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Finally, after some hardwork for the past few days… I’m able to sit back a bit and enjoy my new sweet home.

Haven’t gotten my Screamyx connection yet nor the land line from TM. I’ve asked them to relocate last week but nothing happened - the typical service you would expect. Here I’m stuck with 3G (no 3.5G).

So here’s what happened during the move. Remember the bunch of guys hired to move my stuff? Well, I won’t be using them again. Few things that irked me:
1. Promise start work at 5:30PM, only arrive around 6:00PM but then have to wait another 30 mins cos the workers haven’t eaten yet. What? I’m pissed because it’s their idea to start work at 5:30PM with the delay it’ll be late when we finally finish up.
2. Well there are 4 of them like they promised but only 1 guy working full engine. The other 3 need to take break (chit chat/smoke) at least every 45 min or so.
3. Promise to wrap my fridge, cupboard - nada, didn’t happened.
4. Dented 1-2 things.

These guys know what they’re doing - telling from how they work out strategy to take out the things and how the fill up the lorry. However they’re just below par in terms of service.

Only thing that seems ok to me is that they manage to fit all things in 1 trip, make sure all the movements completed before 10PM and keeping the damage to a minimum.

So next time you need a mover, get the contacts from your buddy - getting one by recommendation is far better than trying to find one in yourself.

Phew! the family is on the last lap to complete moving to our new home. It’s been a lengthy 6 months or so involving talking to numerous people, project management, renovation, surveys, bargaining, body ache, sweat… you get the idea. This weekend, we’ll be moving to our new home. A double story terrace house that I think will make the kids happy.

Since I’m almost done, I think I’ll have some time to put up a guide to benefit some others who I’m sure will be facing the same thing as I did.

Right now what is still pending is the kitchen cabinet - well in the end we settle for IKEA. Yeah, not the best out there but I think the price and convenience made us to decide on them. The IKEA purchase probably deserve another own post later. I just received 99% of the parts just this morning and the installer only free this coming 20th. That means we’ll not have a proper kitchen for at least a good 6 days after moving.

Hopefully the final move happening this week will be smooth sailing. Just had a ’site visit’ done by the movers. He recommend me 8 ton lorry (wow!) and 4 workers to carry everything in one go. The price given is RM570.00 (all included). I hope it’s worthwhile, this guy seems to know what he’s doing.

So stay tune for the ending… once everything is done!

The past few months probably the busiest in quite a while… well, everyone is busy but this time around things really need me to be in middle of everything. Well for a start, new member of the family - Muhammad Adam Rayyan was born on 9th October 08… very exciting for the whole family especially the sister Asyiqin. After so many months trying to explain to her about the ‘thing’ inside mom’s stomach she finally get it. She somehow still adjusting to the new sister role, started to show her jealousy and always trying to get more attention. On one hand I’m juggling between managing home alone, getting back to the kids, spending quality time with the family and of course daily routines like work.

Talking about work. Work also got a bit more intense, getting deeper involvement in projects. Of course joining HP as experience hire means expectation is greater. In fact reason why I’m staying up late is really because I came back late today to clear up stuff. HP workload is pretty reasonable with occasional peaks. Considering what I’ve gone through before, this is pretty much tolerable.

I’m also overseeing renovation of my new home. Making sure the contractor did the work properly, getting items purchased, managing things like renovation bin, etc… wow, it’s not easy. Of course partly due to wanting to maximize the TCO, being a sales person myself means I want to be hands on for every decision (why not, that’s my money).

Things don’t seems to slow down not until Christmas I guess. Well, HP announced company wide closure for about 2 weeks. That’ll be something to look forward to =)

It’s hard to admit that I’m praising Microsoft product, but I guess Live Writer fully deserved the praise. I came across this nifty tool by chance really. I left my old company and alone at home, need to connect and some of the friends are using MS messaging system - so I tried to install MSN messenger only to find out it’s moved to MS Live. Downloaded the installer and there are few packages which I was highly skeptical - from previous experience being duped to nonsense product… but the Writer tool seemed promising and I gave it ago. The installer is one bad aspect for the live services. It supposedly to simplify installation however it turned out to be pain in the a**. It’s darn slow… and sometimes just failed unexpectedly. Then you have to start all over again.

