SITEX 2004

Took a trip down to the SITEX exhibition at Singapore Expo with J after work today. Armed the camera with just a 35/f2, and went in search of interesting stuff to see and snap.

Apple took up a sizeable chunk of floor space as usual, with plenty of gorgeous Powerbooks, iBooks and iMacs on display. Enthusiastic exhibition-goers fiddled with iPods as the Zen Micros in the nearby Creative booth failed to attract the same level of attention.


iPods getting felt-up

Qool QDA-700: Palm-powered PDA Phone
What caught our attention as we walked past the Viewsonic booth:



The Qool QDA-700 seems to be aimed directly at the new Treo 650 from PalmOne. Opting for a minimalist look without the clunky keyboard, the Qool flip-cover phone possesses a swanky 2.8" hi-res colour TFT LCD touchscreen and a 1.3 megapixel built-in camera, and runs on PalmOS v5.4. Tri-band capable and compact, it weighs in at just 139 grams. That's awfully light!

More photos:

Look here for more features.

And the rest of the show...
We asked for a demo of Canon's Pixma iP4000 printer. J and I had seen the same series of printers on the shelves in Tokyo's Sofmap stores, and from what we know, this series of printers did very well in the Japanese market, thrashing HP's offerings completely in terms of looks and performance. The demo photo-on-photo-paper print was very good indeed. Black text output still didn't quite match up to HP's, but was fairly decent even then. At S$279, the iP4000 looks like a fantastic photo printer offering.

J managed to pick up a Logitech earpiece for Nokia phones at $10 from the eGames booth, and we fiddled with some Microsoft keyboards for a while before deciding not to get one (she still likes the Apple keyboard).

Got rice?

Pigeons gather to snack on spilt rice, next to a stack of empty rice sacks piled neatly on the sidewalk corner.

Rice generally figures largely in the local diet, but lately I've been more interested in the japanese-style mochi. Had some really good grilled mochi buta-maki at KAZU Sumi-yaki on Wednesday night. KAZU is one of my all-time favourite restaurants that I heartily recommend to friends - great food, excellent value. One of these days I'll get around to doing a blog entry for the place, I promise. :)

André

"Casual French Dining" proclaims the red-white-blue signage at 66 Tanjong Pagar Road, but tonight's other customers at this 3-month-old (according to the waiter) restaurant weren't dressed in tee-and-jeans like J and I were.



The dining hall is upstairs, and it wasn't immediately obvious where the staircase was, but that proved to be no biggie - shophouse restaurants aren't that complicated. The high roof and dangling ceiling lamps make the place feel quite roomy, and the decor is simple but modern, having very little of the "old shophouse" feel.



Quick food recap. Starters:
Mushroom Soup with Sauteéd Mushrooms (<$10) - A little coarse, but flavourful. Dad liked the texture, I didn't.
Escargot (<$10, house recommendation) - Garlicky and nice, served in half-dozens.
Pan-seared scallops (<$10) - Only two scallops! Then again, it's a sub-$10 starter. Overcooked and a bit tasteless.
Foie gras (<$20, house recommendation) - I didn't try this one, but Dad said it was really good value for the money.

Mains:
Squid-ink pasta with salmon (about $20?) - J ordered this one, but the oil from the salmon made her queasy. Decent serving of salmon, but nothing else to shout about.
Pan-seared cod with soya-based sauce (>$20, house recommendation) - Now this fish was nice! Wasn't a very big serving though, wish it could have been bigger.
Pan-seared lobster with risotto (>$25) - Didn't get a comment about this dish.
Parents also ordered another pasta but I didn't try that either.

Dessert:
Passionfruit cheesecake (<$10) - I liked this one. Nice texture, not too sweet either. Easy on the tastebuds.
Coffee ($2.50 ea) - (What's there to say? Not bad.)



Other comments: Food timing was messy, with J finishing her soup before everyone else's starters came. Otherwise, service was fairly attentive. The floorboard under my chair tended to give way every time a waiter walked past, although after a while I just ignored it.

After a 20% discount with UOB Visa/Mastercard, the damage worked out to be around $150 for five people. André is a B.Y.O. (Bring Your Own) restaurant; corkage charge for the bottle of wine we brought was just $10.

Verdict: Some hits, some misses. Fair value for money, but didn't find anything outstanding.

André Casual French Dining
66 Tanjong Pagar Road
Singapore 088487
Tel/Fax: 6223 4548

Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Another quirky jewel (link copied from Wantunn Me?) making its way around the office generating peals of laughter is this strange book available at Amazon:

How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Of great interest are the customers-who-bought-this-also-bought section, and the reviews that follow. Who can deny the immaculate taste of people that buy gems like "The Zombie Survival Guide : Complete Protection from the Living Dead", "Who Cut the Cheese: A Cultural History of the Fart" and the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) DVD?

