Super Macro

Since I bought my Canon 100mm f2.8 lens, it totally changed to way I look at things around us. All the time, I thought Macro lens is simply a "magnifying glass" for SLR camera but I was totally wrong. If you visit my Flickr photostream, you will know what I mean. Not only does it make things bigger, it allows me to "play" with light and compose shots from different perspectives. Insects, flowers and leaves have never looked this good to me before! I have reviewed a fair bit about the lens in my previous post, so I won't dwell too much in this area today.

What I wanted to share with you today was a technique which I have come to love in macro photography. That's to shoot "super macro" combining the 100mm with a reversed medium telephoto lens, such as a 50mm prime lens, a cheapo Canon 50mm f1.8 will be a fantastic prime to experiment with. The trick is to focus both lens to infinity and held together tightly, in my case, by hand :) In this set up, I can get even closer to action and a much higher magnification value without spending anything substantial. The downside is of course, you would not be able to use the AF function of the lens and so the only way to focus is to move the whole thing back and forth. A word of warning though, I am not sure if there is any other easier way but if you do the way I explained above, it's definitely not for the faint-hearted :)) Working with extremely narrow DOF or smaller aperture with limited ambience light is always going to be a challenge in macro photography, well, for me anyway. Persistance and patience will help you a long way!! :))

P/S Thank you Arturo for showing me the secret!!

Christmas comes early :)

Introducing the newest addition to our family : Betty :))

Betty is a budgie, a small Australian parakeets given to us as a Christmas present by KC, one of the pharmacy assistant at work.

Because she is only a baby right now, we are trying hard to train her as much as possible so she will not be afraid of handling by human. Apparent like certain species of parrot, budgie can learn how to talk as well!

Today, we got her a brand new home and a hanging stand!! When she has become more domesticated, I will bring her out to shoot more photos and post them on my flickr page. But at the moment, Betty is pretty much confined to her cage :)

Josh Groban AWAKE Tour (Perth)

Josh Groban burst on to the international music scene in 2001 with the release of his self-titled debut album featuring the hit single, "To Where You Are." His follow up CD "Closer" with the smash hit "You Raise Me Up" brought enormous success to the young singing sensation. "Awake" was his third studio album which was release late in 2006.

Perth was his last stop of the Awake Tour around Australia. The concert was held at Challenge Stadium on 14/10, which lasted about 90mins. There is only one word to describe his concert : SENSATIONAL!! He performed brilliantly throughout the concert and has proved that he is a musician of many talents! What I meant was, he can sing (did I mention he CAN sing?), cracking jokes every so often, a brilliant pianist and as a drummer, he rocks! Well, how do you know a concert is good?....easy, it is when you get goose-bumps during the concert hehe!

He performed most of the songs from his lastest alhum AWAKE, which includes my favs, You are loved (don't give up), February Song, So She Dances and Un Giorno Per Noi. He also threw in quite a few of my favourite old numbers from his previous albums which include my all time favourites, Remember When It Rained and You Raise Me Up.

If you still haven't heard of Josh Groban, you haven't heard a music at all!!!

The only complaint I have about this concert was those ass-killer seats! Yes, it was cheapo hard plastic seat which was not the most comfortable on earth....but in the end, it was well worth the effort :))

Is incompetence a "norm" in pharmacy service nowadays?

Sorry for the lack of updates to my blog recently. I have been spending literally too much time on Flickr and I think I might take a break from it soon =P It is kind of addictive, I mean in a good way because I have learnt so much by surfing through hundreds of photos everyday and I have met some brilliant photographers and great friends.

I feel compelled to complain something today to get it off my chest! We just updated our Point of Sale (POS) system in the pharmacy in hope that it will provide us with better inventory control and sales reports. And what did we get? A system that totally stuffed up our inventory during the conversion process, stocks level is out by miles and most of our sales figures are totally out of whack! According to our system, we have actually sold 350 boxes of Panadeine tablets (48) last month...what are we? A Chemist Warehouse? When we run into problems, the software company generally takes 2 - 3 days to response, and most of our queries/problems are tagged urgent response needed! I am not going to name and shame here just in case they get angry at us, then we might get no service at all in the future :)

Another thing that upsets me is the level of service offered by one of our pharmaceutical wholesaler, Sigma. They have appalling customer service and is getting worse by the day! On a typical phone call to their customer service, the average waiting time will be around 5-10 minutes and that's on a good day! "Your phone calls are important to us, please hold and our next available...." do I need to continue? :) Now they want us to pay $12 per month for the Pharmax ordering service that we don't use at all! We made numerous phone calls to query about the charge and to cancel it, we were directed back and forth at least 4 times between Perth and Melbourne customer services and no one seems to know what's going on. Then one of them said to us, that $12 is not the charge for the ordering service, it's the standard charge for using their customer service!! Pay while you wait for service...that's something new you don't hear everyday :) No wonder they are going broke, for your info, their share prices have plummeted more than 50% in the last 6 months! I wonder why.

