Toyota Altis Major Car Servicing

Time to do a major car servicing to my Toyota Altis. Having clocked about 170,000km, some of the engine rubber seals and parts has worn out. Should have known that it was rather serious when I notices spots of engine oil on my house front car porch. It didn't cross my mind that the leak was serious. During one of the my field sales trip for a customer call on a late afternoon, I was suddenly taken in by fatigue and decided to have a pit stop in a Petronas petrol kiosk.



While having a cup of coffee, I was thinking, "Perhaps I ought to give the engine oil level a look since I'm already here in the petrol station." After my coffee break, I open the bonnet and was rather alarmed that the oil level was empty!

I was rather fortunate to check it and bought some engine oil. If the engine was to burn, it would be a major disaster! Anyway the Toyota Altis was due for servicing so may as well send it in to fix the engine leak and service the car at the same time.

Seems like the Toyota section 19 service centre is rather pack for those cars undergoing major servicing and I will have to wait for a full one week before I could get my car back! No choice I suppose.

Although the Fukushima earthquake has affected Toyota parts manufacturers, there is still sufficient Toyota spare parts for servicing and repair. So the delay is not caused by the spare parts shortage but rather so happen there was a large number of cars being sent in for major servicing and repairs.

According to the Toyota servicing staff, such major servicing usually takes about 3 days, but this time round, the car servicing will take longer due to lack of lifting ramp service bays.

Spying at my calendar, I noticed next week there will be a two week long school holiday break. Perhaps that might have something to do with the many cars being sent in. After all, parents would like to take some time off with their children and go for some travel destination holidays locally. Sounds like a plan! Well, my son is still rather young for any long road trip. Perhaps in another month or so then.

Meanwhile, I just have to sort out my transportation issue. In Malaysia it is a big handicap if you don't have a vehicle to move around, the public transportation is just way too unreliable!

[update: May 2012]

Again my engine oil was way empty! This time round I sent it to Kota Ming Motor for checking instead. They checked the engine but could not find any leakages. All the seals are as it should be. So they inform that whenever cars become old, the engine would start to burn off black oil into the exhaust system. The workshop owner joked that my car condition was so much better than his old jalopy!

I bought this car way back in June 2004, so it has been used for 8 years already. So a partial solution to avoid forgetting to check for engine black oil level, was to use semi-synthetic engine oil and have the car serviced every 5,000km instead of the usual 10,000km. A thicker viscosity oil would also help prevent the oil from being burnt away too easily by the engine combustion.

However by using a thicker viscosity, the drive would not be as smooth as a fully synthetic engine oi. I could live with that. After all the car has served me well for so many years and it was coming towards the end of its trouble free driving. You could see the many scars of driving in Malaysia. No way you could keep your car dent and scratch free. If you didn't knock something, someone else would eventually knock into your car, as the saying goes.

One thing for sure, a Toyota car has a long durable life span. Even though this Altis car was manufactured in Thailand and not Japan, it still kept much to its quality standard.

HP OfficeJet warranty exchange problem

I was very pleased when my defective HP OfficeJet all in one printer fax scanner was given a one-to-one exchange. But my joy was shortlived after receiving the replacement unit. I don't know whether this was a slip up from the HP warranty service department. I don't know why they gave me a defective unit as replacement, in fact this unit was much worst off then my earlier OfficeJet.

Although my ealier unit could not get a dial tone,it could still print and scan. The replacement unit was a total wipeout. It kept giving me a paper jam message when i haven't even fed any paper. My guess the previous owner was a having a seroius paper jam defective unit. The HP service department didn't do a good job with the repair and they release the unit?

Very poor show on their part. Coz it left me with a poor impression about Hewlett-Packard. In their attempt to discourage people from submitting their defective HP units for warranty claim (they want to charge me $30 for checking a unit stillwithin warranty!) and made me call for phone support and yet they gave me a defective replacement! I was thinking how they could give customers brand new unit, but actually they are just giving reconditioned units which were defective and send it by the previous owner.

Sigh! No choice but to call them again to give me another replacement OfficeJet for the defective replacement OfficeJet that was for my earlier defective OfficeJet.

If the next unit is also defective, it would really show Hewlett-Packard having a very poor on their after sales service.

In fact I'm thinking twice about purchasing HP products in future. In their attempt to cut cost to improve their short term bottomline they are sacrificing their long term goodwill of their customers.  

