Happy New year 2012!
Now I know I’m late in posting this but I was just sleeping off 2011 and kinda overdid it. So once again, another year comes to a close and as we welcome another new one 2012. I bet everyone had a fun night on the end of 2011? Me? Zip, just stayed in and had dinner with my family. So let’s recap with 2011
January to April
Was jobless from November 2010 till March 2011. It was pretty boring except for a CNY and a Rei figure shooting. In March I had finally found another job. At first it felt like another mundane desk monkey duty, I spent most of it rewriting manuals and doing minor tests. But surprisingly, they were willing to invest in their employees and so I was sent off to Cyprus for a 2 weeks training course though that didn’t mean it was a cakewalk as I had exams and tests to complete and I literally hit the ground running when I came back. But as a result, I had to cancel all my plans to go to Bangkok for the Motorshow with studio rojak.
May to July
Now this period was rough, I remember spending most of my bloody time carrying out even more tiresome regression tests by hand instead of using some sort of test harness. Had I thought the assignments been tough with their short 3 days period for each of the 3 assignments, this was nausea inducing at best.
But fortunately, I had my own things to do by scanning in all my film while at the same time reworking how I stored data on my imac .
Then in June, it was that time of the year again, Super GT 2011! And this year we managed to score a media pass! Finally, after all these years! But sadly, at the same time, the quality of the queens were evidently in much great decline.
Then after coming back from that, it was back to newer assignments! I had the chance to work on…..(drumroll!)…..tech support (crap!) and the company ban all non-essential company internet activity (the only thing we could access was the major news websites). But fortunately, one caveat was discovered initially, while personal notebooks or netbooks were banned but tablets were not yet included so lo and behold! I went and got one. Although a month after that, the company banned tablets in the end XD.
During that time, I only reviewed 1/7 Rin Tohsaka figure.
August to December
Now August was really dry, it was right after Super GT and Bon odori 2011 which I didn’t go because of work. I think all I did was just work, this lasted until October as if to re-state itself as the month of Halloween, the world lost great men, Steve Jobs and Dennis M. Ritchie.
After that, something happen at work. There was a major restructuring, as a result I was literally shifted around teams and groups every few weeks as management were trying ideas. As a result, I spent October till December doing absolutely nothing. I kept pestering my manager about this and I must have annoyed her so much that she sent me and a friend again to Cyprus for advance security training since no one had the knowledge here. Luckily this time, there wouldn’t be any assignments nor exams.
In November though, there was AFA11! My friend and I had a good time especially at the Miku concert. The events were great and the cosplay were beautiful! I also wanted to attend the final event of the year Comic Fiesta 2011 but it fell on the very weekend I came back from my overseas training, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it.
So what did I do after that? Well because I still had a lot of leave left, I decided to take them till the new year which brings us to this entry. I’ll be heading back to work on the 3rd of January and hopefully to a better year.
Happy new year!
Mistakes and lessons while traveling
My most hated technology peeve. The cellphone
Call it whatever you want, handphone, cellphone, mobilephone, smartphone, iphone, and yadda yadda! But the one piece of technology I hate the most in the world is the cellphone (for this article we shall hence fourth call it the cellphone). It’s not because I’m some old fuddy duddy that hates technology, it’s not because I hate to keep in contact with people around me or in my life (well, to a certain extent yes). To counter those points, I’m actually one of the most techno person I know! I have imac, ipad, android phone (which I use as a 3g hotspot for my other devices) , digital slr, and heck my watch is advance! It’s doesn’t just tell time, it’s also a compass, barometer and altmeter. So one cannot say I am a luddite. As for the second point, well it is true to a certain extent but that is another story for another time.
In fact, I don’t really hate the cellphone per se, what I really hate is the etiquette of cellphones in today’s modern society.
Please don’t waste my time.
I got a message last night on my phone from one of my friends who had worked with me in my last company before we were retrenched (he resigned before it happened), informing that the CEO of that company just bit the dust, kick bucket, bought the farm, generally DEAD! So? What does it matter to me? I didn’t even recognize the damn name til he told me who was it. To which I reply, so what? He was already sick with cancer and had ceded all operational duties even before I joined that company those short few years ago.
The way he composed the message, he assumed I would have given a fucking rat’s ass about the death and weep or something, I have never met the person nor has he ever done anything for me. I’ll be honest, I don’t care nor weep for individual people I have never met in my whole life. Except for me people whose culture I simply respect, and let’s face it, no one likes a manager or CEO because 95% of them are total idiots! It’s not like this man’s work helped or saved me, nor did his time on earth helped be bettered my life. Totally zero influence.
