A couple days ago I went on a cashless shopping spree during lunch time at around KLCC, here’s what I did and how I did it.
To start off, it was lunch time, so I went to one of my favorite Japanese restaurants with great lunch sets – Ozeki Tokyo Cuisine at Menara TA. For the special set, you get to choose two main ingredients from the list of eight. My set of sashimi (five types) and unagi comes with Japanese rice, salad, tofu, miso soup, a small appetizer, and fruits. With tax, it came to RM 40.60.
That was the first swipe.
After lunch I went to Isetan KLCC looking to get something as office snacks.
Well, there are many fans of Hello Kitty, but obviously these people has never heard of Hello Panda, for not only these are cute, they are ultra delicious as well. RM 15.50 per tin, I bought two, so that came to RM 30.50
This was the second swipe.
Walking around Isetan Food Market section, I chanced upon the non-halal session and decided that I should stock up some bacon for emergency breakfast options. A pack of 500 gram smoked streaky bacon goes for RM 33.90. Perfect.
Here went the third swipe.
The kittens at home loves wet food, so before walking back to office, I stopped by Cold Storage KLCC to grab a few cans of Purina Royale Fancy Feast wet food for them. It was RM 4.29 per can, seven cans equals to RM 30.05
Fourth swipe of the day, still haven’t used any cash.
Just before heading back to office, I decided that there should be something to go with those Hello Panda cookies, so I reloaded RM 30 to my Starbucks card and grabbed a medium sized iced latte for good measure.
Fifth and final swipe for this very short shopping spree, all done within an hour and will satisfy not only human but cat stomachs as well!
If you have noticed, I carefully made sure that each spending was over RM 30, and there’s a very good reason for that.
My RHB Debit Cash-Connect MasterCard is running a contest with pretty awesome prizes waiting to be won. Card members only need to swipe RM 30 or above with a single receipt to be entitled an entry. The prizes up for grabs are:
1x Nissan Almera 1.5 E(A)
1x Honda CBR250R Mugen
3x iPhone 5 (16GB)
5x Mini iPads (16GB)
So now I have five entries to this contest, hope lady luck is on my side! Oh, by the way, there’s the 0.5% unlimited cash back with the card too. Sweet.
The car’s power and ability in zipping through the city evading the alien mothership and its drone is born from a partnership between PETRONAS and AMG. It’s a sweet machine and I’m sure we’ll find out more about this soon enough. In the mean time, enjoy the video.
For those of you who follows me on Instagram, it’s certainly no secrets that I have cats as pet at home.
A little bit of a history – it all started out with Cendawan, a male Bengal cat that we bought from a breeder as a 3 month old kitten back in September 2010. Slightly less than a year later in August of 2011, we picked up two skinny stray cats at the neighbourhood, brought them in and named the male kitten Belimbing and his sister Tembikai.
Belimbing, Tembikai, and Cendawan
Over the last couple of years, the stray kittens grew up to have beautiful semi-long coat, and Cendawan packed on a healthy 7 KG. These cats are the masters of the house, we merely happen to be the live in staffs who serves them.
Cendawan was saying, “open em up for me to eat already!”
Each of the three cats have their own traits.
Cen being the biggest alpha male with Bengal’s unique characteristics, is also the most demanding and most responsive of them all. He response to calls pretty much like a dog, and double up as my everyday alarm clock.
Without fail, this ball of fur will head butt me before 7 am everyday asking me to feed them. It’s all convenient and awesome on weekdays, the only small problem is that he doesn’t have the concept of weekends.
Fancy Feast Royale Broth is an instant hit with the cats
Temmi is the princess of the house. Being the most adorable looking thing at home has its advantage. She usually minds her own business but will come around and “make cookies” on my stomach with her sharp claws.
You can never fault Temmi for she can never do wrong. She is also the loudest in the morning, meowing as if the 1 minute wait while I prepare their food is the biggest torture ever. She seems to eat quite a lot but manage to maintain her 3.5 KG slender body.
the dry cat food is their main meal
For a long time, we thought Bing might have been a mute. Turns out he’s just the quietest cat ever. Bing is never in a hurry for food, but perhaps his lack of athleticism contributes to his 5+ KG body size.
Anytime we sit at the couch watching TV, Bing will be the first one to jump on and use my legs as his personal pillow while demanding to be brushed.
Fancy Feast Royale wet cat food gets nom-ed down pretty fast as well
One of the reasons our cats are healthy and have beautiful fur is the food we feed them. I’ve always make sure that they consume wet food in addition to premium dry food. As cats have the tendency to not drink enough water, having only dry food might leave your cats dehydrated most of the time.
Recently I introduced PURINA FANCY FEAST cat foods to them, and as per recommendation, we started out with FANCY FEAST ROYALE Broths. It was an instant hit especially with Cen and Temmi, the gobbled up two packets (comes in 4 flavors) of the broth in no time, leaving very little for Bing.
This is the only soup for cats in Malaysia, and I think it really helps curb the dehydration problem in cats very well.
