This is what I will look like to all females who read my latest blog post. 

what do you do when your HD crashes? 

My cellphone has gone haywire with sms-es flowing in endlessly as friends, colleagues and blogmates and regular Spankin' DA Monkey readers berate me for being an uneducated moron (I'm being diplomatic here for the sake of sensitivity - har har) for not replying their emails.

The truth of the matter is that my hard drive crashed...again. Ever since I've had the misfortune to upgrade (that's an oxymoron if I ever heard one) to windows XP, I've had endless problems with bugs migrating from one program to another. The HD crashed a coupla days later and I took it to the shop to get it fixed.

A week later, after I had bought 80 gig of space and confidently installed Norton Ghost to automatically backup my data on a weekly basis and configured my old D: drive as another backup for my new C: drive, it crashed again.

I promptly took it back to the shop, Mtec Computer (PJ) Sdn Bhd on the 2nd floor of Mid Valley. The boss Lee had just got married (poor guy!) and was busy getting his jollies off on his honeymoon. His staff were equally busy goofing off big time on a rotation basis and out of the 3 of them supposed to be working, only one was physically in the shop at any given time, covering up for the other 2 via handphone. When the tomcat's busy playing with his meow (read pussy) the mice have a staff party.

Why am I bitching about some thing that's absolutely none of my business? Because they didn't tell me the truth about my harddrive. Every time I visited the shop, which was daily for the first 2 days, I was told the same thing...Ah Fatt (the guy who installed my HD in the first place) was not in, have a teh tarik and come back in an hour. After 3 hours of the same story, I rang my friend EC Lee who had the misfortune to introduce me to the shop in the first place and told him the situation. He asked me to pass the cellphone to them and let it rip in Hokkien, describing exactly who and what their collective mothers were.

Now the bastards knew bloody well that I had bought the HD from them not more than 10 days ago and that the bloody thing was still on warranty. So to play it safe and cover their yellow asses they told me it was the WINDOWS XP that had crashed, not the HD.

They also told me that since it was the Deepavali/Hari Rari holiday season, it would take a week to source the parts needed to fix it. Don't they stock spare parts? Err...no.

10 days later everyone's back at work and I was still without my beloved HD. I call EC Lee again and use a time-honoured Punjabi tactic and remind him that my parents are friends with HIS parents and that we go back a l-0-0-0-0-n-g way. Voila! A mere few minutes after that the shop actually calls me for the 1st time and proudly declares that I can collect my HD at 8pm that very evening, and that I only have to pay RM270 for the spare parts.

I call EC Lee again. He's in Penang closing a mega deal so my cellphone bill will also be mega. Apparently he got fed-up with the shop guys and offered to personally pay for the HD out of his own pocket if they will just fucking fix it and return it to me and stop ruining his good name for introducing them to me!

Of course Mtec not only neglected to tell me this bit of information, but they did not have the HD ready when I turned up at 8:05pm to collect it. I also lost all my data as they replaced my 10 day old HD and reformatted it. At 9:35pm I was told it was ready and my bill was RM270 for replacement parts (power switch and motherboard thingamajig).

Long story short, I gave in to blackmail and paid up. It was a faulty HD, it was on warranty, EC Lee unnessarily forked out cash from his own pocket, I was deprived of a pc for 10 days, lied to, made to waste my time drinking 15 bloody expensive teh tariks AND LOST ALL MY DATA including my precious nearly 650 plus email addresses in Outlook Express. Plus I can't bloody recover my Outlook Express account until now. And I forked out RM270 of hard earned cash. I could say the bastards had me by the balls, but the truth is I know I sold out. I'm pathetic.

I also know I've been without a pc or an internet connection or been able to update or recharge my pda for 10 days. When you're renovating a new club and need to process documents for training staff and what not, not being with a pc is like being unable to generate a hard-on when both Coco Lee and Shu Qi are lying naked on your bed and mewling for some tender lovin'. Wrap your mind around THAT one.

So bottom line... one of my writers for Pinch magazine, Vanessa, had a similar problem with her laptop. Bloody thing was still on warranty when it just up and died on her. The vendor disclaimed all liabilibity and left her high and dry. She took it the press and created a such a stink that even Alam Flora declared that they could not clear it up and she's now taking the sons of female dogs to court. Good on yer, Vans - you've got bigger balls than me. sigh...

As for me, my statics say that this blog is read by 647 people on the average. Minus my mother reading it 646 times, that means one other unfortunate person. I have a message for you dude - if you have a problem with your computer and would like to be entertained while being ripped off, go to Mtec.

