Poster Size

I keep finding myself having to search for poster and print size measurements so I’m posting it here for future reference.

Poster size visual reference guide from Free Poster Templates.

There are a few 20×30-inch posters I want to frame and mount, plus some other prints, but finding the right frames have been very difficult so far. Previously, I sent a poster to a professional frame shop. The result was great but the price was quite expensive, especially as I chose to use non-reflective glass. The glass also made the frame heavy.

So now I am looking for something made of plastic. I like the trade standard Flexiframe range by Mark Bric, but I haven’t seen them sold in a shop. Most likely then, I will buy either the RIBBA or STRÖMBY frames from IKEA. Their sizes (about 70×100cm) will be larger than I need but at least I can buy them conveniently.

Errands

I was reminded recently that I haven’t been updating my blog. Well, what can I say; I have been busy or otherwise occupied. :P

There is nothing unusual happening at work. Oh, the university has decided that we cannot bar students for non-attendance anymore, which is fine by me. Word has it that the university wants to avoid the trouble of dealing with students taking legal actions after being barred from taking the final exam. If true, I say that it is one very lame excuse. Why bother having any rules then? In the past, issuance of warning and barring letters had helped both the university and parents discover cases of students going missing.

Now that we cannot bar students, many lecturers don’t even bother taking attendance anymore, although the university still says that we are recommended to continue doing it. What for? Only the Rector now can bar students “in cases of breach of university regulation”. I was told that it means that lecturers can request the Rector to bar students for any violations. I suppose that now I can finally get students barred for wearing toilet slippers to class.

Last year, I bought a new pair of baju melayu for Raya after six years. The last time I bought a new baju melayu before that was in 2003 for my IIUM graduation. Since I had to attend the convocation ceremony twice, I bought a suit and a baju melayu. The baju melayu I had before that lasted even longer. Going by the previous records, I ordered enough baju melayu last weekend to last me at least twenty years! LOL.

The past weeks also had me busy with Mak’s cabinet. We had a termite infestation that ruined part of my mother’s new cabinet. So we disassembled the cabinet, threw away the parts beyond saving, bought replacement parts, and are now in the process of reassembling the cabinet. Before that the walls need repainting. I bought a 5-liter can of Dulux Light & Space last weekend. Mak picked a purplish pink shade called Pink Sea Iris. Hopefully, I can get the painting done this weekend.

On top of everything, I am also looking at second-hand 4x4s for my brother. Luckily, there is a cousin living nearby who knows a mechanic we can bring along, as I know next to nothing about cars. We went to see a couple of prospects last night, and we’re going to see at least one more tonight. I really hope we find a good car soon, as I have better ways to spend my evening than looking at old cars.

Selamat Hari Raya!

The contractor finally left on Friday. He will return after Raya to install my brother’s shower screen and rewire/replace the fuse box, at least. That left us with just one and a half days (!) to clean the house up and make it presentable for Raya.
“Will we get the house ready in time?” asked Mak.
“Of course” I said. There really was no other way around it. We just had to get it done by any means necessary. It took us all the way to Raya morning – we finally stopped at about 5.30 a.m. – but we did it. PHEWW!

So lesson definitely learned: never to have house renovation close to a major festival, unless you don’t intend to celebrate it or plan to be somewhere else.

Another important lesson relearned is the amount of junk we accumulated over the years. Mostly they were various plastic containers that came as free gifts, old souvenirs, and other miscellaneous broken and old stuff never used or not used for a long time and unlikely to be used in the future. God knows why we kept them in the first place.

Ramadan 1430

This year’s Ramadan is different here at our home in that we are going through it – so far, at least – without a kitchen. The renovation work is still on-going, so much for the contractor’s earlier promise that everything will be done by Ramadan. In fairness, however, the work being done has gone significantly beyond the simple bathroom renovation we started with, and everything is almost done now.