Got My HP OfficeJet J3508 All-in-one Fax Scanner Printer

Eulogy for Victor Seow Kok Leong

Victor and I shared some good times together, since the time I met his sister, Lena. Victor and I had many similar interests. He like planes and aircrafts and together with Lena went on a holiday trip to Langkawi and enjoyed the LIMA airshow. I didn't know it was a reward by my wife for his visiting the doctor. Later he took up aeronautical maintenance course. The college was located in a very ulu kampong area but somehow that college run by MIC wasn't very good and Victor had to quit the course.

A close family friend, Mr Chan introduced a job as a land surveyor but later Victor took up the challenge of network administrator. Victor have learned a lot from there and decided to venture out on his own to start up a security system company with the support of doctor friend.

Church Camp at Genting View Resort

Having an Alpha course for our church camp at Genting View Resort. With baby in tow and family members going to be a very interesting time here!

Breakfast at Awana Genting Highlands

Enjoying myself with the complimentary breakfast in Awana Genting Highlands. Breakfast crowd enjoying themselves. A bit of a queue at the egg omelet station, ever popular and one of my fav breakfast in a hotel.
The sky kinda gloomy but the Genting Highlands air is fresh. Not too cold. Probably about 26 ° C. My casio watch probably inaccurate since I'm wearing it, shows 29 °C.
Still a nice day and I could see many golfers going for the round in Awana Genting Highlands.the soothing greens is always nice to view and relax.
Time to go soon, after baby takes his bath!

Prince William and Kate Wedding

Wow it was really a grand affair from what I could catch on Astro. My wife wanted me to record the Prince William and Kate wedding event and it was 4-5 hours long! Fortunately my DVD can record 4 hours of it and not to mention the countdown and behind the scenes documentaries I had to use 2 disc instead. So that would about 8 hours worth of recorded DVD to watch later!

Faulty free gift - USB thumbdrive

If ever a free gift looks too good to be true, this is it. Spend 10 difficult to get points from All IT to redeem a faulty Microsoft free USB thumbdrive gift. Thought I would use it to store MP3 songs for my Red Fox wireless MP3 player. Unfortunately the data kept getting lost after transfer. Even back to exchange for another USB thumbdrive, but that too turn out to be faulty.

The All IT PIC wasn't very keen to entertain me the first time round and to change the second time round to another gift would probably be a bigger hassle. Talk about consumer rights and poor customer service hiding behind the policy of redeemable free gifts are not entitled for exchanges. Looks like I will just end up using this as a useless pretty looking keychain. I guess if I ever want to store important precious data, I should only use brands that I know, at least the defect would be under controlled and at the very least warranty against product defects. Next time I will be more weary about unknown generic IT brands. Always better to pay a little more for peace of mind!

[update]
While browsing around the internet, I found people actually bought fake branded flash drive. How the fake flash drive worked is by showing false capacity, ie if the counterfeiter would make the chip inside the pen drive show up as a 2GB capacity thumb drive, but in actual reality, the memory chip could only hold 512MB of data. I guess the same falls for this faulty thumb drive that I got from All IT.

Why do they do that? To save money from putting in the required memory chips and sell it at the market value of the higher capacity, but in the end the product is faulty and you can't use it at all.

However there are some tools out there where you can fix the reported capacity to the actual capacity and thereby you could still use it but up to the real capacity. Well, kinda too late now that I have thrown it away.

Anyway at the current rate of decreasing price of flash drive, I could get a 4GB thumb drive for as cheap as RM20! Anyway, I have many flash drive and I'm aiming at the high capacity ones with my latest procurement at 64GB! Wow! And yes, it is not cheap!

End of Flock Browser

Aw, shucks. And I really liked the Flock browser. But when I received the announcement in my inbox:

Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the recommended web browsers listed below.

Just too bad for me. Although it uses the same engine as Mozilla Firefox, it has added features to enhance it including the various social website integration. I suppose the Flock browser people decided to pull the plug and not maintain another version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.

So looks like I will have to revert back to good old Firefox. The latest update to Firefox 4.0 has some updated features. But somehow I noted that the Google Toolbar has some issues with it. I keep losing the Gmail button if I tried to customized the Firefox toolbars.

Well, it was good while it lasted. I have been using Flock for many years now. So will just have to re-acclimatized with the Firefox layout.

Got my HP officejet J3508 all-in-one fax scanner printer

Just my luck. My 3 year old HP all-in-one fax printer went kaput and I had to get replacement. Opted for HP Officejet J3508 all-in-one fax scanner printer.

