Posted on 20 September 2006 @ 23:10 in Memories, Tech Stuff
I made my first web site in 1996. Oh, that’s 10 years ago! It was for HTML practice to help me in a new area of my job - managing and maintaining the company’s web site.
But I’ve been on the Net longer than 10 years. My first foray onto the Net was in late 1989. I was given an email account as a grad student at the University of California, San Diego. One day, a friend told me about newsgroups and showed me how to read them from my email account. That was where I found the kdlang newsgroup and made friends who later opened their homes to me when I travelled around the States before returning home in 1991.
After I came home, I was missing the newsgroups so much but eventually found something similar - BBSs (which I think stands for Bulletin Board Service).
The Internet came to Malaysia in 1995, via Jaring. I was one of the first to sign up.
Dabbled with GeoCities in the early days - didn’t everybody who eventually went on to have their own domains?
After I came back from visiting my San Diego Zoo pandas in 2001, I decided to register my own domain, which was how www.chetscorner.com came about. It wasn’t my first choice domain name, but both chet.com and chet.net had been taken. I’d used Chet’s Corner from day 1 of my presence on the Net - I thought it described where I am on the Net, in my own little corner.
www.chetscorner.com is still there, but hardly updated. These days, I post at Chet’s Chatter, my weblog. I called it Chet’s Chatter version 3, as I’ve had two previous weblogs, all with the same name. By now, you probably can tell how much I love my name, and how little imagination I have.
One of the reasons why www.chetscorner.com is hardly updated is because it uses HTML. These days, there’s CMS (Content Management System) which makes it very easy to update and maintain web sites. My company’s web site, started in 1996, has gone through two upgrades. The first two used good old HTML; the third and current version is run by CMS. I myself just registered another domain which, when it is up and running, will be run by CMS. More information when the time is right.
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Posted on 17 September 2006 @ 23:30 in Travels
N is visiting England for the first time at the end of the month. She was searching for places to visit when I saw her online this afternoon. I offered a couple of suggestions and a specific shop in Chinatown if she was looking for Chinese food.
Young Cheng in Lisle Street.
I’d stumbled upon the shop one cold April afternoon during my recent trip.
So many shops and the one I went into, I sat down and the waitress came up with a pot of tea and a bowl of something in soup. I said I didn’t order it and she said it was on the house. Oh! Nice! Especially in the cold weather. I ordered the Singapore fried noodles which was greasy. Good thing the soup had quite a bit of meat in it.
(Journal entry, 11 April 2006)
I kept going back to Young Cheng whenever I was in Central London, both for lunch (for the free soup!) and also at least once for dinner. The soup was not only hot, but also filling. The few times I was there, I made the mistake of warming myself up with the soup, so that by the time my lunch item was served, I was already full and had trouble finishing the food! But then, I couldn’t very well have taken just the soup and not ordered anything else to eat. I would not have been welcomed back there if I had!
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Posted on 15 September 2006 @ 13:20 in Personal, Stress Busters
I’ve just received confirmation from the Wolong Panda Reserve, via Suzanne Braden, Director of Pandas International, that I can adopt the panda cub born on 23 August 2006.
This cub, however, is not the same cub I wrote about here, but the younger twin. The cub I originally wanted to adopt (by the way, a boy, and not as stated in that same post) has died. He had been born with a harelip (the first such case in the world of giant pandas) and recently died of congenital heart disease. Suzanne forwarded me the news as soon as she received it, and asked if I would now like to adopt his younger twin, a girl, born about two hours after him. I immediately replied to say yes. However, the confirmation had to wait until Wolong gave the go-ahead. Which it now has.
Happy panda day for me, indeed.
Here are two pictures of the boy cub with the harelip.
No pictures yet of his sister.
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Posted on 10 September 2006 @ 08:45 in Stress Busters
Yes, even through his thick coat of fur, he is ticklish!
This picture is from a series of screen captures from a video PU member IffyBear had taken back in May 2006. Cathy the pandakeeper had put her arms under his armpits to lift him up. Next thing you know, he’d keeled over to his right, and clearly giggling from her touch!
Thanks, IB, for sharing this ultra-cute moment!
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Posted on 3 September 2006 @ 09:11 in Personal, Rant
We had taken Greenie to the vet’s on Merdeka Day. She had been suffering from skin problems and I just felt we needed to do something for her. I’d called her regular vet and asked if perhaps we should have blood tests done on her. Since he’s a mobile vet, he said he wouldn’t be able to do it, and we’d have to take her to a regular vet.
I went to a vet clinic in the neighbourhood and found that they would be opened on Merdeka Day. So we took her there, and because it was her first time at a vet, she was restless, so the vet said she would have to give Greenie an injection to sedate her. Apparently the sedation would last 30 minutes.
Greenie continued to sleep even after we took her home. Before I left around 4ish, I went to look at her, she was trying to stand but still looking groggy.
By the next morning, she was dead. My nephew later told me he’d been in touch with the vet a few times from the previous evening till when they found her dead. The first time, at around 8 pm, he’d called to ask if it was okay to feed her, and the vet said yes. So he fed Greenie some water and food, but she refused the food. Around midnight, he called the vet again because Greenie was crying in pain and beginning to foam at the mouth. Apparently, the vet said to just leave it. The next morning, when my nephew called to say Greenie had died, the vet said she would come by around 10 a.m. to have a look.
But the vet never showed up. When we called her to ask what time she would come by, she said she had sent another vet. Well, we had two visitors who said they were from the clinic and told by the vet to come and collect the bag of food and two bottles of medicated shampoo that we’d bought the previous day. But they did not identify themselves as doctors. Later, they came again while I was out, but they merely repeated what the vet had said over the phone in the morning - that Greenie probably died from water in her lungs.
Huh? I checked with my nephew and he said Greenie did not choke when she drank the water. He said she was probably too groggy to know water had gone into her lungs. Huh? Is that possible?
It’s two days since Greenie died. I haven’t stopped feeling guilty for my part in her death. I was the one who’d decided on which vet to send her, even though it was a vet we’d never used. I based my decision on the fact that the vet clinic was in the neighbourhood and open on a public holiday.
I’ve been going through the event over and over in my head. At first, I thought it might be a combination of the anaesthetic the vet had injected her, and a heartworm prevention jab. Later, after reading up a bit more on it, I realised Greenie was probably allergic to the anaesthesia.
But what really upsets - no, angers - me more than anything is the vet’s irresponsible behaviour. To say she would come to the house to look at the body, but never did.
This vet has a cute web site with a picture of herself. There was an email address so I wrote to her. I ended my email by saying I would never recommend any of my friends to take their pets to her clinic.
When I sat down to write this entry, I was going to reveal the name of the clinic. But I won’t. Not yet anyway. However, if you’re reading this and you have pets, tell me if you want to know the name of the clinic so that you’ll know not to take your pets there for treatment. For now, all I’ll reveal is that it’s a shop along the same row as The Ship in Damansara Utama.
For some reason, I have no doubt the vet is a good vet, but for now, being a good vet does not mean anything if the follow-up - breaking a promise to come by the house to see the body - is so totally irresponsible.
And no, she never replied my email.
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