I kinda wished that Ayra was growing up at a slower pace and gave us more time to soak in her baby phase! And now she’s becoming a toddler!

When I was in San Jose, I stayed at Ramada Limited Santa Clara. It’s a motel-type accommodation, which looks like places where serial killers, drug dealers, and mistress-bangers do their dirty deeds. Of course, my observation comes from watching countless B-movies. So what kept me safe while I was staying there?

A sign on my door telling people not to molest me…

Last month I was sent to US for about 3 weeks. But this time, it wasn’t for any airport-related projects. I had some tasks in a couple of Malaysian government agency offices in Los Angeles and San Jose. It was really tough to leave my family again… I don’t know if I can cope with long-term overseas assignments again. Yup… with a baby daughter at home, anything more than 2 weeks can be considered long-term. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I’m one of those travelling folks who only comes back once every few months. If I was still single, I’d be happy to go anywhere for any amount of time!

After I arrived in Tom Bradley International Airport and stepped ouitside, I immediately recognized the exact spot where I got caught smoking by my dad some 15 years ago hahah! I stayed smack in the middle of Downtown LA, at the Orchid Hotel. Although I’ve never heard of this hotel (and neither did the many cabbies there), it was quite nice for its price. Very modern-looking, with some funky lighting. The guy told me that they were waiting to open a restaurant and bar on the ground floor, and I could see that the floor layout was built to accomodate a night club as well. My room had a nice 40″ plasma tv, but there were no HD channels so I got stuck watching Astro-quality channels on a sexy TV. Horrible… haha!

There weren’t many places to see in Downtown LA. It’s like KL without the shopping malls. Purely business centers. I asked around about places to shop, and some guy suggested for me to go to the Shopping District. It’s a stretch of road called Broadway Street, and I was told that there are loads of shops selling sports goods, clothes, electronic gadgets, musical equipments, etc. So I went there, and it appeared to me that I’m right in Chow Kit road, full of Mexicans.

So there were nothing to see within walking distance from the hotel, unless I wanna go to the Staples Center which regularly feature sports events and concerts. LA Lakers played when I was there, and Gath Brooks had a concert on my last weekend there too. Loads of people wearing cowboy hats walked around everywhere at that time.

People kept telling me to go to the factory outlet stores to get some cheap goods. So i went to Citadel Outlet which is about 15 minutes from Downtown. I had been there with my family when I was small, and the place didn’t change much. There were loads of outlets like Guess, CK, Puma, Levi’s etc. I bought some stuffs for my wife & daughter but nothing for myself. I didn’t find the place very interesting. The cabbies there told me that Citadel isn’t really cheap, and you get more selections and discounts if you go to normal shopping malls. So I went to a mall 15 minutes up north called Glendale Galleria. It’s sorta like the new One Utama wing crossed with the Curve. It’s very big, and the internal layout feels very posh. Definitely more things to see here, and the prices are quite cheap too. I bought a Coach bag for my wife and quite a few other things.

I also went to Universal Studios, but I didn’t enter the theme park. The daily pass was about $60++ and I didn’t think it would be worth it for me to go alone because I’d be too lazy to go on all the rides. I wish I could bring my wife and daughter here… maybe some other time when I’ve got loads of cash to burn. I just walked around the Universal City shopping area and bought some stuffs at Hard Rock Hollywood. I’ve got friends whe are crazy about collecting every single Hard Rock tees, so I bought those too.

After a week and a half, I flew to San Jose, the Silicon Valley. It was my first time in a small regional airplane, and I hated it. I’ve got a severe fear of turbulence, and the aircraft’s small size further amplified the bumpy flight. I could also feel the slight steering adjustments made by the pilot. So the moment when the pilot is getting his bearings right just after takeoff and before landing felt really unstable. My hands and feet were sweating badly from fear.

San Jose is really nice. It lacks the towering skyscrapers of LA, so you could really see the beautiful snow-covered mountains in the horizon. My ime here was really packed with work, so I really regret not having the time to visit the offices of those big-time tech companies like Apple, eBay, Cisco, etc. The only leisure trip I took here was at Santana Row, an open shopping area much like Bangsar. I got myself a nice pair of Oakley shades :)

Everytime I have an outstation trip, I imagined that I’ll take loads of pictures everywhere. But in reality, many factors prevented me from lifting the camera and pressing the shutter. In LA, I had fears of being mugged, so I just left the camera in my bag most of the time. Also some of the time it was really cold that I couldn’t bother to take any pics. Another thing was that I prefer to have a familiar subject, so if my family were there with me, I could take pics of them instead!

The biggest event of the year for me was definitely the arrival of our lovely baby daughter in April. When I first saw her, I was amazed at how beautiful and perfect she was and I kinda wondered how someone like me could produce an angel like her. Me & wife were so scared before her birth. A lot of things went through our minds, like how many things could go wrong during delivery. I also had this crazy fear that I wouldn’t love the baby as much as a parent should. Anyways, everything went fine. The delivery was normal and without problems, and the baby was healthy except for a bit of newborn jaundice. She also brought joy to the whole household and our whole family love her to bits!

I started my new job in December 2006. So far, it has been very good. I managed to learn many new things in the IT industry, in both technical and business aspects. I also learnt a lot on the IT side of the aviation industry. Tender proposals took most of my working time, but they were interesting because those aren’t the usual government IT projects that I had been doing a lot at my previous company. I also did some travelling which was cool except that it took a lot of time away from my family.

In May I went to Jakarta for 2 weeks to get some hands-on overview of the airport IT system that my company developed. Sadly I didn’t get to be a tourist/shopper very much due to the fact that I followed a night shift schedule at the airport. Also, a trip to Jakarta city would consist of 4 hours in the car and about 2 hours of walking around. From what I was told, that’s typical of Jakarta traffic jams.

