Ta-da!

All set for 2010. :-)

How time flies...

Wow, I didn't realise I didn't post for the month of September...

National Day month is here again!

Hahaha, it's July and I'm starting my five-month internship soon...

In about 12 hours...

About 20 more days to go...

Going to Toulon, Nice and Marseilles over the weekend till Tuesday. Let's hope the pigs didn't flew.

Going to Kiruna/Abisko hopefully to catch the northern lights, and then to CeBIT next Thursday... what a packed week.

Set up a Twitter account just because *she* found it to be another convenient way to stay in touch with me. What's rad about Twitter is I can do microblogging by sending SMSes. How odd that what was once a pet idea of mine is catching on by the millions worldwide. I'm not crediting myself for this idea, there must have been countless of geeks who thought of setting up their SMS gateways connected to a web server to enable this kind of functionality, but the scale of which microblogging is at right now is nothing short of amazing.

That brings us slightly closer to where this blog may be heading. With Twitter and a nifty Facebook app, I can easily connect to my friends just about everywhere I go as long as there is GSM service. The notion of a personal blog is endangered, I would say, in the face of such social networking tools. However, the fact that I had hand-coded this entire website myself is proof of my passion and skills. Maintaining the existence of this website is still my priority, but its direction needs to be aimed somewhere. I intend to morph this website slowly into some kind of a public, no login required place to find out more about me personally, and ideally professionally. I'm thinking of making the giant leap. HTML5 and offline storage wizz-magic. Cutting-edge web integration tools to make this site more dynamic. And as a sideline, looking into Palm webOS dev kit. But anyways, keeping hjk.ikueb.com online for as long as possible is a certainty, and I'm still trying to grasp for new ideas to furnish this site with.

You may not see the same kind of updates I've put since 2003 till now in a potential rehashed version of the website, but the new updates will be good. And hot. Oven-baking, volcanic-ash hot.

Tidied my links page...

Today marks the one-month anniversary of me back in Scandinavia, and today was a very interesting day. The snow was the thickest I've seen at my place, and on top of that the Sun was out in its full glory, prompting me to head out and snap some pictures. I did some "ice carvings" as well! What's more amazing is that it started snowing pretty heavily in the evening, even though it was only for a short while.

That's about all from me...

Gosh, just realised I haven't updated here in more than a month...

What's surprising is that this is possibly the best month of my life for now. I finally found someone who enjoys my company as much as I enjoy hers, I'm in exchange in Sweden now, and today marks the 14th day of my overseas trip, which is the longest so far and it can only get longer... till mid-June.

And yet, I have definitely, seriously, lost that blog-writing mojo... I quite believe I mentioned in a past entry that what had motivated me to write here had radically changed. It went from skirt-chasing to my NS tales (largely) to my life in general. The Internet for me evolved from nothing to Friendster to Facebook and Youtube. Time is sadly limited, and somehow writing on my dated blog is edged out by all these activites, not to mention the time required for studying.

I tried to revive this place by coming up with a redesign, but the perfectionist in me says that it's not mobile-friendly enough (excessive use of Javascript be-gone!), and hence that's still in a limbo right now. I thought I would have more time here in Sweden, but I figured most of that time will be down for more studying and traveling...

So, what's the meaning of this blog then? It must definitely be put online still to me, even as a token of remembrance of the past stages of my life. Unfortunately, providing updates is one important thing that I cannot really promise now, like how I have done so in the past and yet consistently failed. I suppose my conclusion is to stick with the online part, and we'll figure out the latter... eventually.

Somehow.

Have quite a couple of friends who had their birthdays yesterday, having it today, and coming soon in the next couple of days.

Also, I played the best prank on my friend when I changed his Facebook relationship status! WOOHOO!

Lastly, it's December! And the new site design is not up yet... maybe I'll get more free time in Sweden...

From Sixth Avenue (my parents dropped me there while sending my sister for piano lessons) and ran back with a detour towards the old Fire Station and opposite Bukit Batok Nature Reserve...

I just skipped the month of October...

Really busy right now... still hoping to push my forever-been-pushing facelift for this website by the end of the year... ^_^

Finally, after months of sticking with the fan, my room finally got a brand new Daikin inverter air-con! Goodbye my 14-year-old Carrier!

