Q4'11 Teambuilding

I haven't been posting anything related to my work for quite some time for now. Here it is, the latest team building which just held yesterday at Hydro Hotel, Batu Feringghi. There are a lot photos but I will just upload this one piece which has everyone in it. It was fun and we had a lot laughters. I was so tired from laughing, for real...

I left Arizona!!!

After the rush trip from Penang to Arizona, at last I am settling down in Oregon for a short time. This is a place where I love to be. Chilly. I like seeing trees, grass and green more to rocks, sand and brown. But this is not for long. I will be back in 2 weeks time. Anyway, things are really crazy here and I missed lunch on the first day I was in Arizona, not forgetting about how I ate the melted polystrene foam for dinner. It was pathetic except for the golden opportunity to travel and the good friends I have when I landed in the stranger's land. Basically they are the best people I met when I first landed.

Thanks for picking me up from airport, the help to solve my rental car issue, sending me to my flight at 5am in the morning, home cooked lunch, company for dinner and 3 days of feeling home when I was there.

Gonna sleep soon, lack of sleep lately.

We ought to live better, remember this!

Life in point form

1. Weeliem and I both down sick on two different weekends. So we spent two weekends ineffectively at home recovering. It has been a terrifying experience as his mom thought he had h1n1 and I think it might be true. We had all the symptoms but recovered after a week. The fever was the most painful part in the sick process as I had to spent money to buy a digital termometer to monitor his temperature. Ended up we went to two hospitals and one clinic but none wanted to check him for the influenza h1n1 virus because he never faint, have difficulty in breathing or vomit blood. He has to have any of these to force them to check for a patient at his age for h1n1. Luckily we both are ok now and we have the immunity!

2. Someone in office passed away on Monday all of sudden. From what I heard, he had hypertension due to his heavy workload. Yes, working in Intel is a hell. I admit but I never thought it can be so serious. He is even younger than me!

3. Highlight: A few of us went over to my sister house to celebrate her daughter one year old birthday. My sister cooked a feast for us. The most impresive is the birthday chocolate mud cake. We could not eat the uber tempting cake on the night because we had to finish the pizzas, chicken wings and nuggets.. The cake and left over yam cake became our breakfast the next morning.

4. I have been busy with work and other stuff which keep me company until end of the year. I have a lot of unfinished work laying around for months already now. My life is so full of surprises... The biggest surprise was my trip to Oregon this year, which was unacceptably short 2 weeks but I find rewarding because I can snap some photos in the lavender farm. I love the colour!

5. I miss a trip like Australia. I want to have one again especially with little Cheryl. Something she said the other day keep on coming into my mind every now and then. She was so cute. She said "shhhhhh... baby oi oi" . It was the way she conveyed the message in her loud whisper with the shhhhhhhhh and her finger on her lips. I miss this little mischevious girl.

6. Our country politic is so messy that I think everything is crap

My 3rd PDC Annual Dinner

Over the years I work in this place, this was the third time I attended their annual dinner. This year, PDC annual dinner was held in Trader's Hotel. My personal opinion, the hall was not suitable for occasion for these number of people. There were too many poles and bars blocking the tables from half the hall to the back. However, this is the one of two places that can hold our large number of attendants. However I like the event afterall because the organizing committee has put their best to the night.

The venue was decorated to suit the Hollywood Night theme, with the golden grammy award statue on the stage and Pitt's couple at the entrace for people to camwhoring with.

Photos of me with the man :D Beautiful moments again.

I did not sit with my team during the night but I tried to find them for some photo shootings. I missed photos with Soek Junn, Amy, Shi Ming and many more because I did not know where they were sitting. Everyone looked gorgeous! Like Jonathan said, he was not aware that PDC has so many pretty girls until that night!

Some pretty shots with the yummy girls of the night. Yes, and with guys who set their hair for this event. Cannas and Alan were performing, they did a great job!

These photos were taken somewhere else than in the hall itself, except for the photo with Lee Yee. I accidently grouped it to this piece of photos.. The others were taken in restroom, entrance and the hotel lobby.. It was an awesome night, where every engineer was one time like a celebrity. Hehe.

Q4 '08 team building

On last Monday we went to Relau Metropolitan park for our team quartely team building. We had hiking, voluntering work, kayaking, paint-balling and movie before. This is the first time we had such physically and mentally challenged activites.


