Food, travel and Photography
On a lovely Saturday afternoon, we had a wonderful time with a few good friends. Instead of spending money and going into town for great food, we had better. This was a Do-It-Yourself, Bring-Your-Own high-tea. With a delectable spread of simple, but delicious food, the time spent was absolutely wonderful. We don’t need a lot of fancy food or a 5-star dining room… our simple house and home-made, hand-crafted food was all that was needed. Awesome!
Recently, my trusty DVD printer (yes, it prints DVDs and CDs almost exclusively), the Epson R290 keeps telling me the yellow cartridge is on empty and refused to print. I usually stock cartridges so that was not a show-stopper. A minor detour for Asian readers: your yellow ink will finish the fastest so if you’re not OCD like me on ink, at least keep a spare yellow cartridge somewhere. Not very scientific I know but every printer I use has always depleted the yellow ink first. This also happened while I was shooting two hundred-plus families at Mid valley for the recent focus on the family’s photo contest. All three printers ran through their yellow cartridges with an average ratio on 1.8 to 1 other color cartridge. Asian skin tones perhaps.
Anyways, replacing an ink cart is a two minute operation… until I get an incompatible/non-original cartridge error. Okay, my carts are all Epson originals. Pop the cartridge out, cleaned the contacts, pop it back in. No go. Okay, next yellow cartridge! Still no go. Power-off, disconnect power cord, replace with empty cartridge, etc. Nothing works. So, after one hour and two brand new yellow cartridges, the stupid thing still tells me the cartridge is incompatible or incorrect and I need a 81 or 82 cartridges. That what it says on the box and the cartridge!!! I know why manufacturers do this. They literally are giving the printer away and making back their revenues on the consumables. This is a fact. I used to work for a printer giant (two letter acronym, US company, Palo Alto, you get the it…) and the printer group always makes money. They may not hit targets all the time but they never lose money.
What to do? I’ve got a couple of customer DVDs to print! The next lowest ink level was the light-cyan cartridge. So, let’s replace that and see if I need to replace my printer. Pop the cart out, pop the new cart in and damn. It works like it should. One day later and a short trip down to Low Yat Plaza, yes, Epson inks are kinda hard to find… especially the higher end inks and this is like entry level IMHO. So next step, replace the yellow with the newly purchased cart and finally it works!
Hmm, I think I’ll be looking at a Canon printer next… provided it prints DVDs as good as my Epson.
While Malaysian broadband is lacking in more ways than one can count, there is yet hope. A certain monopolistic company and their terrible service is all most of us have but if you can actually afford it, SDSL is much better considering the guaranteed transfer speeds compared to best-effort. Best effort in boleh-land is probably equivalent of try-lah. You’ll probably encounter download speeds as fast as 100kb/second to about 1kb/second. Yes, it’s that variable. Come to think of it, Malaysian traffic is similar. I can take anywhere from 15 to 100 minutes to get to work!
There’s yet another option – Metro Ethernet. Yes, many cities in Korean and Japan have high speed Ethernet broadband connections while our fancy broadband is still stuck at the mostly same speeds it launched with seven years ago! Paneagle has it’s Metro-E in select buildings and areas and if you can afford it, a certain monopoly’s broadband becomes dial-up! This is a 5Mbps Metro-E link.
Check-out my simultaneous download of Windows 7 from the MSDN site 
and yes, I’m still in Malaysia! Here’s the info on my IP address:
IP address: 202.169.29.70
Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns01.paneagle.com.my.]
ASN Name: PANEAGLE-MY-AP (Paneagle Communications Sdn Bhd, Metro-Ethernet & Internet Access Provider, Malaysia)
IP range connectivity: 1
Registrar (per ASN): APNIC
It’s really amazing how much junk one can accumulate over the years. Instead of having a garage sale, here’s a list of things I have that you can take for a tiny bit of cash. I’m not putting a price on the items but a reasonable offer will always be considered!
Mega-list-of-items (single units unless stated):
- Seagate Hard drive 200Gb SATA
- Seagate Hard drive 40Gb SATA
- Western Digital Hard drive 320Gb, SATA
- Western Digital Hard drive 500Gb, SATA
- Western Digital MyBook 640Gb FW/USB/SATA
- Seagate 4Gb Type II (CF) microdrive
- 1Gb DDR2 SODIMM (Notebook RAM) (4 pieces)
- Transcend 133X 2Gb Type I CF
- Sandisk Ultra II CF 1Gb (2 pieces)
- Sandisk Ultra II 2Gb SD (2 pieces)
- Canon EF75-300 IS f/3.5-5.6
- Wacom Intuos Serial port tablet, 9″x12″ (A4) size (USA adapter, can be used with 220-110V converter)
- SMC 7004VBR 10/100 Broadband Router with 4-port ethernet port
- Epson R290 Inkjet printer, including 1 complete unused ink cartridges
- HP OfficeJet 5510 Fax/Copier/Print/Scanner, Color inkjet.
- Dell E1705 Widescreen LCD Monitor
- Logitech cordless desktop 110 (Mouse & Keyboard)
- Asus A8N-VM mainboard with Athlon64 XP2 3800, no ram
- DLink DWA110 USB Wireless adapter (2 units)
- Dlink 4-port KVM Switch
- Dlink DCS-950 Network camera
…
heh, I’ll update this if I find more stuff
