Had a really long day covering this wedding but in the end, it was absolutely worth it! So much energy, fun and joy that it was impossible not to get some of it on you even though you're chasing people down to photograph them!

You can't have enough of RAM so, likewise, you can't get enough of cores!

I really forgot how bad KL traffic at 7;30am was and is! Have been spending the last four days at Tech-Ed South East Asia over at the KL Convention center. And traffic was really bad! Anyways, here are a few photos. I didn't bother bringing my camera plus also after last weekend's off-road jaunt, something whacked my truck's air-conditioning fan out of commission so no cool air if the truck isn't moving and on Jalan Damansara, Mahameru and Tun Razak, moving is defined as snail's pace!

I know I've not made any updates for over a week but there's been a whole lot of activities that just leave me totally zonked out by day's end. Good thing is that I finally got my wife's PC up and running. Everything's sort of installed and in place except for a few minor utilities like DVD authoring software and the like. Then came the big bathroom leak incident. For poor workmanship (gone are the good old days), the master bathroom of my condominium started leaking into the unit below. We've been using the second bathroom for a week now and that doesn't help my weariness as I've got to boil water to get hot water since I don't have a water heater installed there.

Loading durians for the trip home!

Last weekend was Sanofi-Aventis' Corporate Social Responsibility trip into the SEMOA villages and we did eat lots of durians and donated some needy supplies. And I had to rush to deliver the photos for their marketing department within 48 hours! Oh well, I still have got two weddings to process, a photobook to complete by next week and another wedding shoot the week after!

Yes we ate all that!

Well, yesterday I headed down to LY Plaza to my favorite IT retailer for a bunch of parts. I was aiming to wait till end September to get this upgrade but an unexpected disaster happened. Anyways, so, here goes upgrade phase one. Phase two is smaller and is not so obvious. If you noticed I have two Intel Core 2 CPU boxes in the photo. The one below is a Quad-core CPU which will be going into my main workstation but not exactly so soon. Why wait? I've two weddings to process so that takes priority and I need to stabilize the other workstation first. Choice of parts is nothing extraordinary. Just reliable parts to get the job done. After all, tech refresh is every 18 months anyway

Bunch of new parts ready to be assembled!

New architectural marvel or just a simple heat sink?

64-bit Vista install...

This time by Kong Weng while I was batch processing about 150+ photos and assembling the 'Our Big Day' Slide show. I look more relaxed now since at this moment the photo was taken, the slide show was almost completed.

Had a jammed pack weekend starting at good friend's wedding and ending at my parents place doing re-potting and other stuff. A long sleepless week with a few problems didn't help things much and my wife's PC decided to expire peacefully at 7:04pm, Thursday, July 31st. Cause of death is two blown capacitors. Oh, well, time to upgrade. Anyways, after conducting a FlashWorks 101 lession on Friday night, I put all the batteries into chargers, packed my gear and slept at 1am.

05:38 : Woke up due to heat and couldn't get back to sleep
06:20 : Little dog barking (my iPhone alarm clock)
06:32 : Aromatic coffee (Starbucks Rwanda Blue Bourbon) to kickstart the system
06:45 : Shower and soon after, load-up and head-out of the house
07:10 : Arrive at Jalan Selangor House
12:40 : After two houses, arrive home for lunch. Down 500ml of water, 325ml of 100Plus
14:00 : Download photos and take shower. Batch convert from CR2 to JPEG, downsize.
14:45 : Finished shower, and hit the road again.
15:05 : Arrive at Bible College of Malaysia - Wowzers, it's 100 degress in the shade!
18:30 : Arrive at Bangsar Seafood Garden. Immediate download of photos
18:50 : Test run of first slideshow. Restaurant notebook crashes, Flash doesn't work on backup PC.
19:01 : Batch conversion from CR2 to JPEG. Test my notebook to Projector
19:20 : Finalize slideshow and re-arrange some (reviewing it yesterday made me realize a few more photo sorting/ordering slips)
00:30 : Arrive home. Take shower.
01:00 : Review my photos and my wife's photos (from another wedding)
02:30 : Crash into bed.

You can check out the some of photos on Anna-Rina's blog here. It's always fantastic to always meet another awesome photographer and how could anyone be more cool than Anna-Rina? Plus she managed to snag my big ass blocking the entire view at Church! Awesome!

© Anna-Rina

Normally, I'd never ever buy a fully built PC for myself (or wife) from anybody - HP, Acer, Apple, Dell, you know. This is probably the second PC I can consider getting other than this HP TouchSmart model that looks quite snazzy. The XPS One doesn't count because it's not available in Malaysia yet. What's not to like? Price is one thing but why can't Dell Malaysia remove all the useless stuff (monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse) because I've got better and sell just the unit? Secondly, it maxes out at 4Gb RAM. Come on, this is 2008, we need 6Gb and 8Gb! Anyways, pricewise, it gets pretty high (I spec'ed mine up to RM4,968 with a 2.5Ghz CPU) so again, I have to pass on it. However, it looks like Dell's waking up a bit and PC manufacturers are begin to make snazzier boxes. The new Latitude E-Series looks good