Category Archives: Pictures

Are you a musician?

In 13 days, October 11th 2006 to be exact, I would have not cut my hair for 2 years. (Minus the 500th-day sideburn trim.)

I think I’ll keep it for a while, still, for I have found more reasons to treasure my hair lately. For one, it’s never the same; meet me 3 months later and you’d think I had a different hairstyle. What cheaper way to have different styles of hair than to leave it to grow through phases? (short, slight thickness, poking your eyes, poking your nose, poking your mouth, so heavy your hair doesn’t puff, shoulder-length, long-enough-to-tuck-under-armpits-length, covering-your-bosom-length, covering-your-navel-length, replacing-your-… er, nevermind.)

My plan, after growing it till it makes no difference, would be to make dreadlocks, and then go bald, and then look like a boy again. But then I’d miss headbanging like so.

(Credits to smashpOp for taking these pictures.)

Anyway.

I was at my distraught-friend‘s birthday party, sitting at this rather quiet sober table with this guy and two hot chicks. Let’s label them hot chicks as Lisa and Shel.

The guy was telling stories about how he was hopelessly gentlemanly with girls, and how his friends tell him off for being a nice guy.

He once bought a girl a Hush Puppy, stuffed a RM1

In A Food Mood

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And now, for another rare subject on my blog – food!

Left column, top to bottom: How many bottles of beer on the ramp?; you can tell by the shadow that it’s happy hour; Mecca Cola for those who think Coca Cola is unholy.
Right column, top to bottom: Guess how big this cup is; mixed-up buttered kaya-dripping peanut-spread breads with swapped toppings; the obscenely thick layer of butter on my mixed-up order at Wong Kok Char Chan Teng.

O’briens, sandwiches for the health-conscious.

Vivo American Pizza serves not so obscenely strong-tasting turkey ham and mushroom cheese baked rice. My favorite! It has now become the only place I figure is worth my money in The Curve, really.

Somewhere in Dang Wangi…

…lies a window, that is on the side of…

…Yut Kee, excellent non-halal pork-tinged Chinese food. Top-right: toast; bottom-right: roti babi (pig bread).

Got a craving, but don’t want to finish a snack in one go? Lengthen the life of your snack by getting something hot, like Lays Stax Barbecue flavor (their Vinegar flavor lasted a few snacking sessions because of its sourness!) Don’t forget to balance it with fire extinguishers in case it gets too hot for your tongue.

Alright, so I couldn’t resist taking yet another picture of the moon… cake.

All this blogging about food has made the hamsters hungry.

I Blog You

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And now, for a rare subject on my blog – people!

Left column, top to bottom: Guess whose skinny hand that is; Cheryl flashed at 1/500th of a second in Shutter Priority mode, so the background is properly exposed instead of being burnt out; Bryan Chin is smokin’; Jaya Jusco Equine Park is so empty, the security guards and cleaners take part in the contests.
Right column, top to bottom: Yes that’s right, the skinny hands belong to Davina, a (now very) skinny musical ensemble/arthouse film star/independent movie star, so please feed her so that she may regain her original weight (as in this picture with hippos stuck to her); Cheesie has nailed the art of advertising my phone; papparazzi.

Watching this guy walk was hilarious.

Oh, just one of those KL International Motorshow girls I happen to know, that’s all…

Shaz, behind a slanted polarizer, in Hartamas Square.

Slinky, after setting my camera’s white balance to a strong green wall.

It looks like Cheryl, sitting on the railing in the back, is sitting on Bryan’s head.

smashpOp knows no bounds when it comes to creative camwhoring.

Have you ever come back to your car to find drunken chicks on your boot?

Finally, pictures of… myself, reflecting.

Long exposures with the aid of a blue light. I don’t remember what the blue light was though!

As a bonus, here’s another quiz: Guess where this is, and which blogger I think the orange bear looks like! As always, the winner will get pimped with at least one paragraph.

!yvaN ehT nioJ

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Many do not know this, but on the 16th of August 2006, I was actually in the United States of America.

Joining me were colleagues, including smashpOp.