New addition to my family

Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro EF USM! Got this lens last Saturday from Plaza Imaging in North Bridge.

First of all, I am really impressed with the capability of this lens, the images captured are pin-sharp in details and colours are great. Focusing mechanism is internal (USM), hence it's fast, quiet, accurate and most importantly, allowing manual overide with the focusing rim in AF mode. The length of the lens is fixed and will not extend during focusing, this is great when focusing at 1x subject distance. Build quality is great and is on par with my other Canon 17-85mm IS lens.

However, using this baby in macro photography is a totally different ball game altogether. First is camera shake and frustrating out of focus images. At this focal length doing 1:1 macro shot, any tiny shake will translate to totally blurred images. I guess missing the images stabilizer (IS) in this lens does not do much favour. Another problem that I am experiencing is the control of DOF. Having a narrow DOF, while can produce fantastic looking background/foreground blur, it also means a tiny camera shift can result in out of focus shot! Well... I guess I will just keep shooting, hopefully practice does make perfect :)

Warning!! There are other downsides for buying this lens....as I shamelessly quote from Bryan's review. "You will find yourself looking for little things to use for subjects - which are everywhere. No bug is safe. You will find you neck hurting from looking down all the time. You will discover a world you never knew existed." Macro photography is great fun!

Food for thought

While I was having a quick lunch yesterday at work, I skimmed across SWAPS August newsletter which is aptly titled "What's in a name?". If you work in a drug store, you are probably trying to push the sale of so called "home brand" or chemist own products through the roof and hopefully making lots of profit in return. If you are a consumer going to a chemist to buy a product, chances are you will probably be talked into buying one of those "home brand" alternative as well.

This is all well and good but one problem. The problem is when a customer comes in and asks for a branded line because they have used it successfully before, or they have seen it advertised on TV, and then they are "talked into" a different product, sometimes you can win and sometimes you can lose. You can win because you are probably making a much bigger margin on the sale, you can lose because the customer may not be satisfied with the results and guess what, they may not come back and tell you that. In fact, they may just not return at all.

Home brands and brand substitution when it comes to healthcare is a totally different ball game all together. Unlike supermarket where you have the option of choosing a home brand cookies and if they are no good, you just bin them. Healthcare is a very sensitive issue and consumers are aware of that and are taking it much more seriously than, let say, choosing a box of cookies.

Provide a "value" service, because at the end of the day, that's what matters to customers, not the cheapest, but the best perceived value. After all, those companies who own those big brand products are the ones who are spending big money advertising and driving consumers to your pharmacy. Don't try and beat the supermarkets at their own game!

An afternoon around Freo

Another do nothing achieve nothing day :) Woke up late, then we have a very "healthy breaky" at Hungry Jack (Burger King) before going to Ikea because Jin wanted to look at some wall shelf unit. After lunch, I grabbed my Canon and we went down to Freo for an afternoon stroll around the market. Morning started out very cloudy but afternoon has turned up to be a rather pleasant day, it will be a sin to stay at home I think :)

I took some sunset photos at the Coogee Beach Holiday Park and I have posted a couple at Flickr. I have never been to this part of the beach in Freo before, there is a jetty on the beach as well but it is no way as long as the one in Woodman Point. So I guess if you are looking for a fishing spot, just drive down another 10km or so to Woodman Point.

The following 2 photos were taken earlier this morning...just mucking around with my lighting.

Here is a photo of some dried flowers which we bought from a craft show in Guildford.

Vivitar DF200

For most people, Vivitar is probably recognised as a manufacturer of cheapo point and shoot cameras sold on supermarket shelves. Well, rather contrary to that, it is a fairly well-known manufacturer of photographic and optical equipments based in California.

The company is probably better known for their high quality no-frills flash guns that are quite popular among photograhers. Last week I purchase a Vivitar DF200 digital slave flash gun from ebay. I reckon I got a good deal, the whole thing only cost me a mere $61 and it came with a mini tripod as well as an adaptor for attachment onto normal camera tripod. As you can see in the photo, the Vivitar is significantly bigger than my Canon speedlite.

