I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in four weeks, having been away so long at first due to a nasty cold, and then a trip to Malaysia.

I track my weight at the gym, and as mentioned before, I've been losing weight steadily. Yesterday, I found that I'd lost another 1.4 kg (3 pounds) in the intervening month since my last visit, and now am at a many-year low of 92.4kg (204lb). At 6'4" (192cm), my target is 200 lb (91kg), so I'm almost there.

Anyway, I'm trying to guess what it was that allowed me to lose three pounds in the last month, despite almost no exercise, and have come up with a few possibilities:

• It's all from the nasty cold, which really took a lot out of me.

• After all the chocolate I ate on Valentine's day, I got onto somewhat of a sweet-tooth kick, and since then have been a bit heavy on the cakes, custards, ice creams, cookies, cupcakes, muffins, etc. It's been a diet heavy on everything, and maybe that's the key to losing weight? 🙂

• The copious quantities of mildly-spicy food we ate in Malaysia are somehow good for the diet?

• The disruption of my normal eating habits, due to travel. Normally I eat a lot of cereal for breakfast, or, really, any time we're not eating out or Fumie's not cooking. And I like munchies at night. I did without those while sick and in Malaysia.

• Swimming at the beach and at the hotel pool?

• Previous visits to the gym have upped my metabolism such that I can lose weight even while being a couch potato with a beer and chips?

I was fitted for a suit yesterday -- I'm buying a suit for the first time in 10+ years. The guy measured my waist at 94cm (37”), which is a bit more than what I sort of think I should be at (32”), but I guess that's when I was in my 20s and had no build and no fat (and weighted 180lbs). I really should be at about 36”, so I do have a few more pounds to lose. At least, I'd like to keep my waist measurement less than my inseam measurement, and so 36” is the magic point.

Update: many years later, I'm in much better shape, at about 79kg (175lbs) with a ~30” waist.

We took a total of six Malaysia Airlines flights during our recent trip, and in every respect but one, Malaysia Airlines was a first-rate airline. The staff (reservation and ground and air) were very nice, service was prompt and good, the planes and gates and terminals were all clean and bright. Flights generally left and arrived on time without fuss or problem.

But I need to rant about one issue: the airline's collective lack of common sense when it comes to night flights and the basic human need for sleep.

Our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Kansai International left at midnight, and lasted about six hours. I generally try to avoid redeyes, but have been on a few, and previously they've all run under a similar schedule: you get a light drink/snack right after takeoff, and then an announcement along the lines of:

We know most of you want to just sleep, so if you'd like any drink/food, feel free to call us or come back to the galley. We'll turn the lights off, so use your seat light if you'd like to read. We'll serve a snack an hour before landing.

Even so, periodically throughout the flight the attendants quietly walk the isles with trays of water and peanuts. It allows those that want to sleep to do so, yet still provides service to the rest.

Our Malaysia Airlines flight started out similarly. There was a light snack and then the lights were dimmed, and soon people were falling asleep. But an hour and fifteen minutes into the flight, everyone was jarred awake by the pilot loudly giving his welcome speech. “Thank you for flying with us” and “We'll be flying over....” blah blah blah blah. Why, I wondered, are you telling me what we'll fly over when it's pitch black outside, and anyway, why did you wake me up for this!?.

Two hours later I was awoken again by all kinds of noise in the central galley, which I was near. We were two and a half hours from landing, but they were already preparing for breakfast (it was 3:30am!). They turned on the lights and came through with a drink. I asked the stewardess why on earth are you waking people up for this at 4am? Don't you realize that people want to sleep? She said that they couldn't get through breakfast in time if they don't start now, as if ANYONE CARED ABOUT THAT. She was completely unapologetic, just a robot doing its job. I was shocked and angry (and very tired).

A half an hour later when they came through with the food, the stewardess actually WOKE ME UP to ask if I wanted to eat breakfast. I don't know whether it was the same one or not, as I didn't even look out from under my eyemask before waving her off.

In the end, they were completely done with their service more than an hour before we landed, so if they really felt the need to give a full breakfast (at 4:20am!), they could have started an hour later, giving their customers an hours extra sleep.

But they should have let people sleep from right after takeoff until just before landing. Note that this is a regularly-scheduled flight, so they deal with passengers wanting to sleep every day. I can't tell whether their entire lack of clue is due to inconsideration or just being stupid, but neither justify such an unforgivable corporate attitude.

At least one person could get some sleep:

(click to see Exif data and map)

We're back in Kyoto after 10 days in Malaysia.

