Saturday, January 28, 2012

What can I say :)

The faces of our Matt

Dear M and M,

When you grow up, life will throw you ‘responsibilities’ whether you like it or not and it may not even be just. But however good or bad it gets, we hope it will be us who you think of first in the best and the worst of times.

Matt, I wish you could remain this happy forever, that is all we ever wanted for you and little miss M :)

Missing you, see you both in a couple of days.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Interesting: “and then…” will f*&% you up, shared South Park creators :)

imageCame across this short VDO through my Google+ stream that led me to ‘Mentorless’ and finally ended up at ‘MTVu’.

The creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone surprised a freshmen class of ‘Storytelling Strategies’ at NYU.

The writing tips in this 6 and a bit minutes clip is like pure molten gold, poured while red hot into a bowl of flawless, colourless, grade 1 plus diamonds, click ---> here to jump to the video :)

Friday, January 20, 2012

Our M & M, one can’t stop talking and the other won’t keep still :)

M and M

Dear M & M,

Soon Little M will be 3 months old, we keep forgetting how quickly you all develop at this stage. For the past three weeks, the most noticeable thing with our Little M is that you like to have a bit of a chin-wag, nothing deep like the latest round the cabinet reshuffle (what was our first ever lady PM thinking?), in fact any topic will do as long as we make it sounds soft and gentle, Little M will always join the conversation with very insightful thoughts such as, ooohhh aaahhhhh and back to oooohhh again (by the way, if we don’t talk to you, you’ll start crying :)

As for you Big M, last Saturday your music teacher asked me (right after your morning lesson) what I fed you for breakfast? She thought I must have given you sugar cubes (and about a ton of it too) because you were like a very bouncy bouncing ball for the whole forty minutes.

I don’t know why all the scientists are spending so much time researching into ‘fusion’ as a new form of clean energy, all you have to do is to construct a humongous hamster wheel (link it to a generator), and chuck in just a few three year old kids, and voila, clean energy at a cost of a couple chocolate cookies and a glass of milk. Honestly, I don’t know where you get your energy from, my camera is now permanently on S (shutter speed priority) instead of the usual A (aperture priority) simply just to keep you in focus while you were dashing around :)

Life is amazing with you all :)

Friday, January 13, 2012

I curse you, Continuous Shooting… :)

I curse you continuous shooting.

The rational of the advice made so much sense… “set up your camera, then put it in continuous shooting, keep the finger on the trigger until the story ends, then go back and choose the best ones, that’s how the pros do it”, well thanks Sherlock :)

But no one ever told me how mentally difficult, to darn near impossible it would be to delete a photo, even the cr#ppy ones, lol. I know hard disks are really cheap now, but it would have been more prudent & efficient to delete the bad ones, trust me I’ve tried to delete a slightly out of focus photo of both M and M. As I placed my finger on the delete button, both palms started to sweat, heart rate more than doubled, vision became blurry and the room started spinning, all I could do was just to walk away, and let it be :)

On a serious note, continuous shooting is an absolute must for me, I would have changed my name to Frano Selak if I had managed to catch Matt or Marcella smiling at two months old on the single shot mode. So do give it  a try, trying once won’t do you any harm, honest :) lol.

Worth a visit: Different in Colours

Dorothy Counts Came across this set of photographs on Chive (and yes I don’t just look at the FLBP sets, but when I do (cough, cough, every flippin day) it does make my day ‘most brilliant’). Their posts always declare the source, so I followed their link to a set of photos within Imgur (try it, it’s good :) (http://imgur.com/a/wapUe#mYGo9)

“Putting colours into black and white photos” would be my simplest description, I would love to mention his/her name here but couldn’t find his/her identity, for all I know it could have been Batman or Wonder Woman.

The best thing is that, this person doesn’t just transform historically important photos or portraits of famous people, he/she also does requests.

There are several reasons why modern photographers choose to take photos in black and white or transform colour photos into black and white before publishing them. To give it a somber tone (imagine a clown without make up, lol), to rid it of distractions (imagine a clown with black and white makeup), to highlight the subtle effects of textures, lighting or contrasts, and probably the most frequent one of all, giving it ‘timelessness’ quality to a photograph.

But to see these iconic photos, that most of us have seen a thousand times before, in colour, just made it more real for me, take this one (above) of ‘Dorothy Counts’ (probably was one of the bravest girl (fifteen at that time) in the entire galaxy). I don’t know, seeing it in colour just made me feel the pressure that she must have faced multiplied by about a billion (same thing for the Ann Frank’s portrait, of course it does help if you have the knowledge of who these people are).

Of course I haven’t got a clue how the ‘Architect’ of these photos had chosen the colours for the clothes, hair, chairs, background, necktie and so on. I’d guess he/she could have made research into the colour of the eyes and hair, and may be there is a tool revealing how different greys represent different colours (or am I just dreaming here).