It's the first time I've experienced 4 Chinamen being more glib lying with their tongues than a roomful of 40 Indians. Now if you're Indian and reading this, spare me your outrage, please. I really don't have the time or the mood and I don't give a flying fuck for your seemingy wounded feelings. We both know Indians can tell you they didn't turn up for work because their maternal grandmother died for the 6th time this year. If you're offended, just de-subscribe from this mailer and go watch Astro Vaanavil and save us both the grief, ok?

If you're EC Lee and you're reading this, thanks for paying out of your own pocket, and please don't go recommending rip off artists like Mtec again.

If you're Mtec and you're reading this (I sent it to your email address but being the irresponsible bastards you are, I don't think you check your email. If by any miracle you do, my lawyer's phone number is 012 2116789 and his name's Ari. Don't bother calling me, call him. He says he could use the extra cash I'll get from you to buy a coupla computers for his office) - fuck you and all your future generations. May you be regular consumers of fake Viagra and die with limp dicks.

Please don't misunderstand me - many of my closest friends are Chinese and Indian males and females and this is not a racial issue. It never is racial with me. Besides, you can't have delicious gorgeous yum yum (did I use enough adjectives?) chinawomen without chinese men can you? This is about being ripped off and ignoramuses using Cantonese in your face because of your brown ass without realising that you're fluent in their language to rip you off. It's worth a millon bucks when you finally let rip with a coupla "tiew lia mas" of your own to let them know that you speak their lingo and watch their puny little jaws drop to the ground...PUHLEESE!!!

Makes me proud, it does. Even brings a tear to my eye. Chinamen boleh.

gotta have this every morning. 

If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills,
If you can make it through the traffic gridlock to work,
If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food everyday and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time,
If you can overlook when people take things out on you when
through no fault of yours, something goes wrong,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can face the world without lies and deceit,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
If you can do all these things,


Then you are probably the family dog.
woof woof

Relationships can blow up in your face if you're not careful with your partner's feelings. 

I had a telephone chat with an ex-girlfriend last night. Apparently her ex is now cheating on his recently-married wife who’s just given birth. To add masala mix to the spice, it’s with a young girl from his work place. Some Leopards just cannot change their spots…

It was the grandest wedding of all. So it has been throughout the years, the two of you, side-by-side, the perfect couple, sharing all of life's good times - and bad - as only two people in love can do.

That's the stuff of fairy tales and those sappy '50s and '60s television shows. This is real life and the two of you aren't Mr and Mrs Right. As a matter of fact, there hasn't been anything right about your relationship for a long, long time.

Welcome to Divorceville. Population: More than you would expect.

So now what do you do? You're in financial ruin, emotional distress, and overweight besides. Every day is a bad hair day. Life just doesn't get any better than this. Or does it?

Nothing is certain, definitely not relationships.

Sometimes you end up with a hair-raising trip on the roller coaster when all you asked for was a nice calm ride on the merry-go-round. The fact is, as long as human beings are the key ingredients in relationships, some relationships will, by necessity, end. No two human beings are the same at every stage of their life. Goals, needs and desires change with time, sometimes conflicting with the goals, needs and desires of the relationship partner.

If you wish, think of each relationship as a novel with a beginning, middle, and an ending. Sometimes the novel is good enough to warrant endless sequels. Sometimes not. Because a relationship ends, it does not mean you will never love again.

Pain and suffering are part of the program. Of course there's pain - how else do you learn to savor the good times? Of course your life is disrupted. How could it not be? You, however, have the ability within yourself to make your life better, despite the odds. Consider it a test... just around the corner is something newer, bigger, better. There is a reason why this has happened. Can you find it?

Looking for a lifetime guarantee? Buy an appliance. Want unconditional love? Get a dog. Ready to be realistic in a search for everlasting love? First, forget "everlasting" unless you're buying batteries. Accept the fact that people change and that sometimes those changes cause major upheavals in the lives of the people who love them the most.

You wanna know what's the hardest thing I've done in my life? Forcing myself to let go of someone I still love very dearly because she's moved on with her life. We're still friends, of course.

In this amusement park we call life,
there's a rollercoaster called love.
When you buy your tickets,
you take your chances on the ride you'll get.

Great news...Alex Wong@SingleTrackMind is currently in Los Angeles working hard on his 2nd album! I'd like to share this photo he recently sent me.