On my birthday in September, I was sent to Boston, US for almost a month. I was there to implement a test environment of the airport IT system. The main system is already there, but there were no testing system where patches and upgrades would be tested prior to deployment to the main production servers. Boston is quite a pleasant place to live. It was one of the earliest colonized area in the US, so a lot of the architecture styles were British-influenced. At that time, the Boston Red Sox were winning and it provided me a glimpse of this baseball-mad nation. The trip also reminded me of my student days, because I had to walk for 15 minutes, then take a train for about 10 minutes, and ride a bus for another 5 minutes to get from the house to the airport where I worked. The temperature was also quite unpredictable. One day it could be 12 Degrees Celcius, and the next day it could climb to 27! I also went for a walk in the Harvard university compound. The environment was similar to most British unis, with old buildings and lots of greens. I managed to do some shopping while I was in Boston, but they were mostly for my baby daughter. The baby stuffs over there are damn cheap! Also, I got an iPod Nano to be shared between me and the wife.

On December, I got sent to Bandung to deliver a huge Sun server. I checked-in the server together with my bags which was a very risky thing to do. But that was the direction I got from the company, and that was what I did. Upon arrival in Jakarta airport, I got held by the custom guys (which I had expected). I told them that the server will be used to demonstrate some new systems to the airport officials. My company implemented Jakarta airport’s IT and Flight Display systems, so that sounded like a valid reason. The custom guys babbled on about needing to leave some sort of ‘assurance’ money with them, and to collect the money from them when the server leaves for KL again after the demonstration ends. So without even asking how much they wanted, I told them that I’m gonna call one of the airport bosses. I took out my phone and started dialling, when suddenly one of the custom guys told me that since the server was for the airport bosses, I can just pass through without having to pay anything. Bloody conmen. On the next day, I went to Bandung to deliver the server. Bandung was nice… lots of pretty girls. There were many descendants of Dutch-Indonesian mixture. I had not time to shop on this trip too. Or maybe it’s because I never make the time to go shopping anyway. This time I came back empty-handed.

Many more things happened, but the ones above are the highlights of the year for me. Let’s see what 2008 holds…

Several swans swimming in Lucerne, Switzerland. Pic taken during an European holiday in 2003.

aren’t mommy & daddy tired of pointing that heavy camera at me?

No, dear… we won’t get tired… we’ll keep on taking pictures of you until you’re old enough to scream ‘Get that camera out of my face!!!’

The camera has been instrumental in cultivating my interest in photography. It’s got full manual controls (aperture, shutter, ISO settings, zoom, etc) and it has helped me a lot in learning all the different terms & settings involved in taking pictures. I bought it through eBay when I was studying in UK about 5 years ago. All the years of use and abuse had somehow taken a toll on it, and now the camera frequently hangs and often shuts down unexpectedly.

Even though it has a great list of features for its time, there were some things that bugged me.

• Poor low-light performance - the camera takes poor pictures in low-light conditions, even when bumping up the ISO to 800.
• Slow focus - the lack of an AF-assist lamp makes it hard to focus in dark areas.
• Shutter lag - there is a noticeable lag between pressing the shutter release button and the camera actually taking a snap. This proved quite frustrating when taking pictures of moving subjects, and babies. Babies couldn’t keep the same expression for a nanosecond, so the funny & cute face that the baby just made turns into a snarl when viewed in the viewfinder.

There are a few other things that I learned to live with. But then sometimes last year, a friend of mine who runs his own photography business loaned me his Nikon D70 and several lenses. I have been assisting him in some jobs for quite a while and I started to use SLRs more. And thus our quest for an SLR begins.

We got the D40 kit for RM1690 at a shop in KL Plaza (Billion Photo or something like that). It was cheaper by a few hundred compared to other places, but after we went home and I went through the box contents and documents, I realized that the kit was cheaper because it’s a grey market import. The set was from Japan, and the warranty card is in Japanese. It was a mistake not going through the box contents at the shop. We just played around with the camera and the lens. anyway, hopefully the camera doesn’t go kaput within 1 year!

Of course, these canalphones are nowhere near the quality of hi-fi personal listening devices, but the sound quality tops anything I currently and used to have. Maybe even the Sennheiser, but I couldn’t be sure because the thing has been broken so long ago that I forgot how it sounds.

Because the canalphones sit IN the ear canal, it’s able to deliver wider sound frequencies and louder volumes which basically means better sound quality. Lots of bass (especially for technoheads) clear midrange and clear treble. And they’re relatively cheap compared to the sound they produce. My wife won’t let me know how much she bought it for, but here in Malaysia it’s about RM120, I think. Maybe way cheaper. If you want to go further and have lotsa money to burn, you can look for Ultimate Ears Super.Fi 5Pro and Shure E4c. Here’s a review, but don’t ask me where to find them.

I’ve heard of canalphones several years before, but my first experience using them was with a pair supplied together with my wife’s Nokia 3250 phone. The sound, while not in the same league as the Sony ones, were surprisingly good! And then I tried my colleague’s Edifier and another Sony canalphone model in the office, and I immediately thought that it was time to shelve the idea of sending my long-dead Sennheiser headphones for repairs. With canalphones, I don’t even need a headphone amplifier due to the low current needed to power the drivers.

But if you’re trying out a canalphone for the first time, be warned that you’ll feel a little uncomfortable at first, having something shoved into your ear canals for the first time. Hmmm that sounded a little dirty huh… Anyways, most canalphones come with several sets of rubber sleeves to fit a wide range of ear canal sizes. But if your ear canals are wide like your mouth or tight like your anus, I don’t think canalphones are for you.