We rarely went to the Ramadan bazaar in the previous years. Breaking fast, iftar, was little different from our usual daily dinner. “We should eat less during the fasting month, not more,” my father used to say. Father would insist on breaking fast with dates, but otherwise mother would cook the usual dishes, and for drinks we would have hot tea. There were times when I wished that we’d have more, well, “special” food on the table like “everyone else” but by the time we finished eating I’d realize that had there were more food we wouldn’t be able to finish them all anyway. Besides, it’s hard to go for tarawih when you are so full.

This time around, however, we’ve been having takeout food from the Ramadan bazaar and various fast-food joints on a daily basis. I don’t think that I have missed hot home-cooked food more. Even when I was in Boston, I cooked my own food almost every day.

Spent

(or Why I Haven’t Been Replying My Non-Work Emails)

Ah, only five weeks into the semester and it already feels like an eternity!

The semester turns out to be my toughest yet, largely due to the new course I am teaching. Although I took Money and Banking as a student, in my second year of undergraduate a decade ago, teaching it for the first time means I have to do quite some preparatory reading myself. However, we are on an accelerated schedule to complete the course by the semester break within a month from now instead of the end of the semester proper at the end of October. So I am constantly chasing the clock, barely catching a breath from teaching one topic to preparing for the next.

Making matters, well, more interesting, I’ve been assigned seminar rooms for my Principles of Macroeconomics classes as well. Seminar rooms are designed around the LCD projector and screen. All this while I’ve been teaching with just the board and marker pen, occasionally using the overhead projector, but now for every topic I have to spend additional time – time I do not have – preparing a PowerPoint presentation.

What all this means is that since the beginning of the semester five weeks ago I have been doing work at home during the evenings and weekends it’s exhausting. I practically haven’t read anything other than textbooks and instructor’s manuals since!

It doesn’t help too that the house is being renovated. While my parents have been planning the renovation for quite some time, the timing just cannot be worse. Half of the house is currently out of commission, including my bedroom, while the rest is in varying degrees covered in cement dust. I have either the living room or my sister’s bedroom to do work in, but when my parents watch the television I have no other choice but the retreat to the bedroom working sitting cross legged on the bed. And now my back is beginning to hurt. The contractor promised that I will get my bedroom-cum-home office back by Ramadan, which is in less than a week. I only hope that he keeps his promise.

I gave my Money and Banking class their mid-semester test more than a week ago but only got to start marking it last Friday. I thought I’d able to be finished with the marking this weekend but now it is simply not happening.

PFFT!

Home Improvement

I bought a Cooler Master “notebook cooler”-cum-USB hub yesterday. It’s not that my notebook is running unusually hot, even though I keep it running all the time, but I like the feel of having it slightly elevated and at an incline. That I now have a fan running to cool the bottom of the notebook and four extra USB ports is a nice bonus, plus the whole setup looks quite cool. I also considered buying a 16GB flash drive, but figured it will be a convenient excuse to go to PC Fair next month.

The mystery of my stuck wardrobe door is now solved! One of the sliding doors got stuck soon after I bought it in 2007. The only way I could open the door is to raise it slightly before sliding it open. Recently, I installed handles on the door so I can lift it properly without potentially damaging the door frame in the long term; but since then the problem actually grew worse. Finally, on Saturday I found out that one of the rollers had actually broken. I then took the broken roller, which was literally in pieces, to the furniture shop towkeh. He disappeared into the backroom and came out a few minutes later with a free replacement. Now my wardrobe is as good as new – YAY!

__________
There is a special convocation ceremony to give an honorary degree to the PM at 4 p.m. I am not planning to go although attendance is supposedly compulsory. Meh. Supposedly, there is a list of designated names to attend the ceremony. Supposedly too, my name is not in the list. :P

Off the Shelf

Weekend mega project #2134501-1B1-2K42-6-A – “Wall Shelf”.

BUKAN PROJEK KERAJAAN BARISAN NASIONAL

Why do I want to install a shelf on my beautiful newly-painted wall?

1. Though the biggest person in the house, I have the tiniest room. So, I need space not only for my-big-fat-ass-self but also all my stuff. And I have plenty of stuff – I think – to put on, er, any place I can find; hence a wall shelf.
   
   
2. Now that I have my ‘piece’, I need some excuse to drill holes and drive screws to justify acquisition of said power equipment.
   