However, once you have it installed then it should be a breeze. You get Writer to start, enter you blog address (it can also suggest you a blog space at MS Live) and user name password. If all went well, your template gets synced to your local system and off you go with content creation. It’s at no cost and also pretty easy WYSIWYG editor. What I like most is the ease of use, ie adding pictures, formatting, you can add map (MS service of course), tags, etc. It can be done off line and later published to online version.

This post is written with Live Writer and it greatly enhances my frequency to post since I can do it at my convenience (offline) and eases the creation. Give it a try! Just google it and get the installer. If you’re not impressed, google further and you’ll have a lot of review from satisfied users. It’s still an infant product so expect it to be more sophisticated in the future - at the moment it doesn’t crash! so that’s good!

Get it here: http://get.live.com/

I’ve not been posting for quite some time now… really due to the home network being freakingly slow. The modem and wifi router seems to work well - no errors, can connect and indicators looked normal. Yup looked normal because the WAN indicator seems to blink rather strangely - it supposedly being active but rather blinking slowly.

I waited for few days hoping it’s now going to be long Streamyx issue. After the third day, I logged a report to TM. I called them up after Maghrib prayer and the person in charge seems good enough by not asking me those absurd questions. The normal diagnostic questions are asked of course. But under 10 mins everything is logged and I got my report number. Phew! TM say they will call me to follow up in 2 days.

On the second day, true enough they called me up to follow up. My issue still there but they kept their promise. The lady asked me to check my bandwidth and promise to escalate. The next day someone from TM called and arrange for an appointment. I set it the next day lunch time. The guy came, did a check with his laptop and modem… concluded that my modem has gone crazy. Looking at the diagnostics, I agreed and later bought a new one.

I must say that I’m impressed with TM support for this case. Actually I gave up on their support  3 years ago for this reasons:
1. Long wait to be served, been put on hold too long.
2. Been passed around.
3. Report ’suddenly’ closed and I have to re-open a new case - few times… darn irritating I tell you.
4. Unworthy promisses - say going to follow up, nobody called… arranged for appointment, last minute didn’t turn up…
5. Not resolving the problem.

Based on my latest experience, they seemed to improve. Quite honestly, if they call me up to follow up on the case I won’t mind talking to the manager to commend their good job. I hope they’ll continue to improve.

Interesting development for IBM Bladecenter. An independent vendor has taken Sun T2 chip and put it on a blade which conforms to IBM Bladecenter design. It should be compatible with all current chassis and the look and feel sure does look like something from IBM - well it’s not built by IBM in this case. This was build by Themis Computer.

I wonder how the response from Sun or IBM customer. Even more interesting is how IBM or Themis going to support this.

One good thing for IBM is this going to be one of the good story under their blade ecosystem story.

Ideas did an interesting coverage with opinions from IBM, Sun and Themis - here.

By the way it runs 1 T2 SPARC CMT processor, up to 32GB memory and a 500GB hard disk (single drive). Fibre Channel and InfiniBand support will be available via optional adapters. Did a quick check, it wasn’t in IBM Serverproven third party vendor link - so probably this is not something that IBM will support direct.

I came back today from work to find myself stuck in a bad traffic jam. I wonder what actually caused it, well it’s due to news that the government going to increase petrol price up to 40% starting midnight. The petrol station was packed and no way I’m going to join the queue. It’s not that I’m rich but probably not worth the wait since by the time I got there the queue was very long. I reached Bandar Utama near tv3 where there were 2 petrol station and the queue is already like 300-400 meter? Well the hike is pretty damn high - 40%. I normally will fill up full tank by weekend for the whole week and that cost me about RM50. Now it’s gonna be RM70… wo! koyak man… As I was reading the nations reaction over the web, one interesting quote is - ‘minyak naik, barang naik, makanan naik, satu je tak naik - gaji!’ translates to ‘oil price went up, groceries went up, food cost went up but only one thing remains still - your pay!’. How true.

