Cinta Pada Ibu dan Ayah

Kali ni adalah kali pertama aku berlakon dalam videoclip. Rasa macam kekok pun ada sebab dalam kehidupan sebenar aku, aku belum kahwin lagi, apatah lagi nak ada anak. Apa-apa pun , aku nak ucapkan tahniah kepada Talent agency aku , Calice Lam kerana memberi peluang kat aku untuk berlakon dalam videoclip.

Sebenarnya aku tak pernah pun jadi ayah betul-betul, setelah jadi pelakon secara sambilan, jadi aku terpaksalah berlakon menjadi ayah kepada budak dalam video clip ni. Budak dalam videoclip ini memang merupakan penyanyi kanak-kanak yang betul. Beliau adalah orang Malaysia yang berbangsa cina, selalu menyanyi lagu-lagu cina.

Walaubagaimanapun, kita layan je videoclip ni, supaya wujudnya kesederan kita tentang pengorbanan ayah dan ibu kita menjaga kita sewaktu kita kecil dulu.

Full-time, part-time, and volunteer

When I was doing my pre-university programme in Malaysia, I spent my leisure time by reading a lot of motivational books. I still remember the first book I borrowed from my dad titled " Success is a choice" written by an American writer.

The hobby continued even after I further my studies in Degree in Computer Science. 

I also read self-development books when I have free time. And then when I graduated, I worked as a System Designer for an IT company. I was busy with company projects, and I found out I had less time to read books. 

So, I hardly found time to read books. I was so into reading quotes because it saved my time, rather than finding time to read the whole book to complete.

This is the best quote which I like most. 

“When you're young you have time and energy but no money. When you get older you have money and energy but no time. And later when you finally have time and money, you no longer have energy.”

And then, I come out with my own philosophy about life.

To be a successful person in his career, everyone needs to have full time, part-time and volunteer jobs.

1. Full time job 

When you are in 20's, you must have at least one skill which you are very good in. Some people call it as profession. Find a job which requires professional and technical skills. Example of professional jobs are doctors, architect, accountant, mechanic, businessman, engineer, and interior designer. You will pay your house rental, car monthly installment, electricity, phone bills, food and drinks by using the money you get from the salary. I work as engineer specialize in High performance computing and servers. So far, this full time job is the only work that I get highly-paid as compared to my previous jobs that I have done. I have Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (majoring in Computer Systems) and I  already worked in this industry for 5 years and I never quit from this field. I specialized in supercomputers, servers and IT infrastructure, but I do not have professional skills in computer hacking, software developer and IT gadgets.

2. Part time job

You cannot 100% depend on your full time job for the whole of your life. As you grow older, you will have no time and energy. Everyone should have hobbies and interests. Part time job is what you do for the sake of  finding extra money to support your expenses paid monthly. You must do part time job based on your free time left, and you do it for fun which matches your interests. Examples of part time jobs are tuition teacher, baking cake & cookies, working at restaurant during weekend, selling paintings, data entry, promoter and many more. Even I'm an IT engineer, it does not mean that I have so much money. Therefore I must also find extra money to cover the monthly car installment and house rental.  I like acting, modelling, and travelling. So, I do part time modelling and acting, and writing a blog an article on magazine, be a tour guide to foreigners during my free time. The best part doing part time job is you do it , you get paid, and you enjoy it. There are so many part time job website on the internet, and why not you just give it a try to apply for one. But, please remember that your only intention to get part time job is getting extra income, not more than your full time job, and do not spend so much time on this compared to your full time job. 

3. Volunteer job

As you grow older and older, you will find yourself less interested on your daily professional career and part time jobs, even though the pay is good. God does not create a human living alone. We need to live in a harmony group. Everyone should have healthy social life. You must also spend your time with social activities related to humanity and religion. During my free time on the weekends, I volunteer myself to non-profit organization programme and activities such as Aman Palestin and couchsurfing.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Plan your work, work your plan

Today, while working I recall back these two important quotes which are important in my working environment............. Plan your work, work your plan. and If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Planning is crucial for meeting your needs during each action step with your time, money, or other resources. With careful planning you often can see if at some point you are likely to face a problem. Plan also is like a map. When following a plan, you can always see how much you have progressed towards your project goal.

Planning is also important because it prevent bad things to happen at the end of your project. Planning is easy and gets your ideas clearer for better formation of your final product.

One of the important aspects of planning is that it eliminates bad habits and the fear of failure. When one makes a plan and sticks to it one is likely to break bad habits he or she has and this means you are less likely to fail. Planning also allows you to prioritise, focus on what is important, it reduces crisis management and it provides the framework for informed decision making.

Therefore, everything needs plan. If you are still studying, you must plan how to complete the assignment.
You must also plan what do you want to be after you graduated. By the time you are in the working environment, you must learn how to plan your work and complete the tasks given by boss. Then, you also need to plan your career path. One day you will become a project manager, and planning is very very very  important.

