You should know by now that I spend a lot on photography, and these stuffs cost a BOMB!!! As you might have all know these stuffs depreciate pretty fast. In no time, equipments worth thousands of $$$ will end up in the junkyard. Well, today I’ll share with you how I get my money back. Instead of leaving it in their boxes, here’s what I do: - I sold them.

Word of mouth can only travel that far, so I usually put my stuffs online @ FIZ, RS and FK. And through experience I did learn the “negotiation skill” required. Let me share that with you.

1. Canon S1is (Buy: RM1900 Sold:RM1000) - Big mistake. I even gave away extra accessories like Lens Hood, Circular Polarizers, and Rechargable Batteries which costs at least RM500 more. Desperate sell that time as it’s my first time…lose quite a lot.



2. Nomad Jukebox (Buy: RM800 Sold: RM50???) - One good example of what happens if you keep ur broken gears in the attic for 5 years. Yet I still get a good bargain rite? :P



3. Toshiba Satellite (Buy:~RM4000 Sold: RM100???) – Old stuff, used it for my studies in MMU. I still remember the specs: Celeron 600MHz, 128MB RAM, 6GB HDD… those were the days. After turning on for 5 years, the LCD rots, and the computer died of old age. Can’t believe it's still worth smth thanks to Alex who sold it for me through lelong. Best part is my dad’s brings its bag to work today.



4. DCM2006 (Buy: RM88 Sold: RM80.) – Do you know even magazines can get a good price at the 2nd hand market? Sold mine on lelong for 90% of the original tag. This month, I’ll be putting up my DCM2007 series for sale as well. Do check out this page for updates.



5. Lowepro Orion Trekker II (Buy:~RM250 Sold: RM150) - I bought it from Hong Kong (CNY’06). After 15 months of extensive usage, I managed to sell it to a gentleman in East Malaysia (Jun’07). The buyer transfer the money to my account without looking at the stuff. He even paid me for the postage. Cool~!



6. Sigma 70-300 APO Macro (Buy: RM720 Sold: RM550) – Who says GIANT Hyper market sells only groceries? I sold this thing right at the car park of GIANT! I was asking for RM650, but that Samaritan managed to bargain it down to RM550 after testing the unit up. Lesson learnt: survey before you buy.



7. Nikon SB-600 (Buy: RM800 Sold: RM600) – This one is interesting. Adib invited me out to have a look with a few of his macho friends. At the beginning I was a bit scared, but eventually he bought it from me with RM600 in cold hard cash. $$$ BLINK $$$



8. Nikon D70s (Buy: RM4200 Sold: RM1850) –You might think I’m stupid selling it off at such a cheap price. But think again, after 34k exposures each exposure costs me only 7 cents! And if I continue keeping it, it’ll mostly stay in the dry box and collect dust. Thanks to Mayki who got it off my shoulders.

At first I intend to sell items 7 and 8 for RM 2,500. Eventually I get back RM2450 selling it separately thanks to my bad negotiating skill. Finally I close the deal by reducing the price by RM50 if they pay up by the end of the week. BAM, they finally paid me in full this morning. So, now you have it. These are all the stuffs that I’ve been putting up on the web and all managed to sell pretty well. So what else will you be expecting from me in the near future?

1. A retired brand less HIFI system with decent speakers (BUY:RM300 RSP: RM50)


2. My CPU: Asus T2 Casing, PIV, RAM: 1G, HDD: 120G, 16x DVD Burner (BUY: RM2500 RSP: RM888.88)


3. Samsung 17” LCD (Rechipped): (BUY: RM1000 RSP: RM 300)


4. DCM2007 (BUY: RM120 RSP: RM120)

More stuffs to come, with pictures attached. If you happen to be interested in the above stuffs do give me a ring at MAXIS-453 2074.

Labels: Photography, Tech

I'm back in Penang for less than a week (4 days to be exact). So far, it has been a very very packed week for me. Not like I'm forced to do most of those things, yet...who would want to loose out 10 days of their "virtual life"???