The flash from this Vivitar is extremely powerful and will definitely help me in various photographic applications. Now I just need to get a difuser to fit on... back to ebay soon :) The flash is wireless and it works by detecting flash from another source and fires its flash at the same time. The only downside to that technology is that the flash may get confused if they are others using flash nearby. Below is a result of an earlier experiment with the flash in a 90 degree arrangement with my Canon speedlite. Despite a slight over-exposure, overall the result was quite satisfactory I think :)

Summary of the week :)

I haven't been updating my blog as often as I would like...reason...just being lazy and spending the bulk of my free time practising photoshop and photography. Last weekend we discovered a great picnic area next to the Swan River near Swan valley, less than 20 mins drive from the city.

This place is very tranquil and relaxing, definitely a stark contrast from those regular weekend "hang out" areas such as South Perth or Kings Park which are frequented by parents and their screaming children. It is situated just off the second bridge alone Swan Valley drive from Great Eastern Hwy. After the picnic, we went to our favourite winery, the Fish Tail and got ourselves a dozen of Rose :)

Last Tuesday, we went to watch the much anticipated 5th installment of the popular Harry Potter movies. Well, this time for the first time I couldn't even bother to write a review for the movie. It's just a mixed bag, CG is getting a whole lot better with great eye candy but apart from that, the story is very weak. I nearly fall asleep during the first half of the movie! The biggest let down is the ending...what a disappointment! .....so what was all the hype?! But don't let me stop you from going to that movie...I am no fan of Harry anyway!

During the past few days, I have been taking many photos again. Most of my good posts can be found on my Flickr website.

Go Bumblebee! I want one!

Well, I can't resist to pen down a few lines here about the movie which I just watched moments ago: Transformers! True to the magic of my all time childhood favourite animated series, this movie is a must watch! It's witty, it's outright silly and dumb at times, it's loud and senseless, but it's seriously fun to watch :) It's strange how a good movie can transform 140 odd minutes seem like 30mins of sheer rollercoaster joy! Like Matrix on steroid, the action continues from the start to credit. Do you still remember when you first saw the "bullet-time" in the original Matrix? That was exactly how I felt when I saw the CG generated robots battle sequence in this movie, equally impressive!

Shai LaBeouf (i-robot is the only movie I remember seeing him) acted remarkably well and his "bodyguard"...the bumblebee, although unable to speak most of the time, CG has managed to create some great emotion in his robotic eyes....reminding me of the puss in the movie Shrek :)

Make no mistakes, this is one of the best movie releases this winter...possibly better than the yet to be released last installment of Harry Potter! 4.5/5...minus half a star for the seriously complicated, seemingly illogical and perplexing "transformation process" of the transformers! ..but then what is logic you might ask me :)

Creator of Bomida :)

Jin's friend Kyeong Ah arrived from Korea last Tuesday and she has been staying with us for the past few days. Although she sort of staying with us, she was hardly home most of the time as she was out meeting and catching up with her old mates around Perth. Tonight we had sort of a farewell dinner for her as she is heading to Margaret River for a few days with her friends before flying over to Melbourne. I met her in Korea when I was staying in Sang Ju with Jin and she gave me the nickname "bomida" which I use for my photographic work and my blog :)

The following photo was taken with the aid of a dolphin torch light. It is a rose brought over by Kyeong Ah from her friend's backyard in Busselton. It's one of the biggest bloom I have ever seen! Unfortunately, its petals were getting a little old with some browny discolouration. However, the touch light seemed to do a great job by not only hiding those imperfections, it has also greatly increased the colour saturation as well!

I have another photo which I want to share with you all, especially Dao :) This photo was taken couple of months ago when Dao came over to our place. It basically consists of 3 photos put together under Photoshop with some effect filters and layers and lots of mucking around. Bigger version can be found on my Flickr website.

Me and Myself

Photoshop just continues to amaze me :) Today I learnt a new trick on how to duplicate or clone myself in photos. I wish I could do just that in real life so I could send my clone to work while I go on a holiday or something.

Cooking up a storm! Me, myself and I :) Where is Jin?

Made in China?

Great advertisement! Give me two!