None the less, this site is definitely worth a visit, please NOTE, parental warning, there are some iconic ‘graphic’ photos in the set.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Slightly defeating the objective of being ignorant :)

Being ignorant is such a wonderful thing, I wished I could be ignorant all the flippin time when watching films. If I had known prior that Bruce Willis was a ghost, the film would have been nothing more than just a very well made horror film, or who would have thought his father was Darth Vader and the Princess was his sister!

ThemoviespoilerI am glad to be ignorant, well, at least for the hundred plus minutes or so; to have been lead by the director’s story telling skills, totally submerged into the characters due to the skills of the actors & actresses, to have been paced by the editors or overwhelmed by the sets and locations (sadly, mostly are now just CG). To have all those coming together, building and building, story, plots, sub plots, deceptions and finishing with a crescendo of the great reveal or ending is just so blooming fun :)

However, I am another victim of ‘curiosity killed the cat’ syndrome, totally my fault of course :) It all started with desire to know the plot line, Wikipedia is quite good for that, then discovered that some wiki pages were baring it all… after that it was all down hill for me :) ended up at this amazing site, www.themoviespoiler.com.

The name of the site utterly explains itself, from what I have read, each spoiler was around four to five thousand words and the quality of some of the writing was so good you’d thought it was the director who wrote it, lol.

Just read “Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, wow, no wonder why both got such a great reception, and of course spoiling it all for myself now… Oh why do I do it :)

Errrm… I wonder what should I read next? :)

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Preparing for the next best thing :)

Time for upgrade

Dear M and M,

Your mother said I am up to my old tricks again :), I’ve been pining for a DSLR since the previous one was stolen, the Nex 5 was supposed to be just a ‘halfway house’ of a camera before moving on to yet another Nikon.

But I never did move on to another DSLR, Sony Nex5 turned out to be a mistress I never wanted to leave, never wanting to get back to the Mrs., in fact there was one crazy moment when I thought I wanted to remain with her forever, then came along the D4.

Totally not worth the price and just a tad over qualified for just taking a few snap shots of you two running around. But right now all forms sensibility have left the building, only remained are the hazy impetuous of pure ‘tech lust’, lol.

 

So you both may be wondering ‘what are my old tricks’? Passing on current ‘gears’ to a family member in hoping your mother will give me the nod to get the next greatest and latest (often it doesn’t work, so I think I’ll need to change strategy here).

As you can see here, I am literally forcing Matt to use the camera, well not quite, he came up with the camera wanting to take a picture of me, of course it was a too good of an opportunity to just let it pass, it has lots and lots of buttons and dial that all three and a half year old child could only love, perfect, I began to teach (exaggerate) how each button is so much more awesome than each of his button on his simple point and shoot. Soon he will be running up to his mother asking if he could keep the Nex5 forever… leaving the path open to the almighty D4 and then taking over the world… haa haa haa, all I need now is the ‘ka-ching’ to get the darn thing.

(While reading through the post correcting all the mistakes (there are probably loads left), I came to wonder how on earth did I take this photo, I am sure it will come back to me soon)

Friday, January 6, 2012

Let the cravings begin :)

D4front

Canon 1DX now has a competition worthy of its calibre, of course when destiny grants me loads and loads of dosh, there would be no other choice in my mind (come on destiny the camera comes out in February :) (why Nikon over Canon, nothing deep or complicated, I am more familiar with the Nikon’s system).

It is going to be fun just reading the various tit for tat on the forum, and nothing but burning greedy cravings for a while :)

If you need more info. there is no better place than www.dpreview.com, or more precisely http://www.dpreview.com/articles/7799914638/nikon-d4-overview/

Cheaper than a Starbucks’ Venti Green Tea Cream.

Klong Toey (or Klong Toei) market is probably one of the largest and busiest fresh markets in Thailand (very fresh, so fresh that most of the goods are still very much alive), there are also stores for clothes, kitchenware, hardware and so on as well.


VegetablesAs the market is not too far away, Gio had decided to do here grocery shopping there instead of going to the well known supermarket, such as Villa Market, Tops Supermarket or Lotus.

This pile of vegetables could have cost us anything between 500 – 300 THB (16  - 10 USD) depending on one’s choice of Supermarket, but at Klongtoey fresh market it was 190 THB (6.1 USD) this is as much as the most expensive Starbucks’ drink in Thailand (Starbucks Venti Green Tea Cream @ 215 THB (6.9 USD)), just want to put it into prospective :)
Enough goodness to feed a family for about a week, all for a price of a Starbucks’ drink, talking about an economic divide.







Klongtoey Market
I can wholeheartedly recommend it to all travellers who want to see a different side of Bangkok, it is a bit ‘raw’ (not a tourist destination) and extremely busy. Please be careful of your belongings… pickpocketing is rife, so please be careful, you can try searching ‘Klongtoey Market’ on www.images.google.com, to get an overall feeling of the place. The location is 13.718228,100.560039, have a safe trip :) Please also note that the market is close to the Klong Toey “densely populated with substandard housing and utilities area (slum)”.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Are you interesting enough for 10 ‘quality’ posts a month?

