Taken with K700

It's so cute that I'm tempted to bring home some that day. It's not even wider than my finger. It may not be printable on my printer. It costs more than 1/2 of the A4 version yet looks like 1/10 the size of A4. It even comes in colour. This may come in handy if I have a 1:30 doll house that comes with a very very small printer.

Tagged: singapore cute

Combination of 3 images, no prizes for guessing the age. There's peach, grapes, strawberries, lemon and kiwi on this cake. Did you spot them all here?

Forgot my wide angle lense (how could I!), so the next best thing would be to take a couple of photos then stitch them together. Found this free auto stitching software that will do it effortlessly and even rotate the image a bit to make them fit. Looks quite cool except for some black areas around the image.

Tagged: singapore cake dsc h1 panoramic

Taken with the panoramic function of my K700, one of the most common handphone in Singapore today.

This kopitiam located at one of the oldest housing estates in Singapore includes only 1 stall selling wanton noodles and a drinks seller. According to my Dad, he used to bring my sister here more than 25 years ago for their breakfast. They are still using the traditional folding tables and plastic chairs and the atmosphere there really brings you back 20 years or more. Perhaps the only modern tell tale signs will be the ribena packets at the right side of the photo.


Tagged: singapore kopitiam k700

Would you pay $10/hr to play beach volleyball at the heartlands? Or $80 for a day's access? It seems that somebody did book the place for the next few evenings. Maybe I should keep a look out for it.

Tagged: singapore clementi beach volleyball

How many sides do a die have? 6 sided just like the one above? Now I had seen 3 sided and 8 sided dice when I was just a boy but today, I got to see more than that. Look at all these regular and fair dice I've got.


The 4 sided die, you read off the value from the base of the die.


The 8 sided die with triangles as the face of the die.


This is actually a 10 sided die. The value starts from 0. Perfect for choosing 4D numbers. Each face seems to be a quadrilateral.


A 12-sided die with pentagon as the face.


The mother of them all, a 20 sided triangle face die.


Comes in green too

All these dice are for one game, it's call maths warrior. It's a 2 players game where the objective is to "kill" all your opponent's dice by using Math and luck. Basically, players take turns to attack and of course there's maths involved. Want to get a set for yourself? Contact me lar... Think it costs about $12 for a set of 12 die above with instructions etc...


Tagged: singapore games math dice dsc h1

Omigod!! Konica is withdrawing from camera and photo business!! Wonder if that will affect the 20 cents per digital 4R prints I enjoy now at Konica given their announcement.

For color film and color paper, while considering our customer needs, we will step-by-step reduce product lineup and cease our color film and color paper production by the end of fiscal year ending March 31, 2007.

Furthermore, Konica is going to pass on their dSLR technology for Sony to design and market Sony's own dSLR.

Under this agreement, on March 31 2006, Sony will receive certain assets from Konica Minolta PI that are necessary for the development, design, production and so forth of digital SLR cameras compatible with Konica Minolta PI’s “Maxxum/Dynax lens mount system”.** Sony will accelerate development of new digital SLR cameras based on and compatible with the Maxxum/Dynax lens mount system with a view to marketing these models this summer.

From the earlier announcement of the Konica Minolta - Sony collaboration on Sony's dSLR:

Konica Minolta has superb autofocus auto-exposure technologies nourished through development of “Maxxum/Dynax series” from the age of film cameras, mechanical electronics technologies indispensable for SLR cameras, and sixteen million units of lens shipped worldwide.

Together with Sony's expertise in CCDs and CMOS sensors, superior design and the use of Zeiss lens. There's so much we could look forward to in Sony's dSLR.


Tagged: singapore sony konica minolta dslr

We got a pretty witty lecturer for Physics this semester as he shares some of his "words of wisdom" with us in class. This one is way overdue but heck, bet most of ya never heard of it before. This one is about the moral issues on marking assignments/tests.

There are 3 ways to grade all the tests scripts.

You can go with the impressionist approach to take one look at the paper and determine the grade.

