Well, my backache hasn’t fully healed yet but I can’t wait for weeks long before I get to ride my new hybrid bicycle for the first time (The same darn bicycle that made me hurt my back a while ago). Ignoring my physiotherapist’s strict orders, I decided to ride it last weekend.

I wanted a speedometer mount for my bicycle but I am too cheapskate to buy an proper attachment and can’t be bothered to mount it up, so I went to eBay and bought a mobile phone mount for my Samsung Galaxy S2. After all, a smartphone can do more than just displaying me the speed stats. All I need now is an app and I found this nifty free app called MapMyRide. Not only it has all the basic speedometer and statistics tracking features, it also records my rides/journey/workouts using GPS. Arming with the app, I recorded my first 10 kilometres workout  Here’s my route info.

Of course with that punishing workout without warming up myself, my back hurts again. My physiotherapist is not going to please to hear about this, but it was worth it. : )

P.S Oh, one of its cool features is letting me to capture images with my mobile phone’s built in camera and uploaded along with my route info. But the shots are not rotated when they are shot in portrait mode.

It’s my birthday yesterday and today I’m officially over the 30 year old bracket. Signs of hitting the old age (well for me, 30s is old) is the severe backache I’m still suffering. According to the physiotherapist, it was a disc spinal injury. Having said that there was no no grand celebration, no drinking sessions, no visitations from mates. I’m just not in the mood for anything until my back gets healed. It was just a simple, quiet dinner with my partner.

What about prezzies? Nah, I’m way too old for that now. I buy my own present and it’s a bicycle.  The irony is, it was that same darn bike that aggravated my back in the first place when I tried to transport it back to my home. It was also one of my new year resolutions, to pick up cycling again after more than 15 years and go healthy. Now, the new shiny bike is sitting idly in my garage and I’m not in a position to ride it.  (-__-)”

It has been more than a decade since my last visit to these local attractions. As a local boy there, there is no reason walking into temples and caves once every week like a shopping mall unless I have a reason to. This holiday, I had one; showing my girlfriend around especially Sam Poh Tong and Kek Lok Tong caves. My home town is surrounded by limestone mountains and these historic hot spots is a must, aside from gorging good food (another top ‘attraction’) from the local eateries.

The trip  to Ipoh was a short one so I decided not to carry my heavy DSLR along. The shots I took was from the Samsung Galaxy S2′s camera. It does take pretty shots IMHO.

What a way to start the first day of work (officially office starts today but I’ve been working since last week) in 2012! I hurt my back last weekend when I was (again) lifting and stuffing my brand new bicycle into the car. The pain initially was not present until yesterday morning.It was so intense till I can’t move much of my waist when I’m asleep and I can’t even stand up straight. Literally I swore after each step I made.

My god, I feel like I’m 70 years old now with a crooked back. Going to see a physiotherapy this arvo. Hope he’ll somehow ease up the muscle cramps/tensions so I can drive safely home and get myself a good night’s sleep.

I usually opted to work during my office’s official Christmas break (a.k.a close down period) in between late December and early January.

Some of many reasons to do so:

• I can save up my annual leave for something else better since going out for holidays during these crazy peak seasons ain’t worth it.
• I can concentrate on my work without a hint of disturbance/ distraction from my fellow colleagues. Well if I’m really that good, I wouldn’t be blogging right now -___-”
• I own the office for a short time!
• I can blast my music loud and whenever I want.
• I can practically stripped naked and do silly walks in the office without anyone seeing me.

Okay, the last reason is just a figure of speech. Not that I actually did it.

Enough time wasted to think what to write next. Back to work.

Happy New Year 2012!

I celebrated my New Year on a plane, returning from my two weeks holiday break. The year 2012 greeted me with a very hot summer. It has been high 30s for the past couple of days (yesterday was hitting 40) in Melbourne. My car was heated up like a microwave and the steering wheel is scorching hot. Not funny at all.

As it has been predicted by the ancient Mayans, 2012 is the year where the world is going end. Let’s see how it goes.

Another experiment on the timelapse and the photoshoot was done at my colleague’s kitchen. This time, it’s rendered under 24 frames per second hence the motion is smoother.