XXth birthday? :)

Yesterday was Jin's birthday! Don't even ask me how old I am, because I have lost count since I past the 30 mark! (but I am glad she is catching up hehehe!) Initially we were planning to go to Char Char Bull in Freo for dinner but then because of the gloomy weather, we decided to go somewhere closer to home. Four of us headed to Sienna in Leederville but to our dismay, the restaurant was full. After a rather lengthy discussion out in the cold, we decided to settle for Kailis Bro Seafood Restaurant at 101 Oxford St. Leederville. Price wise, the restaurant is not cheap by any standard, we were $175 poorer after that and we didn't even bother about desert or coffee.

Food quality was excellent I must admit. The cobbler that I ordered was very fresh without any "oily" feeling even though it was deep fried in batter. Jin reckened her battered Spanish mackerel was a little bit too dry but loved their chilli mussels. Dao ordered some herbs-clad snapper while Lisa had a bowl of pasta with blue crab meat. Lisa was happy with her pasta but Dao, being a rather talented cook herself, wasn't too convinced with hers :P The friendly service provided by the waiters and waitreses is something to be commended as well. A big downside is the noise level in the restaurant. It was higher than expected for a restaurant of this standard, making decent conversation a rather unpleasant experience. Apart from that, this restaurant is hard to fault and since I have been giving quite a few movie reviews so far in my blog, I will treat this as a review as well and award the restaurant 4 stars out of 5! Not bad at all!

A weekend at Guilderton

A weekend camping at Guilderton and everything seems so refreshed! Yes, I survived the camp in the small town of Guilderton about 95km north of Perth. Guys, if any of you ever feel like taking a short break from reality, your soul will thank you for having a short stay at the Guilderton Caravan Park. The holiday park is situated right on the mouth of the Moore River overlooking Indian Ocean. From the look of it, the park itself is the town center and there is only one cafe/restaurant/general store. Everything is so "natural" and tranquil...well...except for the weather of course :)

I brought my trusty Canon with me but because of the lousy weather, I didn't have much luck with it. Lets hope Lisa and Dao have better luck with their Nikons so I can grab some photos off them...and of course, with me in the photos hopefully :P

As you can see in the picture, the Moore River mouth was largely block by a stretch of long sandy bar with the water level in the river seems a lot higher than the sea level. Basically, you can walk from one side of the river to the other on that stretch of sand and the view of the river from there is amazing. I could only wish the weather was nice enough for me to see the full sunset from the beach!

We have 2 tents set up and me and Jin stayed in the smaller one. Yes, food and food and food and of course, beer and beer and beer and I mean lots of them! Well, that's basically what we did most of the time and strange enough, the heavy downpour and strong wind brought by the storm added to the "cosiness" in the tent! There you have it, that was my first experience at camping and it was fantastic :)

Fishing is one of the favourite activities in Moore River and indeed there are lots of river bream in the river. Unfortunately, most of the bream we cought on Saturday afternoon were undersize so we ended up releasing all of them back to the river. Before we could try our luck on a different fishing spot, the rain just sent us straight back to our tent again :(

No doubt we will be back to Guilderton again in the very near future, probably bringing our tent again to camp there. Hopefully then we will have better luck at fishing!

Shrek The Third

Yea...that's right! It's another movie review time and this time is the long awaited sequel to two of my all time favourite animated movies - Shrek 1 & 2: Shrek The Third. Well, don't get too excited because to me, it's just like the other two "third sequels" that appear this year so far(Spiderman 3 and Pirate of the Caribbean - At World's End), Shrek The Third is a rather disappointment and lame film unfortunately.

I think Shrek is a little bit long in the tooth and this installment should have been a DVD-only release rather than the big screen. The movie tried very hard to be funny and unlike the previous installments, you would be hard pressed to find about fresh idea in this one, except the Snow White :)

The story is quite lame as well and the plot is sketchy at best. With the death of the frog king, Shrek was made heir to the throne which he actively refused. He then embarked onto a journey to find the next in line heir with donkey and booted kitty. In the meanwhile, Prince Charming was massing an army of fairy tale villians for an offensive take over of the Far Far Away. The whole movie is laden with stale and rather calculated jokes. Overall, it's a 2.5 stars movie and I think I have been very forgiving :)

Self-Annihilation: Pharmacy vs Woolworth and Coles? NO LONGER!

Came home from work earlier today and not feeling very well thanks for all the coughs and sneezes customers brought in from work. But that's ok, after all, they are the ones who pay my bills and mortgage and put food on my table at the end of the day. I reluctantly picked up an AJP, a monthly pharmacy magazine which I apparently subscribed to but never get around to read them. I got a pile of them stashed in a giant basket in my kitchen still in their plastic wrappers.