Main course was the FANCY FEAST dry cat food (450g packets, 3 flavors). Bing and Cen seemed to really enjoy this too. Now these are some fussy cats actually, and the fact that they love these food means that PURINA’s got it right.
Dessert then was a couple cans of FANCY FEAST ROYALE wet food (17 different flavors!). The cats again ate it like it was their last meal. The food looked pretty good, so I actually tasted it a bit myself. It was flavorful and not salty (cats and dogs aren’t supposed to eat nearly as salted as us), I can see why they like it.
KY with cen, Haze with temmi, and Horng picked up bing
These cats make our home come alive and greets us almost every time we come home. If you have furkids like these at home, be sure to feed them and treat them well.
PURINA also wants your cats to try the new FANCY FEAST ROYALE Broths, to redeem free sample (limited to 2,000 samples), go to www.fancyfeast.com.my, fill in your particulars and the free sample will be mailed to you within 4 weeks.
Now excuse me while I give them a laser work out.
Disclaimer: I was paid by Purina Fancy Feast for this post
Yesterday, 5/5/2013, was the 13th national election of Malaysia, the country I called home. Just like back in 2008, I went cast my votes at SMK Sri Permata for the candidates of PJ Utara parliamental seat and ADUN of Kampung Tunku. Here are some of my thoughts and observations:
Google and the whole world was watching as Malaysian went to the poll. The Google graffiti of the day was cute and appropriate. I’ve heard that it was worldwide and not just for google.com.my either.
At polling stations, we are separated into different “saluran”, apparently according to age groups. However, this was not done in a manner that made most sense, and hence my line (saluran 4) ended up having a one hour queue while some of the other lines had no queue at all. This should be something that’s easy to fix.
Voting process itself was rather straight forward. First we checked our names at ground floor, then at our saluran we present a paper with the number (mine was actually wrongly written, off by 1 digit, human error), have our IC cross checked, the agent will then call our names.
Next was to get our fingers painted by indelible ink, and we then get the ballot papers, one for ADUN and another for Parliament. It didn’t take more than a minute or two.
I didn’t realize that the state of our national schools were so bad. This is SMK Sri Permata in Petaling Jaya, not any old school in rural areas, but the facilities were extremely basic and upkeep were poor. If this is how average schools look like, they seemed to have regressed since I went to high school back in the 90s in Penang.
The younger generation deserves better. No wonder private education is a booming business.
Even though my line was the longest at the polling station, I did manage to get it done in about an hour. We went to TDH and claimed a free beer for voting (thanks!), and then waited patiently for the results to come in at night.
After dinner, we decided to head to SS2 for a while to see what’s going on at the DAP’s gathering with Tony Pua and gang announcing the results as they come in.
The results were very encouraging, with DAP leading many of the seats they were contesting. Unfortunately there were not able to get the results from PAS and PKR in real time, we turn into Malaysia Kini on mobile for those. We left at around 10 pm when my phone’s battery was running low, and had our hopes and spirit high then.
BN managed to secure enough seats to form government sometimes after 1 am. This was quite a lot later than usual.
Final results were 133 vs 89.
Some observations:
DAP won 38 in 51 seats contested, with PKR securing 30 and PAS at 21
BN denied 2/3 majority in parliament
Independent candidates did not get any seats, it was largely a two way fight
Many big names previously on BN (or BN friendly parties) fell or did not contest – Raja Nong Chik, Ali Rustem, Zulkifli Noordin, Ibrahim Ali, Chua Soi Lek, Rais Yatim
This could be the last election for Lim Kit Siang and Anwar Ibrahim
BN managed 49% of all votes while PR won the popular votes with 50%
There are many instances of ballot boxes coming in as late as 5 hours after poll closed, some managed to swing closely contested seats to BN candidates
Banglasian seems like the new ethnic group in Malaysia, there were instances of rakyat stopping alleged “ghost voters” at various stations
SPR and major TV networks seemed to release BN wins way earlier than PR seats
State wise PR lost Kedah, managed to retain Penang, Kelantan, and Selangor all with 2/3 majority
PR managed to make some progress into Johor & Sarawak
MCA (6 seats) and Gerakan (1 seat), as well as MIC to a lesser extend, become irrelevant. People are tired of race base politics
While the election seemed dirtier than ever, flow of information were also the best with Twitter/Facebook and WhatsApp
Many of us gets results through these means faster than even online portals
Many express dissatisfaction on Twitter & Facebook, declaring that democracy is dead. I personally don’t think it’s dead, but here in Malaysia, it needs cleaning up badly
Malaysia is still very much the country I love, and like many, we will continue to strife towards a true democracy. In the end, though PR did not manage to form government, there were many small victories nonetheless. There are something to build on.
Lastly, I’d like to introduce word of the day to you - Gerrymandering.
Never thought that when I set out to start this website a little more than 8 years ago that it’ll one day attract so many eyeballs. So thank you for reading, and here’s for another 5 million!
