Cracking under pressure

Work has been a little frantic lately as we're coming close to a major release of our entire application line. This Saturday I'll be heading into the office to help with the rollout effort. In the mean time I've been spending all week working on urgent fixes that have to be migrated before the deadline.

Here's a picture of me at my desk hard at work.



Ah who am I kidding, it'll be a laugh this weekend. That's Dan, my manager in the background. We're currently discussing what sort of takeout to order on the weekend. I favour a bucket of chicken myself but the general vote seems to be leaning towards Thai food.

And before I forget, Happy Merdeka day to all fellow Malaysians. :)

Return to Photoshop

After finding some really nice tutorials for Photoshop on the net, I thought I might go back to the old girl to see if she's changed much since I've been gone. To give her a fair chance I decided to start with a simple project similar to what I did with GIMP on Alison's red pepper grinder picture.

I wasn't very happy with the original picture as some of Campbell's colour was being bled out to a yellow car in the background. To increase the contrast I used a mask on top of an adjustment layer to desaturate everything in the background.

It's probably due to my familiarity with photoshop over GIMP but things just seemed a lot more intuitive. I'm quite pleased with the results and look forward to trawling through my picture collection to hunt for other snaps that I can 'improve'.



As a side note, my first impression of Adobe Bridge is that it sucks monkey balls as a viewing program compared to Picasa. Like I'd write a post that didn't plug a Google product. ;)

I can't hear you

I've been suffering from an ear infection over the past week and it's really starting to peeve me off. The pain isn't really bothering me as much as the inconvenience of the situation. Everytime I shower I need to get what looks like a huge sago ball a stuff it in my ear to prevent it from getting wet. Walking to work now has become a drag as I can't use my earphones for fear of infecting them (not planning another trip back to Singapore to get new Panasonic retractables). Of course, let's not forget the ear drops that I have to use four times a day that feel like a cross between paint stripper and angry red fire ants. What's that? Yes, the yellow goo you see dripping out of my earhole would be my liquified brain.

In other news Charlie and the Chocolate factory should be coming out here in two days. If we're feeling adventurous, or in the mood to hurt defenseless minors, we might brave the hoards of sugar high children at the premier on Thursday. I haven't really been following progress on the film but it's Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, what could go wrong?

Snow gathering

Alison and I drove to Eprapah today for a little family get together. Alison's maternal great-grandfather (Charles Snow) basically founded scouting in Queensland and Eprapah scouting reserve is a big scout training site.

The weather was pretty overcast and did not permit any decent shots of the forest paths unfortunately. Forgetting to bring the camera on our 20 minute jaunt through the bush probably didn't help either. The best I could manage was a quick snap of a dead lizard with my mobile.



Lack of direct sunlight however was a fantastic opportunity for taking photos of the family all gathered up with no where to run.



I enjoyed an extended session playing family photographer, taking lots of portrait shots with my telephoto. I'll be posting some of the nicer ones on flickr. Hmm... might be about time for me to go for a Pro account.

I caved

I was hoping I could last a little longer than a week but my head has somehow managed to justify the purchase. I've gone for the twin lens kit with the 18-55mm EF-S lens and a 55-200mm EF lens. I'll be getting used to it this weekend and should hopefully have some new pics up on flickr soon.

Huzzah for my first DSLR :)

Update: Well I've played around for an afternoon and I have to say that it's a completely different experience compared to my Pro90IS. I'm still trying to figure out what I can get away with for exposure settings. It seems like I'm getting decent results even when I increase my shutter speed to the point where the camera warns me that the aperture won't open wide enough to allow proper exposure. I do miss the swivel LCD display but I'm sure I'll get used to using a viewfinder and I'm having a blast trying to track our fish with manual focus.

Blogger blues and minor updates

I'm still playing around with the format of the blog. It's a little annoying that there's no way, that I can see, to add a next button to take the user to next page of posts. Guess I've been spoilt by other commercial blogs on the web like engadget.

As a minor update, the walking is still going good. I've shaved my time down to a little over 15 minutes now and I'm not nearly as puffed when I get there. Things might change as the weather gets warmer though.

I've also christened my new piece of plastic on a decadent slab of meat at Hog's Breath. Great steaks there.



