Las Vacas at Jalan Yap Kwan Seng

Las Vacas is a meat shop restaurant. When you enter the restaurant it feels like the raw meat section of a supermarket. The tables and chairs are all brown colour and wooden so its very Aussie like. The meat are from Australia. The restaurant is located along Jalan Yap Kwan Seng, next to Oldtown. It used to be Tony Roma's before this. I saw another Las Vacas branch at Mont Kiara.

My friend recommended me to try Las Vacas because I have been a bit burger crazy lately and so, why not try the burger at Las Vacas.

The cuisine in Las Vacas is Western. You will find normal western stuff like stirloin, beef, lamb shoulders, soup, salad etc. Maybe they are different than other Western restaurants because their meat is fresher.

For appetizers we had steak pie and mushroom soup. It was not too bad. But, still nothing to rave about.

For their burgers, I had a taste of the lamb burger and beef burger. Burgers comes with a side of fries. We had a choice of the size of burger patty we wanted. Size ranged from 150g to 500g. We ordered the 150g patty and it was really filling. The chef told us that there was a western customer who ordered a 500g burger and finished it!

Taste wise wasn't really that amazing. It did not have enough flavour in my opinion. The patties were not that juicy too. The lamb patty was quite oily till eating half the patty gives a 'jelak' aftertaste.... I needed a cup of tea to get rid of the taste. After that i was at BIG in publika and the sight of burgers was a turn off after those two burgers.

The portion of the burger is big. I should not have ordered their mushroom soup coz it definitely filled my tummy and left no room for all the burger.

We requested for the burgers to to cut into four. Sharing is recommended. It isn't very horrible, but it could be better.

We also had beef salad. We wanted grilled beef but it came as boiled beef. This was because all the waiters/waitress were foreigners. The one who took our order did not understand what we wanted. She was like ok ok can grill, but still came out boiled. We requested for the beef to be more brown, but the waitress told the chef that we wanted it more cooked. Then the chef, who is Malaysian, came to our table after our meal to chat and he told us what the waitress told him. He was shocked too coz if it was boiled more, the beed would be tasteless. The salad was tasteless actually. When we were served the salad, we asked the waitress if we should toss the salad to eat since it was tasteless, and she walked away and brought us an extra fork and spoon *really facepalm*

It cost about rm110 for two mushroom soups, one lamb burger, one beef burger, one beef salad and two steak pies and a slice of chocolate cake.

I made spaghetti

Nothing beats homecooked spaghetti for dinner after a long day out!

Phone stalker

In Malaysia, if someone is stalking you on the phone, and if you are using an iphone, you are not allowed to block that user, evebthough you know the number. If you are using an android, you can block that user.

Making a police report is useless because the police will tell you they cannot do anything since it is not life threatening.

Making a complain to your telephone company will not really solve your problem if you are using an iphone. The only solution recommended by them is to change your number.

More WikiWeirdness

I asked in my last blog, what has happened to Wikileaks?  Here is an organisation that once regularly broke headline news, which has more recently descended on its Twitter feed to the language of conspiracy thrillers, a slur campaign against Sweden, retweeting George Galloway's controversial views on rape, and waging a personal attack on the lawyer and journalist David Allen Green.

Since that post David Allen Green published another piece on the legal mythology of Assange's extradition and was promptly blocked by the Wikileaks Twitter account.  A quick reminder of how -ever so slightly- ironic this is given that Wikleaks states that its aims are:

Curioser and Curioser, said Alice

Last night the Wikileaks account published a tweet, which (if you read it properly) states that it is an archive news item from the BBC website.  It refers to the time during which the Swedish authorities briefly dropped charges against Assange, before reinstating them.  The problem is that many people apparently missed the word "archive" and assumed this was a current story. 

This story is however over two years old and is therefore not "news" in any sense.  It is out of date, because Assange is of course once again a rape suspect.  Having exhausted his legal remedies in the UK, he has now also jumped bail and is liable for arrest on that count too.  Note the context of the tweet: this was not a series of archive pieces: it was positioned between current items.

Wikileaks has 1,621,031 followers at the time of writing.  The story was clicked on enough times to launch it to the most read stories on the BBC - which of course then led general users of the BBC News site, who are unaware of the tweet, to click on the story.  This looked like news: and big news no less: "Wikileaks rape warrant cancelled".   It in fact made it to the most read story on the BBC site at 5am this morning.  By the time of this screen shot it has dropped, but only to position 2.

When I tweeted about this today I had a rash of responses from followers who said that they had entirely missed the "21 August 2010" on the top left of the BBC page.  Plenty thought this had just happened, which I rather suspect was the intention of the original Wikileaks tweet.  I am not able to verify it, but have also been  told the Wikileaks Facebook page also contained a link that did not have the word "archive" on it.  It was later replaced with the Twitter link with the word included.

Manipulative, Misleading, Attention Seeking

So what to make of all this?  It is hard to understand what Wikileaks was seeking to achieve by posting this out of date story in this way, given it was not part of a chronology or linked to anything else.  It strikes me personally as being manipulative, misleading and attention seeking.  I definitely am not prepared to naively dismiss it as "innocent".  If, as widely believed, Assange is himself behind the Wikileaks account now, it comes across to me as mildly deranged and certainly the act of someone who is desperate to remain in the intoxicating limelight of media attention.  Was it a test to see how powerful the account is in getting people's attention and pushing stories up the BBC website list?  Who knows.

The tweet certainly did achieve the aim of getting the (now, non-) story back up in people's minds.  Bravo for that.  However it has at the same time further lowered my opinion of an organisation now apparently not concerned about much other than being a mouthpiece for defending its founder against personal allegations against him.  It has also taken a lot people for fools, something that might well come back to bite the writer of the tweet.

Bruised

The one time i cannot bear to look at myself in the mirror. Ugly purple bruises!
Anyone can help me? Five days dy...

Diamond facial at Beauty Century, Midvalley

I went for a facial today at Beauty Century. I have read good reviews about it and since it is my first time, I get a discount. I love discounts! Normal price for this Diamond Peel facial was RM98. But if you are a first timer, they charged RM38. RM38 covers consultation (45 mim), back massage (15min), diamond peel (10min), facial (15min), steam (15 min), extraction (30min), aloe vera mask ( 15 min) treatment, charcoal mask (15min), face massage (10min), toner, moisturiser, sun block and lastly, head massage (5min).
All the duration were just my estimation. Basically, they will ask you if you have three hours to do all those things as a first timer. Quite worth it!

Of course, the consultation part was where they try to recommend me to go for a 'better' treatment. She recommended I do the DFN facial which cost rm500 per treatment! I could not hide my shocked expression. I came prepared for a rm38 facial and to hear rm500 for a facial was way too much. DFN helps to make the pores smaller, reduce scars and make pimples smaller. Everything I wanted and needed, but im so not ready to fork out that amount. It does not even gurantee i will be satisfied after one treatment.

Aside from that, i had an awesome back massage there and everyone was really nice. The beautician was also very detailed in explaining what she was doing to my face and warn me if it was going to be painful. The diamond peel is a machinine that sucks up all the dead skin cells. She told me to feel my skin and it was so smooth, something like the after effect of sanding wood.

View bar at G Tower

Birthday month = Full of freebies
This was not really a birthday celebration, but a celebration of something.

Beer and mojito. Mojito super sweet bleh.
The KL view from the bar was so-so only. The klcc twin building was mostly blocked by the new condo, Binjai.

It was also the first time seeing the jln tun razak and jalan ampang intersection.

Other than that nothing new. Surrounded by concrete.
Had a great time!