In other news, went to the Motorshow today as well. Only one floor, the S$8 was paid to watch car stunts. Heheh...

Thought that I'll do some updates here... I got my Nikon D90 on Saturday at 1690 in cash and I've done 47 test shots - both day and night - as you can see in my Flickr photostream.

Likes:
- Undeniably good noise performance!
- 3" 920k screen!!!

Dislikes:
- None yet, but that's probably because I'm still experimenting with the camera controls.

I guess I'm ready for some normal shoots rather than test shots, watch out for it either on my Flickr photostream (general photography) or Facebook (friends' photos).

A couple of days back, Nikon shocked-and-awed the world by releasing the world's first movie-capable Digital SLR camera. The D90 is highly unique not just in this aspect, but also the fact that it brings (most of) the image quality of its more expensive brothers down to a highly attractive, "advanced amateurs" price point.

The biggest attraction for me about the D90 is simply the movie recording capability. As Chase Jarvis puts it in his write-up (http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2008/08/chase-jarvis-raw-advance-testing-nikon.html):

It’s so cool that we’re seeing the merging of high quality still and video pictures into the same camera. Sure, for us pros, we’ve got the RED camera. But for everybody else? This is the future. People: this is an SLR that shoots killer video! ...It's going to be a powerful tool. You can control your own depth of field so beautifully using the manual focus ring, the audio capture is solid, the high ISO capabilities in video?! Way cool... Long lenses, fisheyes, zoom lenses...versatility.

Being an aspiring photographer and a "video-grapher" myself, I finally see in the Nikon D90 (no doubt the first before we eventually see a string of DSLRs with similar features) a strong set of features that appealed to me immediately at a reasonable price point. By merging the boundaries between a DSLR and a dedicated video camcorder, I really believe that this would be the camera that will escalate my interests and profession in both photography and cinematography.

So why am I reading this, you may ask? Well, if people can get rich with million-dollar homepages (http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/), I guess there's no harm doing a little "shameless" self-marketing through my friends on Facebook. The deal is this: all I'm asking for is a S$1 donation from you. For that S$1, I will be glad to take a photo and video for you using the Nikon D90, assuming if all goes to plan. The photo will be taken at the camera's highest resolution with RAW and jpeg provided. The video will be shot at 720p/24fps, the highest the D90 can go, with the length capped at 5 minutes due to camera constraints. I'll be willing to take any photo and video in Singapore, where I'm currently at, as long as it is not immoral or illegal.

If you're feeling really generous, I'm all for accepting donations at S$1 for every extra photo up to S$20 per person. I guess that is a reasonable limit as I don't want to end up taking like hundreds of photos for a single, really generous donor. All in all, I am looking at raising S$2000, which should be around the amount that the D90 kit version may cost when it reaches Singapore. However, I may at my own discretion change this amount to equal or slightly lesser than its actual retail price when we get a confirmed price. That also means I'm potentially looking at 2000 people donating S$1 each for now!

I'm not going to fix a firm deadline as to when I need to get the D90 yet because it largely depends on when it actually arrives in Singapore and how fast the donations are streaming in. Ideally, I'm looking at a October timeframe, which will give me about two months or so (with exams in between!) to honour my agreement as laid above before the end of the year.

The fact is I'll most probably be heading overseas for my student exchange early next year till June, so I guess it's in the best of our mutual interests to get the D90 as early as possible so that I can complete what I promised you, the potential donor, and take the camera on my studying trip. Of course, if the D90 is going to come late to Singapore, then it simply means I have to work a lot harder in a shorter amount of time to make things work.

Last but not least, this is *FOR REAL* ok! All of us have, at many times in our lives, wanting to purchase certain stuff and joked about getting your friends to donate to your "fund". Well, this time I'm walking my talk and I'm really looking for kind-hearted friends interested in furthering my passion in both photography and cinematography.

To make the donation to me, you can either donate via the Paypal button below or send me a Facebook message where we can further discuss the details.
Please do get the message out to your friends as well, thanks a lot for reading this lengthy post!

BTW, check out my Flickr photostream!

Next to the AHM trainings I had in the army, this must be the longest distance I have ever ran continuously...

Google Maps link