IndyJunior © Bryan Boyer

Friday, November 17, 2006

No More Extra Pages...

To all the Canadians out there. Canada no longer puts extra pages into your passport should you run out (say in the middle of an extended trip).

Of course, some of you may already know this or may have figured it out before hand but it never hurts to put the information out there.

Applying for a new passport doesn't seem to be a problem. The only thing is it would take about 3-4 weeks to get it.

Of course, we also read in our Africa LP book that some border crossings look suspiciously at brand new passports too!

You just can't win...

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Is This Thing Real?

We were at Low Yat Plaza, one of KL's electronics malls, in the downtown yesterday.

Yes, we were on another mission...and yes, J will be posting about it very soon I'm sure.

I want to talk about the funny thing that happened while we were looking for this toy, but first, some history...

A couple of weeks ago, we were down in the same mall in search of cheap memory stick pro duo's. Armed with the prices available for the 2 GB cards in Canada, we went to all the shops which sold them to get pricing. And man did it vary. There was almost a 200 RM ($66 CDN) spread in prices from cheapest to most expensive!

I was ready to settle for a card that I had bargained for already for 250 RM. Not bad I thought. A bit cheaper than what I saw online in Canada (although tigerdirect had it even cheaper I found out later!) anyways, we thought we'd hit one more shop where we saw some and to our surprise, the sales person told us it was 188 RM!!! It even came with some "free" mp3's....yes, I got 180 MB of love songs! :)

After I asked if he could go cheaper (I just had to ask! :) ), he explained something about how they were overstocked and this is cheaper than anyone else already....whatever so we bought it and it's worked great ever since.

Now back to yesterday...we're checking out this gizmo, which happens to be another memory stick pro duo user and while bargaining for it we mentioned another shop had a 1GB included for x amount...the sales guy did some calculating and said he didn't know how they could give that price UNLESS....unless the memory stick was a fake from China!!!

He told us how there are companies that have copied the outside packaging for these sticks, all with the official Sony labels and such. Appartently, it has forced Sony here in Malaysia to put out packaging with a special holographic sticker and pin number which you can log on to a website to check if it's legit.

To me it was a bit silly since if you are logging on to check this pin number, you've already bought the stick and if it's fake, there's probably not much you can do anymore. That thought aside, it left us wondering what the heck we bought 2 weeks ago? I definitely didn't have a sticker and pin number! So off we went looking at all the different shops which sold these sticks and some did and some didn't have the sticker. Some came with an adapter, some didn't. There's so much variety that I don't know what to believe.

I still don't know if what I bought was real, and we thought to avoid this problem, we would buy a Sandisk version for J's toy. Everyone pushes the 5 yr International warranty etc, but when we got home and I opened up the box, the little "warranty" sticker was ripped and only a little piece left, and on the box, it said warranty will be handled by the company we bought it from (instead of Sandisk I assume).

wtf man.....W...T...F!?!?

The Right Side is the Wrong Side...

It finally happened...I "accidently" ended up driving on the right side of the road. :P

All was going so well until we got into the smaller streets across from where the coffee shops are. We were heading there to pick up lunch and I was busy talking when I made a left turn and for some reason I just ended up on the right side. I guess part of it was I was looking for a parking spot on the right side but I wasn't concentrating and just by instinct the car ended up there. Luckily, speeds don't go more than 15 km/h here (really small street).

There was only one car coming and I remember thinking "what the heck is he doing on my side of the road" before I finally realized it was me that was on the wrong side.

The other guy was probably thinking what an idiot! Sorry dude!

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Should've, Could've, Would've

Looks like we may be hitting a bit of a snag in our plans soon.

I didn't really give it much thought before we left but it's looking like almost every country in Africa requires a tourist visa. Now normally, it's not that big a deal to get the visa's but it is if you only have 4 empty pages left in your passport!

Shoot.

Live and learn. For anyone doing extended trips, think about gettting a brand new passport before heading out. The thing I didn't count on was you have one page for the visa, then the customs person takes another page to stamp your entry and exit. Now I did try to get the Indian customs guy to put his stamp on a used page but all he did was stare at me blankly and proceed to take up another precious empty page.

Thanks buddy.

Looks like we're heading into town tomorrow to visit the Canadian Embassy to see what options we may have.

Bad News then Good News

Not news about us. This is about one of my favourite bands.

A while back Blink 182 decided to go on hiatus (ie. broke up) and when I found out, I was a bit sad to think I wouldn't get to hear anymore music from them. I don't think there's a song that they wrote that I didn't like. Some more than others for sure but they were all good with a great sound.

Now that I've had some extra time on my hands recently I've been able to read up on stuff that interests me and I was happy to find that the members hadn't stopped creating but decided to start 2 new bands!

Yes, hooray.....

Angels and Airwaves is the new group from the same person who started Boxcar Racer. He even pulled in some of the people from that group (except the drummer). The site is amazing. They're even coming out with a feature film. The demos sound pretty good. I can't wait until I get back to grab the CD.

+44 is the next group started by the remaining members. Again a great sound. Their CD comes out on the 14th of this month. Again I can't wait to get it. For those of you in Toronto who are Blink fans, +44 will be at the Phoenix on 11/21!!!! Sweet....

Now all I need to do is figure out how to spec out a sweet multi-media PC. ;)