This one uses black ink cartridge 702 only. That's all I need as I basically use it for faxing mainly with occassional document printing.

The colour print version, the J3608 is more expensive though it has a higher print speed of 20ppm vs 15ppm for the cheaper model. That's ok for me, no need so expensive. Besides my soho home business is still in the early stages. So not expecting any heavy fax volume.

My old HP officejet all-in-one could still print and scan though. Looks like it will just end up as printer only. I think I'll just place that in my in laws place wher a printer is required.

This HP Officejet J3508 is sufficient at least for now.

HP OfficeJet Warranty Exchange Problem

[update] Aug 2012

My good old HP all-in-one finally went kaput in my in-law's house, instead of getting another HP printer, decided to replace with a simple Epson desktop printer. Simple printing was all I needed in the other house.

As for my current house HP J3508, decided to not leave it on all day long due to lightning strikes. I have lost several surge protectors and it was very inconvenient when the surge protector failed to prevent damage to the fax printer itself. Though fortunately HP replaced a another set with no question asked. But it was not a brand new fax machine, just a repaired version from another user who had a problem with it. I found another solution to my personal fax requirement and that was to subscribe to a virtual fax service. It wasn't so cheap, but it was very convenient and less problematic.

Recently my work place 8 year old Panasonic Laser Fax was not working well. It could not feed in the paper for outgoing fax. Although it was an expensive fax, I thought it was not value for money for the repair. The fax toner was expensive plus every 4 toner changed, the laser drum need to replace and it wasn't cheap!

Nowadays people tended to scan into a PDF file and email over, so the amount of receiving fax was less. So opted to get the cheaper HP J3608 fax printer. It was simple and lightweight (the Panasonic fax was heavy!) and good enough for our simple daily usage. I couldn't find the black ink cartridge version only HP J3508 anymore. Perhaps it was so low priced (I bought the J3508 for RM200) or perhaps not popular, the vendor decided to sell the colour printer version instead (the J3608 was RM270). Since most incoming faxes would be black, the colour cartridge would definitely be under used and become unusable come the expiry date. No matter, the fax machine would still run without the colour cartridge, and if truly needed, it would be cheaper to replace it when compared with Panasonic toners and drum.

The only disadvantage I see is the HP inkjet printout would smear when come into contact with water. So if our hands were wet or sweaty, the fax copy would smear. This incident would not be common so I guess it would still be acceptable.

Cat got sore throat?

Can cat get sore throat? Coz my cat seemed a little weak in her meows and not at all noisy and loud. And the meowing sound sure sounded somewhat hoarse to me.
The weather in Malaysia rather hot these few weeks though fortunately the hot spell did have heavy showers once in a while that helped to break the heat for a brief period anyway.
I myself and family members just recovered from cough and flu.
But my cat got sore throat? Now that is something new to me.

Benefits of eating Papaya Fruit

Papaya Fruit - new information of goodness added

 

Papaya

 

No need to cry about scarcity of blueberries, strawberries, etc in SINGAPORE.  We have our wonderful payayas, pineapples and bananas, and durians and mangoes are affordable.

 

Papaya was the only studied  food found to halt breast cancer

 

Scientists studied 14 plant foods commonly consumed in Mexico to determine their ability to halt breast cancer cell growth. These included avocado, black sapote, fuava, mango, prickly pear cactus (nopal), pineapple, grapes, tomato, and papaya. They also evaluated beta-carotene, total plant phenolics, and gallic acid contents and antioxidant capacity. They found that only papaya had a significant effect on stopping breast cancer cell growth. (International Journal of Food Science and Nutrition, May)

 

Papaya is a store-house of cancer fighting lycopene

Changing to HTC Desire Z - thinking

I'm considering to change my android phone Sony Xperia X10 mini pro to HTC Desire Z. Sure I've just updated the firmware for this X10 and i liked the new updated stuffs. But there is still one drawback: the tiny fonts. At my age a larger font would go easier on my eyes especially since i do a lot of texting and mobile blogging. I couldn't find the font size adjustment in this Xperia and many of the rich text mail has extra tiny fonts. Fortunately the road sync has very nice comfortable fonts but it only allow one email account though. So my next best option is to plough in some dough perhaps trade in or sell my Xperia X10 and upgrade to HTC Desire Z. I know HTC got font sie adjustment base on my short lived experience of using HTC Wildfire. So it is just a matter of time for me to change my mobile phone.

Wot? My wordpress comment form is not working?