While we're at it, here's the author's homepage.

Don't visit unless in need of a productivity suck.

After the rain

A view from a puddle in the alley behind my office building, taken this last evening. This shot has been flipped vertically.

It's been raining almost daily. Last Sunday just past noon, there were few clouds and the sky was mostly blue; just an hour later the rains were pounding at the windows. Good thing J's instincts had kicked in early, and we'd already brought the laundry indoors.

Rainy workday afternoons always make me sluggish. The temperature in the office yesterday felt like it took a several-degrees dip; dark skies outside the windows made it look like 7pm the whole afternoon. Perfect conditions for napping, had to fight really hard to stay awake.

Can't do without those late-afternoon coffee breaks anymore.

I've been gotcha'd

Note to self: never swap CF cards in a card reader connected to a Mac without firstly dismounting (ejecting) the card - my second CF card got wiped clean without warning. Lexar's ImageRescue software managed to haul up seven of the eight photos on the card, of which four were retrieved in perfect order. The remaining three had data corruption problems and were either badly scrambled or couldn't be opened. Painful experience.

I'm still looking for software to replace what I've been doing on the PC. Firefox works fine, with the exception that the Mac doesn't really understand the concept of a middle mouse button, so I'm stuck with using Command-click to launch links in tabs. Speaking of tabs, Tabbrowser Extensions for Firefox was a little quirky at first, but has since settled in and is just purring.

To replace SharpReader, my RSS reader on the PC, I happily found NewsFire, which is freeware, pretty, and oh-so-stable.

I couldn't really find a good replacement for mIRC though. Colloquy looked pretty nice but had a tendancy to slow down with multiple active server/channel windows. The typing lag coupled with message windows grabbing focus made me give up; I'm now back to running multiple instances of BitchX, using screen to manage sessions in Terminal.

Adium is a really sweet multi-service IM program for the Mac, like Trillian for the PC but much nicer. You don't get all of those nifty individual features like Avatars for Yahoo! Messenger, but everything else just works. Seeing as how the Mac versions for most IM services just plain suck, Adium fills the gap very nicely indeed.

For viewing AVI files and the like, it's a toss-up for me between VLC and MplayerOSX. Both have their quirks and issues, and I'm still trying to get used to them, but they play most of what I want to watch.

I'm still running both systems side-by-side, trying to figure out what else I need to find alternatives for. But the prognosis seems good for switching to the iMac as my main system. Stay tuned.

Photo 'shop

Ducky got to attend the Greg Gorman seminar. I'm soooo envious! Bleah.

When he gets back I'm going to sit on him until he spills all the goodies from the event.

Only missed when gone

These last two weeks at work have been hectic. Since our ops engie is gone, and Ducky is on leave, I've been inundated with support requests ranging from the asinine to the incredibly feckless.

Most of the requests I get are of the "I'm not a technical person" or the "I don't know how to follow instructions" or the "I'm just plain lazy" variety, or some cock-eyed combination of all three. In reality, the first two are just variations of "plain lazy". How many things would a non-techie office user need to set up that can't be done by simply looking for the instructions and following them? In an organization where searching for information is the biggest thing since peeled potatos, there's a whopping lack of faith in the methodology.

Then there's the "I have X-person here working for me tomorrow, he needs to be set up by yesterday" request. And it always comes through a lackey at the last minute, because the self-important are above giving advanced notice, making it someone else's problem, ie., mine. You can't shoot the messenger, can you? Wellll... just give me a bazooka, and I can hope the blast radius covers everything. Wishful thinking.

And if the requesters aren't attended to in short order (a couple of seconds), or spoon-fed and coddled (please clip my toenails while you're down there), or politely enough (would you like cherries and whipped cream with that?), whoah boy - be prepared for the backlash. "I spend all my time chasing you people around and I can't get any of my own work done," was one that got my blood boiling yesterday. I haven't been able to get any of my own work done for the past two weeks thanks to you people!

LART! LART! LART!

Fortunately, there are a handful of requests that come in which are concise, detailed, and most of all, important. It's unsurprising that most of these come from techies or people who work closely with techies - they understand the value of a clear problem report, and when it's clearly a problem. Helping these people is so much more satisfying because you know they understand your limitations, leave you to prioritize, and appreciate your effort.

It's during irksome periods like this that make me really want one of these.

