isaacooi.com – alive & android

I reckon Ikea cafe is the nicest place to start your day. Free coffee before 9.30am and certain breakfast item that cost only RM 1!! Yes! RM 1!!! Why not?

Anyway, something random popped up today when I was there trying to reply some emails from my tablet. I realized it was very uncomfortable on my neck as I was looking down on my tablet for a very long time. Then I saw this thing on the table.

It’s their table top stand for all their promo items. Just the thing I needed to continue with my work on my tablet.

Talk about tablet ergonomics. This table top stand item by Ikea is just the perfect thing for a 7′ tablet! It fits perfectly! The ring binder is also at the right position to stop the tablet from sliding down. Maybe from now on they can sell this as an accessory for tablets? Good idea eh? By the way, you heard it from isaacooi.com first!

Should have posted this yesterday instead of today. I guess better late then never. Photography took a back seat in 2011. My camera bag is still sitting there right on top of the cabinet and I can’t even remember when was the last time I used it. With great phone camera (or is it camera phone? Whatever..), I hardly take out my DSLR anymore. Even in my last few trips travelling to outstation/oversea, I’ve survived with my faithful Galaxy S2. It was all good. Anyway, here you go, my favourite shots in year 2011.

Milk tea

Sunset (Taken at Old Klang Road)

Traffic Jam! Random photo taken while stucked in jam at Persiaran Surian

Don’t know what to call this, it’s some sort of “kuih” they sell at Melaka

The Kapai drink sold in Jonker Street, Melaka. Just thought the arrangement was awesome!

This horse can’t take you far away. Picture taken at the playground at my place.

Chinese New Year 2011! Just thought that their expression were very natural. And guess what, CNY 2012 is only 21 days away.

Windows of opportunity? Took this shot at home

Tea farm at Cameron Highlands

Android honeycomb? No.. this is the real one..

Marina Bay Singapore

Lastly, I think this is my favourite of all and I will print this out on canvas.

Peacock @ KL Bird Park

Maxis has finally allow customers with data plan to check how much data they’ve been using on that particular month. This caused me a big problem last year when my data charges hit up to RM6,000! My point to them was if they don’t have a mechanism for me to check how much data I’ve used, they have no right to charge me. Good thing MCMC came into the picture and helped me to solve this dispute.

You need to be subscribed to Maxis monthly data plan package before you are allowed to check on your data usage for the particular month. If you are not subscribed to any data plan, the only way you can check your usage is through your monthly bill. This is how you do it.

1. Dial *100# and press send. This will bring up a menu like this.

2. key in 6 Internet and Settings to continue and you will come to another screen like this

3. Select 1 Mobile Internet (MI) and you will reach the options available for Mobile Internet

4. Select 7 Check Status and you’re done. The next screen will show you the billing cycle for your plan and how much data you have used for the particular billing cycle you are in.

Some people told me this didn’t work for them. I tried calling Maxis Hotline and got mixed reply from them. The first operator told me that this service is only available to Android devices, the other guy told me it’s available to all devices (including iPhone & BB). Anyway, check it out and see if this works for you.

My recent trip to Singapore with family. I just thought Singapore is a great place to just get away and take a break. It’s so near and yet there’s a lot more to do now with Universal Studios. I remember many many years back in my primary school days, a lot of my friends used to go to Singapore for holiday. It probably stopped for a while later when KL seemed to catch up with many more local attractions. But looks like Singapore is back in tourism business again. Definitely worth going apart from business trips or conferences.

The very first place that we visited was Marina Bay Sands. The night view was spectacular!

Singapore Zoo






The water park in the zoo is a big thing with the kids


Father & son having dinner outside the night safari

Next up is Universal Studio, Reuben is so excited about this that at certain stops he just didn’t want to leave the place





Some deco items in Waterworld

And of course the best part of the trip is we got to catch up with Allan & Renee. Great friends!

This has got to be the most interesting trip that we’ve planned for our cell group. A trip to an organic farm with a barefoot farm tour, ice cold fruit juice and also organic vegetable buffet lunch!! This was how it all started.

The farm is known as GK Organic Farm and located at Kampung Sungai Buah (somewhere near Bangi). Took me about 30 minutes from Bukit Jalil to get there.

We started at 9.30am in the morning and first in the program was the briefing for the half day tour by Mr Gan. We were told that we need to tour the farm barefooted!!

First stop, the place where Mr Gan compiled and made the compost.

No one was wearing shoes. It was difficult in the beginning but then we got used to it.

Ok, not everyone can walk barefoot, Reuben was crying so hard so that we carry him all the way.

Mr Gan, our tour guide explaining on the “Sawi”

SAWI!!!

This papaya tree is so fruitful until the tree can’t hold the weight of the fruits. We were told how to differentiate the gender of the papayas. The rounder ones are female and the long ones are male.

Thea and Yipp.

More walking

One type of fruit from the Fig family. The way to eat this fruit is to boil it and drink the water.

View of the farm

Some of the fruits sold by GK Farm

The farm tour ended at about 11.30am, all of us gathered back at the hall and saw how enzyme drink was made. We were also served with chilled sugar cane juice. The juice was made without adding any sugar or water and it was refreshing indeed!