Fumie and I had left Penang earlier in the day to head to Kuala Lumpur for some shopping. We had been originally scheduled to make the flight in the evening, to connect with the midnight departure of our flight to Japan, but we went in the early afternoon so Fumie could visit some shops. Fumie's mom and Anthony took the original 9pm flight, and we met them in the Kuala Lumpur airport.

For our shopping trip, we first went to “Suria KLCC” (KLCC is “Kuala Lumpur City Center”), a huge ultra-modern shopping center at the foot of the until-recently tallest building in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers. (They didn't look all that tall standing at their base, but that could be because they're not “flat”, and so you don't get quite the same perspective of tallness when that close. I dunno.)

We then tried to take a cab to another place (“Starhill Shopping Center”) less than a mile away. But after progressing only a quarter mile or so in 20 minutes of late-afternoon traffic, we got out and walked. It seemed that the moment we got out, the traffic started moving. Oh well.

Anyway, we got back to the airport in time to meet Fumie's mom and Anthony, and we all took a Malaysia Airlines redeye (left Kuala Lumpur at 12:05am) to Osaka (arrived at Kansai International a few minutes before 7am). All told, it was about a six-hour flight (there's a one-hour time difference in there).

It was a zippy flight, at one point a half an hour before landing reaching a ground speed of 1,054 kilometers per hour (655 mph), which is just about the speed of sound in the air up there: where we had just started descending from 41,000 feet -- 12 and a half kilometers up. Of course, we weren't actually flying “at the speed of sound” because our travel was through a block of air that itself was moving at about 250 kph (155mph) in our general direction (a 155mph tail wind), so our speed relative to the air we were moving through was only 500 miles per hour. Still sounds zippy to me, though.

After an hour and a half of immigration, customs (paying duty on our shopping), and waiting around, we finally boarded a shuttle bus. Two hours later, at 10:20am, we arrived home. Phew.

All in all it was a very nice trip. I do wish, though, that I hadn't lost my iPod. I didn't lose my camera, luckily, so I now have 600+ photos to process (on top of a few hundred remaining from before I got sick before the trip).

In taking a quick look over the shots, I thought this one was cute. A runny nose knows no vacation:

(click to see Exif data and map)

[UPDATE: there is an update on this picture]

I've been in Malaysia for a bit over a week. We stayed the first three nights at a hotel on Penang Island (a large island about the size of Silicon Valley and just about as well developed) and then moved two miles away to Fumie's dad's place, also on Penang. He's here on a long-term work assignment.

For the weekend we went to Langkawi island, a somewhat smaller and vastly less-developed island a 20-minute flight north of Penang, just off the southern border of Thailand. Our hotel, the Andaman, was a thirty-minute drive from the airport and exactly at the edge of nowhere.

The Andaman is a study in contrasts. They aim to be a 5-star world-class resort, and their RM900 (about US $270) rate for a small one-bedroom room is on the slightly low side of par for that (I did meet someone paying US$400 for a room, so I guess we got lucky). The breakfast buffet cost US$21, and a cocktail $7.50. Yet, private in-room baby-sitting costs less than $3/hr.

The room has no clock, and none are available should you ask. Their food presentation (utilizing flowers and leaves and shoots from the surrounding rainforest) is the best I have ever seen, eclipsing what I've seen at swanky restaurants in DC, Paris, London, and Kyoto. The room was clean and the air conditioner worked very well, but the general condition was not much better than you might find at the average Motel 6. (There were, to its credit, many more towels than you'd find at a Motel 6.)

The resort had its own private beach which was unfortunately devoid of young women in skimpy bathing suits. Massages ran about $25-$50 per hour. They had a “business center” (a room with two computers) with internet access, but the computers were running Windows XP with only 128 meg of memory, which rendered them and their 2.8GHz Pentium processors virtually useless.

Anyway, we arrived back here (Penang) yesterday. Tomorrow, Fumie and I go early to Kuala Lumpur for some shopping, then meet Anthony and Fumie's mom at KL's airport for a midnight flight back to Japan.

Some random observations about Malaysia:

• The Weather Channel doesn't know much about Penang weather. Before coming they (via Yahoo! Weather) predicted thunderstorms every day of my visit. One day had a brief (30-minute) shower, and very late one night the skies positively opened up for an hour. Otherwise, it's been fantastic weather.

• There are a lot of wireless access points in residential areas, but very few have WEP (basic minimal security) turned off. Since even access points with a name like “default” have WEP, I have to guess that it's on by default for most units sold here. We're at a cluster of five or six 22-story buildings with a total of 331 units, and I found only one open access point that I can connect to. I'm composing this posting offline, and will trot over to Building “F”, floor 16, to “borrow” someone's WAP to upload to my blog. (Since I'm composing offline, there are no embedded links, sorry.)