OR

You can go with the statistics approach by giving grades randomly following a bell curve

OR

You can take the rhythmic approach to set 2 easy questions and 2 difficult, so you go "tick tick cross cross" in marking.

Tagged: singapore funny teaching teach nie test

Classes at NIE just barely started for me and I'm almost standing at the midpoint of this short semester. This is the middle of the 3rd week of a six week semester and I have like so many assignments to do (again) before the semester ends. For all those aspiring teachers to be still in university, enjoy the relatively slow paced undergraduate life you have now before you step into NIE. You will know what I mean when all your grades depend only on your continuous assessment. Look at this...

Module A: 4 essays (500 words so must be concise, yet need to do read up and referencing so cannot anyhow say) and a 70minutes tutorial presentation cum discussion in group work (lesson plan included).

Module B: In class group work twice weekly with homework assignments, 50%, writeup cum individual presentation 50%

Module C: Lesson plan (5%), Microteaching (35%), Reflection (10%), Assignment 1 (5%), Assignment 2a, 2b (15%), Assignment 3 (10%), Assignment 4 (10%)

Physics Module: Choice of essay, writing exam paper, critique an exam paper (100%).

That's like 4^2=16 things to work on in 6 weeks (About 3 each week). Makes me feel like a secondary school kid with 8 subjects under my name again. Thanks goodness I'm a physics graduate...


Tagged: singapore nie

I must admit I'm having lots of fun with this (DSC H1) versatile camera, taking lots of photos I never thought of taking before. Sony may had screw up in the music front but they sure make some nice cameras though. There are many "experts" around who look down on Sony as a camera brand, just like some "drivers" who do likewise to Korean cars. Don't be fooled by these "experts" as they may not had taken any decent photos themselves. I have read more than my fair share of baseless comments against Sony cameras in Singapore and it's time to straighten the facts now.

Myth 1: Sony is a new-comer in cameras and can't be compared to old horses like Canon and Nikon in terms of quality.
Fact 1: The first consumer digital camera (as we know it) was born in 1994, Sony sold their first cybershot (DSC F1) in 1996. So Sony had 10 years of experience in digital photography. In addition, Sony cameras nowadays uses Zeiss lens and in Sony cameras are doing as well as Canon in lab tests. (At least for my H1, which incidentally is a Sony made lens)

Myth 2: Sony cameras are over-priced.
Fact 2: The Canon Powershot S2 IS list price S$949 (23/6/05) vs Sony H1 list price S$899 (18/7/05). This is just an example that Sony cameras are competitively priced. Not forgetting the Sony H1 comes with more accessories than Canon S2 IS. This comparison is fair because both cameras are 12X 5mp cameras with similar specs competing for the same market.

Myth 3: CF/SD is better than Sony memory stick because it is cheaper and more versatile.
Fact 3: Comparing Sandisk 1gb price for standard memory cards, SD (USD 99.99), MS Pro (USD 89.99), CF (USD 99.99). The memory stick came out cheaper! Of course, I have to say that the MS is more expensive for 512mb and below but cheaper for 1gb and higher but this is sufficient to dispel the myth.
Fact 4: CF/SD cards are more common among several brands of cameras while the MS is mainly used by Sony, but MS could be use with other products such as PSP. They are versatile in their own ways.


Tagged: singapore digital camera dsc h1

Warning! This moon is not werewolf safe as it is a full moon.

Another moon shot today with the cloudless sky above. It seems that the fuller moon gives lesser details. I should be looking forward at a crescent moon in the future. Maybe the moon is the reason behind all the scandals.


Hiding behind the clouds

The earlier moon which would have looked better if the clouds wasn't there.


Tagged: singapore moon dsc h1

Grab a coke and some popcorns, be ready for some more drama brewing (yet again) at Tomorrow.sg that you will never get to see in local productions. Scandal after scandal, is it Tomorrow never dies or will there be no more Tomorrow? Everybody loves scandals and here's how it all started.

Scandal 1 - Tomorrow.sg get caught with their pants down
Tomorrow.sg posted a scandal on their editor (see scandal 2 below) and took it off almost immediately. But not before someone catching them doing it.

