Went for a walkabout in October with Yan Yan and my wife, with plenty of photo opportunities. Only able to process the photos today, due to amazingly full schedule.

Anyway the title is a bit confusing, ’cause technically speaking the places we went to were not only confined to KL. We also went to Sunway and Putrajaya.

It was during Deepavali. Obviously.

This round of post processing involves some newly learnt workflow. This is the first time I utilized LucisArt for that Dave Hill look. Tell me if that works.

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Happy DongZhi, or in chinese, 冬至快乐! It’s amazing now that you think about it, the ancient chinese calculated this annual path of the sun which coincides with the winter solstice. The winter solstice is when the sun has gone as far south (if you live in the northern atmosphere of the earth) as it can through the winter, and is now on its way back to warm your icy cold butts. The chinese calendar is actually a combination of the lunar and the solar path, which is far more useful in predicting the occurrence of the full moon, the seasons and maybe even the eclipses (not sure).

Anyways enough of the technical details. Go ahead and enjoy your “tang yuan” 汤圆 with your family!

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My first impression of Windows 7 was good. Coming from a Windows XP environment, W7 proves to be a refreshing change in terms of speed and looks. Perhaps this is really not a fair comparison. The aging XP was really quite bloated with all the softwares I installed. Being an easily infested little weakling, XP had to fortify itself with an antivirus and a strong firewall. That I think, contributed to its comparatively slow startup.

Enter Window 7. Microsoft promised that W7 will load faster, more secure, and at the same time, look sexier. There has been a lot of good reviews about W7, and naturally I was tempted to try it out. I finally had the chance to do it last week. Formatted XP and replaced the damn machine with Windows7. Even the installation process was a breeze compared to the old XP days. Only a minor hiccup occured, otherwise the installation went without a hitch.

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Stupid beast this MBR (master boot record) is from Windows. Even in its 7th reincarnation, MBR still bugs me. I am not a big fan of Windows, but I still find myself going back to Windows. And Windows 7 looks more attractive and sexier than XP by a mile!

Anyway why do I bother about MBR? That’s because my harddisk has always been loading Ubuntu mainly, Windows secondary. Being the primary OS, Ubuntu assigned GRUB as the boot loader. Things get ugly when I switch back to Windows, as you shall see why.

In order to reformat my dual-booting machine, I first have to install the secondary OS, in this case Windows. Then only can I install Ubuntu, so that Ubuntu can manage the booting itself. Besides, the Windows installation is too stupid, it cannot detect other existing OS’es to co-exist peacefully with others. Typical Microsoft.

So my MBR is destroyed. No matter how many times I install Windows, it just will not load from the hard disk. Took me a lot of googling before I found out this MBR thingy. And how it differs from previous Windows XP! Previous XP still uses fixmbr.exe to solve this. Not since Vista. Vista and Windows 7 uses bootrec.exe instead. (There is another similar command, called bootsect.exe, but that does not work. Google it!)

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