What do you want to be in the next 5 years?

You must have second plan as a back up plan. We call it Plan B. Don't worry too much if the plan does not go well. Remember this quote, If plan A doesn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters.

So, let's plan your work and make sure you work your plan. Good luck!

Working as an IT Engineer for 5 years

 Today is my 5th year of becoming an IT Engineer! There are 3 job positions that I hold in 5 years of working experience and there are also few private and government agencies projects that I participated in.


Grid Computing / Linux Server Support Engineer

• Serves as an escalation from Level 2 server support in MIMOS Berhad.

• Perform complex Linux systems administration tasks in a virtualized hosting environment

• Troubleshoots, configures, and tunes systems. Installs software, patches, upgrades, applications within SLA/escalation guidelines

• Fulfill provisioning orders for new cloud servers and perform website and application migrations on new and existing cloud servers

• Resolve technical and logical support inquiries via phone, chat, and tickets

• Script automation tools to make work faster and more accurate

• Continually identify efficiencies for systems, processes and procedures

• Perform other various duties as assigned

• Installing, configuring, troubleshooting, testing, and managing over 1000 virtual machines by using VMware products, KVM (libvirt)

• Handling user incident problems by using Marvel Software Ltd ticketing system, dedicated to delivering the best ITIL/ISO compliant ITSM software to its client.

• Assisting Software Development and Central Engineering department in improving existing server inventory listing by suing several programming languages such as PHP and Linux Bash Scripting.

• Install, configuring, troubleshooting, testing operating systems such as Redhat , CentOS, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008.

• Monitoring servers by using monitoring tools such Cacti, Nagios, Xymon. 

• Performing daily check up on physical servers in data center, provide technical support for hardware maintenance, making log case to hardware supplier, contractor or vendor for hardware replacement such as SGI, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, IBM.

• Configuring HP integrated Lights Out (iLO3) for HP servers for system administrators to remote access and server monitoring.

Systems Engineer
• Installing, configuring, troubleshooting, testing and on-site support for most Linux-based operating systems such as RHEL, SLES, OpenSuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Knoppix, and Solaris.
• Contribute 90% of total research and development of total company projects in dealing with bioinformatics application.
•    Experience in installing and configuring supercomputer with capabilities more than 120 CPUs and 1TB
memory, and cluster with 40 nodes.
• Enhancing system performance by configuring load balancing, network bonding, RAID setup, server virtualization, LVM.
•    Installing, configuring and managing Email server for a research institute with 100 users.
• Conducting Linux System Administration Training and open source tools for more than 100 people from government agencies and private sectors.
• Assisting technical team on physical installation for servers, storage, tape library, network cabling, Fiber channel, SAS cable, rack mounting, and hardware spare parts.
• Troubleshooting hardware and software failures and provide on-site technical support for company’s clients.
• Managing IT infrastructure and user management for the company (workstation, servers, web, Mediawiki, Samba, NFS, NIS, LDAP, VPN, DNS, VNC, router, access point, modem, printer server).

System Designer

•    Designing and developing web-based application by using J2EE, Java, and Oracle database.
•    Participating in user-requirement study, assisting in the preparation of requirement specifications in accordance to users’ needs.
•    Implementing Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
•    Provide production support and resolve issues for company’s clients.

Training Attendence
•    Attend Knowledge Grid Forum 2009
•    Attend SuSE Studio Training 2009
•    Attend online Training of ScaleMP product 2010
•    Attend short training of Storage EMC VNX and VNXe 2011


Achievement and Project involvement
Asiatic Centre of Genome Technology (ACGT) Sdn. Bhd
•    Installing and configuring Rocks Clusters (Linux distribution) for high performance computing
Cluster for Bioinformatics operation purposes.

Flexcale Systems Sdn Bhd.’s office operation setup
• Installing and maintaining VMware ESXi server and VMware Server, configuring DNS settings, Installing and configuring mail server (Zimbra).

Jabatan Alam Sekitar
• Installation, configuration and testing of VMware Esxi, CentOS, Load Balancing with Balance, DRBD, Heartbeat, MySQL .

Ministry of Agriculture (MOA)
•    Installation and testing for SuSE operating system and Database MySQL.

Toll Group
• Corrective maintenance of Linux OS Server (CentOS 5), Troubleshooting, Installation of components/ softwares (Webmin, VNC), troubleshooting sendmail.

Flexcale Systems Sdn. Bhd.’s Research and Development
•    Research and development of Quota and Traffic Bandwidth Manager to manage user internet
access speed control.


Malaysia Genome Institute (MGI)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for Openfiler Operating
System for NAS server
•    Setup RAID-0 for 3.5Terabytes Storage.
•    Configuring Quota Management for users in NAS Server

Jabatan Alam Sekitar (JAS)
• Conducting training of VMware ESXi, Introduction to Linux, MySQL for government servants at department of Jabatan Alam Sekitar.

