Born Dec. 21, 1958 in Bukit Mertajam, a small town in the northern Malaysian state of Penang.

1960-1972: Spent the most part of my childhood in a flood-prone, gangster-infested shantytown called Prai (now transformed by greedy developers into a sprawling suburban nightmare) in the north part of Malaysia's West Coast. My protective parents sheltered me and my six younger siblings from the sordid seductions of the slums by keeping us indoors most of the time. This unpleasant environment helped to shape the taciturn, broody, awkward, vulnerable, untrusting cynic I eventually became.

Got my first bicycle at age 10, which cost my oil-depot foreman father a quarter month's wages, or so I was told so I would take good care of it (I later found out that it was a handout from my dad's American boss). But it only lasted a couple of years and was subsequently replaced by a bigger green bike.

1972-1978: During my senior years in school (a ramshackle double-storey wooden building called Bukit Mertajam High School), everybody called me 'Santana' because I was already into guitars then. My parents had bought me my first guitar, a cheap Chinese plywood job (Kapok), when I was 14, and lived to regret it ever since.

In my late teen years, guitars became a more meaningful substitute for girls with whom I could never get on because of a crippling shyness and a lack of self-esteem. But I made up for that in the ensuing years.

Me and my music-loving friends (our tastes ranged from the loud... Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Rory Gallagher... to the weird... ELP, Sparks, Budgie...) were also into modified bicycles - machines that in a sense made freewheeling, 'chain-smoking' subversives out of us. It was on these crude Chinese-made beasts that we had our first taste of offroad daredevilry. And in case you think the riser-bar trend in mountainbiking these days is a new thing, we were already using risers (with a mega 1ft rise!) in the early '70s for offroad biking! (Bernard Leo, an old hometown cycling chum of mine who now puts a tricked-out Klein Mantra Comp through the roughs in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, has a better memory of those wild days: "Remember the Freewheelers? That's what we called ourselves during our rides. Racing from Prai to BM for tuition and off-roading after Mr. Ng's class! Remember when your 'hi-riser' bars collapsed coming off a jump and you hit your chest on the stem? Thought you bought the farm then!")

1978-1998: Dropped out of school after my 'A' Levels and bummed around for about two years and read a lot of dark, sombre classics by the likes of George Gissing, Thomas De Quincey and George Orwell.

Threatened with being kicked out of the house, took a job as a teller with a bank. Quit after a month to join a newspaper as a copy editor.

Did the usual journo's tour of office duty for 16 years before quitting as the editor of a youth newspaper in 1997 and moving back with my parents in Prai (the fact that there are now two McDonald's outlets within two miles of each other should tell you how far the town has come from its slummy past), which by the way is a half-hour car-ride away from the crowded and polluted but charmingly laidback island of Penang.

Since then, I've been spending my days and nights as a bike bum, wallowing in the spirit-liberating pleasures of mountain and road biking. Currently I own five bikes -- three for offroading and two for the road.

Oh yeah, for a while, was also in a rock band called Kamasutra. Played lead guitar and sang covers and a few self-written songs in what was essentially a rough-but-never-ready power-pop trio.

Currently operating as a non-profit field recordist and indie album producer (2003). First production job was the third solo set of Malaysian singer-songwriter Meor. It's a folk-rock album in Malay entitled 'Itu Padang... Aku Di Situ'.

Other production/performance credits: 'Solo Rebab' (Pusaka/2003), 'Tribute to Mardana'(2004).

Also, in 1984, took unpaid leave for six months to bum around Europe with a guitar and a backpack. It was the first of many self-seeking journeys abroad (check out Bum Tales for my impressions on those trips).

I also own 10 guitars: a '93 Gibson Les Paul (cherry sunburst), a Gibson SG '61 reissue, a hand-crafted Takamine EN-18 stereo acoustic/electric, Ibanez Stefan Grossman model, Ibanez AE450 gut-string acoustic/electric, Yamaha FG433S, Washburn M-1S mandolin, American Standard Stratocaster (sunburst), a Mexican Stratocaster (black), a Charvel electric (got ripped off in New York on that one), and the latest acquisitions (1998), a Yamaha AEX1500 (violin sunburst) archtop and a Yamaha SA2200 (brown sunburst) f-hole electric).

(Go here to check out my synth adventures.)

Other pieces of equipment in my home studio include a Technics WSA1 acoustic modeling synthesizer, a Yamaha DG-1000 guitar preamp, a Fender Deluxe 80 solid state amp, a Laney tube amp, Yamaha REV7 and SPX90 effects processors.

And did I mention my book, CD and LP collections? More than a thousand tomes (fiction, non-fiction, dictionaries, reference books etc.), 5,000 discs (mainly review copies for my weekly newspaper column), and 500 LPs at last count.

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