Ramadan Kareem

First day of fasting today. First few hours of fasting and I’m already feeling weak. Silly really. After all, I did get up for my pre-dawn meal - heated food up, made a hot drink, the whole works - all with eyes half-closed of course.

Looks like the usual bus doesn’t run the normal schedule anymore so this morning I had to take another and change. You’d have thought that by now I’d get used to fasting but all that walking and stair-climbing this morning really made me exhausted and maybe that’s why I’m feeling weak. Pardon me, I do take time to warm up for Ramadan and only last night as I was about to perform tarawih prayers did I really feel it was really Ramadan already. Just give me a few more days before I really get into the hang of things. In the meantime, I shall limit walking about and try to conserve energy by not climbing up and down the stairs at micasa too often.

I was just settling down into my chair this morning when I felt myself being rocked. Strange, I thought. I mean, yes, it is the first day of Ramadan but I couldn’t already be hallucinating now, could I? I actually wondered if the keyboard was somehow vibrating and I was feeling the vibrations (haha). The rocking continued and after a while I stood up. Then my colleague came and asked if I felt anything because she felt a tremor too. We thought then that what we felt were the little aftershock tremors following the earthquake that rocked Sumatra yesterday. Turned out there was another powerful quake that hit Indonesia again this morning.

Wow, that was my first time experiencing a real earthquake (a simulated experience in Tokyo surely doesn’t count! And besides, we didn’t take it too seriously as it was only a simulation).

Addendum: I just remembered that I did experience an earth tremor before. It was on Sunday, 28 October 2001 [and not in November as reported here], and I was in Nottingham (yes, you read that right). Apparently, once upon a time, Nottingham had an earthquake that dried up the River Trent and earth tremors are actually quite common in England.

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I braved the scorching noon sun yesterday to print a year’s worth of photos at a nearby shopping complex. It was a long process having to identify and scan the folders of photos I want to be processed from the CDs and thumb-drive I brought with me, plus the lady behind the counter was distracted by other customers. As the total number of photos I had turned out to be quite substantial, the lady said I was entitled to some free large prints (8R or so).

But in her next breath, she told me that they now charge processing fee [just like they do for developing films] for every memory stick/CD/thumb-drive accessed to retrieve one’s photos. I wasn’t pleased to hear that and when I found out that I could get the processing fees waived if I didn’t opt for the free prints, I opted not to get the free prints. I handed RM50 to her only to be told that I must pay in full. Eh? Told her the RM50 was for deposit but she said, no, I must settle it in full even though I told her earlier that I would only collect the photos on Friday. [Even if I had known at the onset how many photos I have in total anyway, I don’t normally walk around with a lot of cash – after all I have been pick-pocketed twice and got my bag snatched once.] And they charge 3% for credit card transaction. I was not happy with this, especially after having wasted more than 30 minutes in there and walked off after saying, ‘It has been a waste of time.’

God must have not wanted me to return to that shop – although I did contemplate on it as I still wanted to process my photos – because all the ATM machines I passed after that were either out of service or had terribly long queues.

So folks, you now have to pay to process your digital photos just like you did when you processed your films previously. And Foto Suria does not accept deposit; you must pay in full. Whatever happened to deposits and/or COD?

Called up Foto Zzoom and found they currently have an offer and I would actually save money by developing my photos there, even after taking into account the charge for processing.

Just my recent experience to share with other consumers out there.