What have I actually being doing instead of reporting about my Germany-Swiss-Austria trip??? Once I got back to my room, I login my GoogleReader checking if there's anything I missed out in DPReview, then it's the engadget, gizmodo and other photography blogs I regular. Turns out there's 1000+ posts I've to go through. Only managed to slim it down below the 100th mark last night. Yet from all the things I've read...I can only say GNOME 2.20(http://www.gnome.org/start/2.20/notes/en/) released and some of David Ziser (http://digitalprotalk.blogspot.com/)'s flash photography. I also noticed that Nikon D3 gets more attention than the Canon's EOS 1Ds MarkIII but their EOS 40D gets quite some reportage though.

(Trivia) Reading trend: From your 54 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,323 items, starred 12 items, shared 10 items, and emailed 0 items.

Then, it's US's season premiers for Smallville, PrisonBreak, Heroes, DesperateHousewives, FlashGordon, BionicWoman and the likes of it. In Japan I get my regular does of hentai (not!) Naruto and Bleach. I'm not tied in my chair to finish all these episodes, but it has been a norm for me, just like the habits others have for getting a new phone every 6 months, taking a bath for not shorter than 30 minutes, or having to put purfume before leaving the house.

At work, there's more things waiting for me to follow up. My manager just breifed me about the list of things our group need to confirm by the end of the month. Need to come up with a few purchase orders, some reports and naturally dozen of junk mail to trash. Luckily I was not in charge of production, so the pressure is a lot lesser comparatively. Finish giving out souvenirs, can't bring back much for them as things are expensive and ppl I know at work is -- plenty.

Personal mails are not that hard to clear though, only took me 2 days to clear up Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. On the other hand, magazine subscription that came through snail mail will be piling up on the side of my bed. Hopefully I can go through a few of them tonight as the past few evenings are taken either by my other obligations.

Fortunately, I still have some time to spend with my younger sister who is back in Penang for her industrial training in LamWahEe hospital. Told my parents a bit about my trip, and spend my regular wednesday evening with Irene. The JetLag is making my head feeling heavy, and adding to the lack of sleep, it's not helping at all. Irene says that it's becuz of the lack of beers after drinking frequently for the past week, possibly the lack of coffee in our blood vessels as well.

Looking forward to the weekends...since my Saturday event assignment is canceled, I'll try to clear up my luggages, change my bed cover and finish a magazine or two. Hopefully I'll be posting up the photos I've taken, and also do a little write up on the trip. Stay tuned for more updates.

Labels: Entertainment, Family, Myself, Tech, Work

Whenever you want to jot down some notes, scribble some ideas or plot a chart to explain a cost reduction project for your company, what do you do? You turn on your monitor, and start looking for Microsoft Words, Excel or PowerPoint. But, is that THE ONLY option we have? For 90% of computer users, the answer is Yes, Of Course, Definitely. The other 9% of people would say OpenOffice is better? It's free, and enhanceable.

Today, I would like to introduce you another competitor for the OfficeSuite - IBM's own Lotus Symphony. It's free, it doesn't run on Java (Slows down computer) and it open documents in tabs, has ODT support and a lot of nice feats. I'll love to port it into Ubuntu (my fav desktop OS) so that the community might have more choices to use.

From installation till my 1st trial, everything is quite smooth, no hiccups detected so far despite being a beta.(not like Safari's web browser that I file a bug 3 hours after it's launch. So, why wait when you can get the better, most updated(17th Sept '07) and free Office Suite which you can install in unlimited number of computers, and not to worry about licensing as it is GPL/OpenBSD (correct me if i'm wrong).

For FAQs and Installation Guide visit [IBM Lotus Symphony]

p/s: OpenOffice 2.3 has just released as we are speaking, grab it now and be the first to brag about it.

Labels: Tech, Work

When I was sending some documents to the shop to do some trophies, the shop owner already warned me that there's something funny in her computer, virus or something like that. But I insisted she open the document as I urgently need to make the prizes for the competition coming Wednesday.

As I scaned the thumb drive in the office this morning, I found out that the USB is already infested with something called W32.Imaut.N, which I hope doesn't affect the computer I have at home.