It was the April 07 issue and as I flicked through the first few pages, the headline on page 4 cought my eyes: "The enemy within: aggressive pharmacy competition reaches new depths". Pharmacy industry was faced with a grievious challenge couple years back when retail giants, Woolworth and Coles Myers were trying to get a slice of this multimillion-dollars pie. Every pharmacists (well, almost everyone) were united in their voice to fend off these Walmart-inspired, profit-driven greedy giants. At the meanwhile, a "cancer" is growing within the industry which has slipped under the radar of most of us: big discount pharmacies aka "warehouse pharmacies"!

"NEVER BEATEN ON PRICES!! If you find a cheaper price elsewhere, we will match it and give you 10% off the difference" Heard that before, seen it before, now the cancer is spreading even faster in Perth and is coming to a place near you! FEAR THEM!! Yes, if you are a owner-pharmacist, you should be very worried and so do all of us hard working pharmacists, who are trying to make a living out of serving our community with our knowledge.

Here I quote from the article: "A new player within the Liverpool market, Chemist Warehouse, has gone on the front foot in its competitive campaign to attact customers away from its more established rivals..offering discounts well below cost. These reportedly include Panamax 100tab pack selling 69c and 89c, free gifts with prescriptions and volume discounts on a host of analgesics." As unbelievable as it sounds, the Chemist Warehouse was also reportedly sending their girls to dish out their discount catalogues within and outside of rival pharmacies! Other examples include dispensing three and four packs at once and telling customers that they would only receive their OTC discounts if they had their prescriptions dispensed with them.

How bad can it be? Have you seen people from Big W distributing their catalogues in Kmart? How unprofessional and unethical can those warehouse pharmacy owners be? Can you trust your health with those unscrupulous greedy minority "pharmacists" who want nothing but their aim to close other stores? What is the price you put on your health? I feel sorry for those new pharmacy graduates who are trying to make a living out of this endangered profession...believe me, I feel sorry for myself too!

p/s sorry about the language tone I used in this blog, that's just because I AM ANGRY!!

A day in Perth Hills

Today was another one of those "doing-nothing again" day :) We decided to head for a drive to Perth Hills to visit the Springdale Art exhibitions in Kalamunda. It was rather relaxing with lunch at the Stirk Park in Kalamunda until I got shitted (pardon my language) by bird later during the day. Will come back to that later but Stirk Park in Kalamunda is one of the most picturesque park I have ever visited around Perth. I have added couple of photos in my flickr with Jin as my "model" :) If you happen to find yourself sitting at home doing nothing during one of the weekends, please take a short drive to the Hills, you won't regret it!


Then we drove along the Mundaring Road across the hill and stopped by the Mundaring Weir Hotel for a cuppa. It's a nice discovery actually and we promise ourselves that we will go back again, may be for a meal or two next time. The little cafe was packed full of people and I could see the poor girl behind the counter manning the espresso machines could barely keep up with the orders :)

Oh yea...did I mentioned the defecating bird? I think I must have upsetted some birds in my previous life, this was probably the second time birds having fecal incontinent on top of me! Why me?? Well...thinking about it...I got attacked by magpie before, so this was not so bad I guess. It all happened near where I took the above shot :)

Hale School mid year concert

Last Friday, we went to my nephew's Hale Junior School mid year concert "Celebrating Music from Hollywood Movies". I think the concert was organised yearly by the students from year 3 to year 7 and my nephew was in the junior string quartet. It was a fun-filled night and I am really proud of you, Lynden, and your school is indeed amazing! They played music pieces from various movies ranging from classic like "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" right through to "Jurassic Park" and "Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End".

The standard of the play was nothing short of breathtaking and it was indeed hard to believe that those kids are still in primary school! Looking at them really makes me feel ashame of myself. When I was at their age, I was probably catching fish in dirty drains (longkang fish), digging holes in dirt and fighting with other kids over lollies!

A crazy day

I am so so full...yea...still full at 2am in the morning, I was so full earlier on that I couldn't even sit properly...so full that I feel like throwing out :P

This morning, we had BBQ with Mal and Jenny and their friends in King's Park. I was pretty hungry this morning considering that I only had a piece of bread for brekki. Yea...so hungry that I ended up eating more than my stomach could handle I think. Furthermore, we forgot to bring water, instead I washed down my food with only red wine! So driving home at the time was probably out of the question, so we decided to hang around the park and had an afternoon nap there :)

Then we went to brother's house for dinner straight from King's Park with my stomach still pretty much full. The noodle that he cooked was so nice that I couldn't resist but to gobble down the whole lot in a giant bowl! So, back to square one...loosing control over eating?...happening to me all the time!