Clockwise from top-left: The journey to Westport, Port Klang; the USS Enterprise, the world’s oldest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier; hangar entrance; the companion ships.

Gee Todd, kinda nifty, y’think?

Clockwise from top-left: Pilots are given codenames, like “Shag”; these guys get “Dirt” and “Sticky”; plane ol’ hangar round; sign of the times.

Aircraft carriers are rushed to the scene, because quite simply, planes would not have enough fuel to be immediately deported to a situation.

Clockwise from top-left: What reaction would you give to eight nuclear reactors?; this was also where Top Gun was shot; nosing around; the walk down from the flight deck.

In other unrelated pictures on the same day, while waiting for the bus to take us in with security clearance, we spotted this naturally-cooled lorry…

…and had time for panning shots, too.

Oh, and a morning sun, much earlier.

Tag Race

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13th July, 2006, some Tamiya racecar circuit in One Utama.

Toyota Scion xB! The ultimate pimpin’ box car!

Set your shutter speed to 1/30th of a second to get this panning shot. Or just zoom all the way in, set your EV to +2 and ISO to 50 or 80 for similiar effect.

Suzuki Swift!

1/20th of a second, 140mm focal length (at 35mm equivalent) to get this panning shot.

Do-riff-too!

And now, to pad this blog entry.

Oh Joy, you tagged me!

AWESOME PEOPLE I WANNA MEET:
– Davina Goh, because she comes to mind first when I think of awesome.
– Suzanne Lee, so I can molest… her camera.
– Keanu Reeves, because they say I look like him, and I’d like to take a picture with him to find out.
– the Angel Of Death, because I want to borrow his scythe. I could think of a thousand uses for a scythe!

THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT:
– oxygen, because you need that to start a fire.
– my Nokia N70, who provides me companionship on those long journeys.
– my clothes, it helps me from being jumped on by swarms of nubile girls.
– rock and roll, because I love rock and roll.

I WISH I COULD:
– avoid coming to friends’ minds when they are doing blog memes and have to pick friends to tag
– cut down this meme from 5 items to 4. Oh well, I took the liberty of doing that already.
– walk over and tell people how I feel.
– clear the backlog of stuff I have to blog about.

SONGS THAT I THINK ARE AWESOME: (For once, 5 is not enough.)
– Queen – Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy
– Incubus – Summer Romance
– Prince – Sexy MF
– The Doors – Light My Fire (has Jim Morrison ever come to you in a dream?)

I WANT:
– chicks such that people would tell me to get a room. 😀
– to do only things that will improve or contribute to the wellness and progression of society (or self, at least…)
– to be your backdoor man. (Damn those naked men coming to you in dreams!)
– to rearrange the order of some of the questions in this meme. Oh well, did that already.

HOW I SEE MYSELF IN 10 YEARS:
– through a mirror?
– looking ten years older.
– acting ten years older (or at least, the more desirable attributes of that age…)
– writing 2016 on dates, and not 2015.

RANDOM FACTS:
– I don’t roll over and sleep.
– My right sideburn grows faster than my left, and my beard gravitates to my right sideburn.
– I don’t block people on MSN.
– The Nile in Egypt is the longest river in the world.

MISCONCEPTIONS:
– I smoke. (The tainted teeth are a result of Teh Tarik.)
– I am a druggie. (The stoned look is a result of lack of sleep, updating my blog in hopes of entertaining all you bored people.)
– I have the height of a NBA basketball player. (My face just looks tall.)
– I have a big camera. (I’m often sighted with a friend’s camera, be it Tarquin’s or Jacintha’s or Shaz’s or Asyraf’s.)

I TAG:
– whoever I can catch. I’m going to count to 5 and start chasing!

Rainbows And Polarizers

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Time for some long-procrastinated camera geeking.

So it was a hot drive down to Ampang, when I tried to capture the light distortion from the sizzling heat by putting a polarizer filter in front of my camera.

And whoa, what did I see? Rainbows!