Scary...I plugged in the USB for scanning at 8.07 in the morning, and the scan only finishes at 14.00-ish....6 and half hours just to scan one thumb drive. That's like forever in year 2007. From the print screen you can see 1074 risks found... partially my bad also la, since I install some portableapps on my pendrive. But the figures are plain scary la....that's about 1.8% of the files I have.

Should be more careful about these sorta stuffs...now that USB drives has been plug and play all over.

Labels: Tech

Being extremely busy with events lately, there ain't much time for me to read blogs, what more blogging about things I came across. But, this is a very costly expenditure that I have to brag talk about. Credit cards...

Dad have given both me and my younger sister supplimentary card for like 5 years already. It ease our spending quite a lot as we are able to spent some extra money which are not in our pocket. Yet, despite the "luxury", we do not turn wasteful over night. Dad never received any shocking credit card bills in the mailbox (we did not tear the bills away, promise~!). Yet all these while, I'm still not able to do one thing - shopping online.

There are so many gadgets and accesories that you can only see online. The local market is not big enough for retailers to import to justify their risks. There are places like eBay, Amazon and hundreds of websites which I am able to access the products with my own credit card account. And since there are so many victims of online fraud, I still hold back the idea of getting my own card when I can finally qualify for one. But as the desire for stuffs grows faster than the Malaysian market, I finally gave up on tolerating with the gap and get myself a card.

Once I get my card, 1st thing I did was to purchase a Linkin Park Underground membership (still haven't get my stuffs till now). Disapointed as I am, I didn't give up...I continue buying something cheap from eBay. Found a 1st edition hardcopy of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code", registered PayPal and the book is shipped to me in less than 3 weeks. (lovely). This grew back my confidence towards online shopping. As Richx introduced me to the hp OLS end of last month, I checked on the site everyday, browsing various brands to finally decide on one which fits into my budget.

It's not an easy task I tell u. Since the beginning of the sales (2nd July), I have sleepless nights, turning my computer off and on again middle of the night, filling in the forms, and being hesitant to press "SEND". After 4 days of running up and down computer shops to look around for a suitable unit, I finally braved myself to click on the SEND button. 3 weeks I waited, and here the computer finally came. This morning I received a call from the delivery man, and they agreed to send it to my company instead of my house address as it's more accessible. Opening up the box, I can see a nice new PC, but need to take some time to set it up. Now it's time to enjoy the fruits of my patience... will let u know more about the laptop later.

Labels: Myself, Tech

On my way to bed, saw this article that attracts me Computer-Generated Image Looks Exactly Like a Beautiful Woman [Gizmodo]. Our Indonesian friend has such high level of imaging skills, no wonder top prizes for photography competitions came from that country with thousand islands.

http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/max/songhyekyo/

Now... I'm rather tempted to learn. So much to learn over so little time. Aih~ why ain't I committed enough to technology? :(

Labels: Tech

How frequent do you visit a page again after pressing CTRL+D (Add to Favourites) which has became a habitual task once you happen to see smth interesting and tell yourself, "I'll come back to it again when I'm free".

SELDOM!!! People just dump it there and totally forgot about it. Doesn't even bother to archieve Favourites when they bring their computer to format, or change platforms (eg. XP -> Vista).

Irene was dancing along with some loud music in the middle of town, so I spend some time reading thru my favourites. 78% of those links are already 404 - Not Found. While the other 16% are links i never bother to look thru anymore. There are even sites that store other things as compared to their intentional purpose.

How frequent do web developers maintain their site, changing links, and makes users confuse. I was playing with some Universe depository on Ubuntu, which makes it really tough for me to download or follow instructions properly. The links doesn't work anymore, neither are the stuffs there. Hitting around the bushes ain't smth I do out of bed, so don't try to bring me on a rollercoaster ride!!!

The community (Ubuntu and others alike) should be discipline enough to redirect other users to a new link. Make it look seemless if possible, as for Jasmine, please don't switch blog hosts too frequent, it's hard for me to keep track mkay?

Labels: Myself, Tech

GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) is an equivalent to window's, but the language written is different. Need to have some knowledge of Linux before hand, which I learn while working. Now, typing away happily in Internet Explorer 7.0.