What we had today :)

Getting fat...fat...fat...ate outside whole day today :) We woke up around 9am on this beautiful second day into winter and decided to have brekki at the Blue Duck in Cottesloe. We went there following one of my cousins' recommendation because of the great breakfasts they serve. Well, to tell you the truth, I think the food they serve is "so so". I ordered the Blue Duck full brekki while Jin is happy with just becon and poached eggs. Their menu can be found here. Although the brekki left much to be desired, the atmosphere of eating on the restaurant balcony next to Cottesloe beach made up for it.


In the afternoon, we went to one of the wineries in Swan Valley, the Fish Tail. It is a very small winery and therefore, you can only purchase their wines directly through their cellar. They don't sell their products through any of those liquor stores in Perth. I think we went there about 2 years ago and got some "Pink Salmon" and it was fantastic so we decided to go back to get more :) "Pink Salmon" is not your typical red wine because the red merlot grapes skin was only allowed to be in contact for 12 hours only to give that brilliant pink colour. The grapes were fermented in stainless steel container and hence, unwooded and the taste is crisp and sweet without the "dryness" of typical reds. Check them out next time you head to the Swan Valley and you will not be disappointment!

Sunset around Perth

The weather in Perth during the past few days were excellent and everyday after I finished work around 5:30pm, I was treated with wonderful sunset with pieces of amazing golden clouds spreaded thinly over the horizon. I wish I have my Canon with me all the time, but I don't think running around with my 3.5kg Crumpler bag full of stuff is that practical anyway :) I whipped out my trusty Nokia mobile with 2MP camera and took couple of shots. As you can see in the photo, this puny "dodgy" camera from Nokia is not a bad emergency alternative after all. As Ken Rockwell wisely put it, "Your camera has nothing to do with making great photos". Ken has been providing me, and I believe millions of people around the world like me who know little about photography, with invaluable knowledge and great inspiration. Thanks to his website, I have learnt much.

It was lucky for me that I finished work early last Friday and had a chance to take my camera down to South Perth to take a few shots. I have posted more photos at my usual place at Flickr. Although a little bit a cloud in the sky would be nice to give the sky a little bit of texture but that orange golden colour the lit up the sky at the horizon was an amazing sight indeed.

Another Tuesday - It's Pirate time!

Pirates of the Caribbean: The World's End is a very long movie indeed, spanning nearly 3 hours from start to credit and you know what?...it feels that way too! Lucky we went to an earlier session, otherwise, I think I would have fallen asleep midway into the movie :) There you go, in a nutshell, this is how I think about the movie unfortunately.

It's way too long for the story and to make thing worse, it involves far too many characters which I think fail to connect with their audience. Forget about Captain Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbossa is back thanks to Calypso, the goddess of sea trapped in human form by her lover, Davy Jones. It's Barbossa who leads the show this time round I think and thank god he does well to keep me interested at time.

Oh, just throw loyalty out of the window in this movie. In fact, betrayal is the most apt theme for this installment; betrayal of trust, betrayal of love, betrayal of friendship, betrayal of promises and there are plenty of it.

Saying that, I think this third installment is much better than the inferior second film, which until now I still can't fully comprehend...or is it just me? The movie excels visually and the epic ship battle is nothing short of spectacular but a tad too drawn out. Love the flying cannon monkey though :)

Overall, I give it 2.5 out of 5.

Another lazy afternoon gone by :)

Today was a truely lazy Sunday...woke up late, breakfast in the bed and computer game for couple of hours, then went down to city for an afternoon stroll. Actually it was Jin's idea because she wanted to have a look at some autumn sales in Myer and Cue :) For me...as usual, lugged around my camera gear whenever possible just to catch something unexpected may be :)

After browsing through quite a few "fashion outlets", my stomach started to grumble. We had a great lunch at the Sassellas Tavern above the city arcade. We love the pub/restaurant setting and most of all, they serve food in gigantic proportion. Of course, going to a pub with having a booze or two will be a shame!

I bought a ND4 filter alone the way in the hope that it may help "slow down" some action in reasonably bright daylight. Earlier experiments can be found here. I think I might need a darker ND8 to handle some brighter situations.

Myths vs Facts: Part II

OK...Windows Vista isn't that new anymore, but from what I can see not many people have actually switch to the "the newest and the greatest" yet.