Got this pic from http://blog.ineedhits.com/tips-advice/is-blogging-still-useful-for-seo-in-short-yes-10389344.htmlExcluding writing about what you’ve found interesting on the Internet or just re-posting interesting articles from other sources, no other’s people’s Youtube, no global events, no interjections/ comments / reviews / thoughts / dreams / aspirations. Just your life, your actions, reactions, environment of your life, will it be interesting enough for ten quality posts a month, or how about 120 quality posts a year?

The foundation of this blog is a diary of me and the family, no thoughts, no rants (well that isn’t quite true, only a couple though), a few desires (mostly tech. stuff), some domestic events (National elections, flooding and so on) and certainly no dreams (only a few ‘hopes’ here and there).

This year I was going to try for ten quality posts per month, being a realist that I am, I don’t think I can make it, unless I throw one of the baby out of the window, that should provide me with content for the whole year, imagine all the trips to the court and prison :) (I am truly kidding, creating own content is one thing but creating a National headline is another).

Clicking ‘Next Blog’ to jump to the next blog (obviously) in the ‘Blogger Universe’ repeatedly, made me a bit sad but not surprised to see so many blogs started off so well, just like a new plant sitting on their windowsill, they must have watered it every day and really looked after it, because the quality and the number of posts were all so blooming. Then something happened, it suddenly wilted and died.

Looking at my own, for Q1 of 2010 I had only managed 8 postings; to tell you the truth having a family with small children really helps, all the hospital visits, all the holidays, wetting the bed and poop events (interesting to others or not, certainly are very interesting to us) are prime arsenal for my blog, as it was intended to be, a diary.

And I know now when this blog will die, probably when my kids are about 12 or 13, then I can not see myself writing to them (about them) anymore, in fact they will probably be keeping some kind of a blog of their own or more likely be using facebook / google+ like the rest of the universe. So most of my content would have disappeared, and where else will I likely to be spending my blog retirement, probably flickr :)

Conversation: Matt and Shower

Background:

Matt woke up late and soon I had to leave for work to avoid the dreaded Bangkok’s traffic. No time for our usual play before shower… he was having none of it :)

 

Scene:

Tears, Tears and even more Tears. The two of us standing in the shower and he refuses to take his off his pyjamas and go into the shower, so a little force was used to take off the PJ, which resulted in even more tears…

 

Conversation:

Matt:   “Papa I don’t like shower.” [sob].
Me:     “Come on Matt, don’t you want to be clean?. You need a shower!”
Matt:   “Papa, please Papa, I want to be dirty, I don’t want to be clean Papa” [tears!]
Me:     [biting my lips trying not to laugh]

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Broken engine :)

Suanlum on the late 1

The photo was taken on the 5th of Dec. 11, aka Father’s day here in Thailand (King’s Birthday), being a National holiday I decided to take Matt out so that his mother could have some peace and quiet.

Decided to take him to Suanlum, but never intended for us to end up on a two seater speed boat, lol.

The engine of this fantastic speed boat was supposed to be 4 LP (Leg Power), but unfortunately due to the length of one pair of legs being rather short, the boat ended up with just the 2 LP, and truth be told this 2 LP engine was almost 40 years old so it was a real surprised that we made it all the way across the lake.

He had a great time (his first time), and kept spotting several turtles, I never knew there were so many ‘invisible’ turtles in this lake (probably the same clan as those infamous ninja turtles). My parents came to pick us up, coordinating over the phone for the precise location of where we were was a bit of a nightmare, only then to realised that the last time my parents came to the park was over twenty years ago :)

I wasn’t really prepared otherwise I would have taken a better camera, but the camera on the BB was not too bad, will try to get better shots the next time :)

Monday, January 2, 2012

Life was different then, :)

Books 2012In the past buying a book or two on a whim was never a problem, the stock never built up to more than a two or three at any one time, of course that was when life was different :)

Old habit dies hard, it really does, still buying books on a whim (of course with hind sight I do wonder why I’d bought some of these books in the first place), but life is different now, time to buy books but don’t have a second left to read them, haa haa haa.

Perhaps I should stop killing trees and move to an e-reader :) or one of those audio books (nah).

The sad thing is, there are so many more I want to read… :)

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Welcome 2012 :)

As usual we decided to stay in BKK for the holiday, with Marcella being less than two months it was probably the best choice. With Gio being Catholic, she decided to have the baptism for Marcella on the very first day of the year, yet another great choice, not so many people, the ceremony went like clockwork, no tears whatsoever.

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How did I knew that he had to sit there on the tallest pile of chairs? It must be my ‘Bourne Identity’ type training, like a moth always wanting to head butt a burning light bulb, he beamed for the pile of chairs with singular intent, like his own personal Everest… it must be conquered, and he did with my help of course.

So here is a rare picture of the whole gang :) what a thought cliché I am having… “Good grief I look so old”… I am glad Matt stuck to his game plan again with his special brand of smile, Marcella is sleeping like a baby (duhh, of course), Gio is forever complaining about her weight as it was going down rather slower than her expectation (this was after she had murdered two huge cupcakes), lol.