Funny conversation that happens:

RS: mum, how much sugar must we add?

RS’s Mum: agar agar lor. You go taste how sweet you want.

RS: mum, how much coconut must we add?

RS’s Mum: agar agar lor.

Haha… so now I know why is it call agar agar!

Equation:

Simple ingredients + simple steps = delicious agar agar

Now I know how to make another dessert, I Can make for my friends to eat when we have meet-up or picnic… haha.

an hour of ferry

It was a 3d2n trip. We journeyed by a 9 hours coach followed by an hour of ferry from Singapore to reach our destination. Though the journey was long and tiring, we were all blown away by the beauty of the island. We stayed in Redang Beach Resort, just beside Laguna Resort. It's not as luxury as Laguna Resort, and it's bathroom is kind of disturbing too...

The waves were quite strong, and we love it!

Beautiful isn't it?!

Softest sand I ever felt

We were told that we were not allowed to bring any thing out of the island including any form of living/dead corals, shells and even sand (RM25000 fine or 2 years jail if caught). I was told that the fine sands promotes the growth of corals on the shore of the island, therefore implementing the strict restriction to prevent anyone from bringing the sand out of the island.

Due to the fact that my DSLR wasn't waterproof, I couldn't bring it to the snorkeling points. There were 3 snorkeling points(different locations, speed boat to bring us out to the island) that the resort would bring us over the 2 days. We went one of the snorkeling point on the first day, another on the second day and decided to give up the 3rd point because most of us were too tired from the 2nd snorkeling.

The first snorkeling I experienced sea sickens and was vomiting on my way back to the island. There wasn't much to see there as it was more for us to get familiar with the gears and breathing methods.

The 2nd snorkeling point was at the Marina Park. Even though there were corals and fishes on the first snorkeling point, it wasn't much as compared to Marina Park! We were all given breads to feed the fishes and immediately we were surrounded by more than 30 fishes trying to get their bites on the bread! I tried to stuff some of the bread under my pants so that I can transport to another part of the ocean, but the amount of fishes attacking my pants were so crazy that I quickly shake out each and every breads out of my pants. We were also lucky to have one of the staff bringing us around the ocean in Marina Park(There's only a few of them) and we got the chance to touch and see a lot of creatures that others couldn't. =D

As for the rest of the day.........

Sand fight!

I'm not participating due to the fact I'm carrying my camera

Tie Boon and his girlfriend...

LOL!! I couldn't stop laughing at their expression

One of the rare photos to prove that I've been to redang

shemale....

completed!

Chilling with coconuts and ice kachang

frisby!!!

Another reason for this holiday trip was to celebrate 2 of our friend's birthday which fells on the next month. We couldn't have the trip anytime near their birthday therefore we went earlier. We planned and gave them a surprise cake!

The wonderful people who sang happy birthday in many languages

yeah!

Tie Boon and his girlfriend... My external flash and super big bounce card was making wonders at night.

On the last day, we bought souvenirs for our friends and love ones...

which one nicer leh?

deciding on design...

It's time to go home.... =(

Ferry back home...

Sun rise on the ferry

I'm home with very serious sunburns. However it was all worth it because we had a lot of fun!

These 2 weeks have been a shopping week for me and dear… but is mostly shopping for my stuff. Dear has been accompanying me for these 2 weekends to shop for my things. Even though I didn’t end up buying a lot of things but it’s still fun strolling outside. Dear bought himself a pair of shoes and he is so funny after wearing the shoes because he cannot walk normally… haha. Hmm… I always end up buying food and basic necessities and I must say these 2 things contribute to a majority of my spending. But, I’m happy to be able to eat nice and delicious food (better if I won’t get fat after eating them).

My tired looking dear

Nikon SB600 external flash

External flash not only provides my camera with stronger flash(not the main point) but allows a technique called bounced flash. As the flash source can be point at any directions, it creates a new window for interesting and creative lighting on images. Though I have been reading professional photographer's blogs and flash tutorials, it's never the same when you have the one to try it yourself. It's also a good chance for me to learn some new techniques and expand my knowledge in photography.

Flash pointing to the left

Flash pointing to the right

Quick test shot. Flash pointing to the left, 45degree up

Here another test shot. The pencil case was made during secondary school's dnt class. RS stands for my name =D

Too tired to do anymore testing with the flash..

Will upload portrait shoots when I got the chance to take some with my flash.

Disadvantage? My camera becomes a lot heavier now when the external flash is mounted.... =S

90degree bounce

Update: The flash was put into used when my good friend called me up, wanted me to help her take some photos for her pushcart stall. Great opportunity for me to learn the different type of bounce flash. It's really amazing how much difference a bounce flash can make!

The crowd is not that much from what I thought. There are tourists from other countries, a lot of photographer carrying super pro camera, and of course dear brought his dslr there too. We tour at the event for around 3 to 4 hrs and took a lot of photos. I think if we did not take photo while we walk, we can finish touring very fast. But because of taking photo, we have spent the $7.20 wisely… haha.

I even bought an orchid seedling home. I have long wanted to grow orchid… hope my orchid will grow up healthily. After that we went shopping and have dinner at Imperial Treasure La Mian Xiao Long Bao and they have nice and affordable xiao long bao.

For your info: Singapore Garden Festival 2010 is  from 15 - 22 Jul 2010!

P.S. More photos on facebook!

