cong a.k.a jordana site of me and updates (will change soon)

I thought I was early. Yet I was standing inside the train. It is 6.22am now.

Only just 4 hours earlier I decided to go for a photo shoot myself. The weather was fairly cooling from the drizzling all day. A nice morning with beautiful clouds formation is expected. If my initial thought of meeting Aaron at 10am still holds, I have to shoot before that timing. Since it will be early, might as well shoot even before the sun comes out.

Raffles Place MRT was my stop, or beginning rather. It was not the first time I started my derive, or drift (my classmates will know), from Raffles Place. Most probably the third time. Always a challenge to take artistic photographs in such a business district, I thought. Yes, artistic. For the sake of UOB Painting of the Year competition.

“For the sake” didn’t sound right. It sounds last minute. Unfortunately, it was. Effort was not put in for it. An image was already in mind to be printed later if my derive yields no success.

I do not expect it to be. The clouds are not fantastic. In fact there are none. The sky now are dull and grey. Trying to be a stranger in a foreign land, I tried going to places in the CBD I have not been to. Cabling works caused the grounds to be unearthed. Construction works are everywhere. I do not like the sights of them.

I still have a knowledge of where leads to where. Very soon Tanjong Pagar was where I am. Then came Chinatown. Yakun breakfast at Chinasquare was in my menu of thoughts. So was the image I am ready to print.

The camera was not at all used. The Macbook brought along was hoped to be used to edit new images, but only performed the task of converting the existing image to PDF and saved to thumbdrive. Together with the tripod, all these could have been at home and not torturing my back and legs. But it would be sinful to be thinking that way if I am to call myself a photographer.

The 12″x12″ printout was not fantastic. Dynamic contrast was all lacking. It should not be the case when furthermore it is a mono image. I should have know better. The thing is I should have done earlier.

I told my friends that I have very low motivation to shoot in Singapore. That is why I love to travel. But travelling frequently is not practical now. Sigh… I still have a long way to go in seeing places as foreign land if unique pictures are to be made.

UPDATE: the printout was so unacceptable to me I discarded it altogether. Printing it from my Canon Photo printer on Photo Pro Paper was so much better, as well as better tonal control. Although it was smaller at 8R, the minimum size for submission, at least I know the quality will be better than a bigger piece without substance. The printing shop was my first patronisation, and will also be my last! Wasted my $10.80!

My website has been hanging in the final development stage for months. Who would have expected the time spent debugging could take so much longer than my first stage of visual design. No thanks to the Internet Explorer!

It is undeniable that there are still a huge percentage of windows users in the world. I am not against this group. But having IE as a proprietry browser (and majority for sometime, although it is dwindling) in windows platform does the windows users community no justice. Until the common level of compatibilty is struck in sync with the likes of Firefox, Safari and Chrome, the world’s quality time of web developers and designers will be spent towards tweaking their sites to look “nice” in IEs.

Maybe I just sucks in CSS. To say the least, I have been looking up the Internet for references lesser. To put it more self-comforting, my alignment looks alright in Firefox, Safari and Chrome, irregardless of platform! Having an extra stylesheet to cater to IE spells out the culprit! Ahemm!

Deep into 5am and I still could not figure out why IE cannot accept my centre alignment code. The launch of the website got to postpone a day or more again! Damn!

This summer I pickup a new language, for free! But I am still grasping my A, E, I, O, U when facing this alien! Stay away or be more earthlings-like!

This page serves as the comments page linking from my home page, kuotsung.com. Your feedbacks are very much appreciated. Thanks!

All Apple fans will know this. And they will love this. For this will be the time new products will be unveiled. All the hypes and rumours leading up to the products being released together with millions of anticipation being held for months are too, to use a Mac phrase, expos�, to the final truth.

I am anticipating the release of the new version of iPhone. With my Starhub contract running to its end (finally) on 29th June 09, there is no better time to get it. With the projected date of release being 9th July, and my iPod touch spoilt with the home button jammed, I feel it is just fated, isn’t it? Just pray that Singtel is kind enough to offer the package as a considerate pricing.

So the new version is called iPhone 3Gs. The tech specs didn’t get me excited. I expect the physical structure to change, but it didn’t. Using a phone as big as my iPod touch was a way too big, I always thought. Anyway, the processing promised to be faster, 2x faster. With rumours of it being the same CPU and RAM of the iPhone 3G, I wouln’t want to throw a cold blanket just yet in finding it out till I am really serious of buying.

Safari 4 was not surprising. It is a capable browser all along although I am too used to Firefox to really get the best out of Safari. Finally it is an official version now and the thumbnails gallery of the pages you visited recently is really cool!

Something surprising was the move to include the MacBook Pro lineup with a 13″! It was less than a year I got my white plastic MacBook, now they actually downsize the MacBook Pro family to include 13″! Damn! But other than the unlit keyboard, I am still loving the white yellowish-tainted-from-hardwork MacBook.

Snow Leopard is the one I am craving about. Has been hearing it for so long until I practically forgot about it. The demo in WWDC 2009 looks promising with their so called “refinements” to the already matured, stabled and effective Leopard OS X. Most welcoming of all is the ugrade price from Leopard is just US$29! I can’t wait for September to come! So Windows 7 is coming October 22 eh! :b

I mentioned in my first post, by right this blog will launched together with my web site. Anyway launching it earlier is also part of my intial plan. Always wanted to design the appearance of this blog, but working on my website is taking quite a toll for now. Coming back from malaysia will finish up the last 20% of the website and then take a short break with some long-craved photo taking!

This theme is not done by me. Wanted to credit the creator of this theme but the name nowhere to be found. Downloaded from http://www.skinpress.com/orangy/. Simple, clear design. Wanna stay clear of dark designs for now although they look classy.� The banner is a cute ad with broken links. Will just let it stay there for the time being.

My virign post. Quite out of the blue, considering I wanted to launch my blog together with my website, which is about 80% done. However there are just so many unexpected things in the world that I have to go back malaysia for my 3rd uncle’s wake. He passed away on sunday afternoon, just a week after we visited him in the hospital. That was a worthy trip anyway, for I managed to see him alive the very last time in my life, although this time he was very different from the lively, jovial self he used to be. You will be remembered eternally for the wonderful times I had in your house when I was a kid playing with your boy, my cousin.