Turns out that sunlight, which then reflects off coated surfaces on a car’s glass, is polarized…

…and when it comes through the polarizer filter, some wavelengths are cut off, causing the rainbow effect. However, it varies between car; a Perodua Rusa’s rainbow patterns are like grilles. This was shot from smashpOp‘s Proton Gen.2; you can see the coating’s effect on the sky, but it is most obvious against other cars.

What if you don’t have a coated window? What if you’re not shooting from inside a vehicle? Simple. Cut a piece of plastic from a plastic microwaveable box and tuck it in front of the polarizer filter.

And so, you can still shoot rainbows!

You may think that thick plastic may lower image quality, but it does fine, adding a soft diffuse effect to this picture (no color or levels adjustments made, to show the effect.)

Same goes for this dreamy evening.

An even more interesting idea would be to use a polarizer to shoot real rainbows; the effect of the rainbow might be maximized, or striped, depending on the angle. I can’t wait to find out.

21 Inches Of Love

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So I got myself a 21″ Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor. Most specifically, an IBM 6558 P202, a 21″ behemoth running at 1600×1200 resolution at 85 hertz. Multiply 1200 by 85 hz to get its maximum vertical refresh rate; 102 khz.

LCD Rant

No, it’s not a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitor. I hate current LCDs in the market, as the technology has not matured. The Dell 17″ LCDs I use at the office are very comfortable and look good, but they run at a slow 16ms update rate (thus being useless for games). The Samsung 17″ LCDs in the office, meanwhile, run faster at 12ms, but no matter how I adjusted the moire and patterns, I could never get consistent sharpness or a comfortable view. 19″ LCDs can reach 1440×900, while 17″ LCDs max out at 1280×1024 resolution. A 17″ CRT does 1024×768, which is lower… but most 19″ CRTs do 1600×1200 at 85hz (except Samsungs), and some even allow 2048×1536 at 60hz! A 21″ CRT usually has the same pixel clock and thus, same resolutions, just at a bigger scale.

I also had to keep adjusting the Samsung LCD’s brightness (when I had to use it at the office). It would be uncomfortably dim one moment and bright the next, so I had to adjust it about… each hour. I love Samsung CRTs, just not Samsung LCDs.

I see dead pixels.

LCDs are sold with a warning that says that as a part of the manufacturing process, a few pixels may be dead, meaning they stay a certain color no matter what you’re looking at. Unless there are seven dead pixels (or worse, 1%, which is 13 thousand pixels on a 1280×1024 display), you can’t get it replaced under warranty.

CRT manufacturers don’t chicken out.

L C Death

Cherrie‘s Dell laptop’s LCD died after one year of extensive usage. Edrei‘s Toshiba laptop’s LCD died after 2.5 years of extensive usage. I don’t know if this will happen to desktop LCDs too, but hey, I’ve had my good Samsung CRT for 5 years already.

Buying an LCD is not an investment for the future. I’d stay with my CRT, and buy an LCD later if it gets cheaper and better than CRTs.

Color And Gamma

CRTs also have accurate color and gamma. A major annoyance (going from my 5-years-and-20-days-old Samsung SyncMaster 750s CRT to the Dell LCD at work) is how the Dell tends to brighten the shadows, especially dark mids, giving the picture a dry, desaturated look. The Dell is already at minimum brightness, and the Samsung, its maximum brightness!

The upper picture is an example of what I’d see on a CRT; the lower one is on a LCD. It brings out the ugly compression of JPG, which doesn’t look so nice in the shadows.

NVidia’s Display Optimization Wizard helps you to set the correct color and gamma for your monitor. In my Samsung’s case, it was 70% brightness. However, if I was to Photoshop pictures to follow my Samsung’s brightness, it would be so much brighter on another CRT (on an unbranded Medion 17″ CRT, 0% brightness was my Samsung’s 100%, and 0% brightness on the Dell LCD was still much brighter than my Samsung’s 100%. But NVidia says that everything should be darker, really.)