I am not going to write another review about Bill's lastest creation since there are countless reviews posted everywhere already. What I am here to do is to share my view whether "the lastest" is indeed always "the greatest"? In most cases, I guess newer should be better. In the case of Vista, it's a little of a mixed bag I guess. I have been using 64bits Windows Vista Home Premium for a little more than 4 months now and from what I experience, it's indeed a very stable operating system. I have yet to experience a crash or a blue screen apart from a few times where I have overclocked my cpu a tad too much :) Even if a game is totally crashed, I would still be able to recover from Windows task manager and return to Windows. So that is a big plus from crash-prone XP. Oh, did I mention?... Vista is by far the best looking Windows period!

Sadly, that's about the only 2 advantages of Vista I could gather from my experience. The biggest let down of Vista is that fact that you need a fairly decent computer to run it. As Microsoft has put it, to run Vista at its full potential with all the bells and whistles turned on, you need a computer with a WEI (Windows Experience Index) of equal to 5 or more. Now, Vista rated my E6400 @ default 2.13Ghz with WEI of 5 and at the time of purchase, E6400 was one of the fastest midrange chips out there! Good luck to those who are still running Pentium/Celeron. In addition, everything is running much slowly under Vista than with my good old XP :( Oh..one more thing, don't waste $400+ on new retail Windows Vista, just head to eBay and get yourself a geniune OEM version for less than half the price!

Back from South West

It's a short 3 days trip down to Margaret River - Augusta region but it's nontheless refreshing one. We have been to Margaret River numerous times in the past but this time appeared to be the most relaxing one for some reasons. I always love Margaret River, not because it's full of wineries :) but because of the friendly locals, sheer tranquility and amazing coastline. Although a few visits to wineries won't harm hehe!

I have taken many beautiful shots with my camera this time, despite of terrible weather for photography - hardly any sun, very windy and drizzling unpredictably. May be that's why I finally collected some dust in my brand new lens! Guess this is kinda "emotionally" worse than dust on camera sensor because you can't physically clean/blow the dust away because the elements are completely sealed. Good thing about it is that they never show up on the photos I took.

I have posted more shots at Flickr.com.

Ok...coffee time...can't wait to try some "kintamani" blend which we bought from Yahava Koffee Works :) Hey Wayne - can't wait for your expresso machine!

Myths vs Facts: Part 1

Myths vs Facts: CPU
What is CPU and how fast should it be? This is not a computing class and I am certainly not an expert in computers. But I have seen so many of us get confused with the term CPU. Yes…I said us as people around my age and older. Those younger generation lucky bastards get to use computer even before they reach pre-school! For me, my first experience with 486DX2 66 was at my college library when I first came to Perth. Those computers were running at a “speedy” 66Mhz! Most of the people have a misconception that CPU is the “box”…yea…the “box” that attaches to your monitor. As a matter of fact, CPU actually stands for Central Processing Unit, a complete computation engine that is fabricated on a single silicon chip and it actually resides in the “box”. It’s the brain of your computer and usually is given a speed in MHz, which comes the second misconception.

Myths vs Facts: MHz
MHz is actually “speed limit” that is imposed on a CPU. It’s the maximum speed that the processor can run without generating any errors. However, many modern CPUs can be run above their rated speed with some simple tweaking, and this process is called “overclocking”. Many people think that the higher the MHz, the faster and hence, better their computers are. Well, that was indeed true in most of the case until few years ago when AMD (Intel’s rival) starting to produce CPUs that run slower in MHz than most Intel counterparts but capable of much faster program execution. You will find the same situation occurs within Intel when they introduce the Core2duo family which replaces the good old Pentium 4 dual core (my current budget cheapo overclocked Core2duo E6400 running at 3.0MHz will run rings around any Pentium 4 and most AMD 2x chips out there). A big drop in MHz but a big jump in performance! So is faster MHz actually reflects in faster real time performance? Well, it’s only true if you are comparing the chips, which are produced using the same architecture and process.
Photo on the right shows the mess inside my "box" :)

Myths vs Facts: More RAM or memory = better performance?
RAM (Random Access Memory), also better known as computer memory, is considered “random access” because you can access any memory cell directly if you know the row and column that intersect at that cell. (1 cell = 1 capacitor + 1 transistor) and RAM consists of millions of them! My simple definition of RAM is “workspace” for your computer. If your computer has inadequate RAM, then your computer will be forced to make more frequent file transfer from your RAM to your hard drive cache in order to free up more RAM space, resulting in extremely slow and unresponsive system. Hence, more RAM = faster executions and productions. However, this is only true until certain RAM size is reached, and then increase in RAM will result in little or no real time performance gain but a big dent in your wallet! All but the basic Windows Vista has a minimum requirement of 1GB of RAM in order to run things smoothly. But my advice is, get at least 2GB of RAM if you are planning to run the Vista. I still can’t believe all those people out there are still trying to sell new computers with 512MB RAM for Windows Vista…and worse still, with completely obsolete CPU technology!

