Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Sunday Market at Kota Kinabalu












Sunday Markets at Kota Kinabalu offers a lot of goodies . It is a haven for traditional souvenirs made by local. At the same time there are arts works, paintings, craft works that you can;t possibly get from any of the city shops.




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Sunday, December 7, 2008

Part 1: Bukit Antarabangsa : The place no man should live !

Malaysian loved to blame each other after any disaster that involved human live . But Malaysian will never learn and will never change.

Landslide is nothing new in the history of civil engineering but engineers, authorities, developers, contractors who are parties to such risky development will never stop constructing and pretend nothing will happen once they sign of that piece of paper called Certificate of Fitness.

The cost of carrying out detail soil and geological investigation are normally not cheap. Owner as well as the developer had always find ways to avoid such costly preliminary exercise. Furthermore such investigation are normally carried out within a limited area of the development. One can never tell how the slip can happen as there are so many possibilities the failure can happen. If you add the unknown future development, change of surface and underground drainage system, increase in surcharge loading from new development, then all the factor of safety will get very fuzzy.

Eventually what was describe safe now will not necessarily be safe next year.

(This is the first part of article on the "'Landslide : A Reflection of Malaysia Builder Mentality").

Note : I had spent many years on civil engineering in Malaysia as well as in Europe . I love the technical part of the profession but over years I found Malaysian do not respect the judgment of good engineering. No matter whether they are minister, government officers, millionaires, academician, lawyers, engineers, bankers, they do not value engineering advice.

Project are carried out at blazing speed (accelerated), proper design time are not given priority, contractors are not forced to have registered professional engineers and there is no standard fees despite existence of scale of fees.

The industry is full of greedy people who know more about politic than about building codes and engineering ethics.

In my next article I will try to share some of my bad experience dealing with project owners, contractors in Malaysia and some my nice and not so nice experience working with foreign engineering companies.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Pasar Ikan Masin Kota Kinabalu : extended hours shopping
















Kota Kinabalu offers plenty of stuff for travellers to shop around. There are more shoppers at the traditional market than the modern and up market shopping complexes like Wisma Warisan, Warisan Square, Centre Point, 1 Borneo.

Just wonder if these traditional shops are immuned from the 'global financial crunch'