The next part of the program was something awesome. LUNCH!!!! The organic vegetable buffet lunch. Everybody enjoyed the lunch so much that I think averagely everyone went for more than 3 rounds! I never tasted anything vegetarian so good! I’ll let the pictures do all the talking.

Sausages? Nope, they are sweet potatoes.

This is really good! Banana cake without flour and sugar. Just baked with banana and bread

The lunch was so good that up till now I’m still thinking about it. Don’t mind to go vegetarian if every meal is like this.

Anyway, Mr Gan didn’t just showed us the farm, he cultivated in us the need to go green. One of the badge they were selling stated: “Think Globally, Act Locally”. How good was that.

I reckon it’s definitely worthwhile to come back again, even if it’s only for the food. This is definitely a “must visit” place if you are a city boy and have not seen a vegetable farm before. If you like to visit the farm, please visit their webpage here. Remember to make your booking in advance. I was told that the entire month of June is fully booked!

Chinese New Year 2011 was awesome!!!! I basically had both my family and my in laws here in KL for the celebration. Majority of the time was spent at home resting and spending quality time with family and relatives.

Town was pretty quiet during CNY with not many crowd. That’s probably the best part of staying back in KL during CNY.

Baking CNY cookies was one new thing my wife and I attempted. Actually it’s more to my wife. I only place the tray into the oven and take it out when it’s done. The cookies turned out pretty good. Lots of work but it was really fun!

Then it’s the reunion dinner. This year we went for a nicer place since it’s both my family and my in laws were here together.

Reuben having fun with the drums at Pavilion.

As usual, I’ll always be at my dad’s church for the first of day of CNY for the CNY service.

This is probably the most anticipated Android device since it was announced early September. This is from my point of view as a user after using the Tab for one week.

To start of, let’s talk about the package. You can only purchase this device from Maxis for the moment. You need to have at least Value 50 plan for your call plan and sign up a 12/24 months data plan with RM 10 rebate for the duration of your contract period. Prices for the device is as follows

Outright Purchase : RM 2,699
12 months plan : RM 1,849
24 months plan : RM 1,749

OK. Let’s jump in to the review.

1. SIZE
It’s only 7″ in size compared to 10″ iPad and obviously it’s lighter than an iPad of course. I’d say this is the right size for a tablet device that fits right into your palm and you can hold it with 1 hand. This is also the reason why I went for Galaxy Tab instead of iPad. I have a 10″ Netbook and there is no reason why I want to get myself another 10″ device. I’ve showed the device to a number of iPad users and non tablet users. Guess what, almost 90% of them said that this is a better size to hold.

2. SPEED
The device itself comes with a 1GHz processor and has really made processing really good. This is also rumoured to be the basic requirement for Android Gingerbread OS upgrade. A common thing you may heard about Android is that the system may be lagging or even hang. This could be true because Android is capable of multitasking and running all sorts of apps at the background if you don’t close it properly. Of course Apple iPad won’t encounter this for now because the device is only capable of doing 1 thing at 1 time. If you are new to Android platform, get apps like Task Killer to manage all your opened apps properly.

3. CAMERA & VIDEO
This is the only part which is not really up to my expectation. Samsung has done a good job with their camera in Galaxy S phones with the capability of capturing HD Video (720p). However, with Galaxy Tab, they’ve put in a lower capability camera than the previous Galaxy S. One good part about the camera is they’ve included the front camera as webcam. I tried using it for 3G Video calls and it works perfectly. Have not tried Skype at the moment but will be testing them pretty soon

Photo taken with the camera

Another part on this is the video playback. Galaxy Tab is capable of playing HD video files and High Quality (HQ) videos in You Tube. The viewing experience with the 7″ tab is fantastic! I have tried meddling around iPad to switch the YouTube video mode to HQ but was not successful. If you are an iPad users do let me know if this is possible.

4. FEATURES & FUNCTION
A lot of the features of the phones really come down to the apps in Android market. Android has officially reached 100,000 apps while Apple claims to have hit 300,000. Seriously, it doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t even download more than 200 apps to your phone. Even if you are an app freak, Google took a far lesser time to hit 100,000 apps. Let’s check out the features for Galaxy Tab

Email
Email is really the best thing that I like about this tablet. Samsung has designed a good interface emails where I can have a 1 quick glance at my multiple inboxes and choose to reply from any account. In fact, they made it looked as if I was using Outlook!

Calendar & Messaging
Samsung has also tweak the look and feel for calendar to make it look better in a bigger screen. The calendaring features fit perfectly and displays all the appointment better than how it looked on my HTC phone. Text messages are displayed in conversation mode for the device. Nothing fancy about that but at least you can use this device to send text messages where as you can’t do that with iPad at the moment.

Apps from the Market
Like what was mentioned earlier, there are close to 100,000 apps from the market that you can download. Besides Papago GPS app, I have not encounter any problem loading apps from the market. If the app could not fit into the full screen, it will occupy approximately 70% of the screen which still looks ok. 2 apps I liked particularly are Places and Navigate by Google. What you actually do with Places is to check what are the point of interest around you and Navigate will navigate you to the destination by using Google Maps with voice.

