One of the worst prom I’ve attended. But can’t complain much about it since I’m there to take pictures and most of my friends are there. Not to complain or what, but the organizer is very persuasive. The event is very plain and the food is doesn’t arouse my appetite. I couldn’t wait to go home as Irene will be coming down to Melaka tomorrow.

The girls have some last minute problem with their makeup, yet I’ve promised Melvin that I’ll be there by 7. I drove at a constant 150kmh all the way to A’Famosa Waterworld in Alor Gajah. When I reached there, it’s merely 1915 hours, asked Chun Beng for a program flow. I nearly fainted when I look at the piece of paper. OMFG!!! The night will be a disaster, I don’t think I’ll deliver any nice photos to the organizers, there’s almost nothing worth photographing.

My friends were all there, at least the whole group of them that I usually hang out with. Seow Kern brought his partner all the way from Kota Tinggi, while Bryant brought his partner along as well. They were having a great time themselves, as it’s not the place that counts; it’s the friendship that matters.

After the event, I was signaling Marimo and Corn that I’ll be ready to leave anytime they are ready. They ask me to wait, but there were sitting there without doing anything. That time my face was very black, not something I’ll usually do to the people I care. I’m really sorry girls.

Later only I found out that these people were trying to help me celebrate an early birthday. Josh, YeeJen, Chyoli and ChangWah went up to the stage and sang me a birthday song. I’m celebrating with Boon as she’ll be having 2 papers during her birthday. There’s more than 20 people there and I’m really glad. We took some photos together and I gave each of them a bear hug. Thanks a lot guys, I love you all. Muacks~ :-*

My housemate informed me about this lady outside looking for someone to explain about her products. So i go and see what's going on. It's quite frequent now in Taman Dahlia, where i'm staying as a student of Multimedia University,Melaka (I hope Google get's this).

It was raining outside quite heavily thee days, so it doesn't really arouse my suspicious of a middle-aged lady trying to earn a living. She started by explaining how her company have advertisements on the newspapers and it's almost close to the closing date. Then she explains about the prizes which includes Perdana, Kancil and all sorts of Tourism packages which costs over tens of thousand ringgit.

Later she tells me if i mind having my photo published on the newspapers. Personally, i won't mind at all...if it's for a good cause (money coming down from the sky). Then she gets my IC number, name and signature. I think "ok fine, not like i'm paying a penny". After a long twisted circle, she came to the point where she explains that their company are giving out 3 of any product of my choice to test it out. But the company will need some handling and service charges. It was written there that all the 3 products will cost over five thousand "in the market". So, she asks if i wanna pay for the charges by cash or card. "Cash", i answered. I can't imagine what will happen if she wants to verify my credit card (might even turn into a credit card fraud!!!)

So...at that moment, it suddenly struck me of her intentions, and the risks involved. They are targetting to gain RM3000 from the customers for service charges as a return of a lucky draw. It claims a "sure win" situation. Hence, I start telling her I'm not interested in getting the lucky draw, she was surprised. "Even for a automobile, and a prize you can sure win, won't you want to pay a small amount to try your luck???" I explained to her that those prizes are not of my interst, and there's no such need for me to have those. She asks me to give a solid reason so that she can go back and file a report. I tell her that as a student, we don't have such a financial backup. She says this is not a good way to answer, and she'll write something like " the customer doesn't trust your company". Oh well, anything will do as you don't waste my time.

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Learnt and Share: These people are targetting the GREED in humanity. Come think of this, who needs a sewing machine, a water filter, a home theater and a foot massage at home??? Even if i do, i won't be paying RM 3000 to get all 3 of those items. And those products are not like branded.

If you come to think about it, what do you actually do if you have those products at home? Do you actually need to spend RM3000 for those items? Can you do better use with that amount of money? How long do you take to save up RM3000?

The purchasing method is totally different in our society now. At least for me, I go online to look for the products I'm into, ask for the cheapest price in town, and ponder it over weeks before i take out the money to buy.

As this semester is very stressful for all the students in MMU, i don't expect any of my friends to get cheated. It's not only the money that goes missing, it's the emotional impact that it creates towards the person.

Final note: I hope that none of us, as students of a prestigious university in Malaysia will get caught in such a scam. It's called 刮刮乐 for those of you who read chinese.

It's less than 2 weeks to FYP Thesis submission, and there are still a lot that I haven't touched. It's time to study hard.

The only photo project for this week. Thanks a lot to my housemate for posing for me eventhough he's having a paper tomorrow. Good luck Kuang!

