It was Janice

My post yesterday saw a picture of 2 pretty girls from Techtra Office Automation.














One was Yuki. I mentioned I couldn't remember the name of the other girl.

It was pointed out to me that she is Janice, this information is courtesy of Marco through his comment on that post. Thank you Marco.

By the way, Marco has a couple of blogs which you may want to check out.

http://trace-ability.blogspot.com/ this site is on Large Format Printing Technologies

http://selfhelp4u.blogspot.com/ this one is a self help site with Articles on personal growth, self improvement, self-help and personal power

And yes Peter Chow, you are right. The one in the brown shirt in two of the photos yesterday was indeed Mr Khong from 3E.

CII is now Consumer System Products

Two days after Canon BIS bought dinner, it was CIIs turn.

What was written on the backdrop said Consumer System Products (not CII). I can only guess the name of this Division has changed. Possibly the return of Simon Wong, the prodigal son, to take charge of the Camera business necessitated a split of divisions between the Camera and Printer areas.

Of course, it would all be easier if we have the Camera Division, the Printer Division, the Copier/Fax Division, the Service Division, Personnel Division, Accounts Division et al. They will all be easily understood, and appropriately descriptive, but no. These simplistic names won't be cool. And being not cool won't do, right?

I was told to be in Ti Chen Restaurant Saujana at 12.00pm. However lunch started at 1.00 with many late arrivals. I thought the late arrivals were not being considerate at all.














Edmund Liew was again the Master of Ceremony. He did so competently, colorfully and with humor. We listened to CEO/President Liew Sip Chon before we started eating.

He told us that the familiar Tortoise and Hare story has 4 parts and not just the version we have been hearing all our lives.

In Part 1, the overconfident Hare went to sleep during the race and lost it to the Tortoise. Hence, being Slow and Steady is our first moral of the story.

The disappointed Hare challenged the Tortoise again and won this time running from beginning to end. Hence the moral this time says that we should be Fast and Consistent in our execution.

The resilient Tortoise asked for the race again and this time chose a different route that needed to cross a pond. The tortoise won this time because the Hare couldn't swim. Hence the moral, we can change the condition/enviroment sometimes to give us a competitive edge.

Part 4 was when they race for the fourth time. This time, the Hare carried the Tortoise on his back on the land run and the Tortoise returned the favor when crossing the pond. I gather by now, you can conclude on your own, the moral of this part. Yes, here it means that we all should not be overweight, lest possible synergy between parties may not be able to be executed for optimum results.

So now, what were they saying that there is no such thing as a Free Lunch!

Here with Canon CSP, you get a free lunch and a "Profitable Business by Thinking Outside the Box" program worth RM1850.00 free being conducted by the CEO/President Liew Sip Chon himself. You Can with Canon.














CanonMalaysian Soo Wen sat beside me. She was with Canon Alor Setar before leaving to join Kangar Office Automation. Now, seeking bright lights, big cities, she is here in Kuala Lumpur with Raymond Kuan in RS Majujaya promoting copiers. Unlike most others, she insisted that I took this picture of her close up instead of at a distance of at least 4 feet.














These 2 pretty ladies were Yuki and (dielo, can't remember the other one's name) from Tehtra Office Automation in Puchong Jaya. A company by CanonMalaysian Kenneth Choo who couldn't attend this time round.














Since Alvin Yeoh's wife couldn't make it, he sat down besides pretty girl Stephanie from Canon.

Entrepreneur Rick Low and Veteran Christie Low were there to grace the occasion as well.

Once again, please feel free to criticize on the blur photos as I am still using the slow shutter speed Samsung camera phone and most shots by me were candid and the victims being alive, were moving constantly.

I Agree

I agree with all those people who say that Pakatan Rakyat should stop bitching about their loss in the state of Perak.

There could have been some valid reasons why there is no anti-hopping laws in this country or in so many other countries including England and the United States as well. I have not found out those reasons yet.

