The Big Read

Thanks to Megan, I'm doing this list of books I've read and will want to read. You can do the same too. Instructions are as follows:

Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read
Underline the books you LOVE.
Reprint this list in your own blog.

Apprently, the average adult has only read 6 out of these top 100 books (More details at Megans blog post). So here's the list and what I've read etc...

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8. 1984 - George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34. Emma - Jane Austen

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52. Dune - Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (wow, not since I was a child! I didn’t know it was a classic)

78. Germinal - Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87.Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Oh...btw, I'm still here :P

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Pos Malaysia, Free money and a lot of hot air

If you think this is gonna be a rant, you're right. Partially. Last weekend wifey, baby and me went off to the Jalan Besar Seri Kembangan Post Office to see if we could collect out RM625 (about USD191) that the Government was giving out as a rebate to deal with the rise of fuel prices. We've been hearing a lot of stories of how to actually get the RM625. Turns out, it was pretty painless. You go in and ask for a form to claim the rebate, which turns out to be a money-order ish kinda form with spaces for your name, MyKad number (Identification Card) and your vehicle number rubber stamped on it. Fill that out, take a number, wait till yer turn and hand that over to the person behind the counter. He/she will then take your thumb print (huh? yeah, we still do thumb prints here) put that on the form, hand you a scrap of tissue paper to clean yer thumb and hand you the money. Since dad's car is under my name, I ended up with RM1250. Dad refused to take it when I gave it to him so its mine. Wah..thats what in Malay we call 'Durian Runtuh' (windfall). Until I got into my car and switched on the air conditioning.

Hot air. Tweaked every imaginable setting and all I got was hot air. Called up some buddies to find out why and I got a variety of answers. The figures I was getting in terms of replacing cooling coils and compressors were really frightening. At last, the ever reliable Mr Kee sent me an sms with the contact details of a very reliable Air Con guy:

HENG WA AIR-COND SERVICE CENTRE
3003, Jalan Tun Razak,
50400 KL
Tel : 019 2136170 / 03 26980254

Turns out, the problem was a busted cooling coil and damaged compressor.Oh, the Air con relay was bust too. Pics below. The damage? RM645! So much for the extra cash. Well at least he finished the car in one day. I pity the Mercedes Benz Elegance owner that had his car over there. To change one damaged cooling coil, the entire dash got removed. Back seat littered with the steering wheel, buttons and all kinds of stuff. Sucks to be you dood. :P

Oh yeah, sucky Camera phone pics warning.

The dead Coil



Compressor from Hell. Replacement was a second hand one. New would have cost upwards RM1K. yikes!

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Zipidee doo dah

Ever been in a situation where you've got a zip file and you can't open it cos the idiot admin didn't grant you access to install anything on the lousy outdated machine you're using in the office? Or maybe its a situation where you got a rar or a tar file and have no blinking idea what to do with it. Also, zip files have them nasty viruses in them so you're afraid of opening them at the first place. Well, the fretting is over. Wobzip hath arrived!



I found this while going through some del.icio.us links and was wondering why someone had not thought about this idea earlier.(Maybe there are others but I haven't looked) So on to brass tacks. Simply put, wobzip asks for an upload of any zip, tar, rar file ( up to 15 formats supported: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZHCHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS), un-zips (tars, rars etc) and displays the content for you to download:



1. Is where you upload files from yer hard disk.
2. Is what you press after you choose the zip file..duh

Results look like whats in the box. Be reminded that the limit for files that you upload is 100MB. There is also the option to download what you unzipped back as a zip and an option to delete what you just unzipped. Ok so far? Good. It gets better. Because not only can you password protect your files but you also have the option to input a download link into wobzip and wobzip will unzip it for you. Boom! Here's how it looks like (kinda):



Now, the obvious benefit of using something like this is that its cross platform, there's no need to install anything, no need for registrations and its safe. How do you ask its safe? Well, there's the fact that every file uploaded gets scanned for viruses. The technology powering the anti virus comes from Bitdefender. Speaking of what powers wobzip, the Uncompression Software is made possible by p7zip.

However its not all that complete actually. wobzip is in testing and development and only uncompression is available. The site lists a couple of known bugs:

1. Uploader may cause corrupted files.
2. There are reports that .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 file extension do not work

So yer mileage may vary. Got a better solution or have an opinion about this? Leave me a comment and I'll be more than happy to discuss (or Disqus) it with you.

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Sir-Plurk-a-lot

#3 top Plurker in Malaysia. Woot!



I need to work on my Karma..sigh.

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Changes, Changes

Yeah, its been a while hasn't it? I've been putting in some little hacks into the blog to make your 'experience' better. Obviously, I had to sort out the comments disappearing issue. I want to post a huge big shout out to the guys at Disqus, Daniel and Jason, Thank you so much for fixing my template! erm...ok. I've also put in show/hide thing into the sidebar and I've to thank Annie from Blog U for showing me how to go about doing a fix like that.

Also, I've created a Label Cloud and I have phydeaux3 to thank for the very helpful instructions that eventually helped me do a nice Tag cloud. I must admit I kinda screwed up the RGB color codes while doing the cloud so I had to go back to fix it. Which is not bad since I'm not a Template-Code-Monkey. I've also listed my blog at the BlogMalaysia Blogger directory (easier for the Government to come a calling if I ever post anything seditious!) If you're Malaysian and have a blog, please get yer tushes over there and get yer blog listed there now! Also, I have made a few new acquitances in the BlogMalaysia Forum.

So, with work crushing me in all directions, hopefully I can get to write more often. Currently I'm playing around with Plurk. If you wanna get on it, click here to sign up.

Laters.

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