Re-Mac-covery

In other news, I brought the G5 down to the shop on Friday and got it reinstalled and updated. No problems there, and none again when I ran the Apple Hardware Test at home yesterday.

Learned how to use osx2x to control the PC from my Mac keyboard, and how to deal with its limitations like funky key mapping ('?' becomes '|' and vice versa, ALT key doesn't translate properly). Still figuring out what I need to set up on the G5 in order to be able to switch fully.

J really, really likes this thing. :D

The trouble with Singapore barbecues

I never liked barbecues when I was younger. But going through the Singapore education system invariably meant exposure to barbecues, typically as a social function arranged for/by some ECA (extra-curricular activity) group in school. Throw in a dad who for some years arranged regular BBQ sessions every month or so, and I'd chalked up some experience along the way.

The typical Singaporean barbecue would consist of these main elements, with some variants:

1. charcoal pit fire


2. pre-cooked food, like bee hoon to keep impatient people busy while waiting for the BBQ fire to be ready


3. uncooked food for the BBQ


4. people that you assume are hungry enough to finish all the food mentioned above

The typical Singaporean barbecue also runs into the following problems, also with some variants:

1. people who can't start a fire without a flamethrower


2. people who stuff themselves early with bee hoon and have no space for the BBQed food


3. people who just slap uncooked meat on the grill and expect perfect results


4. people who don't want to cook or prepare food, and just sit at the table waiting to be served, occasionally moseying on down by the fire and make inane comments like "mm, that looks good, can I have a chicken wing?"

Hmm, we seem to have a people problem, don't we?

Exhibit A
When we arrived for tonight's barbecue, three guys were crowded around the charcoal pit and had laid out what looked like a decent setup. Three-quarters of an hour later, the guys had run out of fire-starters, the fire was down to two smoldering embers and they were about to resort to Zippo lighter fluid.

I stepped in and stopped them before they could apply the lighter fluid, and removed the half-burnt paper plates and the rag they were about to douse. Picking up a plastic plate as a makeshift fan, I went to work. Coaxing a sizeable charcoal fire from the remaining embers only took about 20 minutes, and I'm no Boy Scout.

After rescuing the fire, I left the cooking up to them. But as the fire approached its hottest point, the chicken wings went up onto the grill, and I knew instinctively that the first few wings they produced looked cooked but would still be raw on the inside. So I commandeered a food tong, grabbed some spare skewers to test the meat, and cooked the rest of the batch.

I've always preferred grilling chicken wings over low heat, which typically means waiting until the charcoal has burned down to a field of dull-red, white-ash-coated embers. Because of that, I usually don't eat much at a barbecue until later, after most people have had their fill. But J wasn't feeling too good and didn't want to stay late, so I didn't get to eat my slow-cooked wings tonight. I did manage to do some toasty marshmallows though.

The ideal BBQ
To me, a good barbecue party should only involve people who really enjoy the process. Minimal amounts of stomach-filling pre-cooked food. No bee hoon. Satay and chicken wings, fresh large prawns and some easy-to-grill vegetables. Marshmallows are optional, but desirable, preferably Campfire-branded. Long charcoal tongs, long food tongs, long skewers - hate getting my hands cooked while managing food. A well-stocked cooler, good company, and lots of time.

My only problem is organizing it - I'm terrible with the logistics. ;)

"The evolution of the species"

... or so proclaims the banner on the Mac OS X page.

And so I thought, when I (finally, yes ducky) got a swanky new G5 iMac yesterday. After all, it's a fusion of two bright sparks of the non-crash-prone-Windows world, a happy marriage between the classy white fruit and the oh-so-stable workhorse that is UNIX.

The fact that OS X is based on FreeBSD, a platform that I'm familiar with, lent strength to the belief that few things could go wrong without me messing around and poking at the internals.

So it was with due aplomb that, halfway through an automated system update, the screen turned dark and the iMac proclaimed in several languages:

You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.

With the system frozen in place, the only thing to do was follow the instruction - so I held down the Power button for several seconds. The iMac rebooted, background turned blue, the "Welcome to Macintosh" screen was displayed for a few seconds, and then it stalled. I could still move the mouse and adjust screen brightness and speaker volume from the keyboard, but nothing else would happen.

Fantastic. My first day with a Macintosh and I manage to cause a kernel panic.

Over the weekend

Peeks

The building being constructed in the photo above goes right up to the wall of my office block. The din has been horrible over the past few months - earth-shaking piling, ear-splitting drilling, defibrillator-shock hammering, the works.

Ok, so the above photo was taken on Friday during lunch at Ma Maison and doesn't really belong to "the weekend". So shoot me. Ma Maison is one of a class of quality restaurants that I like but always forget about, especially when I need to make a recommendation. It's mentioned here for the record and gets a thumbs-up without any kind of review yet. Heh.


