Apple recently released their new Operating System, Leopard, a new and spanking look with features which would definitely pour extremely ice water over Vista's so called eye-candies. After using Vista for the past couple of months, it is clear that Leopard is the winner hands down. We can always rely on Apple to come up with something so cool and funky!

With all of that comes temptation, should I get a MacBook Pro or not? Of course I wouldn't like to spend all that unnecessary cash as I would rather get a couple of lenses instead for my camera rather than waste the cash on another laptop. Perhaps I need to stay away from all that poison on the world wide web ;)

On the other hand, I got a call from munZ last night while I was out waiting for my LowePro Computrekker (I was buying it secondhand from a nice chap) when she told me that my picture appeared in the Star under the Metro section on page 23. It was a picture taken during the Ted Baker opening at the Pavillion and of course Vincent's picture was there as well. Unfortunately the web version of that article only has 1 picture which is rather surprising as I would expect that they would put more photos on the web as it would be cheaper then.

This weekend will be another photography blitz starting on Friday where I will be covering my department's community day for the whole entire afternoon till evening, the Terry Fox run on Sunday morning together with Lensa Malaysia and Sunday evening for the XYZ FCS Concert featuring Juwita Suwito. I definitely need my battery packs by then, hopefully it should have arrived today or tomorrow from Shashinki.

This means that I would definitely need to get plenty of sleep and rest before the weekend. There are other events (ASUS photography competition at The Curve) as well which at first sounded interesting but later thought that I needed my Saturday to be a rest day. At least this will allow me to catch up on some post processing which I have been putting back as well as catch up on my studying (see books below).



Well this definitely shows that I am a Photoshop noob hence the need for me to do a little self studying and learning the features and techniques especially in the area of post processing. Let the learning begin!

After a month, maybe I might be able to achieve this!

Thanks to Vincent, I was invited to be part of the launching of a new store at the Pavillion, Ted Baker. Ted Baker is a store which sells clothes catering mainly working adults, both male and female. From the crowd which attended the launch, I was sure that their range of female clothing were suited for women in the range of their thirties or so.

As much as I would like to not admit it, it was my first experience attending a store launch and from what Vincent told me, I was expecting a huge bash with loads of food, drinks, and of course people. Instead, when I arrived there with Vincent, this was what I encountered.


Hrmmm....nice sign

Well we were a little early and the "crowd" that I was expecting was most probably going to be fashionably late. The event meant to start at 7pm was only half full at around 7.30pm and by then I was busy munching away at the finger food served as people walked about the store and checked out what was on sale at that time (30%) discount!


Mind you, most of them are workers of the shop!

Anyway by the time the real event started, there were a few speeches by a few people whom I can't really remember their names but someone big from the Royal Sporting House (which brought the brand Ted Baker into Malaysia).



While everyone was busy mingling about, I had to make my way through plenty of photographers (mainly from magazines and a few newspapers) to take some photos of the surrounding area with my trusty IXUS 70 which did the job well enough for me.



Then there was the introduction by one of the Ted Baker representatives from the UK whom Vincent said had a very strong Manchunian accent (no, not from Manchuria but about 7000 miles west at Manchester). I figured out he would say that since is a lousy Man Utd fan.



At least I learned that the store was themed after Alice in Wonderland's tea party where you would see many different tea pots and cups ladened around the store with plastic cakes as decoration. It took me a while before I started understanding what she meant about the theme as I slowly explained to Vincent whom I think missed out on his childhood stories with stories about the great Man Utd instead.

After an hour of sipping wine and munching on some cucumber sandwiches, there was a street magician going about showing card tricks. To be frank, he was rather horrible and the mood was spoilt by his not-so-amazing performance.



By that time, most of the crowd were gone and I was wondering where would people go? I mean, there was free wine, free food, free snacks and a 30% store-wide discount on any items. Where could they be?

It seems that another store was having their launch as well.


There were more food, booze and drinks available and there were models. I even spied some of the people I saw at the Ted Baker shop squeezing their way forward to get close-up shots of the model.



But of course, if you had a long lens like these guys, you wouldn't need to fight your way forward. Looks like its Espirit 1, Ted Baker 0.

Working in the IT line and trying to streamline processes so that things are efficient and works well definitely makes me wonder how companies like Streamyx survive! After reading many posts about bloggers not being able to access their Gmail accounts, I thought I would try to check if there was any press release statement from Streamyx about their international link.

Of course there was none. The first thing I did was key in the URL, http://www.streamyx.com and was greeted by a very unprofessional looking website which I can swear, college kids could design nicer looking websites (and it works better!). You can see that the images used on the page (especially the *.GIF type) were badly compressed as if they used MS Paint to do compression.

Next would be figuring out how to navigate through to their press releases or perhaps announcements. Like a poorly maintained or planned out website, navigating through this webpage is completely crappy. I clicked on "Corporate Information" because it highlighted "Latest News" when my mouse went over the image and was again greeted by the same style and layout of the page with hardly any information on it.

Simple coding flaws show that the button images at the top of the page didn't seem to have any spacing in between and the fonts on the buttons were already touching the borders. Very lazy work to be frank but the good side of this is that the same problem appears on all their pages, "Customer Service" and "Online Services".