Got this from Cirnelle. Tried it out, but it seems like my face is not "celebrated" much. Doesn't really matter does it? I'm not earning a living with my face anyway. [My heritage face recognition]

Let's see...

#1


#2


#3


And as for Irene's, she scores better on the face recognition chart.

If you think god doesn't treat you well, and you have the most trouble in the world that people would not understand, read this.

Child Bride by Kevin Sites

Location: Plaza Melaka Raya/Senyum
Time: 10am ~ 3pm
Door gifts: EF Lens Work III (worth RM100), Digital IXUS Metal Strap (i'm planning to sell at RM25)

Speaker Teoh was a bit harsh on being too pro to Canon brand, while Chong's presentation flow is neither here or there. Well, but glad there's some of such seminars held in small Melaka town.

There's a photo competition after the event. But first, there's this lil gal who's entertaining the crowd. She can sing, dance and the crowd loves her!




Here's my fav model for the day - Candice. Met her last year during the Dream Cars Asia (DCA) at KL Convention Center. Well, glad to see her again.




Well, i think you've been thinking why her face looks so familiar, here's a closer look. Then think Taiwan, u'll get the answer. My friends are all mesmerized by her smile. Are you?

Event: Games.Anime.Comic.Circle(GACC) organized by EMINA.
Date: 18th March 2006
Venue: MMU, Melaka.



Cosplaying Lacus



Another one of the cosplayers

I believe most people are bored of the hotmail's 25MB limit after Yahoo! and Google both came up with GB worth of webmail account. Then Microsoft only allow US citizens to have 250MB email accounts. But these nice people came up with 12 Steps to get 250MB for their hotmail. There's also another method of using POP3 to boost your hotmail account with Outlook, but I'll not go into that as I've lost a lot of memorable emails when i accidentally deleted while trying out that software.

Now, they came up with a project called Windows Live. It's a collection of things which you might be interested in...[Live Ideas]. But what I like is their Live Mail beta, which looks like Outlook and allow drag and drop features. It's still a bit slow as the microsoft's servers are always packed. But with a little patience, it's worth while. I like their interface....something which Google lacks of. I'll love it if Google Mail comes up with some folder features where i can sort my mails like I did for my other free webmails.

我看报纸 (i read the newspaper)
它说：抽烟对我们身体不好 (it claims that smoking is bad for health)
所以我就把烟戒掉 (hence i decided to quit smoking)

再来我有看报纸 (again i read the papers)
它说：喝酒对我们身体也不好 (it claims that drinking is bad for health)
所以我也把酒戒了 (so i stop drinking)

再来我有看报纸 (then again I read from the papers)
它说：做爱对身体不好 (it says that making love is not good for health)
我都不看报纸了 (from then on, I stop reading the papers)

It was raining when I was coming out from Jusco after buying some groceries. I was quite happy at first as Melaka is really hot for the past few weeks. Then suddenly I remembered that I was hanging my cloths to WET this morning. $@#&

Oh well, never mind...it'll dry eventually. I was all sweaty and took a towel into the toilet, only to find out that there's no water coming out. What??? Doesn't matter, it always happen in my area. Took a towel and cycle to campus for a bath. Yeah! I was sitting on the toilet bowl and bath using the pipe to shower. Syok!

Alrite, cut this short. So...when i went back to collect my bicycle, I suddenly came up with the weird thinking:- Singapore just ban the number plate SEX ???? So, in Penang we are now already somewhere in between PGX ???? and PHX ????. So will we be seeing PIG 7546 on the road anytime soon?

Placed a bet with TeeToo...well, if I win, I'll get that number plate from him. Yea~ my new car... PIG 7546. :D

Slept at 4am in the morning. Set the alarm at 7.25am. For what??? It's a saturday morning and I've nothing "urgent" in the morning to do. But it's a photographer's life...

Have been failing to get a decent panaromic image all these while. Yeah, I see some laughing faces out there thinking "What is so hard about sticking panaromic images?". Yeah right. It's not that easy considering I've to shoot Vertically to get a panaromic shot. "WHAT??? You must be joking with me, Nesohu". Nope, no kidding! That's the method a few of the books that I'm reading tells me. Then I've to do everything on Manual Mode. Even the Focussing is set to Manual. I actually forgot to fix the white balance when shooting. But thank god i shoot in RAW! The power of RAW, you'll never know unless you are really a RAW-photog. Tuning is done all after the shot.

