Thursday, August 28, 2008

A Trip to Eat and Watch

The other day my colleagues and I went over to Kuala Selangor for seafood treat. There's this project that was pending for a very long time is now completed. So the company decided to take us for a treat to motivate us for a job well done.

Yea we went over to this lady's parent's place for dinner. Apparently her family opens a seafood restaurant over there and she said it's cheap and fresh.

Believe it or not, It took us a 90 minutes drive all the way to the village. We're so hungry by the time we reached not to mention we have to take orders and wait for the food to be served. Gosh I could almost eat a whole cow. But nevertheless the sight of driving there was a calm, country road. Even the sunset looks much better than the ones we see in the city.

See this? This is a pure fishermen village. This reminds me so much of my own hometown in Sitiawan.

This is the restaurant we had our dinner at. Looks a little dodgy but of course, these kind of restaurants always portrays this concept: More than meets the eye.
One of our Vietnamese colleague. Duc.... Don't ask me. I really don't know what's his deal with this kawaii look. Maybe this new trend just arrived Vietnam! hahaha

One of our dish is this shell fish. I really don't know what you call this snail but it is very common to see these shells lying around the beach here in Malaysia.

A hefty sum of food don't you think so? I think we ordered a total of 10 dishes with a 1kg of prawns on each table. Yummy.

I hereby present to you the participants of our escapade :p We have like 5 DSLR photographers and a couple of digital ones. We even have some mobile phone cameramen haha.

Soon after dinner, we headed to watch fireflies during the night. It's quite famous that people would come to Kuala Selangor to watch fireflies during the night on a boat ride.

I spotted a cute little chap munching his food away so this is my attempt on a black and white potrait picture.

The welome sign of the firefly park. The place as a chalet and like 15 boats taking their customers across the river to watch those insects.

Seriously, the place was very dark with no lights at all. The tour guide didn't even allowed us to use our camera flash to take any pictures coz it might scare the fireflies away. So with a little twitch and adjustment, I tried to take pictures of our horizon. Somehow it came out just perfect. I looked as if we're on a boat, riding to the underworld across to the land of the dead :p

This is how it looks like without my lighting effect. Doesn't it look spooky??

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT


10.) The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

Although the pay for IT professionals is not as great as it was before the dot-com flameout and the IT backlash in 2001-2002, IT workers still make very good money compared to many other professions (at least the ones that require only an associate’s or bachelor’s degree). And there is every reason to believe that IT pros will continue to be in demand in the coming decades, as technology continues to play a growing role in business and society. However, because IT professionals can be so expensive, some companies treat IT pros like they own them. If you have to answer a tech call at 9:00 PM because someone is working late, you hear, “That’s just part of the job.” If you need to work six hours on a Saturday to deploy a software update to avoid downtime during business hours, you get, “There’s no comp time for that since you’re on salary. That’s why we pay you the big bucks!”

9.) It will be your fault when users make silly errors

Some users will angrily snap at you when they are frustrated. They will yell, “What’s wrong with this thing?” or “This computer is NOT working!” or (my personal favorite), “What did you do to the computers?” In fact, the problem is that they accidentally deleted the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop, or unplugged the mouse from the back of the computer with their foot, or spilled their coffee on the keyboard.

8.) You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day

When you miraculously fix something that had been keeping multiple employees from being able to work for the past 10 minutes — and they don’t realize how simple the fix really was — you will become the hero of the moment and everyone’s favorite employee. But they will conveniently forget about your hero anointment a few hours later when they have trouble printing because of a network slowdown — you will be enemy No. 1 at that moment. But if you show users a handy little Microsoft Outlook trick before the end of the day, you’ll soon return to hero status.

7.) Certifications won’t always help you become a better technologist, but they can help you land a better job or a pay raise

Headhunters and human resources departments love IT certifications. They make it easy to match up job candidates with job openings. They also make it easy for HR to screen candidates. You’ll hear a lot of veteran IT pros whine about techies who were hired based on certifications but who don’t have the experience to effectively do the job. They are often right. That has happened in plenty of places. But the fact is that certifications open up your career options. They show that you are organized and ambitious and have a desire to educate yourself and expand your skills. If you are an experienced IT pro and have certifications to match your experience, you will find yourself to be extremely marketable. Tech certifications are simply a way to prove your baseline knowledge and to market yourself as a professional. However, most of them are not a good indicator of how good you will be at the job.