Jabatan Meteorologi Malaysia (JMM)
•    Setup RAID-5 hardware level
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for NFS server.

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UTM
• Setup RAID-1 hardware level for Application Server (CentOS 5.4), setup RAID-5 hardware level for Database server (CentOS 5.4), configuring NFS server and client.

Malaysia Genome Institute (MGI)
•    Upgrading existing Rocks Clusters, Installation of Bio informatics software (Blast, Mira, Fasta,
Artemis, Gromacs, Crossmatch, Emboss, Bioperl Iprscan, Stackpack),  Installation of Redhat 7.3 server , Setup DNS server (dnsmasq),  Installation and configuring Zimbra Network Edition Mail Server

Asiatic Centre of Genome Technology Sd. Bhd (ACGT)
•    Cloning Disk image for High Performance Computing server using Live CD and Ghost for Linux
(G4L).

Malaysian Nuclear Agency (MINT)
•    Installing and configuring Rocks Clusters. Installation of Sun Server product (Sun Fire X4140)  .
Sun StorageTek Installation and Configuration by using Common  Array Manager. Install MPI- based software (MCNP)

Sekolah kejuteraan Teknologi Maklumat, Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for High Performance
Computing Rocks Clusters (Linux distribution) for high performance computing Cluster

Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, and testing for ScaleMP, RHEL, Bioinformatics softwares
(Blast, TCoffee, Perl, Emboss, Clustalw, Hmmer, Fasta, Glimmer, Cap3 & Pcap, Mr Bayes, Phylip, Staden Package, Biopython, Velvet, Samtools, Maq, Bowtie, Act, Oases, Bioperl, GeneMark, SSR Finder Module, CLCBio Workbench)
Jabatan Meteorologi Malaysia (JMM)
•    Upgrading existing storage system using Dell Powervault MD1000 and MD1000. (up to 25TB
each server )

Malaysian Centre for Geospatial Data Infrastructure (MACGDI)
•    Data collecting for research purpose on server CPU performance and user accessibility rate by
using VMware capacity planner.

Malaysian Palm oil Board (MPOB)
•    Database migration from Informix to MySQL server.
•    Conducting MySQL training to MPOB staffs

Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM)
   Conducting training  “Introduction to Linux” to FRIM researchers


Malaysian Palm oil Board (MPOB)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing of RHEL and VMware server for SISPEN (IT
department )

Asiatic Centre of Genome Technology (ACGT) Sdn. Bhd.
•    Installing and configuring Rocks Clusters (Linux distribution) for high performance computing
Cluster for Disaster Recovery server

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UTM
•    Installing Intel Fortran® Composer XE 2011 compiler for server.

Malaysian Nuclear Agency (MINT)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for MCNPX on Sun
Microsystems server..

Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB)
•    Migrating database from Informix DB to MySQL.
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for MySQL server and server.
•    Editing Power Builder script at MPOB Hulupaka station
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UTM
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning NFS server and database server.

Malaysia Genome Institute
•    Upgrading HPC server (Rock clusters) and installing bioinformatics tools

National Hydraulic Research Institute of Malaysia (NAHRIM)
• Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for High Performance Computing, Back up server, storage server, tape library, HPC resource manager, and HPC performance monitoring. Tools.

Universiti Malaya Faculty of Dentistry (UMFD)
•    Deliver, installation, configuration, testing, and commissioning project for High Performance
Computing, NFS Back up server.

Meet up with travellers from Indonesia, Spain, Afghanistan

After I came back from Yangon (Myanmar), I had a chance to meet up with foreigners from around the world again!

I managed to meet with an indonesian guy, Pram. He is from West Java, Yogyakarta. He was the one who hosted me during my stay for 5 days solo trip to Indonesia in early 2013. I was lucky to meet him again in Malaysia.

On the same day, I hosted a girl from Spain. Her name is Alicia. Working as a yoga teacher in Koh Samui, Thailand and she came to Malaysia to renew her visa. So, I hosted her for 2 days and brought her to few places in Kuala Lumpur such as Batu Caves, I-City Shah Alam, and KLCC Petronas Twin Tower.

When Alicia and I were walking at KLCC park, there was an afghanistan girl came to me asking to take her photo with background KLCC Petronas building. Then, we had a very long short conversation. Her name reminded me about this planet called, Zuhal. She is a freelance technical writer working in Canada. She was born in Afghanistan and was brought up in Germany. She then moved to Canada living with her family. 

Alicia and Zuhal joined me to go Masjid Jamek, China Town, and Pasar Seni. They had opportunity to try local foods such as Nasi Campur, Tosai (Indian Muslim food), and seafood.

So far, I have hosted and meet up 35 travellers and couchsurfers from all over the world including The United States of America, Spain, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Mauritius, India and more.

For more information about couchsurfing, kindly visit this website www.couchsurfing.org