Going back to the Corporate Information page, I couldn't find any button or tab which states latest news (inconsistent message portrayed on front page) but there was a "Newsroom" section which I clicked. No news about failing connections to the US or other countries. Seems that everything is peachy keen for them at the moment.

Then I spied on a news headline which states,

Thursday, August 16, 2007
TM LAUNCHES ITS NEW SECURE ONLINE STORAGE AND BACKUP SERVICE FOR HOME AND BUSINESS

Now this is pretty interesting as I always thought that backup services would be a handy thing in mind and since my PC is running most of the time, a constant upload of my backups would be pretty good to have. So I read the news and to be given with two links to decide upon.

To quote the news article:

For more information on e-Storage, visit http://storage.netmyne.com. For more information on TM’s Internet products and services, log on to www.tm.net.my.

I clicked on the first link only to be greeted by a login page which didn't provide me any information nor did it have any links which might bring me to a site to advertise their services. Mind you,  in this day and age, if you don't put any details up to entice your customers, it is as if they want to say they have the service but don't want you to sign up.

I then proceed to click on the 2nd link only to be brought back to the main page of TM's website with no apparent news about the eStorage crap they were announcing.  After clicking around the website for another 20 minutes only to not find any sort of visible link or advert in the website, I proceeded to write this post in my blog.

Why? Because I feel that such a huge corporation like TM would definitely need to buck up on their service levels and think a little further than publish 10 year old "homemade" coroporate webpages when a 12 year old kid can actually publish a successful website such as this.

This just makes me sick and dissapointed.

Sometime back I attended a workshop teaching us the basics of studio lighting which includes setting up lights, positioning them, talking about the various filters as well as getting the right camera settings. I definitely learned a lot there and I did manage to write a small post about the event here.

Well, here are more photos which I shot at the event as well as the link to my Flickr set.




Learning to take shots with the light positioned at the side. The light was filtered with a softbox creating a larger light source so that it doesn't become too harsh and create harsh shadows.


Dealing with the light position directly facing the model. Not easy as a direct lighting can create a very flat image, hence the need to have a little side or back lighting.


While the model takes a break, we have one of the workshops participant become the model. I think everyone was rather "kiasu" as they wanted to continue shooting even when there was a break given. I had my fair share of being the model as well.


And here is the result, not too flattering eh? But oh well, at least I helped them in a way practice on their shooting. I changed the image to black and white and asked them to position the light at the side to create a "fierce" or "strong" look. Doesn't work too well with the ladies though.


Finally, after a long hard morning/afternoon session, it was time for a break.

Check out my whole Flickr set here.

Check out Ted Adnan's blog here and Photography Portfolio here.

Its really ironic that parents would want to curb their kids from playing too much video games while on the other hand you get newspaper reports saying that parents should encourage their parents to have a go at these games. Well, the report did mention that the elderly should try the new Playstation 3 (well not that new) by Sony but in my mind, I guess the best one would be the Nintendo Wii.

Why the Wii? Because it has been proven that you really do sweat it out playing with it and it definitely encourages more hand and body movements, giving life back to that body of yours. In fact, after watching that episode of South Park and World of Warcraft video, playing PC games makes you fat, fill your face with pimples and getting you to ask your mum to hold the poopie bin behind you.

Since that is the case, perhaps I should cut down on the whole PC gaming front which I am having cravings to start it up again. Well I guess this is all due to the fact that I need to train for my upcoming company LAN games tournament again this year (with hopes to get some sort of prize).  Hence the need to pick up Dota again and wondering what the new heroes actually do!

Anyhow, the weekend was great with a small exception that I fell sick and was practically down with a fever most of the weekend but I still managed to pack in a little Dota practice, taking photos for a review and taking portrait shots of the church staff. Sounds productive but I was half asleep when Liverpool beat Everton on Saturday night.

Woohoo, I have finally moved some of the stuff over from the old blog to this new site. Well when I mean stuff it is usually more related to links, counters, chat box and other stuff. Most of the older posts will remain in the old site but from now on, I will be writing in this new space.

And to celebrate the beginning of a new blog (after using the old domain for the past 4 years!, here are some photos I took two weekends ago at the Eye of EOS workshop held by Digital Camera Malaysia and Canon Malaysia.

Carace

 

 Angeline

 Velva

Kim

More photos to come, I haven't had the time to properly post process them yet while I still have other projects I need to work on. Watch this space for more updates!

I have officially started with the migration process of transferring my blog from my Blogspot account to the one hosted here at MarkLeo.net. First of all I need to move quite a fair bit of stuff over and to learn all about Wordpress and how to configure it as well.

Still I hope that this transition will be a smooth one and I can finally get this site up and running. At the mean time I definitely need to find time updating my online portfolio with newer pictures as well as finalize the layout.  Not an easy thing to do as I have zero web design skills and I would totally be depending on my old HTML knowledge.

Welcome to the very new beginning of my blog which includes a whole new server and look. Ever since I have decided to move towards to getting my own domain and URL name (http://www.markleo.net), I also decided to move over from my old blog at http://markleo.blogspot.com to here. Its still a work in progress but this post will be changed once everything is fixed.