2004 – What happened and what we learnt

Well it’s been a long and winding year for me and the Earth in general. This in turn will be a long and winding post.

Here’s my personal year in summary..

Normal freezing cold winter month in the UK, a little different from normal though as I was quitting my job, selling my posessions, my car and preparing to leave the country on February 11th. My old job was kind of boring (System/Network/Database/Admin) and I’d automated pretty much everything, implemented proper heterogeneous backup, spam filter, a firewall and intrusion detection system, converted the file server and e-mail server to Linux and optimised the Windows server and Database.

I was saying good-bye to my friends and family and wandering around the quaint city of Worcester[/url] that I called home for so many years.

It looked something like this when I left. Beautiful but fucking COLD.

A memorable moment was when some pissed up Chav walking in front of my car decided to punch my bonnet 3 times and give me some nice dents about 2 days before I was supposed to sell my car. Seen as though there was 8 of them (fully grown daddy chavs with tatoos and sovereign rings) there wasn’t much my crazy fu could do.

Spent the early month packing my life into little brown boxes, which was an interesting and and enlightening experience and moving is always good as it makes you get rid of all that junk you don’t really want but for some reason keep hold of.

I didn’t manage to sell my car before I left (had the price too high), but I got everything else sorted, eventually managed to cancel my excellent ADSL from Plus.net…One of the first things I noticed here was the horrible Latency time Malaysian broadband and even leased lines have. Normal is considered 200-250ms.

In UK on my 512kbps, it was normal for me to have 60ms ping times to anywhere in the world, if it went above 100ms I would phone up and complain there was something wrong. Here it’s 250-350…that’s normal, above 500ms you might consider something wrong, that’s half a freaking second.

The few days before I left, because of all the snow and ice melting we had horrendous floods, the River Severn was full to bursting and a lot of Worcester roads were closed due to flooding.

Do you see were the swans are? That’s used to be a grassy bank, some benches and a path..

The river was up about 6ft.

February 11th I shipped my life off in the hands of a freight company and flew off to Kuala Lumpur, the city I now love and reside in, via Dubai. It was a long and tiring journey but I finally got here.

February consisted of living out of a suitcase and sitting on a cushion watching Astro, seriously that was about it. Will blog more extensively about living in a foreign country soon.

March was a quiet month too, met some new people and started looking for a car. It was also my first taste of SCUBA diving, I went on a trip with a friend to Tioman and following the divers round, I went snorkelling a few times and it was cool, but I really wanted to get down there.

Yes I took this picture.

Straight after I got back I signed up for the PADI[/url] Open Water course and got myself started, seen as though I had no job then, I had plenty of free time. My Malay language improved dramatically during this period as I spent a lot of time on the Islands and with my diving gang which were mostly Malay guys.

When my computer is fixed (should be some time this week, I have ordered the new motherboard), I’ll post all my diving pics 🙂

During this month I went, diving, did more diving, passed my Open Water and did more diving. It was awesome.

Towards the end of March also made a trip to Redang which was amazing! All the dive sites are nearby (5-15 minutes), crystal clear water and loads of aquatic life to see.

It was also my Birthday this month, which was a total non-event (I was diving the weekend before the Redang trip doing the last part of my OW course), which happened to be my birthday.

April I got my car finally! What a beauty it is too..

Ok so now I could get my ass out of the appartment and find my way around (or most likely, get horribly lost). I started to learn my way around, find good places to eat, get to know the country I’d chosen to live in a little better.

I went back off to Tioman to do my Advanced Open Water, which was a classic trip. My advanced course consisted of a Deep Dive (30metres), a Wreck Dive, a Night Dive (pitch black, scary!) and a module on Peak Peformance Bouyancy.

I also noticed my relationship started breaking down around this time, an impenetrable barrier was growing between us and communication was getting harder and less frequent. I also found out ‘she‘ was a workaholic. I think she had channeled all her energy into work during our long distance relationship to replace me, but when I finally got here she couldn’t switch back and ended up with no time or energy for her friends, me, her family or anything but work. I think she enjoyed the responsibility and power and forgot what the rest of life was about.

May consisted of a little less diving due to impending relationship pressure and constant moaning and whinging…this month a new hobby appeared, the almighty DOTA[/url]. In this month I got hooked to the WCIII custom map Defence of the Ancients.

I spent a lot of time in SS2 and in a cybercafe near my place, I hated going home, I hated seeing ‘her‘, deeply resented ‘her‘ and felt my relationship was in the process of completely breaking down….the real reason I had shifted to another country was turning out to be no reason at all.

During June I started seriously looking for jobs, pimping on Jobstreet[/url], sending out letters and resumes to local companies and using my network of uber contacts.

