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Malaysia 2011 Wrap-Up

Malaysia was just… a blast.

In somewhat chronological order:

  • Buying 12 donuts to take to Malaysia from Melbourne airport.
  • Playing DoTA with cousins in some random internet cafe/gaming lounge.
  • Riding a bike (sans helmet) across the streets of Sitiawan, both with a cousin and alone, to another cousin’s house to steal borrow his internets.
  • Having a bus breakdown in the middle of nowhere, and being stuck there for hours. Having a greasemonkey (in the purest sense of the word, literally covered in grease from head to toe) climb into the engine bay and fix it for us some three hours later.
  • Eating copious amounts of food in restaurants packed to the brim with people also celebrating Chinese New Year.
  • Buying four decks of cards for a couple of Australian dollars in order to play such games like Warlords and Scumbags, Cheat, Hold Em’ poker, Blackjack, and other assorted games for which there are no english translations for.
  • Finding out that two of the most popular shopping centres have seemingly shed a complete level of floor space, but also discovering that there’s now a whopping great big Tesco where there definitely wasn’t one before.
  • Marvelling at how awesome battery life is on the iPhone 4 when you don’t have to be connected to mobile networks.
  • Tasting the local KFC, finding it definitely isn’t as good as it is back home, but at the same time appreciating the cheesy wedges which aren’t available back home either.
  • Consuming many slices of bread for lunch while at the same cousin’s house. Pretty sure I cleaned them out, but they had such an exquisite collection of spreads it was hard not to.
  • Watching episodes of Nip/Tuck before sleeping.
  • Playing and reviewing iOS games before actually going to sleep.
  • Realising that the whole experience was infinitely better with almost all of my cousins there as well. I suspect it would have been quite boring otherwise.
  • Finding and commenting on all the broken English spotted in department stores, printed text, and everywhere. Continue Reading →

iTunes on Windows is terrible, on the Mac, less so.

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating “.docx” Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

A change not of seasons, but of themes.

People keep telling me that change is good. Even though my own experience says otherwise, they say that change is almost always for the better, rather than for the worse. (Realistically, bad change is terrible. Horrible, even.) They say that change is good because a lack of change leads to stagnation, which leads to a lack of innovation, which is bad.

I propose a different hypothesis: change is only good of the change itself is at least as good as, if not vastly better than, what existed before.

Which is really why I chose to change my WordPress theme.

I’ve posted about theme changes before, but it’s been quite a while since the last theme change; in the beginning I used to change themes quite frequently, every couple of months wasn’t uncommon. As soon as I settled on Grid Focus, though, it seemed that I wouldn’t change unless I saw something even more minimalistic or clean. That’s not to say I wasn’t looking, I was always on the lookout for a lore minimalistic theme, a cleaner theme. In Google Reader there’s posts that pop up every now and again that showcase what’s new in the world of WordPress themes, and almost everytime I scrolled past them, dismissing them as “too busy”, or “just not what I’m looking for.

Until, that is, I found Minblr by the guys at Themify.me, creators of Awesome WordPress Themes. (Full disclosure: those are affiliate links. Click them. Or Don’t.)

Continue Reading →