How many of you remember taking a photo, only to find out that the photo turned out bad due to incorrect exposure? (It could be due to underexpose (picture turning out too dark) or overexpose (picture turning too bright).) Even though in the world of digital photography where the camera decides everything for you, things can still get very wrong. And most of the times you have no choice but to press that delete button.

Things gets worse when you find out that the photo is a very important photo that you absolutely must keep. So how can you save it? I have personally seen a lot of people successfully saving their bad pictures digitally, but they were damn fucking stingy. They did not want to share their techniques to the world. Hate these fuckers.

Luckily a bit of Uncle Google and some photoshop experience helped me to figure it out. Take a look at this picture below:

Incorrect exposure, making the foreground dark and the background bright

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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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Remember my Wira that I have converted to NGV over a year ago? Yes, over a year ago. I keep a record of how much I have traveled and the amount that I refueled so that I can gauge how much I have used and how much I saved compared to using petrol. I wanted to know when I will get a return of investment on the NGV kit that costs me RM 3200. Guess what? It has returned two days ago! From now on, every refueling that we do is an income! How cool is that?

But then again, it is rather unfair to do this kind of calculation. One must remember that since I have converted the Wira to NGV, we made a conscious effort to drive the Wira more often that the Altis. If I have not converted to NGV, all our trips to Sagil would have been on the Altis instead.

Yesterday and today I am off. I need to clear more than 10 days of annual leaves, and they will be burned if I did not finish them by the end of this year. So yesterday I drove all the way to Canon Service Centre at Peremba Square to have my sensor and lens cleaned. I must say, that they really did a great job at it. It was completed in less than the promised 30 minutes. And everything was as good as new! The only thing annoying about the place was that they did not display their latest camera equipments in their showroom. They only have office equipments. Kinda disappointing. But it’s a blessing in disguise; the poison on display would have killed me instantly! =P

Saw this guy with a 40D and a 50D, and a myriads of L lenses there too. He was having his equipment checked, overheard his conversation with the Canon guy that his 580EX II tend to overexpose. Damn, seems this is not an isolated case, some of my friends have their 580EX overexposing every shots too!

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The below is a representation of how one should NOT do in Malaysia, but for reasons quite unknown, has become a standard for everyone to adhere to while driving in Malaysia. Foreigners driving on Malaysian road, you will find this guide very informative!

1.  Turn on those hazard lights in the rain and in the fog to remind other drivers that you are there. Turning on your headlights just ain’t enough. You need to be constantly be reminded that it is dangerous driving in this condition with the “tick-tock-tick-tock” sound coming from the indicator lights. It also soothes your sense of insecurities.

2. On the contrary with the above, DO NOT turn on your hazard lights when you stationary on the road shoulder. If you do that, people will think that it is raining heavily or really foggy.

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1. I saw this malay kid, wearing a t-shirt with all chinese wordings there. It’s a club or something of a chinese school. How did he get to wear that t-shirt? Could be given by a chinese close friend, or maybe he studies in that school? Who know….

2. During the ghost month festival, there was a lot of prayers and offerings everywhere. I saw this temporary prayer altar built right next to a buzzing Bazaar Ramaddan. No complaints from either parties.

3. A chinese colleague of mine has a Malay husband. So naturally she celebrates Hari Raya and Chinese New Year. Her sister is married to a Christian Indian. So she celebrates Christmas and Deepavali! So her family celebrates all four major festivities in Malaysia!

4. A crazy Malay dude of mine here in the office suddenly sprang into a Teocheow song out of no reason! =P I don’t even understand Teocheow!

So you tell me, is “Race” needed in government forms? Are we really that divided? Is the cow-head incident in Shah Alam necessary?

This makes me think, are politicians still playing the racial cards to their own advantage? Are political parties that are segregated into race still relevant?

Happy 52nd Anniversary Malaysia. May you still have many more peaceful anniversaries ahead, for my two girls’ sake.

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Arrghhhhh!! This happens rather frequently, caused by the release of a better and more bug-free Linux kernel. This is a good thing actually, but its side effect is exactly what this post is trying to solve. Your boot partition grows, and the next thing you know, you can’t upgrade to a newer version of the kernel anymore!

Good thing about the internet is that you can find almost any information you want. I can always find the solution anytime, but I am lazy. This post is more a reminder to myself rather than another explanation to what is happening.

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I knew all along that there was a thing called RSS-feed. But little did I know that it would be that useful to keep in touch with my friends.

Yup, RSS. Rich Site Summary. Sounds very simple really. A standardized XML format that is exposed to the outside world for all to see, and feed upon. I hadn’t thought about it, until I found out how important updates with my friends are often missed, simply because my current Random Blogroll is not good enough. As its name suggests, it simply displays random blogrolls, with no preference to the latest changes that my friends made.

Fortunately in the world of Wordpress, plugins of that sort are readily available. I downloaded and installed Feed Reading Blogroll. Sounds lame, but it does what it claims to do.

Although I do have a qualm that it loads like a snail, it does not bog down my website. That’s because it’s AJAX enabled. That means that my website will load independently from the Blogroll feed. So even if the Blogroll Feed took an eternity to load, my website still loads normally. Does anyone also share the same problem with me? If not, could you please suggest to me a better plugin to use?

Hmmmm ….. now I know who among my friends are active bloggers. And also I have also subscribed to some cute Asian chicks website. Keeps me updated whenever there are new pictures to see! Yum yum!!

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I got a chance to see what a real bird’s nest looks and taste like. Of course, this is not a photographic opportunity to be missed! Especially since this handful of bird’s nest already cost us RM50!

This handful of bird's nest (only two nests) costs RM50!

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