Titi Eco Resort

Having just bought a 13 years old second hand Toyota Landcruiser Prado, my hands are itched to the max. When my wife suggested a trip to Titi Eco Resort last week, I jumped at the opportunity to take the car for a spin.

I started charting the course 2 days before the trip. With Google Map, it was a breeze. Unlike good'ol days where you will have to flip through maps, making sense out of every twists & turns and cryptic street names that are ever so confused. Less than 30 minutes in front of my laptop, I had the entire route mapped.


View Day trip - Titi Eco Resort, Seremban & KL in a larger map


I took the route from Hulu Langat through the winding roads running along the ranges to Titi Eco Resort. We had travelled this route before, but, we did not drive all the way. Instead, we made a u-turn when we saw the road sign saying that we are entering Negeri Sembilan. This time, we are going to drive all the way.

It was 7:30am, when we left our home. I drove on Kesas Highway and made a detour at Sri Petaling for a dim sum breakfast before we continue our journey. Alas, I can't remember the name of this restaurant, but, we simply choose the one with the most patrons. Well, this is our best bet as can't be everyone making the wrong decision to eat at the same lousy food stall? What are the odds? Anyway, we made the right choice, the steaming hot dim sum was gobble up in no time even the choosy girls are enjoying their food.


It was a scenic drive from Hulu Langat to Titi. The girls were sitting comfortably with pillows and blankets, watching movie from the LCD screen mounted on the ceiling.


We had an impromptu stop at a sign board near the hulu langat dam after spotting 2 troops of monkey savouring a truck load of papayas that was generously "donated" by some fruit farms nearby.


The girls were excited to see the monkeys up close. But mind you, this bunch of close relatives of ours is smart and alert, the moment my wife raised the camera and wanted to take some photos, all of them disappeared in a blink. They must have thought that the camera is some sort of weapons and flee.


On the winding road, as we climb higher (approx. 350m above sea level), the air is getting cooler and the sight was simply magnificent. You can see mountain ranges in a distance, covered in mist, reflecting sun lights that shine through. It was breath taking!

Amelia took a shot with the Hulu Langat Dam as the background

After about 40 minutes & 27km of winding road (Jalan Sungei Lalang), we finally reached the resort.

While I went to check on our booking, Amanda took a shot from the sunroof of the car.

The girls took a shot right at the entrance of the resort

A beautiful looking flower with the size of an infant's head.

Do not expect a five-star looking resort entrance. This (so-called) resort was built by a retired engineer who is committed to growing organic produces. It has a home-stay flavour to its building & set up. The fresh air and natural scent from the fertiliser will wake you senses :) By all means, the scent is not intrusive but good enough to remind you of where you are.

Click on the image above to have a panoramic view of the resort from the entrance. The resort occupies a big area and include a hill top where the main building is being located. The front portion houses the vegetable & herbs farm, ostrich, fertiliser processing hut (turning sugar cane husk into organic fertiliser), etc. while the centre & back portion of the land is where wooden buildings of various designs & flavours are built for accommodation.

Yoshinkan Aikido Malaysia, Family Day 2010

All three of us enrolled into the Yoshinkan Aikido class at the dojo located at Jalan Gasing in November 2009. It was great seeing the girls picking up the techniques and at the same time, a good exercise for me. Well, I have aching shoulders, butts, thighs, etc. but nevertheless, it feels good :)

YAM hosted the family day on 16th Jan 2010 and the two girls were included in the demo. I was pleasantly surprise as they had only attended fewer than 5 lessons but knowing this is a good learning experience, I encouraged them to take part.

You will notice Amber (5 years old) is still having problems figuring out the left and right. Amelia, on the other hand, is getting better with the movement and shows confidence in every move.

Bangkok Trip - Day #2

Bangkok Trip - Day #3

Bangkok Trip - Day #4

Bangkok Trip - Day #1

Windows 7 Starter Edition

My hand was iching.... Can't resist the temptation to leave my daughter's Asus Eee 900 alone, running Windows XP. I really need to give it a shot and see how Windows 7 is performing on a Celeron 900 netbook (not even ATOM)

Let's look at the spec, nothing special.

Asus Eee 900

- Celeron 900 processor

- 1GB RAM

- 4GB SSD + 16GB SSD = 20GB SSD

- 10.1" LCD panel with 1.3Mp Web Cam

First up, I downloaded the Windows 7 Starter edition from MSDN ;)

I copied the ISO file into my DELL E6400 (Win7 x64) and load it up using MagicDisc; Daemon tool had lost my favour after it started to charge for the software and burried the FREE version deep down in the forum.

Next,... wait a minute. Great. I forgot to bring my USB DVD-ROM drive. Ok, need to switch to Plan-B. I will have to install the OS using a thumbdrive or a mobile hard disk. I have no done it before (via USB storage) but what the heck, I started googling and within seconds, voila, I found this site to be very helpful and started following the procedures after backing up those data in my mobile hard disk. Kudos to the writer, it was just barely 20 minutes and I am ready to rock & roll. My mobile hard disk is bootable and has all the Windows 7 CD contents in it.

Time to change the BIOS of the Asus Eee. I booted up the Asus Eee (make sure it is connected to power) and start playing with the BIOS configuration. I changed the boot up sequence to enable my USB mobile HDD as the primary device to boot up. Once that is done, I just need to save the settings and the netbook will reboot.

The netbook automatically booted up from the mobile HDD and started the installation sequence. The installation was a breeze but again, hindered by the computing power and slow USB connectivity, it really take a long while (appox. 1 hours) to complete the installation. Nothing too fancy or surprise here, it's the same process as per Vista.

Upon completion of the installation, do remember to disconnect or reject the media (in my case, the mobile HDD) before the first restart. It took a couple of minutes before the netbook finally showing the configuration screen (asking for user name and password), once past that stage, you're at the desktop of Windows 7 starter.

I had a quick check and first thing came to my attention was the screen resolution. It is running at 800x600. Asus Eee 900 screen res should be 1024x600 and this requires a quick fix. I fired up the Windows Updates knowing most fixes and drivers shall be available online and as expected, just a moment later, the drivers are downloaded (Intel GM910) and installed, well, not after 2 reboots to get it all installed.

Windows 7 starter is running reasonably well on the Asus Eee 900 now. The CPU usage is constantly hovering around 9%-20% with one IE instance running with a download in progress. However, I had witnessed that the CPU utilization hits over 90% and stayed there when I am installing a driver. This should be normal since Celeron 900 is a single and rather old processor.

Of the 1GB memory that this unit is having, 512kb+ is being allocated as Cache while 640K is available with about 100K Free. I would say, this is rather sufficient for executing those run of the mill applications.