Starryluvly said:

Really, the editors at Tomorrow are not doing any favours for themselves. If I submitted a site calling XX a bitch and a whore, fine don't publish it. Obviously it wasn't that, otherwise the two editors wouldn't have published it in the first place. I doubt the two editors would have published it without reading the article I posted - if they didn't that why the hell are they editors in the first place?

Oh, the editors there already have a track record of being poor editors. I have lament the lack of standards twice, here and here. Besides, this is like the 2nd scandal in as many months the blokes at tomorrow.sg managed to get themselves in.

Scandal 2 - The Secrets Behind Why Xiaxue is so *Ahem* Popular

Geek Geek said:

In life, I am constantly reminded of the SAF creed:"You can do whatever you want, just don't get caught." My corollary to that, of course, is:"If you get caught, at least have the balls to admit it and go down with some dignity."

As you may or may not know, there is yet another huge scandal in the making in the local blog circles. Apparently, our very famous Xiaxue has been accused of impersonating as one of her haters, Xialanxue, and even went so far as to create a hate site under Xialanxue's name to poke fun at yet another enemy of Xiaxue, namely, Blinkmummy.

This is what is known as the mother of all scandal that started it. A certain editor get herself caught with her skirt down. (See scandal 3)

Scandal 3 - Censorship @ Tomorrow.sg

Anonymous Coward said:

Seems like our XX editor has removed XLX trackback at least 3 times plus some comments too!

msc said:

please take note the timing and who's online or offline

@ 11+pm
http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f223/missyshannon/Untitled-1.jpg @ 1+am
http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f223/missyshannon/Untitled-2.jpg
xlx link is gone?

The disappearing trackbacks and comments stunt comes after the disappearing post act in Scandal 1.

Scandalous Reads
Does Tomorrow Have a Tomorrow? (I got that covered last month)
Xiaxue, The Exposé (The source of Scandal 2)

Tagged: singapore tomorrow.sg scandal

This moon is werewolf safe as it is taken on the 14th of the Chinese calendar and is not a completely full moon.

Here you have it, an almost full moon. But it is no way as impressive as my other moon. The half moon seems to have all the craters in view at the darker edges but the fuller moon looks just like a ball.


Here's the other moon for comparison. See if you can rotate the moon and fit this piece to the fuller version.

Wondering if I could find Chang Er with a telephoto lens attached.

Tagged: singapore moon dsc h1

Birds drop by regularly to the chilli plant outside my house. Most of the time I couldn't really get a good shot of them because the birds are fast moving (hence it gets out of my zoomed view quickly), the plant has too many branches and leaves (hence blocking my view) and most of the time the bird faces the outside (and show me its arse).

Notice the shallow depth of view in this picture (the branches at the back is blur). It's a pity that I find it challenging to repeat the same for portrait shots due to the small sensor size. Using the DSC H1 made me learn much about photography.

The problem with this bird is the whole head from neck up is black! Not the prettiest birds you can find. But at least some details of the feathers there could be seen here.


Tagged: singapore birds dsc h1

Question
Building A and building B are only 1cm apart. When Lucy walked from building A to building B, she fell to her death. How?
Answer
The buildings had different height!

Question
What is the difference between jumping down from the 10th storey and the 2nd storey?
Answer
The earlier one you hear "Aaaaahhhhh.... Thump!", the latter you hear "Thump! Aaaaaahhhh...." instead.

Tagged: singapore funny jokes

No, I didn't go to Sultan Shoal again. Don't have the chance because no one with access had invited me yet. Blogging about Sultan Shoal had attracted some attention consistently and I have had queries every now and then on how to get there.

So to answer your question, if you happen to visit my blog after searching sultan shoal on google or yahoo, Sultan Shoal is not open to the general public. You can't just book a boat or hop onto a ferry service like you go St. John's island. I can tell you where I took the boat there but I can't tell you how to obtain permission to the island because I do not have access to it myself.