Post production for the photos are edited in Adobe Photoshop CS4 under video mode. I didn’t have Adobe Premiere but the Photoshop CS4 seems to support timelapse and able to perform simple video editing. Final product is rendered with VirtualDub with Xvid compression. Motion blur is added post production. I have yet to full grasp the concepts to perform the perfect motion blur. Let’s hope I can make it happen on the next timelapse photoshoot

I’m going to take a short break in the mid December for two weeks. It’s the time of the season to relax, visit family and get together with mate. While I’m at it, I’ve been invited to attend two weddings of my school/college chums. And that’s not all; I was requested to be their photographer of the day (not the official one, thank goodness).

Since this is my first time, I hope I live up to their expectations. Okay okay, I lied. It’s not my first time; I did a very short stint for a mate of mine and it was not professional at all. It was s**t. Zero substance. Of course that was two years ago; I should have learned my lessons, identified my lackings and improved a little by now. We’ll see how it turns out then. ; )

I’ve seen a fair few of branding on eggs but during my photoshoot at a commercial kitchen last week, I found some with a happy face on it. After staring at the adorable smiling oval little fella, you don’t feel like breaking them up huh?

P.S Of course the chef we worked with didn’t share the same sentiment and turned them into a cake.

Apparently there’s this nifty method to access every single settings in my Windows 7. It is called God Mode

1. Create a new folder on the desktop
2. Name the  folder as GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
3. The folder icon will change into a Control Panel icon.
4. Click into it to access every available settings from A to Z

I found out this little feature from G+ but the link was lost. Anyways, here’s a link which shares the similar story

P.S. If you are using Windows Vista 64 bit, be a little careful though. The comments in the post (the link above) said those peeps who are still with Wondows Vista 64 bit will crash if they turn on this “god mode” feature. You guys are warned ; )

Another experiment for the day.  And today’s experiment is  a 360 degrees panoramic view of my office with my mobile phone. I was thinking to use this idea as a template material for my organisation’s upcoming content development. Or perhaps a virtual tour video.

1. I used my Samsung Galaxy S2 camera and took a 360 degrees of snapshots of my office.
2. Stitch them together with Photoshop using Photomerge automation.
3. Created a Quicktime VR video with Pano2QTVR

I went to Mornington Peninsula for a holiday last weekend with an old Scoopon voucher that I purchased last year. The short trip was  good; calm weather and pretty sunny day. I also had a chance to experiment around with some panoramic shots there. The weather was a little gloomy so the shots didn’t really turn out the way I wanted

p.s. Flickr resizes all my shots to fit a 1024 resolution since I’m using the standard free account.

It’s Friday and I’d loved to see no dramas until the end of the TGIF day. But nooo, something came up the moment I sat down in front of my office desk. For years, I’ve never had a problem with Dreamweaver before. One typical day, boom! I got a weird error prompt when I tried to open a HTML file with my Dreamweaver CS4.

After ‘googling’ (a geeky term huh?) around, I’ve found some users who have similar problem like mine, except some they might have different translators (FTP, ASP,etc)  in the error message. Apparently a  dat file is corrupted somehow and needs to be corrected. And so, what they suggested was renaming or deleting a particular WinFileCache configuration *.dat file in the user settings folder.

The steps:

1. Close down the Dreamweaver application
2. Locate this WinFileCache file. I’m using Windows 7 so it’s in C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\en_US\Configuration
3. Find a file called ‘WinFileCache-xxxxxx.dat‘ (I think the xxx codes might be vary from different user, operating systems, dreamweaver versions, etc). Anyways to play safe, I renamed mine instead of deleting to ‘WinFileCache-xxxxxx.dat.bak‘  in case something screws up.
4. Restart the Dreamweaver and try to open a file (any)
5. And hoooray, everything goes back to normal! *Cheers*

I was lucky to have a photoshoot offsite and to continue my experiments with timelapse. This time it’s a commercial kitchen.

This is also my first time mucking around with panning a timelapse shot. It was awful; my timing is so off and my cheapo tripod is clunky hence the not-so-smooth panning.

My second attempt on timelapse