prawn & petai sambal, steamed eggplant, steamed egg

It's a flurry of activities in the kitchen as I fix my Sunday dinner again! Yesterday's features...


Prawn and petai sambal


Steamed eggplant with garlic and soy sauce


The whole ensemble

the sky is broken

You fall on me
Like a torrent
Yet like a gentle caress
Your presence is overwhelming
Your cadence so soothing
Today I look outside my window
Hoping to see you again
Hoping that maybe today
You fall on me.

spicy beef stew with noodles

I fixed a beef stew for dinner Sunday night. Thought it could have been better so I did a remix version yesterday, added some noodles for carbs and lo and behold...


Spicy beef stew with noodles

Hassle-free gourmet! Simply season the beef overnight with some black pepper, cumin, cloves and salt. Then simmer with chopped potatoes, onions and carrots. Smash up a clove of garlic and throw it in the pot along with some star anise for additional depth of flavour.

So good you can even have on its own!

Yum!

i have found my love

Hang on, hang on to the vine
Stay on, soon you'll be divine
If you start to cry, look up to the sky
Something's coming up ahead
To turn your tears to dew instead.

wherrrre's Wally?

This is mind-blowing stuff.

Search-engine powerhouse, Google has come out with an interface that allows anyone (meaning you and I) to scan the whole globe via satellite.


The Google Earth interface.

Google Earth, as the project is called, is still under beta testing, but already impresses with clear images of cities and major landmarks across the world. A colleague of mine spotted his family's house in Perth...and his neighbour's car!


Paris. Spot the Eiffel Tower.

Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya and Subang Jaya also appear on Google Earth, albeit in lower resolution. It's probably an incomplete scanning process which should be fixed in the near future. But hey, I spotted my residential area. Check it out...


Home sweet home.

the love of God albeit in MORE than 10 words

I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a tea cup than I can comprehend the wild, uncomprehensible love of God.

- Brennan Manning

i'm leaving on a jetplane

It's 4.50 a.m. on a Friday morning and I am NOT in bed.

Here I am in a very empty KLIA waiting to board a flight to Kuching for a last minute meeting that cropped up. The taxi this morning came 15 minutes earlier so I've got some extra time to spare.

So what do I do then? I blog.

I have got my derrier firmly propped up on a decently comfortable chair. In front of me...a black Dell system that runs a version of Internet Explorer that looks strangely ancient. Surprisingly, it works.

Quite a disappointment considering the expectations I had on the MAS Golden Lounge. Well, I haven't the time to check out the coffeee and grub, but I guess I've gotten accustomed to the flat screen panels and ultra fast broadband connections in Changi.

It looks to be a pretty hectic day with this trip, dinner plans, the little prayer meet tonight, followed by the horror flick session. Ahhh...don't we love Fridays.

I foresee myself walking (perhaps "wandering" is the word?) around in semi-comatose mode for most of the day.

of fellowship with the undevout

"He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, not withstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everyone must conceal his sin from himself and from their fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!"

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Confess your sins to one another... [James 5:16]

my family

I just love this picture.

Taken on 31 May 2005 @ Century Pines Resort, Cameron Highlands.

Camp PJGH 2005 definitely left many fond memories.

great balls of fire

I am a happy man =)

I had my lunchtime hunger pangs sated by juicy morsels of beef balls, courtesy of this famous beef ball noodles place in Lebuh Ampang. Funny that I still don't know the name of this place. It's a proper shop alright, but I just never take notice of its name.

So if you wanna go there some time, just call me.

are we having fun yet?

Throbbing headache.
Runny nose.
Sandpaper throat.

I am sick.

coming soonest

revenge of the nerds

Star Wars nerds are the funniest!

This is an ACTUAL “Out-of-Office” autoreply by one such individual in Singapore. His identity shall remain undisclosed.

Stupid have I become. Forgot to write Out of Office message I have. Hmm..?

I am seduced by the nerd side of the Force, please excuse me from 21st May to 30th May.

Meanwhile, I have to rescue the Chancellor from General Stupidous. Then beat the crap out of the traitor Dumb Vader and BBQ him to save the universe in whatever order possible. Judo Master Yogurt will deal with the Emperor and then try to save Pad Me with Senator Fail Again-ah. This universe is messed up or what?

epilogue to an exam

Yes yes...the killer exams are over!!!

It really is a huge load lifted off my back after months of attempting to study amidst so many "distractions"...some valid and some...urm, maybe a little questionable...hehe. So when the proctor told me (did I fail to mention that I was the ONLY candidate yesterday?) to put down my writing instruments at 5pm yesterday, I couldn't be more pleased to comply.

So how did it go? Let's just say that about a quarter through my morning session paper (there was also an afternoon session), I just decided to "let go, and let God" ;) It was tough and I just wasn't as prepared as I would have liked to be. My attempts to cram in too much over the last few days didn't really help either. There was just this huge cumulonimbus of concepts and formulas in my head. Not too good eh?

But all's not lost. I'm actually very grateful for this whole experience, which brings me to thank everyone who prayed for me and who extended words of encouragement. I'm trying not to get too sentimental here, but it's really comforting to know that people are remembering you in their prayers.

I must also share some thoughts that have come to mind over the last week or so, flowing from church camp; that we serve a God who is so much bigger than the "god" we make Him out to be. We sometimes think we can place Him in our little pigeon holes when He is far greater than that.