No doubt it's a pretty place but the island is functioning mainly as an island with a lighthouse and not a holiday getaway.


Panoramic view of Sultan Shoal combined with my infantile photoediting skills and taken seperately with my good old P3 without any meaningful control over exposure.


Tagged: singapore sultan shoal

Which is better? Natural colours or the bluish one? I prefer things to be natural but the bluish one seems more appealing. Finally found a use for the breakneck shutter speed of 1/1000 seconds. Had no choice but to combine it with an aperture of f8.0 which means diffraction (physics majors note) effect is in place, according to the H1 whitepaper (maybe we could test using monochromatic light to see the patterns).


Natural colours of the sunset outside my window


Bluish sunset.

Pardon the angles as I took the photos with hand so there is some discrepancies on the viewing angles of both images. I tried to correct it by rotating the photos and cropping it to make it as similar as I could bother to do so.

I always use Flickr for photos on blog and I had found a way to work around the uploading limits it have for free accounts. Unlike other free image hosting sites such as Webshots, Imagestation and Photobucket, Flickr limits the upload bandwidth of free accounts instead of limiting the no. of photos, download bandwidth or storage limit. This makes Flickr best for blogging (they even get the html code ready for you) and posting images up for sharing on screen with friends and family if you can work around the 20mb per month uploading limit.

Therefore, it is always good to resize your images to the maximum width of 1024 pixels and compress the image to give you a filesize of about 50kb (like the images you see above) per pic. In that way, you can get 400 pics a month which is more than enough for most purposes. Still not enough? Going down to 800x600 could give you additional 20% saved space or 500 pics a month but that means your friends are unlikely to use your nice photos as desktop wallpapers.

To do all the resizing effectively and efficiently, I use dimin image viewer as it can batch process all the images in a folder quickly and the flickr uploader to load all of them to flickr painlessly.


Tagged: singapore sunset dsc h1 flickr

The sky is clear after rain. A good time for moon watching and star gazing. Sucre was upset because I couldn't capture the starry night in it's full glory. But I'm more than happy to settle for the moon, a half moon actually.



There were some clouds illuminated by the moon, but it's a pity that I couldn't capture both the details of the moon and the clouds together. So I did the next best thing, photoshop it, with my infantile skills.

+ =

Now all these had made me itching for the full moon and a telephoto conversion lens to bring her closer to me.

Tagged: singapore moon dsc h1

Forget about National Education, spring cleaning can make you learn more about Singapore's history (most importantly, your family history) than those phoney remakes and stories told using high tech theatre technology.


Before trolleys and baby carriers, they have a DIY piece of cloth to tie the baby round the mother. The perfect baby carrier, it's portable, it's light and it's cheap!


Original letters from China, like those you see in TV serial drama but it's REAL. It's amazing how concise written Chinese can become. (Written Chinese here is different from the spoken Chinese we read, write and speak today)


Certificate of Registration of a citizen of the Republic of China (Now Taiwan) residing in Singapore and certificate of registration to be a Singapore citizen. Some of these documents are about 70 years old and the youngest is going to be 50 next year.

Cool~~~

Tagged: singapore history

At third position... The Monkey @ The Zoo. (DSC-H1, Program Auto)

These monkeys are fast in their movement, swinging from branch to branch all around the bridge area near the zoo entrance. It was a bit of luck when I followed this monkey with my camera and capture this shot when it was resting for a while and at the same time facing my direction. I didn't bother much about the manual settings and let my camera do the job as all I were worrying for is to catch my monkey at the right time and the right zoom at the right place.

At second position... Xiaobudian playing with water (DSC-H1, Burst Mode)

When I saw Xiaobudian splashing water around the pool, I knew I wanted a shot like this. Naturally I choose the burst mode and the 2nd picture yield this treasure. (One of the reason why I like to go swimming during my holidays)

My favourite photo for 2005... Sunset fishing.

Simply being at the right place at the right time to capture the right moment. Even with an ancient P3 camera, I still like this shot best as it sums up everything I felt there.

