Category Archives: Blog

Number Six

★ Posted on at 07:53 pm ★

white rabbit

I find that my taste profile for beers favour the darker ales, so when I picked up some White Rabbit to try (being a fan of other Little Creatures beers), I found it to be very good (in my opinion) and am currently a fan of it. It’s full of flavour with strong caramel notes to it. Always happy to pop open a bottle just to savour the refreshing taste.

* * *

So it’s the big six for this blog now. 6 years since I’ve started it. Wrote a silly and worthless first post. Heh, it’s moved on to a new home without hiccup and all the better for it, considering the blistering speed at which I upload stuff to it via FTP. Would like to do a few more enhancements but this weekend already seems chock full of activities with Chinese New Year just around the corner.

* * *

Took delivery of photos from Snapfish when they had their 9c per print offer. It’s a significant saving from the usual 15c, saving me about $10 for the 160 or so prints I made. Delivery charges were painful though, at $10, so it’s sort of like paying for 15c copies but free delivery.

Printed my pictures at the standard 4 x 6″. Only bad point to the photos were that the photo paper was on the thin and flimsy end, and would probably bend easily, unlike older film developed photos that had the postcard feel to it. Other than that, the pictures were great. Having a colour calibrated monitor really helps out here, as the pictures in my hand were exactly as they looked on my screen (well, from memory anyway, I didn’t compare them directly). Having a colour corrected monitor helps you to identify colour casts on pictures and fix them up (another side note that even with a calibrated monitor, you need a colour calibrated printer to go with it and my previous prints on the home printer were slightly off). Without colour correction, my monitor tends to be on the warm side, with white webpages imparting a slight yellow hue that you probably wouldn’t even take notice of. Images were sharp, and some colours a little too dark but mainly due to error on my part for overprocessing the images. They look fine on the screen but didn’t translate over to print.Your eyes can see more variation of colours than your screen can display, and the screen subsequently can display more colours than what you can print.

* * *

My cousin has caught the grub growing bug and I transplanted some of her tomato plants (I hope they are what she thinks they are) that grew offshoot and have invaded into her chilli plant pot. Heh, will try my luck again with the coriander and parsley later on this year. Also have more experience with aphids, and when my friend (who is also trying out some herbs) brought it up, I knew exactly what she meant by white bugs covering the plant. Coincidentally enough my cousin is also experiencing the same problem now, and it does require some urgency to remove the bugs before they destroy your plant, as they have done so in my previous two attempts with growing coriander.

* * *

Heh, just so many other fascinating things in life to keep me occupied, the only dull moments are when I can’t do it all quickly enough.

Coffee At Every Corner

★ Posted on at 04:02 pm ★

coffee pucks!

Stopped using my knockbox to get rid of coffee pucks due to the warm weather. The coffee pucks (as a very fertile environment) become mouldy pretty quickly, so I resorted to just knocking them out on my tamping mat. I then started stacking them up to make space for more coffee pucks when I made coffee.

Getting the consistent 55 to 60ml from a double shot these days. I don’t drink nearly enough to practise my shots consistently to improve my skills. 500gm of beans can last me a good two weeks, serving just myself and Vyanne plus the occasional guest.

* * *

Was at St Ali yesterday evening, seeing a latte art sort of smackdown. The barista community in Melbourne seems pretty close knit, and I recognised a few faces in the crowd as they were from the cafes I frequent. It was a pretty chill environment, and you start hearing people tossing technical coffee jargon around.

triple rosetta

The amount of control you need to pour a triple rosetta into a cup requires surgical precision, meaning no jittery hands. The cup was poured by a Japanese barista from St Ali called Toshi, and he’s been there for quite a while now.

* * *

Heh, this is definitely not my average rate of posting. It’s just that I’ve been tweaking my blog lately, so I’m more inclined to write stuff these days. A few more things to fix up and I’ll probably not touch it again until after my CPA paper.

On Organising Photos

★ Posted on at 01:59 pm ★

triplet falls

This it the last photo I’m posting from the Great Ocean Road trip. Went to take a look at the Triplet Falls. This is one of the rare times I bring my tripod out and actually use it. Slapped on a polariser to reduce some of the light going in while stopping down to the minimum aperture of f/22. Even used ISO100 on my D300 to get as slow a shutter speed as possible. Managed to get a 2 second exposure out of it. All this just to get the silky look of water from the waterfalls

Really should invest in a 77mm ND filter for these sorts of shots, but I hardly get to see waterfalls anyway.

* * *

Been busy editing the website when I’m free, just to keep the momentum going while I’m still keen and excited about doing it. Putting a little more effort into deciphering code, so I’ve tweaked the archives to display the listings as I prefer it.

As I want continuity, sometime down the road I’d like to move linking photos to flickr. As convenient as it is, I don’t really want to pay $25USD annually to have that option. This plus the fact that Yahoo might wind up flickr one day and migrating the whole lot of photos if it does go down will be a giant undertaking (currently over a thousand photos on flickr).

* * *

I recall from the early days of my D70 while I was reading a Malaysian photography magazine about how one of the photographers organised his photo folders. He created folders with the year, month and day plus a short description and he imported the shoots into each based on that. I picked up the date format easily but took a little while to get meaningful descriptions for each folder.

This was way back in 2004 so I’ve been organising photos that way ever since, which is very helpful for me to find photos as I just need to recall roughly when I went on a trip or did some activity and it doesn’t take me more than a minute to locate the folder and image files.

As my collection of photos get larger (35,000 photos as of this writing?), it gets more difficult to track. I take less photos and delete images with more fervour these days. Quality over quantity they say.

I’m also getting into the habit of tagging my photos with useful metadata for easy search in the future. I get the gist of how it is useful and how I should be tagging the photos so that it makes sense for me when I do a search. I recommend watching the LL guide to Asset Management video from Luminous Landscape if you want a quick and simple method of organising your own photos. I haven’t finished watching all the videos in the tutorial but what I have gleaned so far from it is helping me sort through my files more efficiently.

* * *

After a couple of days of rain, the weather is more tolerable now. Time to go for a quick run.