Nonetheless if somebody voted you in when you represent a party as well, then how can the people not feel cheated when you jump ship? For whatever reasons.

To be fair, these 3 mothers did not say they are joining Barisan Nasional. They became Independents. (Is it true that everybody has got a new Camry except assemblyman Hee?)

Still, I agree with all those people who say that Pakatan Rakyat should stop bitching about their loss in the state of Perak.

This time around, Anwar Ibrahim started the game. What if exactly the same situation happens in another state in reverse. If that should happen, then I would have said that Barisan Nasional should stop bitching about their loss.

Incidentally, I was of the opinion that prior to the GE2008, people who joined the opposition parties do it for what the parties stand for and has nothing to do with possible monetary gains. The opposition was not supposed to win. Was I wrong?

Damn!

Canon BIS Division bought CNY Dinner

It happened Tuesday passed at Oriental Pavilion Jaya 33.

Canon BIS Division looks after the health of the copier and fax business in this nation. Headed by Richard Yeow and lieutenants Ooi Chik Hoe, Shareen Thum and Pang, plus others.

On the same table as I were Kwan Bee Geok, Jeremy Cheong, Project Queen Yvonne, Alvin Yeoh, Cheryl and Candy from Bits and Bytes, Shirley and Raymond Kuan and the most affable Wang from Copynet.

Of course Liew Sip Chon was there.

Spoke with Rick Low, Amelia, Alan 1, Alan 2, Tan Chin Han and Christie Low.

The colorful Rick related to me how he wanted to sue the restaurant when one of the waiters poured some beer down his trousers. He mentioned that on a previous occasion, one of his friends threaten to send a bill of RM500 for a dry clean job when it happened to that fellow. However this time. "Never mind lah, since this time Liew Sip Chon was partly at fault, let's not play the fool."

Wikipedia came to my mind when I listened to Raymond Kuan talk. This guy gives us all so much information. We all now know that he bought his house for RM650,000 and did a RM700,000 renovation before he moved in. He said he and Donny Ling are of the same age at 49. He too said his wife Shirley is 48 years old. He will soon be having a 52 inch Samsung LCD television in his master bedroom. He is currently grooming his son to take over the business. One of his staff Soo Wen will be coming over to my place as well as others to train my people how to do the copier business. Soo Wen will also be representing him in the Canon CII luncheon in Ti Chen Restaurant 2 days later.

Actually there were more. However my brain registered a temporary shutdown due to the information overload.

Once again, the food was excellent and the company of the people fantastic.

Wong Choon Heng is Back (and Back)

Wong Choon Heng now with Canon Europa was back for 2 weeks and has since gone back to suffer in cold London Town last Saturday. He won't be wearing this light weight red T-shirt when he disembark. 13 hours flight time, he said.

When you keep in touch via the Internet, viz emails, facebook, blogs; you don't get the feeling of not having seen somebody for 2 years when you meet up again.

We did lunch together with IT whiz kid Peter Chow. Originally we wanted to eat Kajang Satay in Damansara Utama assuming that a Malay restaurant would surely be opened on the 5th day of the Chinese New Year. Well, it wasn't.

We walked over to Koon Kee for a lunch of one ton mee. Alvin Yeoh was supposed to join us, but something came up.

Ah Heng is doing well in London in the Marketing Department. Very positive, jovial and looked highly motivated. However, they say if things are going well, then the sales department is doing great. And if not, then the marketing department is to blame. Happens in all Canon companies all over the world.

True!?

No kids planned yet, but I am sure the process is not being neglected. Ah Heng will be back again next CNY.

News has it that Leonovo Malaysia is currently restructuring. Apparently a VSS exercise has just being conducted with 30-35 people leaving, clutching a few months pay to seek their fortune somewhere else.

Peter Chow remains with additional responsibilites. Of course, he can handle come what may.

Stand up for the right to criticise religion

You may have already heard of Johann Hari.

Anyway, here is a little bit of information about him from Wikipedia.

