Brief History of Nearly Nothing!
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  • March26th

    Received these 2 items on my mailbox last week.

    It consists of these 2 items in 1 box.

    and

    The interest to build a weather station at home, went back to year 1998 when I first read the following article in Linux Journal ( I still have the copy of the magazine) . It was delayed without any progress, even though I visited (many times!) the website (attempted to buy but always click at the CANCEL button of the checkout page!) and also subscribed to the weather mailing-list .
    My initial plan was to start small with a basic temperature sensor like DT1A so at 2002, I wrote to Brian Lane the author of the digitemp software asking whether he ship to Malaysia- (yes he did) but back then PayPal was not available to Malaysian so he asked me to pay in US cheque instead somehow I didn’t proceed with it.

    Last year, I bought some DS18S20 from RS , hobbyboards temp kit
    also this DT1A but the project stuck halfway mainly due to time factor—the tight 3G project schedule + a new baby was on the way (we were raising 3 kids without maid!)—yeahh right.. Rizal with his reasons again :)

    How was the progress ?
    Nothing much! I managed to revive the dead Linux PC (recent lightning casualty) and installed Fedora Core 3 on it. Thats it!
    I felt a bit guilty spending too much time (hacking) on the project while the kids were awake. Uje will countlessly asking me about a lot of things.. “Abah what is this?” , “Abah, why did you do this” and Sabrina will be busy poking the screwdriver on the PC casing—she already broke my Icute front door casing.
    So just wait!
    :)

  • March19th

    Last night was one of the moments to be remembered for Alysha.
    The whole family was so excited watching her rolling over the body on the bed. The brother Uje and sister Sabrina were too clapping and shouting – calling her name, even Pah was also there to see she’s doing her thing. It was not the first time (perhaps the first 10!) but the excitement was uncontrollable? among us.

    These were those special moments of being parents-happy moments to be treasured for life :) Its very interesting to see the kids growing up, the first word, the first walk also when we found out some striking similarities the way they look like, the way they talk, the food they like – in short our characteristics that were passed on to them.

    Our son Ammar is 6 now. We have seen a lot of progress on him recently since he started going to the special school in USJ this year. He looked more mature now (never cried indeed was always excited in the morning when we send him to USJ), and recently had this new passion to write/colour books. He would pull our hands to help him write along the dotted lines of his ABC books and later colour them. His favourite colour were always orange, blue and dark blue- carried 3 of the colour pencil whenever he found them. I still remember, when we first saw Ammar smiled when he was a baby—I was so excited! Why? Friends of mine alway make fun of my “senyum senget” one of them called it “asymmetrical smile” especially infront of the camera. So the moment I saw the smile, I told Ummi .. See! I told you it was genetic!

    Uje – he can actually write his name “Imran Uzair” now. When we first enrolled him at CEC early this year, he couldn’t even hold the pencil properly and what worried us most he looked not interested in writing etc compared to the cousins. Two weeks ago, the teacher called Ummi told her that Imran cried in class that day because he couldn’t answer questions on some numbers in the Maths class.( I bought him some Maths book right after that at Borders) Later we found out that he could actually recognized numbers in sequence but he would be confused (with number 6,8 and 9 ) if they were randomly ordered. Before that, his teacher told us Uje were doing OK in class, his Chinese pronounciation was good, a very curious boy (that really made me happy!) and talkative too but also a day dreamer! He always dreaming in class (the teacher even immitated his “dreaming look”) however when the teacher asked question about what being taught he could answer it well – isn’t that sounds more like a compliment? :)

    Daydreaming—hmm! Straight away I admitted to the teacher that it was genetic! His father is indeed one of them – Ummi often complained that I always got lost in conversations, my friends said so (during a dinner many years ago when I told them about my son and his own world!) . We couldn’t help it, our kind of people always have this daemons (don’t be confused with demons!) or unwanted zombie running at the back of our head making us lost senses on the surrounding :)

    Next is Sabrina our very own “Power Puff Girl”. She’s really a tough outgoing girl perhaps like her mom- never gave up on anything and always fight back if were teased by his brother Uje. Scared of “ulat”- paranoid of it (also like the mother!) she cried recently while watching Twister ( I bought a book on Weather and showed Uje about Tornado so we went on to watch Twister on DVD after that) perhaps terrified by the scene of a man swallowed by the tornado! I was surprised to see she’s crying maybe she was so sad watching the character (Helen Hunt as a kid) crying losing her father in the tornado in that movie.
    By the way, Sabrina is only 2 and she is now toilet trained – always shout “Tak payahhh!!” when I teased her to wear diapers.