My luck are running out day by day.

First my car’s timing belt, then the LRT, then the Blackberry, then my house. Now another problem pops-up.

This time its my car’s power steering pump - it’s broken. It broke on Tuesday for no apparent reason. Another one is the engine, it makes weird noises according to Tina.

Few days back, repaired my timing belt for RM380, thought I was lucky then as it has not affected my engine. According to the mechanic, the power steering pump will costs me another RM600. By the way, am still wondering why the car spare part in this country is so damn expensive?

Could this be a sign to change my car?

Argh! The year of the Rat is definely not a good year for me. I wonder what will be next. I guess all I have to do is to tackle the problem one step at a time, as I have always done it in the past.

Based on my recent timing belt experience, most mechanic says that I was lucky. In general, whenever your car’s timing belt snaps, your piston, valve, camshaft, crankshaft, etc will have problem too. This translate to expensive costs of repairing the engine, some cars need to replace most part of the engine. In view of this, I was lucky enough to get away with just a timing belt snap. Phew!

However, the expensive repair costs does not necessarily true for all kind of car. It would also depend on the type of engine you have. Based on my readings there are two types of engine namely “interference” and “non-interference”. In my case, it is a non-interference engine, so if the timing belt breaks on a non-interference design, there is enough clearance between the pistons and valves to prevent damaging contact. On the other hand, an interference design does not have sufficient clearance between those parts and engine damage would result from a broken timing belt, thus, expensive repair costs.

But why do you need to replace your timing belt?

Basically, the purpose of a timing belt is to provide a quiet, flexible connection between the camshaft and crankshaft to keep the valves opening and closing in phase with the movement of the pistons.

As a way forward and a good lesson for all, I would recommend replacement at 60,000-mile intervals - better safe than sorry right! Again, breakage is not the only reason to replace your timing belt. Looseness and wear will allow the timing belt to slip and change valve timing resulting in very poor performance, a no-start condition, or engine damage.

So, change your timing belt regularly.

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Gavyn’s latest road runner - Peg Perego - Pliko P3 Classico!

Bought it today, after comparing various types of pushchairs that is available in the market in Malaysia. It offers all the function that I need in a pushchair.

What do you think?

Some people say Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF). But today I got to sat My God It’s Friday - and this is not my lucky day. Today is the worse day for me. I have not got any worst day than today. The story goes like this.

1. I was driving this morning through my usual road to work - the Ampang-KL Elevated Highway (AKLEH) when my 7-year old Kia Sportage Engine stopped in a sudden. Loss the power, loss the break and it was totally shut down. Slowly I parked it at the side road, of course with the usual KL honking cars. Soon, the highway concessionaires patrol car came and tow the car to a safer place. Looks like, we will know how much the damage ($$$) is tomorrow.
2. Not being able to drive my car, I just dump it there and proceeded to the nearest Damai LRT. LRT! Oh my God, looking at my watch it was 0800 am - and you can actually imagine how the LRT looks like. It’s like a sardine can, really! I almost suffocate because there are so many weird smell combined in a confined space. The funny thing is I really feel like a suffocating sardine and at the same time stuck to the LRT glass. The train was so full. I guess if an accident happen, a definite dead is inevitable.
3. Finally, my blackberry failed to sync with the company’s server. For this, I blame the maxis employee who did not properly configured my SIM card.

Oh, am so not lucky today.

It has been quite long since I last check my traffic. Last night, after inserting my advertisers, I have some spare time to check my traffic. I was tempted to see my traffic because I notice that there is a sudden jump in traffic coming into this blog. As far as I know, I have not done any optimisation since few months back to this blog therefore do not justify the increase in traffic.

Based on one of the many stats program that I have, here are the recent stats on number of unique visitors that came into L@bunda dot net :

April 2008 - 1117 (average/ day: 37)

May 2008 - 1686 (average/ day: 54)

June 2008 - 3681 (average/ day: 123)

Jul 2008 (as at 01 Jul 2008) - 178 (average/ day: 178)

Now, notice the sudden jump in the numbers of visitors especially on the average/day. Again, this fascinates me. So I did some checking and found out that this event is due to one or a combination of keyword/ keyphrases. The keywords/ keyphrases are “Che Det Blog” which came from one of my previous post that basically informing people on our former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir’s blog. This blog was first posted by me on 26th May 2008.

Out of curiosity, I opened google and typed “Che Det Blog”. Guess what popped out? The L@bunda Blog is in no.5 in the list. That’s good right I don’t know how long this will last but I guess it will die at some point. Here’s a snapshot I got from google:

My point is, to get good traffic try writing something and relating it to a famous blog and it might just increase your traffic.