7:00 am : I’m still not yet awake, so she kicked me up. I promised to go see how her typical day would look like.

7:34 am : Barely makes it out from Bandar Putra Permai. There is a terrible jam near the construction site where they are still building Giant. But then again, it is always jammed at the damn Serdang Interchange, with or without the Giant.

7:50 am : Still in MRR2, despite going rather hastily against the rest of the traffic. Suddenly realize she forgot to bring Kit Yan’s Twinkle Star uniform.

8:07 am : Arrived in Tadika Mutiara. Assembly already started, and Kit Yan had to endure the embarrassment of coming in late. Braved the dreaded traffic again to go to Pandan Indah, barely 5 km away, but feels like 50 km.

8:22 am : Arrived in Pandan Indah, had a quick breakfast, prepared everything for a tuition class at 9 am.

9:00 am till 10:50 am : TUITION!!

10:50 am : Drove back to pick up Kit Yan who is due to end at 11 am. Checked with the teacher which homework she has to do to pick up on her missing days on Tuesday and Wednesday. Drove all the way to Ampang to buy lunch packs. Cheapest lunch pack around.

11:54 am : Force Kit Yan to take a bath. Something is very wrong with the electrical system at the centre, called the electricians but they just refuse to come! Now the main receptionist area is without proper air-cond. Make the kids gobble up their food.

12:30 pm : Dropped Kit Yan at her nursery in Tadika Twinkle Star, proceed to drop off another kid. Had to use short cuts in the afternoon rush hour. She told me I was lucky, the weather is not so hot. I can’t imagine a much warmer afternoon than this! GULP!

12:35 pm : The kid did not finish his homework! He better finish it in the car before he reaches school. She had to teach AND drive at the same time! Talk about multi-tasking!

12:52 pm : Dropped him off at the school compound. I find the traffic rather messy, but she assured me, I ain’t seen nothing yet! And she was right, as I would soon find out. Had to park haphazardly by the roadside to wait for the other kid.

1:05 pm : Got the kid, now to the next school to pick up another one by the 九王爺 area. THAT IS A NIGHTMARE! The roads are small, the school buses squeeze through the tiny lanes! Picked up 3 more kids.

1:24 pm : Arrived at the centre, straight away got another class at 1:30 pm. Another teacher was on Annual Leave, so the centre had more students than teachers! Parents and students thronged the centre constantly for inquiries!

3:10 pm : Luckily the electrician finally shows up! Briefed him on what are the problems and he got on his way.

3:50 pm : Time to pick up Kit Yan. She seem so happy to see me! Good that the nursery confirmed my identity before I pick her up.

4:15 pm : I forced Kit Yan to open her books. I flipped through her books and see which homework needs to be done. While I was teaching her, some other students approached me! They thought I am a teacher too and started bombarding questions at me! At first I just helped whenever I can, but later I suddenly became a teacher too! * Sigh * The centre was too deprived of teacher at that time, despite another 2 more teachers already turned up.

4:30 to 6:30 pm : The peak of activity! Boys shouting, running around. One refused to eat his lunch, yes at 5 pm! Lucky the air-cond came online, but there are still things the electrician needs to do. Parents called to pick up their kids too, so more people coming in and out!

7:00 pm : Things died down. The last teacher and student left. Kit Yan was already very tired. Waited till the electrician finishes.

8:00 pm : Turned off everything and locked the door. Went to meet an old friend Jacqualine in Mines. Kit Yan was so excited to see her.

9:50 pm : Left Mines, dropped Jacqualine at her home, and went home. As we approached Bandar Putra Permai, Kit Yan was already unconscious.

Four Buzz Lightyear tickets

We’re allowed to choose either Sunway or KLCC. Of course we choose Sunway since it’s nearer to us.

NO RECORDING! Oh sorry, I didn't know that!

Point at the readers, will ya?

Daddy : Okay girls, point at the readers, will ya?

Kit Yan : Okay daddy, is the reader up?

Hui Yan : Point. Okay got it. But my ear is itchy…..

We went there again very very early in the morning, the entire family. Needless to say, the kids were excited!

Even though we were already considered early, there were already balloons flying up in the sky by the time we got there. There were some famous ones that I did not manage to take, such as the Darth Vader, the Levi’s and the Orange.

Here are some pictures taken from the fair that I liked:

Can you go up any further?