We serve a God who is larger than life itself. I shared this with BK on Sunday in response to the morning worship service, that I was reminded that we worship a God who is bigger than the death of the 5 missionaries who perished in Ecuador. In similar vein, but on probably much lesser scale of importance, He is also One who is bigger than my CFA exams.

I have to confess that I've never been a good loser. Well, I try to be, but I know that losing is just not ingrained in me, especially when it comes to exams. This time I have been humbled...really. I have come stripped of my abilities knowing I can only walk this road holding the Hand that leads me.

And so I held it...tightly.

For He never fails.

***

Phil 3:7-8, 13-14

our heart

Now playing in my head...

Our heart, our desire,
Is to see the nations worship.
Our cry, our prayer,
Is to sing Your praise
To the ends of the earth;
That with one mighty voice
Every tribe and tongue rejoices.
Our heart, our desire,
Is to see the nations worship You.

Heavenly Father, Your mercy showers
Down upon Your people,
Every race upon this earth;
May Your Spirit pierce the darkness,
Break the chains of death upon us.
Let us rise in honest worship,
To declare Your matchless worth!

- "Our Heart", John Chisum & George Searcy

if you can't beat 'em, join 'em

I thought this was pretty funny.

kingdom of heaven

Our faith was strong in th' Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
'Twould even grieve the hardest stone...
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They're of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they've been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.

- taken from "The Ship of Fools", written by Sebastian Brant

I thought King Baldwin IV (picture above) was rather cool behind that silver mask. I was trying to spot one particular scene that I had come across in the trailer where he faces Saladin in a showdown, and he sort of cocks his head to one side knowingly. Didn't see it in the movie...rats =p

Oh yeah...I'm of course talking about Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven ("KoH"), certainly one of the movies that I had been anticipating this year. I wasn't expecting it to pass the scissors of our parochial censorship board, so it was quite a pleasant surprise when I found out that the movie was on its way to our Malaysian silver screens.

Anyway, I had the privilege of catching KoH last night, with a pretty big rombongan too...16 of us in total! Surprisingly, everyone was early for the (I had to think awhile to verify this) VERY FIRST TIME!

KoH is reminiscent of a typical Ridley Scott epic. Felt it didn't quite live up to the standards of Gladiator but I still thought the movie was special in its own way. The sets were pretty impressive and Saladin's assault on Kerak did bring back memories of the seige of Minas Tirith back in LOTR: Return of the King =)

Still, watching KoH inevitably brings out the skeletons from the closets of Christian-Muslim relations. There will always be questions hanging over the validity of the reasons behind the Crusades, whether or not they were seen to be unnecessary aggression in the name of extending God's kingdom and converting nations to Christianity, or whether they were a necessary defence against the advancing Muslim armies in the Middle East and Eastern Europe regions.

One of the more provocative questions raised by the KoH is the relationship between God's will and human agency, and whether the former can be discerned in the latter. In the movie, both Christian and Muslim sides claimed to be fighting for God. Calls for bloodshed were attributed to fulfilling "God's will". The phrase "God wants it!!" still rings in my head. Bearing their respective crosses and crescent moons were people fighting alike; in the service of something they held dear, a purpose much greater than themselves that even warranted the giving of their lives in martyrdom.

But were their actions all within God's will?

Christianity Today ran quite an extensive coverage on KoH two weeks back. Pretty good stuff, I should add. One of the articles [1] depicted a frank conversation between a Christian and a Muslim about the possible impact of KoH on Christian-Muslim relations. In one part, the Christian writer asked his Muslim friend, Haq, whether he thought KoH would actually aggravate relationships between Christians and Muslims. I like Haq's response. He said,

"No, I don't. The movie shows how complex people's motives are, that that may express their conviction in religious terms, but they're doing so with base political and economic motives. You say you're doing something for God when you're really doing it for yourself. I think this movie will force people to see that what they thought was an act of religious faith on their part was not really religious at all."

A scene from the movie also comes to mind where Guy de Lusignan insists that God wants the Christians to massacre the Muslim legions. King Baldwin IV refuses to comply in light of the delicate truce hanging between the Christians and Muslims, and goes to the extent of hanging Templar Knights who have disobeyed his orders to restrain from conflict. Balian (the Orlando Bloom character) thinks the harsh punishment to be odd since "they are dying for doing what the pope would tell them to do." He gets a reply from one of his acquaintances, "Yes, but not Christ, I think."

It was the lines like these that endeared me to the movie for its promotion of some of the values that we as Christians treasure. They certainly provided the saving grace to a beautifully crafted movie otherwise distracted by religious and political idealogies.

References

[1] Steven Gertz, "Whose Side Is God On?", Christianity Today, posted 10 May 2005.

(Note: The article has since been removed from the Christianity Today site, but I've got a hardcopy if anyone's interested)

=(

Receiving the BAD NEWS...

The screening's on the 3rd of June and that's in the thick of my CFA study leave. Exams are on the 6th too...boohoo.

=)

Receiving the GOOD NEWS...

I just got a corporate invite to watch EpIII...woohoo!!

third time lucky?

I hear tickets are already on sale for shows on the 18th to the 20th.

Go! Go! Go! =)