coriander in pho

not a food blog

Being 40 and 2025

April 28, 2025 11:23 am

My birthday already passed (December), but I just got my motivation and willingness to blog now. As… snappy as this sounds, opening the post editor on my laptop reminded me too much of (previous) work. When I had my sabbatical, I didn’t touch any of my sites for 3 months — hence, perhaps this was the same case as before.

I ended my 2024, and continuing it in 2025, with a driving lesson. I can’t drive to save my life, and I started to feel that driving is one of the must-have life skills. Here in Malaysia, you will need to sign up for driving lessons for your driving license. There are, at least, three types of driving licenses — which feels like a power-up item, hahah. After you attended the theory class (6 hours of theory class), you need to attend the computer examination (theory exam). Should you pass the exam, you will get an L driving license: Learner. An L-license holder can only drive a car with a certified driving lesson trainer assisting them, no other passengers, and the car should have a big “L” sticker to indicate that the driver is a learner.

During L-license lessons, you will have the hands-on experience of driving a car — in the training circuit and on the road. The lessons take 16 hours in total.

After the hands-on training, you will need to face another exam (practical exam). During this exam, you will have a staff from JPJ (Jawatan Pengangkutan Jalanraya — Road Transport Department) as an examiner. Once you passed the exam, you are entitled to P-license (Probationary drivers) and the license applies for 2 years. Only after you finished 2 years with the P-license, you leveled up to be the Final Form: D-license (Completed Driving License).

I’m still on my L-license form and have yet to evolve. I must say, the lessons can be tricky and now I know why driving is considered an art and experience-based! Wish me luck, everyone! I’m having my (repeat) driving exam next Monday.

Now, speaking about 2025. I know that talking, or writing, about the new year can be so passe. It feels like after what happened in 2020, people started to be more… calmer, in building and working on their resolutions. We had, like, 2-3 years with “staying alive” as one of the main resolutions after all.

That said, I don’t have any current goals/ambitions for this year. I mentioned this in a couple of past posts: I have an immense amount of privilege, which allowed me to say things that I am saying here.

I actually wondered if I should just switch to Indonesian language here. I know that nobody’s stopping me, this is my blog anyway. So perhaps, that’s what I’m going to do: Switching to Indonesian on this blog. Again, a lot of things here remind me too much of my previous work and it’s, uh, unpleasant. The recent news about the place I used to work was not super great either. I even had the thought to switch to freaking Blogger of all places, knowing full well that Google could pull the plug at any time. That said, the website host subscription is already paid up to 2028, hahah. So switch to Indonesian it is.
Borobudur

January 26, 2025 4:13 am

Borobudur, also transcribed Barabudur (Indonesian: Candi Borobudur, Javanese: ꦕꦤ꧀ꦝꦶꦧꦫꦧꦸꦝꦸꦂ, Candhi Barabudhur), is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Magelang Regency, near the city of Magelang and the town of Muntilan, in Central Java, Indonesia.

— Wikipedia
Incoming rain

November 21, 2024 9:21 am

In the middle of monsoon season.
Post-lunch Cardio

November 20, 2024 9:35 am

KL has been getting cooler recently, and I have enjoyed nice breeze as I opened my balcony door and let the air flows through.

I just finished my lunch yesterday when I heard a skittering sound on the ceilings. At first, I thought it was a bug or a dragonfly entered my unit from the balcony (a common occurrence), but I realized the sound was too loud for a bug. I put my attention away from episode 2 “Seoul Busters” and looked for the sound source — and there it was, a small bird perched on my ceiling lamp.

The bird was panicking, which, understandable. Imagine yourself as Jack, and you stumbled into a giant troll’s house after climbing a humongous beanstalk that happened to grow in your backyard overnight.

I tried to call the bird with an attempt that can be said as “whistling”, although it was more like a “blowing air and making squeaking noises.” The bird, might be offended because I might insulted them in bird language, fluttered to the guest room. Then, the chase started.

I closed the door so it was only me and the bird in a standoff. The bird scurried between the air conditioner unit and the curtains. I did open the windows, but the window panes are too low for the bird to realize that they could fly out from there (fun fact: Happens a lot, too, with bugs and anything that breathing and flying.)

At that point, my strategy was to tire the bird out so they will fly lower. I went back and forth, chased the bird, from one side to another. Cue Lil Jon & East Side Boyz’s “Get Low”.

To the windooooowwwww to the wall.

We need to put “bird chasing” as part of cardio because whew.

After an eternity (20 minutes), the bird started to getting tired. I noticed they flew lower, so I grabbed my foldable laundry basket and trapped them. I pulled my son’s shirt from the school event of “Fun Run” (“fun” and “run” should not be in the same sentence) and grabbed the poor terrified little friend.

The bird chirped loudly, emitted a protest. I muttered a mix of apologies (“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry”) and my mother instinct of scolding (“ha! See?! I told you! I told you it’s dangerous! You still do it! See?? Ah, do it more then! Do it more!”) while I ran back to the balcony and set the bird free. They flew immediately after, to my relief.

Also, I found some mushrooms on my wooden table in the balcony.
Digital Graveyard

November 13, 2024 4:42 pm

I never thought too much about digital graveyard until I revisited my bookmarks on my Chrome browser.

When I was a Happiness Engineer, my Chrome browser was connected to my Automattic profile. For five years, I never used my personal Chrome account. Naturally, the bookmarks went unnoticed.

After I resigned, I reset my Chrome browser and realized that I still have the bookmarks —- and a lot of them are either outdated (last update 7-9 years ago, even) or inactive. Some have the bloggers already passed away.

It was sad and bittersweet. It makes me wonder how vast our digital graveyard is. I remember there was an uptick in the Support queue from users a couple of years ago, mainly Indonesians, requesting for their WordPress.com blogs to be set to Private. It was so prevalent, our team had an internal discussion talking about it. The Indonesians staffs, including me, in the discussion put two and two together, and we told the team that the users who asked for their site to be set to Private are most likely those who provide “Jasa Tutup Akun” (Account Closure) services. We noticed that a lot of these blogs were last updated 9-10 years prior, and with rough calculations, the blogger’s age by the request came would be in their early twenties —- the age where one is looking for a job. Their blogs might be created when they were in their teens, and as teens usually do, a lot of the posts could be considered as “cringe” or unfit for their social media profile. As they might have lost their account and blog access, they resorted to these Jasa Tutup Akun services, and these services contact the Support team and request for their (client’s) account to be closed or to set the blog to Private (yes, it’s possible in WordPress.com). The requests were no longer as many as before, though, and I would gander that it’s because the rise of popularity of social media and blog becomes a really niche element in the vast world of the Internet and the team’s effort in reducing such requests.

Anyway.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that we are all here just a mere speck of a dust in the Internet, that bits and bytes beeping, the zeros and ones that comprised our username and our meticulously crafted Instagram persona, and it’s easy for us to think that nobody would miss us if we go away and disappear. Then, there is — at least — one stranger out there that might have you in their mind and cherish and cheer for you.

— This post is dedicated to all bloggers out there

Quick blurbs

Saw this site mentioned the other day on Slack: neocities.org.

Scroll down and you will see “Featured Sites”. Never knew it brings back early 2000s, and it makes me so, so happy.

April 23, 2026