Nothing much to add but this is the wonderful place I will bunking in for the next couple of nights!!
Apologies for the poor photo quality, I took them with my trusty Dopod 838 pro. Anyway its late and I got more work to finish!
Archive for July, 2008
My room for the next couple of nights
July 29, 2008Yes I am still alive!
July 27, 2008Yes I have been missing in action on my blog for a while and that is because I have been held up at work for the past week and this week, I am here at the Marriott hotel enjoying 5 nights stay here. Well I will hardly be in my room because I will be at training the entire week so I do hope that I have the time to blog. I totally forgot my camera so I need to swing by home to collect it sometime this week.
I still have 3 sets of photos to post process so I need to find the time but things have been delayed because of work and this training as well as my recent comeback to my old group of musicians. Yes, I attended a 3 hour practice session just now only to find myself totally rusty but still can do a little bit of winging and of course, assist out the vocal areas. Playing the guitar really did bring back some memories, who knows, I might be interested in pursuing an old Fender Strat. Awesome stuff again!
Till the next post, I got to finish up my CBT’s before I turn in for the day.
Lastly, here is a video for all you would be Nikon D700 users. More poison for you all 
The Nikon D700 Unboxed from Jon Read on Vimeo.
Personally, I find the comments rather witty but the last bits were the interesting parts for me as he showed the new CF card slot functionality. Its blatantly obvious that the viewfinder seems a little out of proportion to me.
My Experience with Borders and Kinokuniya
July 18, 2008Last weekend I was at The Curve and I decided to drop by Borders to check out a couple of books. Mr. Shaolintiger mentioned to me that Borders told him that they might have stock for this particular book I was looking for. Also, Kee Sitt did mention to me about Vincent Versace’s book on post processing called “Welcome to Oz: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop“. Initiatlly I tried searching for these two books at MPH and Times but there weren’t available and a special order or request needed to be completed.
Upon entering Borders, I headed straight to the “Arts” section and began searching for these two books. After a quick scan through two shelves, I just gave up and went to the information counter to ask for some assistance. A very friendly salesgirl was there, ready to serve customers, and she gave a warm smile asking me if she could assist me in anything. I gave her the name of the books which she was rather confused (I don’t blame her as the name of the books are long!).
Instead I decided to ask her search by Authors. Vincent Versace was not found in their database of Authors but they had one hit for Joe McNally. It was the book I was looking for, “The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters“. Happily, I went back to the shelves and found the only copy in the entire store and lo and behold, there was a huge tear at the back cover of the book. The tear was rather significant, one that if continued, would have taken the entire back cover off!The price of the book, RM200+.
I took the book and brought it back to the Information counter asking if there was a newer one as I showed the salesgirl the large torn section. She took the book, headed over to her manager and returned saying that since the book is new, there wasn’t any other stock and that the price would not change. I was of course surprised and also not that entire shocked as it was a new book. I then politely declined saying that I wouldn’t want to buy a book that is already torn at a price which is way more than that you can find at Amazon.
After 10 minutes of browsing other books, the helpful salesgirl ran up to me saying that she had negotiated with her manager again and the manager had agreed to a whopping 5% discount. Yes, 5% discount! Wow, I must be rather stupid to pass an offer like that. Not! 5% for a book which is already overpriced and not in good condition? No way am I that stupid. This time I politely declined saying that I would rather ship the book from the US than to pay so much and get a torn version. End of story.
On Wednesday, I was at KLCC for lunch and decided to head over to Kinokuniya to try my luck on these two books. In less than 10 minutes, I found two whole piles of these two books in the Art section. Not only did they have ample stock, “The Moment It Clicks” was priced at RM186+ (compared to Borders’ RM200+) which was way cheaper. And to my other surprise, if I purchased Vincent Versace’s book (RM131+) at the same time, I get a 20% discount off “The Moment It Clicks“. Yes, that means I paid only RM150+ for “The Moment It Clicks” which is RM50 cheaper compared to what Borders was charging and it was in pristine condition.
Final score: Kinokuniya 1- Borders 0
Note: This has nothing to do with the staff or the service any of these bookstores offered but just a good comparison of their prices and their pricing policy for damaged books.
I hate traffic jams
July 17, 2008What was supposed to be two attempts to head to my office early was foiled thanks to our wonderful and thoughtful police who decided to create roadblocks along major arteries heading into KL. Because KL is such a wonderful and brilliant city with 2 million odd people going in and out, the traffic jam stemmed all the way up till the surrounding subburbs.
To make matters worse, I was actually driving away from KL but because of the slow moving traffic, I was stuck outside my house for almost an hour before I could actually hit the NKVE and ELITE highways. What usually takes about 5-10minutes to get from my house to the highway took almost an hour for both Monday and today. So much for using the highway to avoid traffic jams but I guess the police had only this to say.
I have to head in to KL later today for a meeting at 7pm. I really do hope that there isn’t much traffic.
Grrrrrr…..
My New File Backup Method
July 14, 2008Its not uncommon for many companies to backup their data and nowadays it is the norm to do that especially since there are always many risks that can occur to wipe out all of your important data. Normally in larger type systems, having a backup and then having a DR (disaster recovery) backup of that backup seems to be a way to ensure that important data is never lost.
At the meantime, I don’t have the budget of what most larger companies have hence I just went ahead with my own backup strategy. Previously I had always procastinated on getting extra external hard disks as I was always wonder what size I would get. Yesterday I took the bullet and bought two external 500Gb hard disks.
As you can see above, its the Western Digital Mybook Essential Edition. Both of these hard drives will be identical in terms of data meaning that one will store my photos and the other one will be a backup. Unfortunately I haven’t devised a true DR backup strategy yet where I should have another backup somewhere at least 100km away from the original.
Previously I used Acronis True Image to backup my work but at the moment I wanted the files to be available even from the backup side so I decided to try this software called Allway Sync which allows me to synchronize both my drives with a click of a button. Best of all, it is free 
Getting these two additional external hard disks allows me to free up more space on my desktop as well as use my other external hard disk to be a backup for my personal laptop.
Other than that, I decided to beef up my desktop at home with more RAM.
Yup that is two sticks of 2Gb of DDR2 RAM for my desktop. Yes I also do know that my 32-bit Vista machine can only take in 3.5Gb but its cheaper to just get two sticks of 2Gb RAM. Cheaper than that I paid for my MacBook Pro.
And finally, I managed to sell of my older MB-D200 to fund for a MB-D10. In case you were wondering what these are, they are actually battery grips which fits to the bottom of my two cameras, the Nikon D200 and the Nikon D300 respectively. And yes, the D200 and D300 are actually cameras and not some secret government code which is meant to be kept a secret (mind the pun as I just watched the Bourne Identity recently).
With this I have actually switched my shooting strategy, which is to have the D200 use the wide angle lens I bought the other day and the D300 to use either the 50mm f/1.4 or the 85mm f/1.8 lens.