People would say I am hypocrite because when the March 11 tsunami happened I was greatly sadden but as I said, it’s because I had experienced Japanese culture and life. It brought me great joy, peace and enrichment so to see such great tragedy befall them was simply overwhelming though I did not cry about it, I simply hope for the best and made some donations because that was all I could do. But you tell me about the single death of someone I never met and expected me to care about said individual then I will tell you straight, “I don’t give a rat’s ass”.
Hell, I have personally met CEOs of companies who makes revenue in the billion range and if said CEO was to die today, I would not shed a single nor give another thought about it because the person did not enrich my life, I had only simply worked for him not pledge my fucking allegiance. The company whose CEO just died would be lucky to even breach the million range, hence why their finances were also in the gutter and let’s face it, aside from the friends I made there, I couldn’t care less about anyone else there.
I especially hate CEOs because all their decisions are made without thinking of the consequences and only on trying to make their profits margins higher even if it means crushing all the company’s “greatest asset” as usually announced by them at site visits. So the death of one is nothing of great concern for me, just simply another dead guy who is unimportant to me.
I wrote this entry because I had tried to sleep off my anger at this last night but even right now as I wrote this entry in the morning, the anger is still with me so I figure I should channel this anger into something construction by voicing my displeasure in an articulate way before heading off to work. I feel so much better after doing it.
Format 135 or 35mm is the ORIGINAL FULL FRAME!
I almost went berserk a few weeks ago while I was with my Nikon F6 and I bump across some other people doing photography as well. I can’t seem to forget the incident in which they were curious as to why I wasn’t chimping (preview the shot right after taking it). They assumed I was some master of photography and asked if they could see some of my shot and offer some pointers to them
I offered some tips on how to control the adjustments and compose for certain effects but when they asked to see some of my shots, I told them I was shooting film so no preview possible. The next few questions consisted of asking why I was shooting with film when the advent availability of so many digital cameras. To which replied that I only use film camera if I plan to shoot at my pace. This advise no doubt was simply ignored by them and chucked up to me being old fashion.
They then looked through my viewfinder and found it incredible wide (I was shooting with 17-35mm at 17mm hence their surprise). Asked what size of sensor I was using, at that point I knew they didn’t understand what I had said about 35mm and so fourth. I said it was 35mm full-frame.
“No kidding?! Film has full frame just like digital cameras?!” one of them exclaimed. I mentally facepalmed, more people who don’t really understand the minimal basics but I’ve been down this road before myself so I wasn’t so critical. At least I wanted to learn about everything I came across, these people on the other hand were another matter.
I said, “35mm is the original full frame that only now digital cameras have successfully managed to replicate on a mass-production scale…” wouldn’t you know it? They didn’t believe me as they insisted that 35mm copied digital technology because they had seen film canisters at APS-C (Yes there are such things but they were not as common as 135 format). I explained that film comes in many shape and sizes but their mindset were affixed to film copying digital and that it was really not that good when compared to the wonders of digital.
I managed to brush off the conversation as I wanted to enjoy my time instead of wasting it with their endless digital worship (I’m not a technical luddite, I actually work with some of today’s most cutting technology and I do also have my own digital Full frame). Had I brought my own full frame, I think the conversation would have gone like this instead.
“OH FULL FRAME! MUST WORSHIP!”
“WEZ CAN TAKE BETER PICTURE IF ONLY WE WE HAVE’TH FULL FRAME!”
“WE POINT AND CLICK AND MASTERPIECE WOULD COME OUT WITH FULL FRAME CAMS!”
Or something to that effect. I use to think like that but I soon broke out of that thinking and really wanted to improve my skills and still am. I realized I needed to slow down and train myself to think before I shoot and not simply hold down the shutter button and hope for the best. But I digress, the light was not favorable anymore and I was on my way, while those people were still trying to shoot flowers and kept complaining that they didn’t look like they were taken on a beautiful clear blue sky spring day, it was dark and about to rain. Go figure with that type of mentality hoping their cameras can work wonders for them instead of them making wonders with their cameras.
Super GT Roadshow at Autocity
By this time, I should be on my way up to Penang. Why? Isn’t it obvious? I’ll be in Penang for 2 reasons, (more…)
I’m finally back online with my imac!