   
3. I need to spend some hard-earned cash.
   
   
4. It maximizes my utility?
   

So, how does one go about installing a wall shelf?

1. Find a space on a wall to mount the shelf and measure the space available so you know how big or small a shelf you can mount.
   
   
2. Find a place or piece of furniture to lie down while you visualize the designated space with a shelf mounted. Sleep over it. Savor the sight of the still naked wall. While you’re at it, get a general idea of the kind of shelf you want to mount. Remember that you can always scrap the whole idea.
   
   
3. Go stare at an IKEA catalogue till a suitable candidate is revealed to you. I settled on a RM119 Liden wall shelf for its clean, bare look and 10kg load-bearing capacity.
   
   
4. Go buy the damn thing! The weekend is a bad time to go anywhere near Mutiara Damansara; a school-holiday weekend is worse. (When is the worst?) Fear not, you can always count on people preferring save RM1 and park their cars outside!
   
   
5. Assembly is easy your grandma can do it, but IKEA doesn’t supply the screws for mounting the shelf on the wall. So go buy them. Get a spirit level too, unless you don’t mind a crooked shelf.
   
   
6. Unless you have four arms or go by the name Otto Octavius, grab another person to help you with the mounting.
   

TA-DA!

The Piece

You want some, punk?
My new ‘piece’ – a Black and Decker cordless drill

I LOVE school holidays because the roads are less congested both in the morning and in the evening; particularly important when I have to pass at least one primary school driving to and from work.

I HATE school holidays because the shopping malls – everywhere – and most importantly the cinemas will be packed with people, especially school-aged children and teens. The worst are secondary schoolers; typically going around in packs thinking and acting like they are so cool or tough with no regard to other people, and walk slower than a 100-year old grandma.

In the meantime, the latest Pirates looks set to do really well at the box office, judging by the fact that all the screenings beginning this Wednesday are already sold out! I only managed to buy tickets for next week. We’ll see how this second sequel turns out. With all the digital technology we have today, I am hoping that somebody will make big-budget full-action movies of famous naval battles like the Spanish Armada of 1588 and Nelson’s Trafalgar of 1805. Instead of a one-to-one duel as in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, we can have sea battles of LOTR-like epic scale; minus the hobbits and monsters and wizards.

That would be awesome!

Dirty Windows

The window

After twenty years, my parents finally decided to renovate the house, motivated in part by my sister’s upcoming wedding this weekend. The project started off simply to repaint the exterior walls and living and dining areas, which should have taken at most one week.

Of course, it didn't stop there.

[1] The car shed was re-roofed. The old concrete roof was torn down because it was collecting rain water and was starting to droop. Somebody commented to my father that the roof might collapse, which basically freaked him out. In place of the concrete we now have metal sheets on a wooden frame, concealed at the bottom by a plaster ceiling. Inside the house, [2] the living and dining areas also receive new plaster ceilings, at my mother’s request, and my father had all of us contribute to [3] install a 3-hp air conditioner in the living area.

Those were only PHASE ONE. Oh, my parents also spent one week painting the kitchen while were out working during the day in PHASE ONE-AND-A-HALF.

The hand

In PHASE TWO, my sister’s bedroom gets installed air conditioning as well. All the bedrooms in the house save one face west, so they get terribly hot in the afternoons. Along the way I thought, “what the heck”, and have my room redone too with new walls, new lightings, a new floor, a new ceiling fan and air conditioning, all financed by a semester of extra load of teaching.

For PHASE THREE, which would most probably come after the wedding, my father is talking about having the retaining walls around the property reinforced and replacing the perimeter fencing.

In the meantime, I am seriously thinking about buying a power drill.

Projek Mega

The house is being renovated – my parents’ latest mega project – and there is dust everywhere; marble dust, cement dust, plaster dust. Thank God none of us has allergies. For a twenty-year old house, the structure is still in really good condition.

The contractor is the same person who built the house. It was then his very first project. Our house was his experiment, so to speak.

Work began last Saturday. He brings just one worker, so I can't imagine how long it will take. That much also depends on whether my parents have new ideas.

Twenty years ago