This was taken on our way back. I stopped at the bridge (dare not stop long, got policemen!) and quickly grabbed a few shots.

View from the bridge

More pictures at my album.

I have also embarked on two major photography projects. One was a trip to Bangkok during the Chinese New Year. Another is the wedding of my ex-colleague. I have yet the time to completely process the batches of pictures. The only thing I have now is the slideshow. So there you go, to prove that I am not telling a lie, here is the video ….

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

That’s my little girl Hui Yan. You really can’t blame the camera. You can see that the bright background threw off the camera’s exposure metering calculation, which made Hui Yan’s face dark, and blew the background away. A really bad picture. If I saw this picture a few months back, I would have thrown it away. But I tried to salvage it. The cute expression on my girl’s face is just too previous to throw away just like that!

Traditionally I would increase the exposure setting for the foreground and decrease it for the background. But doing so made the contrast go awry, the effect was not very pleasant at all.

Uncle Google to the rescue! He told me that the way most people increase expose is to duplicate a layer of the original picture. Here’s the trick: change the blend mode from “Normal” to “Screen”. Then repeat the process, copy another layer from the last layer and change the blend mode to “Screen”. Do this as many times as necessary until you are satisfied with the level of exposure.

To decrease the exposure, do the same step, but this time use “Multiply” as the blend mode.

Needless to say, I used layer mask to blend in the brightened up foreground and the darkened background. Here is what I have got:

The picture is correctly exposed, and Hui Yan's face is clearly visible!

What did I learn from this? There is one very important lesson from all this. And that is underexposing is much safer than overexposing. I used only 3 layers to brighten up the foreground, but more than 6 layers before I can properly darken the background. As you can see from the photo above, the details in the curtains are lost forever, and I can hardly bring back anything there. But the underexposed foreground is still save-able, albeit with a bit of a noise. But noise can always be taken care of right?

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

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.

And I do have to agree, Windows 7 delivers! The startup time has been greatly reduced compared to XP. It still requires an antivirus though, but there are a lot of good antivirus out there, some even free. I used Avast, a good (free) antivirus software that protected my previous XP from a lot of possible damage. It updates almost everyday too, keeping the virus threat to a minimum. The only thing close to annoying is its sound; every time it updates itself, it goes “Virus database has been updated”! Scared the hell out of me especially on a quiet night! But that can easily be taken care of.

Windows 7 still requires some learning curve. I have not yet fully explored its features, such as the proper sanction of each different users in the machine. For example, I installed Google Chrome as the administrator, but I cannot apply Chrome as the system-wide default browser. It only affects the account where you are logged in as. So if you use another account, that account will have to do its own installation of Chrome. Not a show-stopper, but I guess this is a good security feature. These and a lot of other features will need a little getting used to.

Just when I thought my machine couldn’t get any faster, the latest reincarnation of the ever famous Ubuntu blew it out of the waters! The speed is like nothing I have ever seen on my machine, PERIOD! I do not have the data to back my claim, but I can say that it is at least about 5 seconds faster than W7! And that is blazing fast! Being an avid Ubuntu fan, the interface pose no challenge to me. I can easily find my ways in Ubuntu like a fish to waters. Perhaps the speed was due to the fact that I used ext4 as the file system for the boot and root.

Karmic Koala does not promise to revolutionize Ubuntu. Karmic Koala only have very basic promise, to speed up its loading time. And Ubuntu delivers on its already very usable and stable platform. Of course, I still find myself dual-booting back to W7 for Photoshop and Canon’s DPP. But for all my everyday use, Karmic Koala will rise to the challenge, and in good speed too!

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!)

The first step is to load your machine with the Windows 7 installer disk. Select the language, keyboard language and country and click next. Select “Repair Your Computer”. It will scan your machine for any existing operating system. Select the Windows installation located in your local hard disk (in my case Windows 7) and click Next. In the System Recovery Option Dialog box, select Command Prompt.

Here you will be prompted with a command prompt, old school style. Type “bootrec /?” and press enter. If you followed the steps correctly, you should be able to see a set of possible options. At first, I chose “bootrec /FixMbr“, restarted the machine, but it does not work. So I loaded the installer again, go through the same steps again, this time choosing “bootrec /FixBoot“. Then after restarting the machine, VIOLA! It worked!

Lucky I have another machine that can go online while I do this. Otherwise, I’d be dead!

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!