Johann Hari (born January 21, 1979) is a left-wing British journalist and writer. He is a columnist for The Independent, the Evening Standard and the Huffington Post. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Le Monde, Slate and Ha'aretz. Hari describes himself as a "European social democrat", who believes that markets are "an essential tool to generate wealth" but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions. He appears regularly as an arts critic on the BBC show Newsnight Review.

Hari was born in Glasgow and raised in London. Having attended Woodhouse College he graduated with a double first in Social and Political Sciences at King's College, Cambridge in 2001.


The following article written by him end of last month was picked up by Malaysia Today. I happened to come across it, reading Malaysia Today. I thought it to be an interesting read and you may be interested to see what he has to say on this subject.


"The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him on the side of the religious censors"

The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we “respect” religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him on the side of the religious censors.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated sixty years ago that “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people.” It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it “Western”, Robert Mugabe calls it “colonialist”, and Dick Cheney calls it “outdated.” The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it – but the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard against which to check ourselves. Until now.

Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants led by Saudi Arabia demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak freely failed to “respect” the “unique sensitivities” of the religious, they said – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It said you can only speak within “the limits set by the shariah [law]. It is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community.” In other words: you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.

Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN’s Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he seeks out and condemns “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets”. The council agreed – so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who tried to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

Anything which can be deemed “religious” is no longer allowed to be a subject of discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate stood up to announce discussion of shariah “will not happen” and “Islam will not be crucified in this council” – and Brown was ordered to be silent.

Of course, the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of the UN are ordinary Muslims. Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared it was “un-Islamic” and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi Arabia, the country’s most senior government-approved cleric said it was perfectly acceptable for old men to marry ten year old girls, and those who disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah.

To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim culture? Those women’s, those children’s, this blogger’s – or their oppressors’? As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: “The ultimate aim of this effort is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom.”

Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.

Underpinning these “reforms” is a notion seeping even into democratic societies – that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of “prejudice” – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water, and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a ‘Prophet’ who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him. I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of “prejudice” or “ignorance”, but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal. When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade. But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality. If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can correct them; if they are right, I am soothed. But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult. By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence. Nobody has ‘faith’ that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it, based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It’s easier to demand the source of the pesky doubt be silenced.

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence. Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak freely.

More Artistic Photos - she says

You may remember I said I went to a Chinese Temple on the 3rd day of CNY.

Jeradyne went as well. She took some pictures as well.

She says her shots are better and more artistic than mine. What a whole lot of horseshit! It is without doubt that my pictures posted earlier, successfully captured the 'feel' of the occassion of which should be more appropriate versus the clinical exercise as executed by Jeradyne, artistic or not.

Here, see for yourselves.

Nasty Nadal

As you know, I was rooting for Roger Federer.

I saw this poster from the fans yesterday. "Grand Slam No. 14, Roger that".

Alas, that was not to happen. Rafael Nadal came along to poop the party. No celebrations, no booze, no parties for me for at least 24 hours.

Nadal was like the waves. He keeps coming and coming and coming relentlessly. If he were to be in a street fight, he will climb out of the drain with a broken arm and a bleeding head to charge at you again.

If this was in the 16th century, Rafael Nadal will lead the Spanish Armada into the Seven Seas to dominate the World.

Damn!

Estrella, I am sorry

Estrella, I am sorry. I did not know you are a Malaysian band when I first listened to Stay. Now I do and Liyana is so cute.

I see great potential and I wish you guys the best.




Estrella is a jazz/indie/acoustic band, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The band was formed on 2006 and released their first eponymous album at 2007. They are currently signed to Laguna Music and actively touring the Malaysian independent circuit.

Having captured the attention of the Laguna Music masterminds, Estrella further evolved their genre from indie jazz to a slightly more complex sound, with dreamy and spacey after-effects. Under the suggestion of Laguna Music Producer, Jeffrey Little, the strummers now became a light band - with members, Shamsul Idzwan on percussions and Jeffrey Little, himself on drums.