Card pile

On Saturday, two friends came over to work on their wedding invite cards, all nicely rubber-stamped and embossed. J's handiwork - she really likes this stuff. Me, I'm just glad to see that her craft purchases are being put to good use.


Smoke stack City

Doesn't Raffles city look like an orange chimney, spewing forth grey smoke? Blame my lack of imagination. Evening sun bathes everything in warm, golden light. (I know I should try shooting during sunrise/sunset timings more often, but I am just so lazy.) Saturday evening quickly turned into Saturday night, and I hurried to the Esplanade to join J, D&H and friends for dinner at Viamar.

After dinner, we rushed upstairs to catch Mamma Mia. Which I found utterly cheesy at the beginning, but on the whole was actually fairly well done. If you ignored the plot. And the corny and contrived set-ups that were put in place just to launch a particular number. Ultimately, it was enjoyable, but I wouldn't want to watch it again.

Japan trip photos

I signed up for a trial pbase.com account and put up some of the photos from the Japan trip. I'm still taking my own sweet time to add titles and captions, so you might find that some shots still lack descriptions. If a shot intrigues you enough (unlikely) and you can't figure out what it is (even more unlikely), let me know and I'll go update it.

Looks like I'll be 'upgrading' to a premium Pbase account soon.

Lens itch: Tamron 28-75/2.8

After hesitating for several weeks because of the overlap in zoom range with my Canon EF 28-135mm IS lens, I finally gave in and picked up a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 zoom lens yesterday.

I can see why so many people are happy with this lens - it has nice sharpness wide open, decent focusing speed and is really light for a f/2.8 large-aperture zoom. In fact, it weighs in at only 510 grams, which is 30 grams lighter than the Canon 28-135mm.


One of my favourite breakfast/tea-time snacks

The one thing that annoys me is the Tamron rear-lens cap, which is specially designed to fit the lens in only one position, making it bothersome to cap back when changing lenses in a hurry. Thankfully the Canon lens caps fit well, and I have enough Canon caps for everything if I keep a lens attached to the camera body.

It started to rain heavily this evening while waiting for J to pick me up, so I pulled out the new lens and started snapping from the relative safety of the overhang.


Panning shot attempt at 1/10sec


Wrong night for a trishaw ride

I didn't realise that the traffic lights flickered so much - look at the red 'dot' trails in the above pics. In comparison, filament-based lights show up as solid trails, like the headlamps from the cars in the background.

This lens will probably be on my camera for the time being as I try to get the hang of its range and limitations. I'll probably pick up a B+W UV filter for it soon - leaving the front element unprotected is a scary thing - and maybe a circular polarizer too, since I can share it with my Canon 70-200 f/4.

Happy! :)

The Moomba

We had dinner with D&H last night at The Moomba, a cosy, dimly-lit but pleasantly-decorated Australian themed eatery with attached wine shop. First time for me, but the restaurant has been around for some eight years or so. (I'd actually been trying to get J to go, but she freaked out when I mentioned that they served kangaroo meat).

(In classic 'oops' style, I'd brought my camera with me but had forgotten to bring a CF card. No pictures this time, sorry!)

Started off with a minestrone soup ($6), which had a couple of sizeable beef chunks, a few strands of spaghetti and the usual mix of beans and vegetables; nothing very special here but good all the same. We shared the Antipasto Moomba, a tower of assorted green veggies, onions, mushrooms and cured fish slices piled neatly atop a garlic bun; an interesting mix of flavours and textures.

This being my first visit, I was feeling curious and absolutely had to try the Kangaroo Loin ($32). I had it done medium rare as recommended, and apart from the slightly game-y taste it looked very much like, and had a texture similar to, a good Sirloin steak, complimented very well by the slightly sweet sauce and green vegetables. I liked it, but J refused to try any and stuck to her salad.

For dessert, we shared a cheese board ($12) and a chocolate fondant ($10). The cheese board consisted of Australian Blue, Cheddar and Double Brie (the Brie was from King Island, yummy), fruit slices and some really, really good brown bread.

The Moomba suffers the same fate as many decent restaurants in the Shenton Way area - brisk business during lunch, poor patronage during dinner on weekdays. Making it a really pleasant place to go to for a quiet, enjoyable dinner, which I like very much. I'll definitely be coming back for more.

The Moomba is located on Circular Road behind Boat Quay, at the end of a row of shophouses close to UOB Plaza.

The Moomba
52 Circular Road
Singapore 049407
Tel: 6438 0141