A little warm up before the activities planned ahead.

All geared up for the amazing race type of game. This is my group, Ronda the Panda.

We had lotsa fun in all the station games with the funny questions and puzzles prepared for us. I had been tricked in the "not a game" game which the coordinator at first asked us to tie as many knots as possible in a period of time given a string. I tied like eight knots but after the time ended, she asked us to untie and leave three or zero knot for 5 and 10 marks. I got 0 because I had eight knots!

Fast forward, we were the first to reach the final station.

After lunch we still have some mini games and challenges.

The group photo of SPDE group. Day full of fun, sweat and cheerings.

Note: All photos taken by James Lum

PDC Day 2008

Today is PDC Day, sort of like family day for our department employees. Everyone is allowed to bring their immediate family members or significant half.

There were many activities and booths setup for both young and adults indoor and outdoor. I did this tatoo thing on my left arm and it is still visible now. I want to keep it for today because today is a special day!

They had wii games in one corner of cafetaria where some members of family or employees sweated over swinging, boxing, hula hooping and tennis game. See the thrilling motion of hula hooping.. :D

I queued up for the manicure which turns up a disaster. The lady was not handy with nail polishing because she kept on brushing the applied nail with her finger when applying the one next to it. Plus it took her like 20 minutes just to apply 10 finger nails with one coat of colour nail polish, stick the flower stickers to 10 nails and another coat of clear polish. After all, it is free of charge so no more complains.


The day was so hot that the direct sun exposure can burn your skin if you were exposed under the sun for more than 15minutes. Kidding. But is true, it was burning.



By that time it was already almost 11.30am and our stomaches were growling hungrily for food. We went out straight to the food stalls and grabbed some favourites like hotdogs, asam laksa, fried chicken wings, ais kacang, fruits and cold drinks.

After filling up our appetite, we proceed to the games stalls at another corner of the carpark! With all the games coupons in hand we tried all the games which were pretty easy. This is Weeliem trying to aim for the tic-tac-toss game. He did not win but I did! Woo hoo.. We came home after finishing all the coupons with full stomaches, smilling faces, happy thoughts and goodies we won from the game stalls.

Rainy BBQ

Last Friday, Julian organized a birthday party for Lan Sin. Everyone positively had fun time under the rain. I stood under the shade all the times when it rained. Sweet. This is my first time attending wet BBQ party.


It was a perfect time to experiment the ultra big ice-cream seller umbrella that intel gave us last year. There were three on spot, not sure whose belongings. The young people BBQ-ed chicken wings, lamb steak and marshmallows. Wee Meng, Lee Yee and Guat May made tuna sandwiches. One funny thing was every paper cup has name written underneath it so one person can only use a cup on that night and nobody will take the wrong one. Engineers are smart.

So happen that Chuan Ning was back in Malaysia for his twins' birth and his birthday fall on the next Monday, we celebrated his birthday together. The birthday pair wished upon the stars that every of their friends will achieve the very best in their life :P

Lan Sin sure happy till weep because of the surprise party and Julian's dedication and hardwork to keep the fire alive under super heavy rain.

Holiday?

I am in holiday mood. Am I? Working on the blue, green and black xterms in a pharmacy.

Mooncake & birthdays again!

I swear that I forgot yesterday was 19th September. I can't remember any occasion that make me look at the date or check the calendar. Today when I booted my laptop and I saw the date at the right bottom corner is 20th, I freaked out. I forgot my very good friend birthday yesterday! Happy belated birthday Ai leng..

Not so sure why September has so many birthdays even one my of sister and some friends are among these few days. Making baby during new year is so fruitful, my verdict.

The same goes to weemeng whose birthday is on last Monday. We had a small gathering about twenty plus people to celebrate his birthday. Talk about small, that is pretty big number to fill up the seats in Secret Recipe.


We had banana chococlate cake for his birthday. Hurray! No more cheesecake... Everyone was VERY happy and so did the birthday-man.


Later after the filling cake, we proceeded to the next activity in list. We were going to play lanterns at the same place like last year. This time, Chor Chen prepared some extraordinary lanterns, like butterfly, panda, phoenix and "can't remember" with the other traditional paper lanterns.