Stocks report and weather forecast looks good on a big screen as well

USE CASE
So what do I use it for? I’ve got a HTC Magic which runs on Android 2.1 as my phone and a HP 10″ Netbook. I’ve left the Netbook at home now and leave it for times when I really need to use the keyboard for work and maintained my Maxis SIM on my HTC Magic. As for Galaxy Tab, I put in my broadband SIM card instead of my voice SIM and I use that more for work especially during the meetings and presentation when I get from places to places. With Android 2.2, Galaxy Tab has the capability of turning the device as a wireless hotspot and allowing 5 devices (pc or notebook) to access to the Internet via the device.

I’ve even tried taking down notes at church during the sermon with the SWYPE keyboard function over the weekend. Glad to say I didn’t miss a point at all. SWYPE keyboard is faster than using your 2 fingers to type on the keyboard.

CONCLUSION
After my 1 week experience, I would say Android has finally got a competitive device to rival iPad. But to pick a clear winner between the 2 is quite difficult. With the clear display, good battery power and good form factor, it has given me a great user experience. The only reservation I have for this device is on the future development for Android tablets. Google has not really confirmed if they will release a specific platform for Android tablets or continue to maintain them with Android 2.3 (aka Gingerbread). But nevertheless, 6 months from now I should have rooted the device and load in custom ROM (if available). But for now, GALAXY TAB ROCKS!!!!

Part 2. This is purely about food and that’s all. My general observation of Vietnam food is quite healthy since they h ardly have any fried stuffs. I could be wrong. Let’s see. One more thing, beer is cheap!

Whenever I travel overseas, I like to have what the locals are having for their meal. Seriously no point going to those fancy restaurant (unless they are highly recommended). I might as well have it in KL. So we stopped by at this stall beside the road for “pho”. I figured that if the stall is packed with lots of locals it should be good. The pho was average. But the next discovery we were to discover at the stall shocked us!!!! What do you reckon it is?

ROAST DOG!!! No wonder there are no stray dogs in Hanoi. I was told that this is their main delicacy and it’s not cheap! I didn’t bother to ask how much it cost. One look at the dog’s face is enough to drive me away.

Roast port. Someone asked if we’re 100% sure this is pork. Errrr…..

NEXT, seafood at Halong Bay

As mentioned in my previous post, Halong Bay can only be toured around on a boat. The boat ride will come with a meal on board if you go for a one day tour. They have included meals on board for us but we were given the option to buy additional seafood if we want to. The above is actually a floating fishing village so call. where they sell various types of fishes and seafood.

Snail that is as big as coconut? Whoa…

Check out all the dishes we had during our boat ride. Plus all the additional dishes we bought.

After Halong Bay, the night market at Hanoi promises more good food. The best one for the whole trip will be this one. The French Loaf!! Yuummmm!!! So nice!

Coconut is always something nice to drink. But later at Hanoi I got tricked.

I ended the tour with Vietnamese Steamboat at the night market. It somehow tasted like tomyam base but not spicy. A bottle of Heineken beer only cost less than RM 3. Heaven right?

I initially ordered Heineken but after I saw some coconuts on the table, I thought I might as well get a coconut since I’ve been taking lots of beer during the trip. Guess what, it’s not normal coconut water.. But coconut WINE!!! Gulp…

This blog is so behind my schedule as one of the few things that I wanted to do in 2010. Anyway, better late than never. Vietnam is one of the place in my list on places to visit. This time, I got there with my colleagues. So thanks to JOS for the airfares and the accommodation. Oh, not forgetting the red shirt guys at Bangkok as well. If not for them the destination would be Bangkok instead of Hanoi.

In short, it’s a lovely city, with narrow tall houses and minimum American influence. Why do I say so? Well, there’s no McDonalds, no Starbucks and no access to Facebook! WHOA!!! In fact, towards the end of the trip, I only saw 2 KFCs, 1 small little HSBC and Gloria Jeans coffee.

The key attraction will be Halong Bay of course. What else right? It’s a place you must visit if you are in Hanoi. But the city itself is not too bad as well. Let’s walk through the photos taken during the trip.

Motorcycles still dominate certain parts of the city. We were given a 5 minutes briefing on how to cross the road in Hanoi. The answer: JUST WALK!!!

Immediately after lunch we head straight to “Old Quarters” aka “Old town of Hanoi” this is the place for shopping and bargain.

Vietnam was under French occupation before so it’s not surprising to see lots of stalls selling French loaf.

More scenes at Old Quarters below

The three who will take on new challenges in June

Group picture.

The tour guide told us that there are 1960 islands in Halong Bay and no one is allowed to live on the island. Majority of the people in Halong Bay built their own floating villages. This is how they make money by selling fruits to the tourists

Fisherman’s boat

Island

More boats

Entrance to the cave

View from the hill

To sum up, Hanoi is definitely a place worth to go back for more as there are other interesting places to explore. Was told that they will be celebrating their 1000 years anniversary in October. Maybe it’s a good time then.

Check out some of the panoramic photos I stitched.

Stay tuned for the part 2 post on my Hanoi trip.