Met May Cheong online this morning. She seems surprised about what I've been doing. But she gave up after I came out with all those photography jargons. Pity her...

Here's what I've got this morning. The effort of waking up early in the morning, and spent 2 hours in front of the computer doing the fune tuning. I've downsized the final image to 1/5 of the image I've stiched. Check if you can find any flaw in the stich. Personally I find it good for a 8" height of print (at least). The file size is 35 megapixel which makes it a 20MB image (equivalent to 5 MP3 songs).


(Click image for a larger view)

It's good to know that you can feel comfortable to put your girlfriend beside her idol and she still loves you at the end of the day.

I love you Irene, you never gave up on me.

Yeah, that's what Malaysian Traffic Police accused this guy with a Wilayah number plate of archieving. Read more on Berita Harian. [Kena saman 956 km/j, by Rashidi Karim]

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For those of you who are not taking science

956km/j = 956,000 m /(60*60 s) = 265.56 m/s

The speed of sound is 300 m/s. That's incredible!!! Maybe MyVi can read the speed of light. Malaysia Boleh!

Source: Luminous Landscape

I was taking my dinner while watching this backdated episode of photoshoptv. Scott was giving a 15 minutes introduction to Adobe Lightroom which was like giving me a sudden shock all of a suddent. It makes the digital workflow ( when i say digital, i mean digital photography) a breeze.

In the front end, there is the Library Compare View for us to view all the photos we take of the same subject. That happens very frequent as we (photographers) want to make sure that we get the shot to be the way we wanted - sharp, crisp, vivid. I'll never want to end up regretting after i got back home and see junk in front of my PC.

Then after u've decided on the photo of your choice, comes the Raw Converter tool. From the brief glance, I was told that we can make selective Grayscale, levels, curves and common White Balance tuning all in the same software. They make sure that your photos are on the center of the screen and they hide up all those toolbox when you don't need them. Besides you can dim those toolbox to the background for a better view of your photos.

After you've processed all your photos, you might want to create slides to present to your customers. That's something I've been struggling to do with Photoshop as there are no decent preset templates I'm satisfied with. You also have the option of creating Fine Art Mat, and Contact Sheets before you send your images to the printers.

Hey wait, there's even more. When you were showing the photo you took from a Nikon D2X, (or any other cameras which has GPS) the location where you took the photos will be recorded on the image's EXIF!!! You can click on the EXIF on your Lightroom, and BOOM! the location of your shoot will come out in Google Maps!!! *shocked*. "WOW", I shouted in my room. I was crazily laughing while I saw this. Make me think twice of getting the non-GPS Nikon D200. Hm...maybe the "rumoured" Nikon D80 might come equipped with GPS? Hm...let's just wait and see. Accoring to Phil Askey GPS on D200 is enable through NMEA 0183 with optional cable.

For now, the software only works on Mac OS X. But according to what I was told, it works faster than Aperture, and have everything Aperture lacks of.

Here are some previews from various sources:

Eric Wong [Photokaki]

Michael Reichmann [Luminous Landscape]

I was trying to download the beta version from Adobe.com where I bump into some "news" about the acquisition of Macromedia . My heart beats twice as fast. I know this wasn't news anymore, it was on the discussion table since April last year, and closed a fortnight before christmas. I never know what powerful integration might be coming out from such merges. But I do like to have a bridge between my works with flash one day (when i start learning flash). Don't really know how to write flash program, but I'm really interested in starting it if i have time off from my Final Year Project. I wished I wasn't in engineering.

I'm not sure about it's validity, but here's a collection of cases of members who considered themselves victims of MLM (multi-level marketting). Read Lampe Help

Since the first time I was being cheated, failed marketting, failed to sell any CD during PCFair, I've tell myself not to touch marketting anymore. That's one of the reasons I din settle for Accountancy when i sign up for my degree course 5 years ago. I'm just not good at communicating and persuading people to the believes that I, myself doesn't believe in.

But now, if you ask me to invest on marketting, I'll only take out all the money if it's to do with something i'm very familiar with. Even if that's the case, I'll do risk access, turn-over and get all the advice I can from a 3rd party.

Recently, I've heard a few friends being drag into such marketting plan. None of it have get me really interested. Those that have been in, have never been heard about again after a couple of months. Money lost, self-respect gone, ego went down the drain. Prove me wrong by sending me a mail if you've suceed in finish paying up your BMW bank installments and your Mount Kiara apartment.