Full moon, as the photo describes. Peace to the world, as the hand gestured

We had some new faces to join us this year, the newbies plus a few familiar faces like Eng Heng, Guat May, Lay Hoong and Yoke Sun. The rest are the same old colleagues.. haih... missing a few.

After a few rounds of parade holding our lanterns, we stopped for game. Wee Han coordinated this game called Mafia. I did not played much because I was killed in the second game. The first person to be killed. No chance to open my mouth yet. Ish.

We ate some mooncakes before everyone drifted back home in different directions. Work again the next day.

It is super hot today that the pain strucked my left side of head again. Not only that, my run also stucked with weird error in log file.

Token of appreciation for hard work

The small gesture from management gratified the people who had worked really hard. Sometimes the gain is satisfying.

We received a flash light which the light is generated mechanically without any battery. The mechanism is cool, the light is apparently bright enough to create day light for a community of ants. There is also a 4G thumb drive, but the size makes it not so likeable by me because when is used with stacking on another occupied USB port on my lappy, it is not able to squeeze itself into the empty slot. I wish the shape is a little more slim.

Restroom's tale

Many chances when I need to have a leak in office, I'll stumbled across wet patches on toilet seat in the restroom. What I have to do is to pull out a lengthy toilet paper and roll it a few times to thicken the paper in layers. It is not other than the most important step to avoid wetting my bare hands with the yellowish liquid or whatever liquid on the seat. Then, wipe them it off clean and dry. I know it sounds gross and I feel extremely gross doing that. I hate it but I have no choice. I don't want to go out and wait some more for the next available cubicle because at generous times it will still be the same. It happen so often that I think I am cleaning the toilet seat in work place almost everyday. I see posters hanging at the back of the each restroom cubicle's door educating and reminding the uncivilized parts of human to sit properly when peeing and never half-sit too because the aim is never correct. Also, never squat on the toilet seat. I know some people love to stand on the seat and squat there because sometimes I see shoes marks on it. There is always available toilet seat paper cover in restroom and these people never seem to like using it. So what? Just pull one out, direction up and pull it down to release it from the box. Tear out the center part of the paper, layer it on top of the toilet seat and sit on it. As easy as ABC. Some engineers are very uncivilized, considering they are the smarter population in human, this should not ever happen at all. I feel disgusted over their daily practise. The more I think of it, I feel like throwing out.

But restroom is the best place to gather news from various people. Sometimes, I can hear very interesting piece of information about something because people love discussing in the restroom despite the fact that everyone else in the cubicles can listen to their conversation. There is one specific person who if is reading this post will surely fire his M16 machine gun as usual and occupy me with his stinky remarks.

Lucky enough that our restroom cubicle's walls are closely build without any gap. The photo below was taken in US restroom from inside the small cubicle. I can see people viewing their image from the mirror even from there. So you can imagine what people can see from outside. hahaha. It doesn't matter to me since I am not interested at all looking at people doing their business. It absolutely strucked me at first when I first experienced the openness of western culture but luckily I got used to it after the first week.

Volunteery, Beaching & Hiking

On last Monday my colleagues at work place had this teambuilding at Pantai Kerachut. I remember the last teambuilding was paintball and I did not played. Now this time round I am eager to show my complete strength to hike up the hill and pick up most of the rubbish at the beach. OK. This time, we are going to do some volunteery service on behalf of Intel. We will clean the beach and up the hiking trail when we supposed to hike all the way up the hill and down to the clean beach where "some" turtles will come to give birth at the right season, Pantai Kerachut.

Everybody arrived at the national park at about 9.30 in the morning car-pooling in a cars. We registered ourselves (wrote our name and signed. that's all which took more than half an hour because the number of people are too many) and the committee distributed the lunch pack. Mine was spicy deluxe chicken from McD.



After a little briefing from the organizing committee, we proceeded to our own team and started shouting some weird slogan. Luckily we have the baba Leonard in the team, that's how we got the ole ole a a slogan so quickly.


Group photo as usual without the photographer and everyone started walking picking up rubbish whenever we saw one.



Some people spotted a huge jellyfish and were making fuss about it. Hehe. I walked over and joined, happily managed to get Chor Chen to capture a good picture with the jellyfish. It was so big and transparent, still alive, buried halfly in the sand.