• Mc Donald's offers delivery here. I must stress that I have experienced neither Mc Donald's food nor its delivery on this trip, but judging from the “McDelivers” signs plastered on a McDonald's we went by, they offer the service.

• There's surprisingly little smoking. It's wonderful. Tourists are more likely to smoke than the locals.

• They're starting to put timers on the traffic lights and cross walks. This, too, is wonderful -- more so than you can imagine. When at a red light or a crosswalk, you know exactly how many seconds until it turns green, and vice-versa. It seems like it would be “nice” but not that big a deal, but it's a huge de-stresser.

• Small motorbikes are very popular, and I've seen up to four riders on one (Mom, dad, big brother, tiny infant). The vast majority of riders wear helmets, although substantially less on Langkawi where everything seems to be a bit more laid back.

• Traffic at first seems to be somewhat chaotic, but after a while you get a feel for the cadence of things, and now after a week it feels well orchestrated. My general impression is that it's more sane than Kyoto or Silicon Valley (and vastly more-so than Southern California). It's so much better than in Thailand or India, which, previously, my preconceptions had Malaysia with.

• There are always exceptions. When traffic backs up at a red light, there is occasionally a car which rudely jumps out and drives in the opposite lane to jump in front of others. A notable percentage of motorbikes aren't generally too concerned about stopping for red lights -- at least, not stopping for very long. (They're about on par with pedestrians waiting for a red crosswalk sign to become green -- some wait, some don't.)

• At least in Penang, there's a preponderance of one-way streets with no apparent “other way” street that I can detect. If you miss a turn and don't know exactly how to get back, you're in trouble.

• The national currency is the Malaysian Ringgit, and prices are quoted as “RM900” (the hotel room) or “RM1.80” (a can of Coke -- 50 US cents). Yet, there occasionally seems to be some habit/fad to use the word “dollar” instead of “Ringgit”. It was quite confusing the first time I ran into it.

• Malaysian food is yummy, although I would be hard-pressed to name or describe much of what I've had.

• Today we went to a department store that was as modern, well lit, and well stocked as any I'd been to in Japan or the US. They had a Japanese-style bakery with all kinds of yummy things. A fancy pastry was “$1.30”, but the “$” really meant “Ringgit”, so the fancy pastry was US 35 cents.

• Islam is the predominant religion, and as such many women wear head scarves (not the full-body black thing with just a slit for the eyes, but, rather, the kind of head scarf Aunt Fanny might have worn to church in the old days). Sometimes it goes with jeans or other regular clothes, but often it goes with a stunningly beautiful, vividly colorful long flowing dress. One of the most beautiful I ever saw (and I've seen many jaw-droppingly beautiful dresses here) was on a young girl standing at an intersection in the middle of Langkawi island, waiting to cross on her bicycle, on here way home from school. It was hot and sunny and her scarf and dress were vividly lime, and her appearance was pristine in every respect. I very much wanted to take her photograph, but the taxi was moving and I was too stunned to act quickly enough.

• Malaysians really know their juice. We were at a typical outdoor cafe (which is much more of a controlled-chaos mad-house than the roads) and I asked the waitress what juices they had, and she rattled off a list so long and so fast that I literally couldn't listen quickly enough to take it all in. Somewhere in the list I heard “guava” and stopped her. What I got was green. (I've since learned that there's green guava and red guava, the latter being what Kern's produces in Hawaii.) Watermelon juice is a popular drink -- you can get it anywhere. It tastes like they squeezed a watermelon and poured the runoff into your glass, which is I'm sure exactly what's done much of the time. Apple juice comes with a heavy green foam head; I have no idea what it is, but it's tasty.

• There's a 100% excise tax on imported cars. “Proton”, the main Malaysian car maker, therefor enjoys a huge price advantage. From what I can tell, though, their cars seem to be in the same league as Honda or Toyota. At least, visually, they seem to share the same designer. Cars in general are getting more and more popular -- even just a few years ago the number of motorbikes was apparently much more than now, but people have graduated to cars as the economy has gotten better. Things look very bright for Malaysia, except for the impending traffic jam that will hit when the economy gets just a bit better.

• There's a lot of nice public artwork (fountains, etc.) that's particularly pretty at night. Both public and private properties often light up their grounds at night with colorful lights, making for very pleasant sights. This is all over, not just the big towns or tourist areas.

• Car seats are not required for children unless they're in the front seat.

• The general feeling I get around Penang is much of what I feel in Silicon Valley. Lots of specialty shops, lots of hi tech, lots of people, a generally safe feeling, mobile-phone advertisements everywhere. The only big differences are that high-rise buildings (20+ stories) are all over, and the mosque (or whatever they're called) ring out five times a day calling their faithful to prayer.