6.) Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs

Your co-workers (in addition to your friends, family, and neighbors) will view you as their personal tech support department for their home PCs and home networks. They will e-mail you, call you, and/or stop by your office to talk about how to deal with the virus that took over their home PC or the wireless router that stopped working after the last power outage and to ask you how to put their photos and videos on the Web so their grandparents in Iowa can view them. Some of them might even ask you if they can bring their home PC to the office for you to fix it. The polite ones will offer to pay you, but some of them will just hope or expect you can help them for free. Helping these folks can be very rewarding, but you have to be careful about where to draw the line and know when to decline. For help, take a look at TechRepublic’s free download “Ten ways to decline a request for free tech support.”

5.) Vendors and consultants will take all the credit when things work well and will blame you when things go wrong

Working with IT consultants is an important part of the job and can be one of the more challenging things to manage. Consultants bring niche expertise to help you deploy specialized systems, and when everything works right, it’s a great partnership. But you have to be careful. When things go wrong, some consultants will try to push the blame off on you by arguing that their solution works great everywhere else so it must be a problem with the local IT infrastructure. Conversely, when a project is wildly successful, there are consultants who will try to take all of the credit and ignore the substantial work you did to customize and implement the solution for your company.

4.) You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones

One of the most attractive things about working in IT is the idea that we’ll get to play with the latest cutting edge technologies. However, that’s not usually the case in most IT jobs. The truth is that IT professionals typically spend far more time maintaining, babysitting, and nursing established technologies than implementing new ones. Even IT consultants, who work with more of the latest and greatest technologies, still tend to work primarily with established, proven solutions rather than the real cutting edge stuff.

3.) Veteran IT professionals are often the biggest roadblock to implementing new technologies

A lot of companies could implement more cutting edge stuff than they do. There are plenty of times when upgrading or replacing software or infrastructure can potentially save money and/or increase productivity and profitability. However, it’s often the case that one of the largest roadblocks to migrating to new technologies is not budget constraints or management objections; it’s the veteran techies in the IT department. Once they have something up and running, they are reluctant to change it. This can be a good thing because their jobs depend on keeping the infrastructure stable, but they also use that as an excuse to not spend the time to learn new things or stretch themselves in new directions. They get lazy, complacent, and self-satisfied.

2.) Some IT professionals deploy technologies that do more to consolidate their own power than to help the business

Another subtle but blameworthy thing that some IT professionals do is select and implement technologies based on how well those technologies make the business dependent on the IT pros to run them, rather than which ones are truly best for the business itself. For example, IT pros might select a solution that requires specialized skills to maintain instead of a more turnkey solution. Or an IT manager might have more of a Linux/UNIX background and so chooses a Linux-based solution over a Windows solution, even though the Windows solution is a better business decision (or, vice versa, a Windows admin might bypass a Linux-based appliance, for example). There are often excuses and justifications given for this type of behavior, but most of them are disingenuous.

1.) IT pros frequently use jargon to confuse nontechnical business managers and hide the fact that they screwed up

All IT pros — even the very best — screw things up once in a while. This is a profession where a lot is at stake and the systems that are being managed are complex and often difficult to integrate. However, not all IT pros are good at admitting when they make a mistake. Many of them take advantage of the fact that business managers (and even some high-level technical managers) don’t have a good understanding of technology, and so the techies will use jargon to confuse them (and cover up the truth) when explaining why a problem or an outage occurred. For example, to tell a business manager why a financial application went down for three hours, the techie might say, “We had a blue screen of death on the SQL Server that runs that app. Damn Microsoft!” What the techie would fail to mention was that the BSOD was caused by a driver update he applied to the server without first testing it on a staging machine.

Monday, August 25, 2008

The True Defination of Special

Last weekend I was walking around downtown to scout around for several stuff. So we decided to walk around to check out the price and where is the best place to buy the things that we might want/need.
1) Sony Ericsoon w580i


Eileen's phone is currently faulty and she is using my extra phone now. She is however scouting around to look for a new phone to purchase as the one she is using now is kinda confusing for her as the keys are not very user friendly. So we looked around everywhere for the best price and package. This colour is a limited edition as normally you only have a black, gray or white colour. Best price we found so far, RM799.

2) HTC Diamond Touch


A PDA phone that any geek would enjoy. This phone is the closest competitor to Apple's iPhone. For my personal opinion, this phone is small, sleek and honestly, It looks wicked! I always was curious on how much this thing would cost me if I were to buy it. True enough, the price is a hefty sum of RM2799. After 2 days of thinking, I decided to let this go for now. Maybe after a few months/years when my existing PDA expires then I might get this. :) but by then most likely there'll be newer and pretty gadgets out in the market =.="
3) Tamron Camera Lense.