The only silver lining is the government going to provide subsidies by rebate. It’s the least what they can do and I do appreciate. What I hope they do better is to make sure other prices remains the same. Normally fuel hike will followed by food, groceries, transportation cost increase and even people are taking advantage - parking operator is also charging more!

I saw our new Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs - Datuk Shahrir Samad on TV3 saying that other prices will not go up due to control and subsidy. That’s good to hear but hopefully that’s what going to happen. I can be sure one thing, it’s going to be hot news tomorrow.

Now where is my motorbike key?

This is quite an important announcement for HP, especially in this side of the globe. Maybe much more welcomed in market like Malaysia. Why I said so really since few weeks back IBM announces iDataplex. It’s somewhat a custom server that plugs into a rack that’s turned sideways. Being custom means longer to design and to order - very likely means that it’ll only targeted to those opportunities which are consider ‘huge’. HP on the other side rightly will be able to deliver this to a more broader customer than web 2.0, cloud computing, etc. Customer can start small with c7000 that give them 32 nodes and later stack more chassis and build a massive system. I somewhat don’t see that happening for IBM. 32 nodes will mean the iDataplex rack will only be filled up to 8U height - if memory serves me right, the compute nodes are the size of 1U server that carries 2 independent servers. This 1U unit then placed side by side.

It will be interesting to see how this will take off. Probably Bl2×220c G5 hot area would be HPC market.

The product page is here.  Some report can be found here and here.

Last saturday was my friend’s son first birthday. I had to go because my favourite Char Kuey Tiau will be served. This is no ordinary kuey tiau but specially imported from Penang - well the brother was an experience Char Kuey Tiau seller so I’ve tasted what he can cooked the last time Bodent had his open house and I was craving for a good one. I had two to justify the cause - hehehe. Thanks Bodent! The party was good, the food was plenty met my school friend… Efi and the family (not seen the family for quite some time) as well as my UM friend - Chin Peng. I had not seen Chin Peng for quite some time and it’s good to see that he is successful now with Petronas as a geologist - the pay must be darn good eh?

That morning I took my daughter to mamak shop and get some roti canai for breakfast. On the way back we stop at a shop to get the toy for Bodent’s son. I also got some wrapping paper, two of them just in case it’s not enough. Back home we had breakfast and I’ve wrap up the toy nicely and leave it close to the key box so I won’t forget to bring it. Close to zohor, mom was praying and I was checking my email in the praying room when Hannah came in with a smile and the toy, completely unwrap - argggggggggh! Before I could say a word, mom was blaming it on me for not supervising Hannah and leaving the present there. I couldn’t argue more… first, yes it’s my fault… second, the way Hannah came in and showed it to us is like - “Look Abah, I open it… can I have it? pleaseeeeeeeeeeee..?” plus the innocent smile. Who can possibly get mad for that?

So I quickly explain to her that this is for someone else and get her to dress up with mom while I quickly wrap the toy back. Luckily I bought and extra wrapping paper. Fuhhh… everything done in 15 minutes though not as pretty as the first one.

Happy birthday Thaqif! Hope you like that Ultraman!
* more photos in full story view.

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HP has surpass IBM in shipment and revenue for servers in 1Q 2008. HP delivered about twice the servers compared to IBM but Big Blue seemed to deliver more profitable systems since revenue wise it’s almost up to par with HP.

The numbers are here from Gartner and some reports are here:
HP Beats IBM In Server Revenue
H-P takes lead in server revenue

Big iron systems shipments seems to be declined but revenue wise better. Maybe people are consolidating more on bigger, more flexible and easy to manage system?