Melamine tainted milk and Corporate responsibilities (Updated)

After reading yet another corporate statement on the "safety" of their products, I feel compelled to voice out my concerns on these communication gymnastics that these corporations are resorting to.
A) On Sept 24th, Mars Food which imports Snickers, M&M and other dairy based confection from China issued an advertisement that states " We are confident none of our chocolate or confectionery products made in China includes any dairy ingredient adulterated with melamine"
What has confidence got to do with safety of the products? Moreover - those made in China at this time? Get them tested and show the test results (the latest results). Test the products sold in Malaysia. It's not like the problem just happened overnight. It has been on going for quite a while. I am banning Snickers, M&M, Dove and any other Mars Food products from my house with immediate effect!
Updated info for 30th Sept:
Indonesia's food supervisory agency said at the weekend that it discovered some 16 Chinese-made diary products contained melamine, adding that all those products - including well-known brands such as Snickers and M&M's chocolates - would be immediately destroyed. "Mars is extremely surprised about the recent announcement that tests conducted by the... Indonesian regulatory authority, have shown that M&Ms and Snickers products made in China contain melamine," the company said in a statement released late Monday in Hong Kong. "The results announced (in Indonesia)... conflict with and are completely inconsistent with all analytical results received to date by Mars from governmental agencies and independent laboratories across Asia and Europe."

B) Today 29th Sept, the local Pizza Hut (in response to another news article of positive presence of melamine in cheese in Pizza Hut Taiwan) says " we did a thorough review of our supply base last year which demonstrates that none of our supply was impacted. All our suppliers have confirmed that this is still the case". Huh??
Hello - this is already September 2008. What you did last year may have an effect (if any) only for the few months thereafter. How sure are you that you are not affected by the melamine adulteration since then? I am not!! And you asked your suppliers for their scout's honor?? That's like asking people to swear on the Quran that they are innocent. Of course they will swear their innocence - or risk losing money in product recalls!!
Pizza Hut is also off my household list of prodcuts to purchase.

Denai Alam - 98% ready!!

As mentioned in the previous post, my house in Denai Alam has been cleaned up and is almost ready for occupancy.

With a land area of 20 feet by 70 feet, the building itself takes up almost 60 feet of the 70 feet length, double storey. With 4 bedrooms, 3 washrooms/bathrooms, a separate kitchen area (renovated from the original design), a separate washing machine and clothes drying area upstairs - I had renovated the house to be as I would have liked it if I were to stay there. In fact, end of this year, we may just move into it so that I can commence renovations on my existing house.

The security of the house has been beefed up with grills - both front and back, upstairs and downstairs. Even the main gate had been changed to one of heavier iron bars.

Each room has an air conditioner point added as well as lights and fans installed.
All 3 bathrooms have heater points installed.

If anyone knows of any potentials who would like to rent a double storey house in Denai Alam, please contact me by leaving a comment and your contact number.

Thank you.

Alex's 10th birthday

Seems like only yesterday that Alex came into our life and in a blink of an eye, 10 years have passed. Today, we decided NOT to celebrate his birthday. We had celebrated his birthday every year without fail and this year, decided to give it a rest.

Madeline and Vincent showed up unexpectedly this morning as Madeline had urinary problems due to her pregnancy. They got that sorted out in the early morning and decided to check in on us if we were available for breakfast.

So we went for breakfast, then decided to go to Denai Alam to have a peek at my house. Shirley had assured me that the ground floor had been cleared and washed. Only yesterday I was there and could only sweep and clean the upstairs portion. Sure enough, everything looked spic and span!.

After that we dropped in on 1 Utama. As we passed by Chilli's Alex asked if we could take lunch there and so it came to pass that his birthday lunch was at Chilli's (unplanned), together with Madeline and Vincent. We also asked Alicia, the girl serving us if they could have anything special for the birthday boy. Chilli's did have something for him - a brownie with ice cream on top.

Together with another transformer figurine from Anime Tech, Alex was happy and contented as we headed home.

Meeting of body parts and reminiscing

Yesterday, there was a meeting of body parts at the Curve. There were also honorary guests present.These body parts had known each other for coming to 27 years!!

At the top is Khoo TL, who does not seem to have aged!! Now, how can a Khoo be a body part. Well... in Cantonese, Khoo is part of the male anatomy - as in ku ku jiao! Khoo interviewed me for a position in HP in 1981 as a Customer Engineer. I must have exceeded his expectations when I was posted in Singapore for a month, one month after I had joined HP. I was there to back up the CE there who was on national Service (reservist training). With no training (and often no initial understanding of the instruments), I managed to attend to a majority of service calls and installations for both Medical and Analytical products. On my third month with HP, Khoo gave me a 25% pay increment - that was RM300 extra!!

Lip WT was the Sales Engineer for Analytical products. How appropriate - he pays LIP service to customers to get them to purchase our products. His hair is silvery grey now and thinning. He used to say that a sign of success of a man is that he either lose his hair by 30 or have his hair turn grey.

Toh HK was my senior in Support. He used to be a sanitation engineer when he was studying in the UK. Over here, we call them the rubbish collector la!! Toh uses his TOE to prod customers. Kicks them if they don't behave. And he has very strong political views. Here is a classic shot of the TOE and THUMB

and I am the THUMB who gives the thumbs up whenever I complete my assignments.

And hence we were parts of the body!!!

Honorary guests for the night were Kong PH, Tai Hooi Lin (I guess he also qualifies as the THIGH - though I am not sure how that fits into operations) and a long time customer Jaya from PORIM.

We had dinner at the Bavarian Bierhaus at the Curve - ordered a couple of pork knuckles (delicious but pricey), a bunch of sausages and I lost count of the number of jugs of beer that flowed till 11pm.

Picture above was taken in Oct 1984 when yours truly was only 26 years young! We had the Sales Engineer for medical products (Goh), the admin (Siti), the Medical Support CE (James) and the 2 parts of the body.

There is talk of a arranging a major gathering of all ex HP staff in mid October!. Sure like to see that happen. The photo above is just about ALL of HP Sales Malaysia in early 80s!! Only 2 of those people are still in Agilent - Khor AK (in black standing behind me) and of course me!. The next photo was taken on a company outing to Fraser's Hill. Nobody believes that I was ever THIN in my life!!

And this next visual here has Siti (the one in Yellow)- our admin for a number of years. She was from Penang and spoke Mandarin Chinese, English and Malaylast but not least is the Far East management team for Analytical back in the 80s!! Back then Dick Aal had mgmt responsibilities for the Intercon region (which was Latin Americas, Canada, Japan and Far East Asia).

I can't for the life of me remember the names of those 3 at the back row!!

Internal Security Act of Malaysia (ISA)

Reading a recent post and the interview with a possible UMNO president candidate Ku Li, looks like I can also be a candidate for ISA!!

Ku Li: No. We must review it so that it cannot be abused to detain people whom they don't like. Currently. they can detain you because they don't like your long hair or another person who is fat.

Ha ha!!