I realized soon after the fireworks pictures, that the current kit lense I'm using is really no difference from using a normal point and shoot camera. This thing however is like an upgraded feature of the lense that I currently am using and it has a better picture quality. Best price after scouting around is RM1430. Ouch my Wallet!!

4) Hoya Polarizing Filter.

This gadget is good for my kind of photographer who does not know how to use Adobe Photoshop. LOL It helps me to cut off the glare off daylight pictures. It does comes in pretty handy though. Price is RM100. Want to see the result of having your lense poralized?


See the power of poralizing your lense? mwahahaha...

5) Dry Cabinet



After having my camera for about 2 years, I still do not have a dry cabinet to store my lenses and kit. Having a dry cabinet is necessary to keep the good condition of your camera and your lenses. The cheapest I found is RM230.

Want to know something funny?

When I was asking the sales guy about the HTC Diamond, this is the conversation that took place between us...

me: How much is the HTC Diamond going for now?
sales: Right now we got promotion. Selling for RM2799.
me: Wow that's quite expensive. What package do you include inside?
sales: We will give you screen protector, a bluetooth headset...
me: What brand?
sales: Jabra. We also give you the software that you need or other softwares that you want and we have, we'll give you, and the GPS software, Map King.
me: That's all? Anything else?
sales: We'll also give you a leather casing, it's not for sale but we use it as free gift. We're also giving away a Special Gift...
me: What's the special gift?
sales: We cannot tell you wan... it's special...
me and eileen: =.=" *we almost fell down*

Seriously, I almost wanted to slap that guy... with his look and the way he said the "We cannot tell you wan" part, it really took me off by a suprise... he looks something like this...

I believe you would too want to slap him >.<

Thursday, August 21, 2008

So This is Where All the Romance Had Gone huh?

Last night I said to Eileen while talking over the phone...

"I damn love you!"

Wanna know her response?

"Oh... I FUCKING love you!"

Wow this is the result of a evolution of romance huh?! hahaha weird it may sound but it does emphasize the love quite loudly :p

Photobucket
Goodness what a couple :p

Last night again, my colleagues and I decided to go over to Putrajaya to take some pictures of the fireworks competition that was displayed by some Canadian competitors.

Look at the top, there's so many people up there trying to take a good position. Hell we're smarter. My colleagues knows a place with a better view angle...I believed him... :p

Somehow this building looks really nice with it's blue soothing lights.

This is where the firework displays is gonna happen. Not exactly though but end of this road... They barricaded this road so no one would go near the explosions :p

Trust me, you WILL never guess what building is this.... Nope, you're wrong...Try again.... What?? Give up? You sure??

OK! This is a PUBLIC TOILET! Mother fucker this is where our money had gone huh? Our tax money had gone to a toilet where the government servants can have a better environment to take their dump!!! =.="


But of course while waiting for the display to start, There was some camwhoring shot. You know girls loves taking pictures and I'm just serving that purpose and not let it die :p

This is a friend of my colleague, her name is ICE.... Any takers??

My colleague Alex and his friend, Ice :p When he introduced to me he was like...

"Nah, this is my friend, Ice..."

I quickly interrupted him and said "Hi! I'm fire :)"
We had fun hahaha

Actually I particularly like this picture. Somehow it looks....umm.... just nice :)





These are the pictures of the fireworks that I took last night. As you can see, there's obviously no wind last night and ended up the smokes just stood there and made the pictures not as beautiful as I thought it would be.

Even so, the whole display itself wasn't so impressive after all. It somehow looks like those rejected goods that was rejected by China's Olympic fireworks and was sent here to show off. I can honestly tell you that I'm really not satisfied with the whole photoshoot for the fireworks display. :(

After that all, I couldn't even take any pictures of the finale coz of the smoke is really clogging up the sky!!!! Then when it ended, within a few minutes, This is how clear it became! God dammit!!

At the end of it all, This is the group of people that came for the photoshoot. From left to right, Me, Alex, Ice, Michelle and Raymond.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Shoot of the Night

Last night my colleagues and I went decided to bring our camera to office so we could do a photo shoot outing after work. So after the clock strikes 6:30pm, off we went. Here's some pictures to share with you guys...

I'm sure you know where's this place already right? Seriously if you still don't know and you're from KL, you really ought to go out more often...

Here's the main picture of the area we took.Then the front view...

Then later on, we had our dinner then off we go for another round of shoot.

And finally, these are the monkeys that went for the photoshoot :p