Strange. What happen to my wordpress comment form. One of my visitors pointed out that it gave a javascript and cookie not switched on error. Now i'm scratching my head and tring to figure just what is wrong. Could be a template issue or plugins. Don't know. Will figure out later. Got tons of work to do!

--- [update 27/6/2011]

Well I thought I fixed after re-installing Wordpress onto a new hosting server. And yet again the comment form was not working. This time I removed another plugin which seemed to solve it for now

Yes, success! Updated sony xperia x10 to android 2.1

This time round managed to update my Sony Xperia X10 Mini Pro from Android version 1.6 to 2.1. It was slow, took about less than an hour but it was done. Customizing and making work as before is going to take longer as i have to set up my gmail account, office account, facebook, twitter, etc plus downloading the apps from Google market again. Not to mention my Angry Birds game. Now i've to start from level 1 all over over again! Bummer! At least the Sony Xperia X10 mini pro is finally updated!

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro Review

Almost updated my sony xperia x10 mini pro

Attempted again to see if i could update my sony xperia x10 mini pro. Saw some progress at the update progress bar so i know it is working.
Didn't have time as i wanted to go home and the updating looked real slow. So decided to kill the update and try it again later.
At least i could see the progress bar today. The previous day was terrible with nothing happened at all. So hopefully after dinner i will give it another try.
I think it will need a good and smooth internet connection to update well. And today's streamyx  internet connection seemed much better.
Once the sony xperia x10 is updated i'm going to lose those google app for android 1.6. Those were nice to use but the authors did not make any updated versions for the latest android 2.x O/S. But from what i learned there were some new functionality such as facebook contact sync with the main contacts and various other updates.
Will see once i've updated.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro Review

Enfapro A+

My wife goes Enfapro A+ for our baby who is now about 10 months old. It seems this brand provides very good nutricient for growing babies for ages between 6 months to 18 months old. But it doesn't come cheap!

There are two versions, then Enfapro and the Enfapro A+. The difference of the A+ is the addition of DHA and other additional nutricient for baby.

It seems you can get it cheaper from the Chinese Medical Hall Shops so today I decided to to get one from Vie Onn in Section 14 PJ. I decided to go for the 850 grams big can because I can never get that size in the supermarkets.

The price was about RM76. Not sure if that is significantly cheaper than elsewhere. Will know if I bump into it elsewhere. One thing about purchasing it from Chinese Medicine shop, you have to pay cash coz they don't have credit card facility.
Anyway let's grab it first for now. If I ever find Enfapro A+ large can 850g in the supermarket at a cheaper price then I will know the difference.

Enfapro price Aug 2012

Enfapro A+ DHA+ Step 2
650gm = RM$66.80

Enfapro Regular
650gm = RM$43.70

Related post:
Enfalac A+ Baby Milk

BU4 Playground is almost open

The BU4 playground is almost open finally! It has been a long wait for the residents of BU4, about 15 years! It was in the developer's plan during launching sale at that time and some of my neighbours bought their house because they want a playground for their kids to play in, but they are all grown up and not so interested in it.
Ah, but it is just in time for my baby. Perhaps one of these days I'll bring him for walk in the BU4 park. For now it is very convenient for my weekly regular running exercise. No need to go so far to the park located next to 1 Utama shopping centre.
And much safer too!

Baby Ten Months Old

Got another tip from the Baby Center that I subscribe. Seems like whenever baby goes bah-bah I also mimic him. Looks like that was not such a good idea. Should follow like what Baby Centre suggests, reply with a proper English sentence. That way he will pick up the nuances of the language.

Here was the short tip from the Baby Center newsletter:

Words or word-like sounds may now be spilling out of your baby. When he chatters at you, just chatter right back. Keep your language simple but use real words. The idea at this age is to model the correct pronunciation, not to "correct" him. When he says "bah-bah" for bottle, for instance, you could say, "Yes, that is your bot-tle." He probably understands a lot more than you realise, so you can keep up your side of the conversation by describing daily activities as you do them, reading to him and singing songs.

For baby to learn a language is going to take some time. That's why it is good to start them off early. In Malaysia here where we are multi-lingual able to speak English, Malay, Chinese plus the various dialects, we really need to start to converse with our child so that they can pick up as many languages as possible. The more the merrier!

The more language one can speak, the better standing for job prospect and communication especially for work.