Not like I don't like Fedora Core 6, but I'll need a transition period to move most of my daily routine over one after another. Thanks a lot to Choobee for helping me on this grub issue since Sunday. It's good to be working with her in the same department (different company), which means that we can actually have things in common to talk about. Just got a meeting with my new Central Engineering group, I doubt that my job scope will be any different, but the transition there will take another 6 months or so.

Work is always challenging, interesting, and exciting. I wonder why others are hating their's that much? I admit I do complain, but thank God for giving me an opportunity to see the world, understand and learn from various different people. Thanks also to dad for building up my Ego, and supporting me throughout my life.

p/s: To discipline myself in exploring this "new" operating system, I'll most probably use my Tuesdays and Thursdays on FC6 while Mon, Wed and Fri will be spent downloading sitcomes from my WinXP.

Labels: Tech, Work

Installed and typing this blog post on FC6 a RedHat project running on Linux kernel. Hopefully it doesn't mess around with my other 2 drives. But now I'm having problem to get back to boot my Window's system. I muz have been neglecting some important steps on the GRUB or smth like that. Won't be able to get messangers for the time being.

It's not a migration, but the learning curve is still very steep, might need sim or hyuei's help this week.

Labels: Tech

S-ATA has always being ringing on my head when I think about HDD. But never did I really know the difference until I've made the wrong purchase today. S-ATA HDD and external casings costs a bit more compared to IDE, but since it's a "newer technology" I don't mind paying extra.


Found this interesting gadget called E03 by Stysen selling in the PC Fair. It's a bit expensive as compared with the other casings, but I buy their idea of putting a fan to cool down the system. Paid RM96 for that. As for HDD, I've always wanted to get an additional 3.5" HDD considering the price is dropping. Thanks to Richx, I decided to get a WD2500KS for RM272. ( 250GB, 16MB buffer, SATA II, 7200rpm)

That's until technology becomes a nightmare to me. Get back home, open my CPU, strip off my harddisk. F@#$!!! Why are the pins different??? Flip through some manuals only to find out that the seller sold me a IDE HDD last time when I bought my computer a year ago. That's to save his costs through ignorance and negligence of his customers. DaMN!

Boh huat, I'll have to use my newly bought HDD as an external instead of a replacement. But now comes another problem. Don't assume HDD comes formatted. When I've switch on the power, the hardware can be detected by my OS, but it doesn't show up on My Computer. Called up a few favours until finally managed to get help from my uni senior - the great Mr S.

Luckily he has all the knowledge and equipments ready at his house. Drove through the heavy rain to find a place I've never been before. Thanks to the tip given by mom, I managed to find the place quite easily. What surprises me is when I step into his room. I've always felt that I spent a lot on gadgets, but this is the first time I see a bedroon with one 19" LCD connected to a Pentium D CPU while the other 19" connected to an IBM laptop, wireless keyboard and mouses, 1 external HDD and another dedicated external HDD, 1 set of 2.1 speakers while another 5.1 hiding under the bed. All these things are cool with in an air-conditioned room.

Surprise you enough? That's a boy's world. Thanks to him, managed to format the HDD, and get it working. Now using it to backup all my Pictures first before moving forward to backup my movies.

Labels: Tech

1st thing that attracts me to it is Open Sources. Maybe it might not be a preference for you, but it does mean that these things comes for free for quite some time before some huge company decided to buy it off.

Here's what I've gotten from it's website.

Democracy. The only video player you need.

1. Play Anything
Play virtually any video-- Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more. Browse your collection, make playlists, stay organized. One homebase for all your videos.

2. Get Internet TV Shows
Subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog. Explore hundreds of free channels with the built-in Channel Guide.

3. Search YouTube
Download and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and other sites.

4. High Definition and Fullscreen
Your computer screen is a high-def display. Watch free HD videos in gorgeous fullscreen.

5. Torrent Power
Easily download any BitTorrent file. Fast. Then watch it in the same app. Simple.

I've tried it, it's rather lightweight, but still not very stable just yet. If you are adventerous enough, you might give it a try. [Click here]

Labels: Tech

What can I say? I've just been having problems with my computer problems for 2 months, and the net has evolve so fast I can't even keep up. See, I'm still here 12.27am in the morning trying to play with IE7.0 while adding Feeds into my Google Feeds Lab.