Now these images are uploaded to flickr with EXIF information. (Cos my free image viewer software now resizes images with the EXIF info intact.) It's my favourite program with an excellent batch processing capabilities and compatible with many file formats. Visit the website here.


Tagged: singapore photos dsc h1

My DSC-H1 had rekindled my interests in photography as it has opened to me many different ways to compose my images and take better photos. No doubt I managed to take some nice photos with my H1 but till date I have yet to capture one that makes me more satisfied than the ones I got from Sultan Shoal taken from my ice age P3. Being a digital guy, I started to go to some photography forums for some tips, advice and perhaps observe how some of them compose their images. Boy am I truely disappointed.

There are so many rich boys around town who knew so little roaming in the forum giving "advices" to newbies to emphasize one point - DSLR rulez, if you are into photography you need DSLR. These people seems to think that the most important thing in photography is getting the best and most important tools available. It's very likely when they are younger, they thought that dressing up in Armanis and Versaces will make them look good.

Some of the gems found there are as follows:

I am just upgraded from prosumer DC and purchase my first DSLR Canon 350D, with the kit lens i am very satisfied with the image quality and the great DOF.

This is not to mention that prosumer camera in most situation can't achieve the shallow Depth of Field that DSLRs can produce

DOF = Depth of Field, which is infinite with my H1 (and P3, and any consumer digital cameras) at wide angles. And I can also achieve nice blur results with my H1 too (see my bird photos). By the way, I also read that, the DOF of a DSLR is the same as our old 35mm film camera. (No wonder my primary school photos have so much bokeh or out of focus area.)

And they are those who brag about the DSLR can do this while other digital can't so DSLR is better. At the same time, they forgot about a lot of things DSLR can't do where an ordinary digital camera could - like take movie clips, portability and ease of use. Of course, I'm not saying that a DSLR is lousy, it just depends on why are you buying the camera for? To take good photographs or to brag about being able to take good photographs if you are in this situation? I just can't stand the crappy advices they give around there.

I agree with you, but remember the tehcnology have its limit, the big cmos sensor of DSLR and PS cam is diff, lets say the same photographer but use diff type of camera (DSLR and PS), I doubt it will produce same images quality from these two camera....dont to mention in under low light condition.

Do you know, a 12mp camera have enough pixels to print out at most to a size of 10"x14" (Slightly bigger than A4 size) at 300 DPI! And a 35mm camera converted to digital sense is actually a 25mp camera! For image quality, nothing beats film, and it could never will physically until, perhaps, you have quantum digital cameras.

Lousy digital camera with Bad photographer = Crappy photos
Lousy digital camera with Good photographer = Nice photos for your desktop wallpaper
Good digital camera with Bad photographer = Crappy photos that takes up 15mb of your card
Good digital camera with Good photographer = Nice photos for prints up to A4 size
Good camera with Good photographer = Nice photos that you can print as your wallpaper (for your wall, not your desktop)

All these reminds me of people driving BMWs but can't even do reverse parking properly. Having the best car does not make you a good driver, just like having the best camera do not brings you good photographs. My take is, get what you need, even if it is a Picanto it still brings you places.

Further readings.
How to make your H1 work to it's fullest potential
Film versus Digital Cameras
Seven Levels of Photographers (Humour)


Tagged: singapore digital camera dsc h1

It's that time of the year again, time to start NIE and that may mean that I will be going off for my hiatus again. Been quite a fruitful vacation for me, the last I will get to enjoy as a carefree student. Managed to

1.) Go on retreat @ Sultan Shoal
2.) Get my new babe DSC H1
3.) Repainted my whole house into a nice blend of continental blue and white.
4.) Bought and assembled new furnitures
5.) Visited the Zoo
6.) Did some forms of exercise
7.) Been to Sentosa
8.) Did some shopping
9.) Doing some forms of online garage sales
10.) And basically blabber about anything under the sun.

So what are 10 things you did during the last holidays?

Mastermind will be back to school in about 60hrs time, however, his timetable this semester is not as bad as the last one. Here a musical fountain photo to celebrate the new year.

Tagged: singapore