My mom also visited, which was cool as it ended up I started work in early July. There are some snaps of my moms trip HERE, but not many as most were taken with her oldskool 35mm camera. We visted Penang, Malacca, Batu Caves, Templar Park and a lot of places around KL like the Bird Park, the National Islamic Museum and so on.

By this time my ‘wife‘ and I were barely on talking terms, but we put on a show for my mother, which was kind of pointless. Our relationship was effectively over.

In July I started my new job, which for me was totally cool as it was my first dedicated information security role.

I have been wanting this kind of job for ages, actually doing Penetration Tests[/url], Security Audits and all those hardcore techie things that I love to do.

July was mostly spent settling down and getting to know what the company was about, getting to know people and so on. Other than that, playing a lot of DOTA[/url] and being happy that I’d finally gotten a job.

I gained a lot of good new friends during this and the preceding months, as you will see those that comment frequently here and are often mentioned in my stories, Suan[/url], God[/url], KY, TheGreatFaggot, Carol, Jimmy and so on.

Partially spent in Singapore teaching the police how to hack, that was an interesting experience. From what I remember, nothing really noteworthy happened during this month.

Apart from the fact by this time I was totally God-like in DOTA[/url].

Personally it was a sad month, as relationship wise, things were going from bad to fucking horrible. Thankfully my friends were around to support me.

A busy month at work, with lots of deadlines and lots of small projects and tenders jumping in here and there to get in the way.

This is month my marriage ended, thank you dearly to those friends that supported me, even though it was a horrible relationship, I was still shattered but thankfully you guys held me together and stopped me cracking. The month was kind of a blur..sad and desolate, but with 20/20 hindsight clearing the way.

Lessons learnt are in some form scribed here..Fate, Destiny and Bullshit[/url]

Don’t just sit there and let things happen, if you are in a crappy relationship, try and see it objectively, get the fuck out, don’t be in love with a memory of what a person used to be, get real and see what they are now.

Women marry men expecting them to change, they don’t.

Men marry women expecting them not to change, they do.

October was the important month where this blog started!

October 19th to be exact with this post – Finally I did it?[/url]

Other than that mostly spent it being sad, moping around, thinking wtf am I going to do, and started looking for a new appartment.

As you can see in the Archives[/url], I didn’t write much of interest in October, my mind was in other places.

November, the month from hell. I was in Brunei.

As you can see from the Archives[/url], I didn’t do much apart from blog, well what else is there to do in Brunei? Yeah exactly, jack shit. I blogged every day, sometimes twice a day.

It was in interesting experience, teaching again, but the students were fun and we had some good times anyway including a hacking style wargame thingy.

Some photos from the trip are in the gallery HERE.

It was a time for a lot of contemplation and pondering, I sorted myself out mentally whilst I was there, which was a good thing. I wrote a couple of meandering posts about what I discovered, Life…pain….hurt….teeth[/url] and gems and Face thy devil or he getteth stronger..
[/url]

Yay, finally back to civilisation, back to KL, my home. December has been filled with buying furniture, shopping, more shopping and sorting out the appartment, also made a new dear friend this month, which is great 🙂

The place is finally getting into some kind of order with the impending delivery of the sofa, just the fridge and office chair remain.

Having your own place is cool, it’s a first time for me, not sharing with anyone else, no living in someone elses place. Totally my own, if anything is there, on the floor/table/whatever it’s because I put it there. It’s a nice feeling to go home and pass out on your own living room floor ’til the next day 🙂

Had some awesome fun this month too and a lot of stress at work which I could do without, but hey ho what to do. Saw the Shaolin Kung-Fu show at Bukit Jalil which rocked.

We had a brilliant Xmas party (Photos HERE) and a great New Years party (Photos HERE).

Here’s to 2005 being better than 2004 in all ways.

On a global scale it’s been a sad year in many ways, economic downturns, political blunders, wars, bombings, plane crashes, Bird Flu, lots of famous people dying, Thai Civil War and a disaster on Boxing Day[/url].

The US have been acting as normal an intervening where they aren’t wanted, they are becoming despotic in some ways and disliked by most citizens of most nations of the world, this may be disparate from what our goverments say (yes fuck you you Tony Blair) but it’s the way it is.

Religion is still causing many problems, as always, social control for the weak.

I have much to write about these two subjects and will do so in the future.

Popular people this year have been Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Harry Potter, Orlando Bloom, Eminem, Usher and Avril Lavigne.

On the tech side, the whole SCO case has been going on and on all year with full reports at Groklaw[/url]. There hasn’t been any huge innovations this year, but open source is getting more widely accepted, Linux is getting more refined and all of our open source buddies are getting stronger (PHP, MySQL, Snort, nmap and so on).

I tried to think of my album, book and movies of the year but I can’t really remember…perhaps will do those in another post.

As an end note, please remember to donate to the Tsuanmi fund in any way you can, the losses are inumerable and the death toll is over 150,000.

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