My persistence on staying intact with IE has bring all the great features from Firefox and Opera right into the Microsoft company. This means compatiblity shouldn't be an issue even if I'm moving into Vista in a few months time. The interface is also really interesting, smth rather futuristic, the only problem is to find the location of the buttons and getting used. Tech savvys wouldn't find it a problem I believe.

Me and Irene have been finding desktop feedreaders are a bit of a nuisance as they are updating and flooding our desktop all the time. It even create security issues while she access it in the office. I have been talking to Irene about scripting smth exactly like FeedReader for web for quite some time. But now, Google have already made my life so much easier with Google Feeds Lab. All I need to do is to export those RSS that I used to read inside (which will take me another 2 hours at least). That'll be all for now, havta get up for work before 8am tomorrow. :(

Labels: Tech

I've got an error with my LCD with the screen only showing "Not Optimum Mode..." For months, I've tried various methods of troubleshooting myself:- Cleaning my CPU hardwares, Installing WindowsXP numerous times, and even ended up spending money to get an ORIGINAL copy of the OS. Later, I've have to wait for 30 minutes intervals before the LCD happen to boot up. (In IC testing, we call such thing as intermitent passes.)Checked online for reviews, which shows that this is one of the inherited problem from the manufacture.

Samsung might have forgotten to do this Public Service Announcement, but this is what I've get to know after having my LCD serviced by them.

According to the Customer Servant Service Officer, the problem came from the MICOM (Micro Computer) which they bought from some semiconductor suppliers. LCDs that are manufactured pre-2005 would have this problem. So, if you happen to be one of the lucky/unlucky guy, do sent them down for a replacement eventhough ur warranty has expired.

I love the Service from Samsung Penang. For electronic products, usually it'll take like weeks before they analyse and get back to us. But for this particular issue, they've already acknowledge, removed and replaced a new MICOM chip for me. Within 2 hours, I've received a call from them to collect the unit. Isn't that Simply Amazing???

Note: I'm typing this entry on the LCD now. And believe me, it works~!

Labels: Tech

Dunno wut luck I ran into lately. Newly bought handphone now under repairs. It's like the 3rd handphone I've bought in less than 6 months. Damn, I really need to be more careful.

OH well, photography is a costly hobby. And when I say expensive, means it can kill u anytime. I died more horribly than those who went gambling every now and then. So, don't follow me. Photography is dangerous.

Labels: Tech

It's been slightly more than 1 year since i got my computer, but i think either the graphic card or monitor is getting down on me. Havta use my sis' computer to online for the moment. A lot of things has happen lately, but will find proper time to let u people know.

Labels: Tech

Not like I wanted it to happen, but all my contents have been gone with the webserver. Apologies to all my readers who are trying to get backdated news. I guess you'll have to do with text files for now.

I am to blame also since I don't backup my servers that very often. But on the contrary, isn't it good to start things anew? Hope that's true.

Anyway...I'll keep you peeps posted of my updates

Labels: Tech

Looking for an antivirus program? Got a worm, trojan or a virus in your system? This program rocks!!! Not like I'm really in the antivirus business, in fact, I don't like the idea of having something taking up a lot of my resources just to keep me safe.

Got a worm in my system files for quite a few days now. It's easy to know as my computer is crying out to me. The fan was spinning all the time because of the extra processes running at the background. Even after a through hardware cleaning, the fan is still working with an extraordinary speed.

Avast! (thanks to mun kien) is a light-weight, freeware which takes up only minimal resources. What I like about it is, it runs a boot check for the first time when I restart the computer. This means that, I don't have to worry about subborn worms sticking into my system once I start the Operating System.

What some people might like about this software would be where it helps you to check on the pages you make on eMailing, and web browsing. I might suggest all my juniors to have this on their computer...especially those of you who install everything into your computer without giving a damn it's usefulness. Seng Kuang, u hear me?

Labels: Tech