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5th Sabah International Folklore Festival

Sabah was host once again for the 5th time since 2001, the International Folklore Festival.  In conjunction with the festival, a friendly competition of respective folkdance is held at the Sabah Cultural Centre, here in Penampang. Countries from many parts of the world congregate here to showcase their popular folk dance.  This year there were 13 countries who made it to Sabah.  Dance troupes from Egypt, Indonesia, India, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, China,Romania and Thailand were here from 18 to 27 July but the dance competition was only held two  nights consecutively from 24th to 25th.

This year, I was fortunate to be selected again to be in the IT Technical team which supports the competition scoring system, only this time I was assisting the jury from Uzbekistan.  It was a challenge because the jury does not speak English nor does he knows how to use a computer.  Neither did I know how to speak Russian besides Da (yes), Nyet (no), Spasiva (Thank you) and Dasvidanya (good bye).  Well I’ve tried to use Google Translate, which helps in communicating one way or so I thought.  Fortunately, we were seated next to the Kazakh jury who had an English translator.  Since both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were formerly part of the USSR, they have common language which is Russian.

Me with Orif Atoev (Uzbek jury) and Dana (translator from Kazakhstan)

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Losing weights

For the past three weeks already I’ve been eating well at hotels due to events I’ve been attending.  Do you have any ideas of quick weight loss diets?  I surely need one now cos my pants are getting tighter.  The food were so tempting but I tried my best to eat the lighter courses.  My gym membership has expired and I don’t think I’ll be renewing it.  Perhaps it would be better for me to run the course at the park nearby the office.

Getting Typhoon Updates

Over the last few days, I’ve been receiving updates on Typhoon Conson via the government SMS service MySMS.  Initially I was glad to have received the update.  But soon after it became annoying to the point where I don’t think I want to get update anymore.  The reason being, I get updated everytime the typhoon has changed location.  Each location is at least 1000KM away!  I guess that’s why they call it an update.  Each update I don’t receive one but 3 messages, perhaps it’s due to the text limitation.  Getting updates is good, especially if you’re in one of those Royal Caribbean cruises.  Surely you’ll want to be updated constantly cos it has greater impact on you.  But from a distance of 1000km?  perhaps not unless it’s a super typhoon.  All we get is some heavy rain that’s it.  As a result of my frustration, I cancelled the update.  Just like the constant update I got on earthquakes, which I thought it was cool to get an earthquake and tsunami update.  Maybe the system should have some intelligence built into it to send updates to those who have the greatest impact by taking into account the locality distance of the person to the impending danger event.

Office Rearrangement

I simply call it changing the fengshui.  Recently I’ve decided to rearrange my office furniture to prevent from getting wet due to the leakage problem experienced for months now.  After several attempts in rectifying the problem, the leakage persists. Only yesterday did I notice or rather hear that some serious maintenance work was done to the roof above my office.  Rearranging the office furniture has certainly improved the ‘feeling’ being in the office.  I have more space now and felt a more positive chi.  Perhaps it’s just a feeling.

Almost two weeks of hotel food

One may be tempted to eat more when at the hotel function.  For the last two weeks I’ve been two events held at the hotel.  The first was the Malaysian Open Source Conference.  This year round, the food was served non-stop.  Then there was the two-day event at Pacific Sutera Hotel.  I tried as as much as possible not to indulge in food served, otherwise I’ll be reaching for the 7-dfbx.  Fortunately the food quality wasn’t as bad.