Sorry about the cruddy image quality. It was dark and this was taken with my K750i.

Google has also updated satellite images of a few cities on Google Earth including Singpore and Brisbane. Hopefully Malaysia will be next so I can check out the old neighbourhood around Subang Jaya.

Can you tell I'm a Google fan yet? ;)

Podcasting the day away

I've started listening to podcasts on the long walk to work to help kill the tedium. Today I tried the prologue to a podcast only novel Earthcore. It's a nice sci-fi setting much akin to War of the Worlds, ie gruesome death and destruction arising from the earth beneath. All fifty chapters are available for free so check it out if you're starving for something to listen to on your long commutes to the office.

Anyone else have interesting podcasts they would like to share?

I got cred

Came home today to find a surprise waiting for me on the kitchen counter. My Virgin credit card in all its aqua blue glory is finally in my hands and all I can say is it's about bloody time.

Now before any of you point out how impatient I usually am, let me just qualify that I've been waiting for this credit card for close to half a year now. Much of that time was spent providing a ludicrous amount of personal identification, talking to 80 year old call centre workers that suffered from partial hearing loss and sitting through an excruciating 40 minute session in a shopping mall explaining to the nitwit filling out the form how to spell my address. I'm not even talking about 'Indooroopilly', that I could understand even if that shared the same name as the mall the twerp was working in. I'm talking about the 'terrace' in 'Riverview Terrace'.

When will people stop making me want to hurt them?



I guess I should be happy that I got the darn thing in the end. Now I have SUPERIOR BUYING POWER (tm) that I'll unleash on an unsuspecting camera in the not too distant future. Ahh my precious 350D, not too long now my sweet.

Google marches on

Google's latest beta for desktop search brings it even closer to OSX Spotlight, another addition to my Vista/OSX love child of a desktop. Finally we have quick results in a pop down window like Spotlight. Now if we can just get them sorted and categorised by file type that would be superduper.



Searching for Gaiman stuff with a bonus pic of the man himself in my Konfabulator widget.

It all begins with a single step

One of the cons of working out in the middle of whoop whoop is that public transport becomes increasingly scarce. Brisbane has a great integrated transport system where a single ticket allows you passage anything from the bus, to trains to the city cat (our local ferry service). I love Brisbane transport but then again anything would look fair compared to the complete rip that we'd have to put up with in Malaysia.

Imagine my dismay when I had to jump from a 15-20 minute ride to the city centre when I worked at Telstra to an hour long trek across half of Brisbane to get to Michael Hill in Murrarie. To add insult to injury the only available transport from the train station to work is through a privately owned shuttle bus service. This basically means that in addition to the 1-3 zone weekly public transport ticket I have to buy ($23.20) I needed to fork out another $25 for the bus to and from work. I was paying more money to travel the last 5% of my journey than the whole train fare.

The last straw came about a month ago when our beloved bus driver hit us with a fare increase, weakly justified by increasing petrol prices. Now he charges $3.00 for a single trip or $5.50 for a return. I choked this down for as long as I could but enough is enough which brings me to the topic of my post (which in truth isn't as dramatic as I'm making it out to be)

With the intention of losing weight, saving a buck and denying the buggers and easy cash cow I've decided to start walking into work from the station. Thankfully it's still winter over here so the weather is quite pleasant though it's going to take a while to get used to the distance. Courtesy of Google Earth I've got a satellite photo here to illustrate my new path to work.



I borrowed my boss' pedometer today and discovered it's takes about 3000 steps each way. Initial trials suggest that I'm only going to add another 5 minutes to my trip (the bus always dropped me off last) so I'm not going to lose much.

Hopefully posting this online will give me the incentive to continue this as long as I can. More updates to come in the following weeks.

Look over there

I've added Flickr and del.icio.us to the sidebar. This blog is actually starting to look half decent.

Since I feel like I've ranted to death over Flickr I think I'll give del.icio.us some fan-boy love. For any of you that haven't tried it head over to del.icio.us. When you boil it down to it's essense del.icio.us is basically a bookmark list that you can share with people and (more importantly) one that you can access regardless of where you log onto the Net from. I seem to have a knack for losing my bookmarks through reinstalls, virii or pure stupidity so the idea of an online, persistant bookmark list is pretty darn attractive.