Finally found the time to do anything personal! My imac had been repaired a week ago but work was still very heavy and any free time I had was spent making changes to the way I stored data on my imac. You see, like everyone, I had stored all my data all over the place on my imac and when it it developed some problem I had to bring it back to the apple shop. This posed a number of problems, because I didn’t want the apple staff or anyone else going through my personal data so I copied all the data from my imac to an external harddisk and the deleted them from the imac.
Once I got the imac back, I decided to centralized all my data into a truecrypt drive making backup and security very easy, if I want to backup my data, I simply copied the truecrypt container along with all my data in one step, instead of looking for them all over (in docs, in photos, and etc). This also has the main benefit of ensuring that even if my computer were stolen, they couldn’t get to any of my personal info because it would be encrypted. This truecrypt archive is mounted at all times and programmed it in such a way that whenever the imac rebooted, it would ask for the password in order to mount the truecrypt container. So if they would to steal my computer, they would need to unplug hence shutting it down and unmounting the container file. Though had this been a notebook, then I would have a problem with them just stealing the notebook and being able to access all my data since the truecrypt file would still be mounted.
This took a while to setup since I needed to reroute all path for programs into the truecrypt container instead. Hence why I haven’t made any updates even after getting back my imac as I was busy setting it up and ensuring it worked properly, this is especially true with rerouting all my folder locations for lightroom which was a pain in the ass to do correctly.
Now I am just working on editing the photos and etc. So yeah! This is one hell of a backlog >_<
UPDATE: I soon found out later that OS X has it’s owm built-in encrypt folder function called FileVault. It encrypts your home folder with your user password and its completely transparent. Also, if you’re apple computer goes to sleep, it will automatically lock it so anyone who steals it won’t be able to get the data even if they extracted the hard disk and use it on another computer or try to mount it as an external because the home folder is encrypted and decryption is handled in memory (*this of course has its own problems but unless you’re guarding top secret info, it will serve most conventional purposes).
So the point of the lesson? Explore your OS’s built in security else you might end up recreating the wheel again. Though FileVault has it’s drawback, it only encrypts the home folder and you cannot select the level of encryption but encryption and decryption is done seamlessly with only a small performance penalty but it’s the perfect solution for apple notebooks! Another advantage of FileVault over truecrypt is you don’t have to worry about space usage since FileVault is actually a sparse disk image that can grow and shrink. Although I think I’ll continue to use truecrypt for my imac since it’s already set up.
Busy busy busy!
To answer the main question, I’ve been really busy since I came back about 2 weeks ago on the 13th of April. As mandated by my training in Cyprus, I was required to do 3 assignments base on what I learned and each one had a very short deadline (3 days each with the last one given 5 days instead). For 2 weeks I was continually working on assignments one after another till I didn’t have time to post up any photos yet of Cyprus.
I really hit the ground running on the day after I came back and have since been running. Though I’m glad to report I’ve completed my assignments (just like in the old days of Uni) I can now focus on scanning in the photos (film) and post them up soon.
Well my progress would have been faster if my imac hadn’t developed a screen problem but since I still had a few more months of warrant left on it, sent it off to the machine retail apple store. So for now I’m back to my old trusty macbook.
So stay tune for photos updates
as I rush to scan them into my computer!
What your choice of DSLR/camera says about you….
This was taken originally from Shutterfinger
Happy Halloween 2010!!
Its that time of the year where the ghouls and fiends come out to play.
Where witches chant and brew with whatever they find and need.
Bored at work.
I know I only started working at my new job but already they have nothing for me to work on. I mean I managed to complete my previous program in time for testing and all but already after that they seem to have nothing else to give me except more boring reading.
“Here read up on something regarding memory debuggers”. They tell me.
“Valgrind.” Was my reply, best memory debugger I’ve seen so far and its Open Source. “If you don’t like that, then use mpatrol but be warned it requires we insert special codes throughout the program while Valgrind doesn’t and works with debugger information instead.”
and what was their reply? “Research memory debugger nonetheless….”
Aside from that they also want me to look at some codes regarding IPC made by their China branch. Which sadly has no documentation nor comments and the function names are no better. What’s worse I only have the header files and compiled library, in short I’m flying blind here………. >_<
I’m so bored…..no actual coding work to do……only reading source codes……..
When does it get ridiculous?
When companies want to sell you camera gear that is only one step away from becoming a borg with your camera.
That’s when you know its gotten ridiculous. Seriously, if I wanted to go this far with video photography, just get a freaking video camera rather than a DSLR.
Who actually goes this far?
I’m still alive~~
I seem to get into this very often...