Brightness Correction

And so, I left my Samsung at 100% brightness, and adjust gamma in Photoshop to look slightly dark (but with detail hidden in darker mids). It wouldn’t turn out so bad on the Dell. Meanwhile, on the Dell, I had to brighten the mids just a bit. If you noticed, my latest pictures all have blacker shadows; darker mids bring stronger color and more saturation, and pictures with a lot of darks also have smaller filesizes using JPG compression.

Price Wise

A 19″ CRT is also the same price as a 17″ LCD, and does better resolution, doesn’t mess with your colors, better gamma, and is better for games too. My computer table is the same size; we’ve always had space for CRTs until recently, so why are you all complaining about space?

P.S. I got mine secondhand. It had defocusing towards the left and right of the screen, so I got a discount, whee! The defocusing was quite annoying at 1600×1200 when reading small text, so I bumped up the font sizes for everything. (Well give it a break, it was 7 years old.) I could afford to do so at such a resolution! For games and movies, the defocusing didn’t matter, since we only pay attention to the middle of the screen. Watching a DVD full-screen has never been so visceral on a computer before! Also, such high resolution means that the DVD doesn’t look sharp enough for the screen!

Why’d I get it?
The Medion 17″ monitor, after fixing, had the same problem again. So I put it aside, moved the Samsung 17″ monitor from the primary computer (on the right) to the secondary computer (on the left), and the IBM 21″ to the primary computer. The last time I had two monitors of different sizes was in November 2002, with a shitty Princeton EO950 19″ CRT. Click here to see a 17″ versus a 19″. 😀

Rocking 4 Hope

Moonshaped

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What: Moonshine, a homemade acoustic show
Who: Tempered Mental, Kluk Kluk Adventure, One Buck Short, Pete Teo, Kohl
When: 9:30pm, 14th September 2006
Where: Laundry Bar, The Curve
How much: Free, but you’ll get thirsty cheering for the hard-rocking bands and drooling at the chicks

More details here.

I also went for The Shape Of Things, as a reviewer for Xfresh.

I’ve already written about it here, so let the pictures do the talking.

Proper drama in a play, for once! After all those philosophical meaningful thought-provoking plays come this, a play whose meanings do not need a toilet seating to understand. Do you go to plays to watch them orate puzzles… or perform and be entertained? A lot of meaning was obvious, though deeper thoughts might reveal more. Was the surprise twist at the end out of spite?

Eve plans to deface a painting, and the nerdy security guard Adam tries to stop her. While the play was about love, there was a underlining parallel reference to art, like in lines like:
“When Picasso took a shit, he didn’t call it art. He knew the difference. That’s what made him Picasso.”

Maybe he’d be able to, with such a rifle (shown outside, in set designer Jia Wei’s garage clearance.

Meanwhile, Eve breaks Adam in. Conversation is natural and not staged, with proper dynamics and pacing. Phew. Some of the other plays I’d seen were like 10-minute grindcore songs. (Grindcore songs are under 2 minutes for good reason.)

Kinky with cameras.

However, while she managed to shape him into a good-looking, confident man, she failed to control his loyalty. On the plus side, she successfully changed a man… while on the minus side, he went to the woods with his roommate’s fiancee.

While the drama may seem exaggerated, we probably know someone who has gone through that.

Some, myself included, may be able to relate to some of the characters in the play at any one time. There was also Two Inch Paperheart, who played U2-like background music in between scenes.

Broken Scar, Everybody!

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Now, for pictures from Broken Scar‘s final farewell show, 7th September 2006.

Ariff Akhir of The Sofa Sessions: Eh Daphne, you know ah, you damn pretty lah. I like you.
Daphne the emcee: Ehehehe thank you!

The Sofa Sessions, featuring bass slut Alda. I used 1/3rd-power flash, ISO 200, 1/25th (to expose the colored lighting but keep motion blur down). The 1/3rd-power flash helped to increase detail in the shadows, especially on Alda’s face, but not enough to give him an unsightly blue/white tint.

Top left: Sometimes, slow-shutter flash can make interesting effects; bottom-left: Velan, who runs Jamasia, looks like Gene Frenkle of that famous Saturday Night Live Cowbell skit; right: Daphne shows off her legs.