Cynix’s World

It has been a long time since I went back to my hometown, Penang. I heard that a lot has changed & Penang Island is becoming heavily populated. Recently, there has been a spring of websites & blogs involving news about SJK(C) Sin Chung in Kepala Batas which was partly demolished.

As The Star pointed out: At about 11am, two excavators started pulling down structures soon after the court dismissed the school’s application to seek non-enforcement of a March 25, 2003, court order to surrender the school property to Motif Era Sdn Bhd, which is also the landowner. Two hours later, at about 1pm, the developer halted the demolition work after receiving the High Court order & the school was given an indefinite stay of execution to the 2003 order pending a judicial review.

All the pupils, including Bumiputras that studied there was devasted by this incident. It is indeed the result of poor management of the goverment. Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon is quick to give his views & give an explanation regarding the demolition & reprieve. He stated that: “We are very disappointed with the developer’s action although they had received the court order but at the least they should have shown some concern for the students’safety in the classrooms.” DAP did not waste time to grab people’s attention by sharing videoclips of this topic.

Temporary Reprieve: pupils during recess

It would seem that the goverment has came up with something to solve this problem temporaily. Headmistress Sze Too Yu Ching said arrangements were being made for all the pupils to be relocated to SJK (C) Aik Keow in Penaga, about 7km away from Sin Chung. Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon also appealed to the public not to view the demolition from a racial or ethnic angle as the state government strongly condemns the rough and hasty behaviour of the developer in tearing down part of the school building on Thursday. He also urged the school to expedite construction of its new building, noting that the Government would allocate RM300,000 for the project.

For pictures & mandarin blog entry regarding this, please visit here. There are ways to help available here as well.

On a different story, Pulau Jerejak which is an island quite near to my Penang house, is to developed as an eco-tourism destination and with no casino in mind. That island used to be a leper colony and later became a penal colony. Sincerely hoped that the situation there has changed for the better.

Tag: penang

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Happy New Year 2006 to everyone. This year has been a special year for me as I’ll be having a new house, a new job and a new lifestyle - working life that is. Just started work this year, went to the orientation on 3rd January. It started with intro like usual, but this one has some much more info, from how to login to enterprise, IP phone to how to report my time & expenses, quite tiring. After a few hours, the recruiting personnel said we’ll be going for lunch. When I was going to the lift I had a chat with a fellow programmer about her work, she had started 10 days ago. She was assigned to a project in Kerinchi and she said there are no transportation allowance to get there. [She could be mistaken as she’s a newcomer as well, collegues said that genereally, transporatation allowance to other offices is given] I was quite worried as I have no idea at all where I’ll be assigned to just yet. And from what I heard, the location could vary anywhere from Cyberjaya to KLCC.

The partners decided to take us to Chinoz on the park for lunch. I dare say that is one of the most expensive restaurant in KLCC. The experienced hire professionals such as consultants, immediatly started ordering appetisers, soups & main entree. Each item costing crazy prices. I had salmon fillet which I enjoyed and an ice lemon tea, wanted to order more, but was afraid that I couldn’t finish them. Enjoyed myself at Chinoz, it’s after all the first time I have been there. However I was quite worried about my placement thus was pretty quiet during lunch.

After a few more hours of explanation regarding health & insurance benifits, flight booking, wroking visas & tons of procedures, the orientation finally came to an end. It was then a HR was sent to me & she told me that I’ll be assigned to a UOB project in Singapore! But I’ll be based in the KLCC office! Thank god, I had always wanted to work in the KLCC office as it looks pretty modern & I have an existing mode of transportation there. Was so relieved that day Many others were assigned to different locations, I was the only programmer assigned to the Singapore project however.

Sample AS400 command window, looks pretty “matrix-y”, ancient IBM app tho

Started working for real the next day, was assigned a project that uses AS400 server & RPGLE progamming language. So I get to learn something totally new & quite different from what we learnt in university. Good thing for me as I always preferred to learn something new rather than doing the same thing repeatatively. Funny thing is that this is the prog language that tortured many of my senior collegues when I was having my industrial training. I didn’t have to learn it then, but certainly have to learn it now, haha… Collegues in the company & project team are very friendly & helpful, taught me a lot of stuff. However this shows that there aren’t anytime for newcomers to chill either.

Received a bunch of company emails, quite a lot of invitations to the company’s various official & unofficial gatherings as well. One thing special about this company is that everyone uses IM, I’ve seen y!m, msn, icq in every desktop and the recruiting HR has told us that this is one of the primary communication media in the company to my surprise. I certainly wouldn’t mind & ‘adapted’ to the company culture immediatly of course, . Learnt how to create PF, DSPF, RPGLE, Query, Subfile and a few more in 2 days of work, tiring but worth it I guess.

Tag: 2006

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