For now, I'm going to need a lot of patience to help baby pick up all the languages!

streamyx internet lagging slow

I'm getting a lot of drop connection from streamyx again today. Either the websites I'm visiting are slow or streamyx has a bad international connection, or perhaps they are in cahoots with BN trying to prevent people from watching opposition video or what I don't know. I'm just trying to do some research and perhaps even trying to update my Sony Ericson Xperia X10 android software to version 2. I think I will do the update next time. For now the lagging part is just too slow!

oh dear, baby got flu!

Oh dear! I think baby caught my bacteria and now he got flu. Probably sore throat too since he sometimes didn't want to drink milk or take baby cereal. I tried to sleep in a different room during my nasty dry cough bout for the whole long month. Well the dry cough get very loud when it was irritated it would wake baby. At the same time reduce the amount of bacteria or virus flying around.

Still it wasn't enough to prevent infection as young baby still have low immunity. I guess the nightly play time with baby could still have germs flying around. The final round that caused the infection was when my wife forgot to adjust the air-conditioner in the master bedroom from 23 °C to a warmer 25 °C and it got very cold in the morning.

Well the weather was very blistering hot lately in the end month of March. So the varying hot and cold temperature would cause many people to become sick.

Anyway, my wife brought baby to see the paediatrician and some medicine was prescribed. That helped to ease and reduce the runny nose and reduce the coughing. Well, despite the runny nose, baby still happily crawled everywhere and made many attempt to stand up with furniture support of course!

Nice to see his bubbly cheerful self! A laughing smiling baby sure perks up your day!

 

 

Bad bad traffic jam in PJ

I think today's menu for badness is extreme traffic jam. Normally rush hour is still bearable if traffic still moves though slow. But today it is as though somebody decided to throw a cog to the clockwork triple slow the bad traiffc. Congratulations then! Bane of all rush hour drivers.
Not sure what went wrong with the traffic system today. Perhaps some smart alec decided to reprogram the traffic light somewhere and it ripples through like a butterfly effect slingshot back to wherever you are.
Ah, this is when you need the law of attraction for calm and peace. Nothing much you can do but to wait it out. If i can blog about the bad traffic in my car you can know how bad the traffic it is. Hah!

Sometimes PC cannot connect streamyx but it is PC fault

Spend the better part of the morning troubleshooting why my office PC cannot connect to Streamyx. At first I thought Streamyx may be having problem. Then I tried to reset the the modem router by switching off then on again and still my PC would not connect even though I got a steady DSL light on my modem router.

Finally I have to do a reboot but I kept this to the last minute as rebooting Windows takes up 5 to 10 minutes (ya, ya ask Mr Bill why Windows always take so long to boot up…) and that seemed to do the trick.

Somehow something didn't start up correctly during the earlier boot and rebooting seemed to restart the necessary services to get the internet connection.

Computers worked very strangely, though it may work well most of the time, sometimes the logic processer go into a loop and go crazy. Like the other day my house PC display went funny colors and felt as though the graphic card may be on the fritz but actually a simple time consuming reboot did the trick. And why time consuming? Coz I don't know why my house PC takes so long to shut down before re-starting. Not sure it is because I installed the 64bit version of Windows 7 and it gets very cranky with an AMD system. Perhaps an Intel CPU system would be more palatable for Windows. Thus Wintel as some of the publication like to put it.

Well sometimes I buck the mainstream hardware and support AMD. After all why let Intel become like a monopoly like Windows is almost a monopoly. You don't have a Windows in your PC it becomes very difficult to work because of compatibility issues.

Anyway, I got my internet connection back from my good old cranky computer (well most computers whether new or old are cranky anyway).

Cheers!

 

Website down coz Bluehost is moving Data Center

Oh, oh… Looks like all my websites hosted on Bluehost is down. Bluehost is moving their servers to a brand new data center complete with advanced temperature control, custom server racks and dozens of improvements that suppose to provide customers like me with better quality.

Unfortunately it also means they have to take down my web hosting account while moving the web servers physically from one location to another. Due to the time zone difference, I was not sure when my web sites will be down although they said they were shifting to the new data center between 9 PM, March 27th and 5 AM March 28th (MDT). I didn't have time zone checker so to convert the time to my local time.

Fortunately, my subdomains are latched on to various services like Blogger and Tumblr etc. So I can still blog somewhere. Other than that, my main site is down.

Anyway, all my web sites are down for now. So I can't do much tweaking or hacking on my main site for now. I was trying to test out the random text using either the PHP script or CGI Perl script for SSI.

I hope the IP for my website still remain the same, I think something might break along the way. Hopefully not too serious that I cannot fix.

Oh, well, take break and have a Kit-Kat I suppose… J