I was so eager to clean up the beach and saw this Milo 3 in 1 packet floating on the water. I slowly moved a step front and stepped my right leg near to the water. It sank! My leg went in and stucked there. I was struggling to pull it out but failed. I was panic for a moment and shouted "hey, I can't get my leg out". Some people came and helped out. So do the photographers who thought this will make a great picture. -_-'''.


My leg actually went in deeper by time. So I got to do something. I released my foot from my beloved sandal and took it out. Voila! My leg was safe. But I need to save my sandal too, so I shove my hand into the hole that my leg made and pulled my sandal with all my mighty strength. I was worried I might break it and felt so excited when I retrieved my sandal out of the sand. Now I have 1 muddy leg, 1 muddy sandal and 2 dirty hands.




I went to a stable hard surface near the water and washed a little accompanied by Leonard and Xiao Wei (very loving couple. hehe). I continued hiking with the rest of the people, most of them already ran up the hill. I really mean ran. I was almost the tail of the team and we walked very slowly stopped every a while to rest. I grasped for breath and was getting hard time to breath also the heavy backpack did not help. I had 1 lunch and 2 bottles of water in my backpack causing my back a little ache.


When some people decided to give up hiking up, I asked Soek Junn if we should follow them. We thought it for 5 seconds and made up our mind to go down because we were more than happy when heard that we could go to the other side of the hill to Pantai Kerachut by boat. But going down the hill took us some time too.

I washed my sandals and legs when I got down at the stream, with Chor Chen the photographer following me hoping to get another great photo when I fell into the water.

After some negotiation by the boss, 8 of us went onto a boat. We were thinking that we will be the first group to reach Pantai Kerachut and can show off by hiding the fact that we actually took the boat. =)


But I was surprised when all of them already at the beach when we reached. Hehe.

They were jealous of us. See their grumpy and unwelcoming face? =P


We all ate our food and rested a while. Then had the usual teambuilding activities ; games. We did kite making and creating a "project" using materials provided to safe keep an egg from broken in a "very" high free fall.

So happy that our kite was the first one to fly up the sky. It was over our expectation. Our kite was different from the rest because we used the colour paper on the wrong side. It turned out to be white instead of the right side which is green.

I did not help much in flying the kite because I have no experience. Haha.

After that, we walked to a nearby place to see some tiny turtles and went home in boats. I was exhausted (from the hike), dehydrated (very hot sun), wet (from the heavy rain while we were going back in boat), and tired (talked too much).

Chicken Out from Paint Ball

So you see I was the one who talked so much on how the paint ball will be fun and exciting with all the blueblacks and wounds. But the thing is I suffered from headache, head spin, sorethroat, cough and flu from the pizza lunch last Friday. Again, pizza hut caused me headache. So I kinda missed the fun out there when our team held it's annual team building at the Kelab Belia & Sukan (KBS) today. I told Xiao Wei that I will not attend it but I ended up woke up at seven thirty a.m. because I received a call from Aan Chien who hurted his knee and cannot attend the paint ball event too. After all, I am up so I went to the office to help out as much as I can. I hired myself as a half day camera lady.


When we arrived at the place, my first impression is it looks so dirty and unattended. Will anyone of us get bitten by snake at anytime? The paint ball war will begin very soon. At nine-thirty, we were given not short but not too long briefing by the marshall. Don't know his name. :P

The marshall showed us on how to operate the marker and explain the rules of the game. We divided the group into eight teams about four people in a team.

The war field get sectioned from watching arena by this nets surrounding the area.

The place is a bit eerie with long grass which might hide some insects or snake in them.

The view inside the playing field. Tyres and planks.

The players were given chance to walk around the field and some already started drawing their strategics and plans.

One of the many groups photos. Macho guys and brave women.

The marshall did not wear a protective jersey like the others but he is allowed to hold this REFEREE shield.


The marshall knows how to act cute also. He whacked people that took out their masks before stepping out from the playing zone for safety reason.

I think this is Chan Chun Wai-in-action.

Han Yao all prepared for the game. Aiming hard to shoot down the red team.

I am not sure this is Jin Wen or Xiao Wei. Looks like a lady feature.

The team get ready to play: Willetts, Choon Peng, Xiao Wei and Chuan Ning.

It was really wasted that I did not play together. They had so much fun and exhausted at the end of the game. So I asked them to take a picture of me and Wee Meng outside the net to prove that I was there supporting them.