I've been envying the size of the viewfinder on higher end models such as D90 and D300 after playing with it some time ago. The viewfinder on D90 is so big, bright and much easier to see your subjects. Despite that, I couldn't upgrade my DSLR as national service is just around the corner, 4 more months to be exact from the date of this post. In addition, there rumors spreading that D90 replacement is coming out soon. It will be totally meaningless if I purchase a D90 now.

While I was googling around, I came across a discussion Nikon DK-21M magnifying eyepiece. Basically it magnifies your viewfinder by 1.2X. In another words, it means you are able to get D90 viewfinder magnification size without having to change your DSLR (default 0.93x magnification on D90, 0.6x magnification on D60).

Finding it this magnifying eyepiece in Singapore is tough job. I've went to every single camera shops on the first floor of Sim Lim square and yet to find one. Finally I've decided to purchase it on ebay, even though it cost $2 more than MSRP.

Surprisingly, it was delivered to my mailbox in just 3days after ordering it from Hong Kong!

The eyepiece is from Japan!

Fitting it on my D60 isn't much of a hassle and when I look into my viewfinder, it's as though I'm looking through a D90!

My viewfinder become much bigger, with a 0.9x magnification, just 0.03x lesser than D90.

Hee... Good buy leh~

I've seen discussion on forum that the eyepiece causes vignette. However I don't see one when I'm pointing at the sky or my room's lamp. Despite the positiveness that it brings, it also give me another problem. As I'm wearing glasses nowadays, the increased magnification made the edge of the viewfinder a little harder to look at. It's much better suited for non-glasses users. Humm, maybe I'm gonna go back to contact lens?

Nevertheless, I've not regretting purchasing this and I think it's something that every entry DSLR needs!

Despicable Me! Great movie!

Watch Despicable Me with my dear last Friday night after hearing very good reviews on the film. Though the film is produced by a very small film studio called Illumination Entertainment, the animation quality and humor is on par with dreamworks and pixel. Instead of using air-conditioned server farms to render images, the company asked IBM to built a customized server farm using the iDataPlex system, a processing system that cuts down on energy use by 40% compared to traditional server farms. It's especially important because CGI  films requires a lot of servers and power in order to render each individual frame and such small studio does not have the large resources to afford them.

Despite the great humor and animation, the movie lacked of story plot and it's rather simple and predictable. Well, one may defend saying that it's easier for kids to understand. However with a better story plot, it will put the studio to a better position in fighting the big animation giants like Pixel and Dreamworks.

Small animation studios are beginning to pull off great films nowadays. I hope one day Singapore will have one too, a high quality one of course...

4 stars for this film!

What I think was nice was their shrimp tempura, mushroom tempura, fried salmon skin handroll, California maki and tamago sushi. Other than that, the food is so so only and there isn’t a wide variety to choose from. Most importantly, desserts are not included in the buffet. I will prefer to have sakae sushi instead. But if you are a person who loves sashimi, I think you can try ikoi because Tiff keep says their sashimi is nice and from what I saw, they are generous in the serving too. Pictures below are the food we ate (food photos all taken by me)

As for my weekends, I had been working for my dad and of course I get paid for working. It is really so call ‘hard-earned money’ and I think not most girls will be able to do it. I think me and my sis are trained in it. We got to manually take out a huge amount of keyboards from the boxes and repack them again and we did dunno how many hundreds of it.

My poor little hands and legs got a few cuts and my hands also become rougher. It was super tiring. This was not the first time we are helping but I think this is considered one of the most tiring one.

Arg~ I haven’t recover from my cough yet. And I think it is getting worst. Think if I die one day, it must be lungs cancer looking at the frequent cough I have in a year.

We reached there about 11am and it was pouring! We braved the rain with emergency raincoat purchased at resort world souvenir shop. The queue management was poor and the cashiers are very inexperience. I switched my queue 3 times because there wasn't any indication where is the queue. I got pretty pissed though...

Due to the rain, there wasn't much crowd, we were able to play some of the indoor rides with very little waiting time. The longest we have to wait was the Revenge of the Mummy indoor roller coaster ride. The ride was GREAT! We had to sit in the dark while the roller coaster is moving. We couldn't make much sense out of the dark environment, and the next thing you know, THE ROLLER COASTER IS GOING DOWN! You could only get a hint with some flash of lights, then the G force of the ride comes! It's really a pity that the biggest roller coaster(battlestar galactica) is still down. I really wanna play that one lor....

There were other great attraction as well. I got to play and visited most of them!

The rain stopped only around 4pm. We then took the opportunity to take out our tripod and shoot as much pictures as we could!

(I had my camera hidden under my raincoat during the rain.)

And guess what, my stupid laggy LG phone is spoilt. Again, it’s the screen problem (which happens to my previous sony ericsson phone).  I can only receive incoming calls and that’s all. Got no choice but to purchase a new one even though my contract has only pass 1 year (meaning I got to pay extra $100 to buy my phone). I will never ever going to buy slide phone and also LG phone. Dear and I did a super quick research and I bought Nokia E72. I love this phone a lot, it is so far the best phone I had even though a lot of the function is useless to me, but I love the design and the colour (it’s a new colour and the colour is ‘so me’ haha).

STUPID RECRUIT EXPRESS, IDIOT RECRUIT EXPRESS. I WILL NEVER EVER WANT TO HEAR THIS NAME AGAIN! (abit random but I’m lazy to blog about what has happened)

Lastly, stay tune to our coming post… haha… it should be a long one.