Spiderman 3

Well...guess what it's Tuesday movie time again. This time we went to watch Spiderman 3 with our friend Dao at Reading Cinema. My expectation was pretty high before I watched the movie because of the previous 2 installments which were reasonably good, as well as the proclaimed astronomical budget. The story was a little loose and a bit scattered but I think the director managed to pull them together pretty well. It's a job well done considering there are quite a few supporting charaters involved. Tobey Maguire (Peter) acted reasonably well in this movie, especially when he discovered his "dark side". Venom, which was the last villain in the movie mutated by the same alien black slime that changed Peter was a little bit disappointing in his ugly outfit and poor design...something unexpected from a movie of such a big budget. Overall, it was rather entertaining and visually amazing. Rating, a near 4 stars movie let down by the badly designed last minute Venom, highly recommended if you are spidy fan, personally I think it's on par with the previous installments.

What I cooked for lunch today

Some people are more adventurous in cooking and some are not. Jin is the unadventurous type, everytime she cooks usually must be by the book...no mixing of multiple ingredients...no multiple sauces...no mixing pork with beef for instance...I know I know, doesn't sound very good mixing different meats together...well...you never try you never know. What I have here are two dishes I cooked for our lunch today, don't worry, not much "mixing" involved...just simple and I think nice :)

If you are interested, here is the recipe for the fish..the amount is just estimates, I just add in what I feel like and most of the time my dishes turn up ok. Oh yea... I like the number "2" :)

Fish fillet in sweet black sauce
what you need:
2 good fresh fish fillet (I used cobbler)
2 tsp ginger sliced in thin strips
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
2 small hot chilli finely chopped
2 tsp corn flour
2 tbsp soy sauce in same amount of water
2 tbsp sugar
chilli powder
pinch of rock salt
some spring onion and sesame seeds as garnish

Thinly coat the fish fillets with mixture of corn flour, chilli and salt to taste. Remember we are not making fish in batter or fish and chip, so do not use too much flour. Heat enough oil to cover the base of a large pan and fry the fish until lightly brown on both sides and remove to plate.
In wok, fry the ginger, garlic and chilli in 1 tbsp of oil until brown. Make sure the wok is hot, add in sugar, then mix in soy sauce and water. Put the fish back into wok for 1 minutes then remove and garnish with whatever you want :)

New TV unit

I would like to do a before and after shots but I was too excited with the arrival of our final piece of furniture for our lounge room, I totally forgot about it. As Karen and Bill would have recalled, that LG tv must have weighed a ton! With great effort, we managed to shift the tv down and up onto the new unit without smashing a single toe!

The no nonsense unit is clean and simple and it's just the way me and Jin like it :) We have been shopping around for a long time and most of the low line units we came across were either too tall or too "complicated" in design = ugly :) My next mission is to get a flat panel monitor for our "entertainment" PC.

TWO more weeks to my holiday!

Yesterday was a rather busy Saturday at work. We had more than 160 customers between me and another shop girl..so it was pretty intense and of course, most of them came in the first half of the day. Jin showed me a great photo of a boat house in Matilda Bay a few days ago and suddenly I felt like doing just that yesterday evening :) So after an unexpected home delivery to an dear old customer after work, went home, get changed and rushed down the freeway to Matilda Bay.

Well, first there were a couple taking wedding photos on the jetty to the boat house...so we waited...then suddenly appeared this rather fat photographer (wish he read my blog) trying to take a photo of the boat house too! (see photo) Gee...got to be a bloody popular spot for both amateurs and professionals alike! So we waited and waited...and he just won't budge! I really felt like giving his ass a little kick after standing there for more than half an hour! When we left about an hour later, guess what?!..he was still there on the same spot!

Jin nearly finished painting her "shabby chick" shelf for pots...it is looking good :) Hey Wayne, remember those flat square pots that we saw in Bunning on last Friday? I went and got one this afternoon with a pack coriander seeds. I hope they grow in whatever potting mix that I bought the other day!