To take things to the next level you can even browse other people's bookmarks based on tags. This is a fantabulous idea as even Google doesn't always serve you up with similar sites that match your interest. Can't beat both productivity and fun in the same package. :)

It's so dark I can't see!

Alison and I have been mulling over this whole camera buying business lately. Today I got my first chance to hold the 350D at Harvey Norman and I must say it is SEEEHHHWEEEEEET. Can't believe how light it is.

Anyway we figure that it's about time we do some travelling so the current plan is to take a trip down to Sydney or Melbourne in November. I'll need a new camera to take advantage of this perfect test drive opportunity. :)

Reading up on photography techniques it seems like I have a LONG way to go before I deserve a decent camera. I just found out that I've been paying so much attention to my shutter speed and aperture settings that I'd completely ignored what ISO I use in my photos. It's no wonder that all my night time shots are so crap. ^_^;

Puzzle me this

I'd read about sudoku a while ago when it was taking British new papers by storm but I never got around to trying one till this weekend. It's a fascinating blend between traditional logic puzzles and mind sweeper. There's a fluid feeling as you flow through each puzzle marking down the numbers. Addictive stuff even if I've yet to complete one correctly.

Percy Pepper!

Alison has been hunting for a big red pepper grinder for ages now to go along with all the other red kitchen utensils we have. Finally bought one today so she's a happy lass. Yes I know it looks phallic and no I'm not worried... really.

My name among the stars

I just googled my name to see if this blog would come up and came across a link about a NASA program. I certainly don't recall submitting my name for this but it seems unlikely to me that there would be someone else with such an odd appellation. Either way I'm chuffed I got my name on a microchip.

Unfortunately this blog isn't googleable yet. Guess I'll have to give it a few days.

Point and shoot

New fascination for the week is photography. Not really surprising how I got here and I can explain the process in a few easy mental hops.

Previously mad about : Apple Computers
I'm still keen on getting one of the new sexy MacIntels once they come out next year. I don't see the point in getting one now when I can salary sacrifice a 12" iBook through work and install XP (or maybe Vista if I'm lucky) on it and get some work done on the beast.

Moving on to : Imitation
If I can't have an Apple then by golly I'll smack my PC into something that looks like it. I installed iTunes, Object Dock, Google Desktop Search, Picasa and Konfabulator to get as close to that OSX look as possible with XP.

Look everyone : Pretty pictures
After all the work I had to do to get my pictures in order for Picasa I stumbled across Flickr. Talk about a fantastic concept, I love sharing pictures with my friends and getting inspired by some of the pros out there.

A new frontier : *click click*
Of course monkey see monkey do. After uploading a pitifully small collection of my 'nice pictures' I find my efforts somewhat lacking. A perfect reason to pine for new hardware to compensate.

At the moment I have my consumer eye on the Canon EOS 350D. It seems to be a logical step up from my current Pro90IS though the price point is a little prohibitive right now. In the interim I'm considering a macro lens for all my flower pictures. Everyone loves flower pictures.

I'm also becoming really impressed with Picasa's options for post processing. Some shots that I'd written off now look passable and my good shots look even better (in my humble opinion of course). Photoshop Elements would probably do a better job of it but I'm happy fiddling for now.

Skin the wha?

Well this had to start somewhere. I've just recently come upon this whole 'social internet' concept and from what I've seen it's pretty neat. It's great knowing that you can claim a part of the web for yourself these days without the bother of maintaining a site for posts and pictures.

I've never been comfortable with sending mass emails to all my friends and emailing everyone seperately just isn't possible anymore (because I'm a lazy arse, not because I have loads of friends). This is about as close to a mass mail as my concience will allow and I predict I'll find writing my thoughts for all to share somewhat cathartic.

Given my fickle nature this probably won't even last all that long but it'll be interesting to see how long I can keep the ball rolling. Expect to see a torrent of posts intially describing every aspect of my latest banal experience to be followed by a rapid plunge in frequency. Over the course of the blog I hope to share the new locales that my distrubed mind has happened upon.