So what have I’ve been up to lately? Well getting my life in order I guess. The reason why I haven’t been posting much lately was because my whole group was retrenched, right after Super GT (At least I managed to use the company’s T1 line to upload all my photos before they made the group redundant).
Hence my lack of posts, though that’s not to say I was inactive. I did go to Bon Odori 2010 just to relax and forget my worries for a while.
It’s funny, 2 years in this company and I get retrenched again. Damn just my luck. At least they gave quite a nice severance package (a few months even though I only worked for 2 years) as compared to my last employer who basically didn’t give shit but what do you expect from an MNC operating in a free-trade zone?
Things I hate to hear…..
Sometimes I wish I can just punch their lights out!!
There are many things I hate to hear in my life. They are
1. “You’re good but I think I am way better because I think so.”
2. “No” (while shaking head).
3. “But ancient tradition dictates….(blah blah blah).” (old people ranting of ancient shit with no reason like why use leeches to cure anemia or something baseless.)
I could go on with a 100 more items but today I’ll add another item to my long list of things I hate….
Yup. Gainax is trying to rob me blind XD
More reasons why I will be broke by October 2010. When are they going to make a Rei version?!
They are trying to steal my money! By making me buy figures by Alter and Kotobukiya!!!
Damn them! The fiends!! XD
Seriously this one looks sweet!
Decisions, decisions, which one should I get?!
I think 35mm is dead in Malaysia…….
Last Friday I had a lunch with my co-workers at Mid-valley. I also decided to drop a roll of Kodak Ektar 100 (negative film, not slide). I figured that since it wasn’t slide film the shops wouldn’t have any problems developing….boy was I wrong!!!
How to avoid working from home.
Look, not even Rei works from home and we know how much of a brown nose she is at Nerv! XD
I remember my first job, they gave me a nice IBM thinkpad T41 to use. I initially thought this was a wonderful perk but then I realized it came with a serious price tag.
This is a job requirement?
Yup, its great to be us.
Yesterday came across an interesting classified posted by a software company in Penang (I will not name the company from fear of getting sued by said company for defamation, its real common for victims to be sued by criminals in this country).
They were looking for an IT developer, listed were the usual expected requirements such as “must be fluent in Cantonese and Hokkian” and etc but you know what really caught me by surprise?
Who is the Photographer?
Who is the Photographer?
Is it a person with purpose?
What is this purpose? To capture a moment for all eternity to whom might still care to know or learn?
Or is it for money or that of duty?
To which either answer might be sad or true.
Is it a person with a passion?
To bring forth a story that inspires or betrays the heart of the viewers?
Perhaps to bring closure to something that was once started but never finished.
But in the end, the reason is still for passion.
Is it a person with lust?
A person who concedes to the temptation of the flesh or tries to with only their eyes?
Call this person weak and evil if you will for they only admitted their weakness
That they are humans after all like you and I.
Is it a person withOUT desire?
Simply following those around themselves
Desiring that which is only desire by others but not themselves for the mere fact of wanting.
Their desire lacks passion and hence goes no further when they encounter a hurdle.
Like a flock of dimmed witted sheep.
This is for Anime fans. You wouldn’t understand it otherwise……
Mio from K-on in Moe moe Kyun form!!
Takamachi Nanoha from Magical Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS!
What happens when these 2 forces combine?
I’m back!
Group shot of team Rojak in Bangkok!
And what a weekend its been! Tired, exhausted, fun and CHEAP! Staying and eating in Bangkok was not only good but cheap!
Most of all since they don’t require all food to be halal! Everything tasted exceptionally good!!! Especially the ladies there! 
. More photos about that later! I need to process them first!
This is what happens when….
you’ve watched War of the World, Seven, Batman begins and Batman: Dark knight. All in one night
The compact changeable lens cameras: Evolution or Revolution?
Before we begin, let’s set a few definition straight :
Also for this entry, we will be limiting our scope only to DSLR and SLRs with occasional reference to the current crop of “PnS” (point and shoot cameras) cameras whenever it helps with the topic.
Compact DSLR
So what is today’s entry about ? “Compact DSLR” ;is what many are calling it although personally it should be called mirrorless design or a poor man’s digital rangefinder. Yes the age of small and lightweight camera has truly begun. Sure we’ve had them for years but those PnS camera were really next to a bag of crap that even a disposable film camera were way better than them.
Happy new year 2010!
Okay I know this is rather late but I have a good reason! I was too busy recovering from a huge hangover after a new year drinking binge to update my blog. No wait, I’m lying. The real reason why I haven’t updated was because I was too damn lazy! (more…)
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