complained to a friend that I hate everything Microsoft, the .NET programming, the MS SQL, even ol’ Bill himself. He sarcastically remarked that if I walk the talk, then I shouldn’t be using Windows at home too. AH-HA, GOTCHA!! I actually don’t! Well, not mostly anyway.
I’m talking about Linux, specifically Ubuntu, one of the more than 50 flavours of Linux in the world, and how it has changed my computing life forever!
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