Recap: Travelling At Port Dickson

It was about a 10 days ago that I spent 2 1/2 days in Port Dickson being the political tourist here and there. Although I have documented whatever I've saw on polling day in my previous day.


The Markas PAS is about less than a kilometer away from the 'blog base' where I wrote most of my postings there. So going there, it's just taking a walk there. And it's opposite Avillon.


Lunch time at the Port Dickson golf club. Thanks to the two kindly ladies that I know, including one who came all the way from Ipoh, I managed to feed my stomach. Didn't take breakfast though except a cup of coffee. Even the club shows 'allegiance' and support to the Gerombolan Barisan Nasional.


Ceramah time at 9th Mile. Eventually, it is known that most who enjoyed it are outsiders.


Good god. This is how the traffic is after the ceramah is over and after midnight. No more campaigning already. Look at that traffic. Boom is waving the flag BTW.


On polling day, look at how bad the traffic is at the 8th Mile. 5 trucks are heading there, with 68 FRUs from 5 trucks deployed to do crowd control. Alan was helping out in counting sheep - errr..FRU personnel BTW.


And here's the bonus shot for that day. PAS people were cheering of this little chimp, so before the man gets shooed off by the FRU, I managed to take a grab..viola.!

That's Not Good For Malaysia

For the sake of Malaysians, it is better not to pursue something that is deemed fanatical like this.

Fanatics would do such a thing there. It seems that we all had forgotten what Malaysia stands for. In the beginning, Malaysia is a secular state, as some of the documents in the past testified as it is meant for all races to stay, not just one.

Excerpt from Malaysiakini (click here to read the full story):

In view of the upcoming general election, Malaysia's Islamic NGOs exercise their democratic right by calling upon political parties, election candidates and the future state and federal government to address issues concerning the interests of Islam, Muslim society and the nation. The calls for a responsive government which is receptive to the aspiration of the people and the Muslim majority contained in a document called "Malaysia's 12th General Election: Islamic NGOs Election Demands". The document is a product of a consensus reached through a series of consultation among Malaysia's main Islamic NGOs including Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM), Jamaah Islah Malaysia (JIM), Malaysian Chinese Muslim Association (MACMA), Syari'e Lawyers Association of Malaysia (PGSM), Allied Coordinating Council of Islamic NGOs (ACCIN), Wadah Pencerdasan Umat (WADAH), Muafakat Masyarakat Malaysia (MUAFAKAT) and Muslim Lawyers Association (MLA), Persatuan Ulama' Malaysia (PUM), Teras Pengupayaan Umat (TERAS). (See the full list below).

The document comprises a host of demands which fall under six main items, namely the special constitutional position of Islam; Islamic education and da'wah (call to Islam); good governance; democracy and civil society; inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations; and Islamic faith and morals. Following are the summary of the demands:

This would be a bad case, an attempt to dismantle what most people are benefiting from being a Malaysian. It would create an identity crisis and worst of all it means religion subversion. It has been too much for most of us recently when Christians faced the problem of the Allah wording that was banned by an semi-literate minister. Musa Aman and the Mufti of Sabah is also in the spotlight and criticism of the Chinese committee for issuing a decree banning all Buddha and Kuan Yin statues in the state.

What more do these so-called holy and people with alms want from? Does such suggestions above means forcing everybody or subverting them to accept the Muslim way against their will?

From what I remembered sometime ago, these NGOs are responsible for all the ruckus while people were eager to see Gwen Stefani and Beyonce performing here. I also remembered that an adviser to this NGOs is somehow Reezal Merican. Correct me if I am wrong on the fact above, such words means more danger than PAS does after it admits that their numbers are impossible to make every part of Malaysia Islamized.

A First Sign of Bad Things to Come


On Sunday, I was in Kampung Baru driving to heart of the city, when I noticed a signboard, similar to the one mentioned by Seputeh MP Teresa Kok. According to sources, it was said that it was written as part of getting Middle-East tourists visiting Malaysia to understand the ground better. The problem is, Arabic is not the number one language used in the world, but it is English and number two is Chinese Mandarin. It seems that some idiots think of otherwise.

People, always remember that Malaysia is a secular state. Don't let such a radical ideology dismantling everything foundation laid to waste with one act like that!

Behold...Low Light Photography!

I was in Singapore for the last 4 days and during dinner on the first night at Singapore, my friend took a picture of me. When she saw the picture after taking it, she got shocked.


She told me that the picture was able to capture natural colors and interestingly, I did not use any flash for the picture. Unconvinced, I showed her another picture by taking another picture of her, with the same settings.

I basically used ISO 800, with lighting set as florescent high levels. The most important thing about the picture is that there is sufficient amount of back lights in order for me to take the picture. But then, while I examined some of the pictures which I took during the nighttime dinner at the Lake House, I noticed there is evidence of grain. Someone told me that higher ISOs may result in picking up of grain.


Maybe I might have to try shooting it at 400 ISO.

The Bangsa Malaysia Report

Over a hundred of bloggers and ordinary Malaysians attended the Bangsa Malaysia gathering last night at the Blog House in Damansara Heights. Initiated by Haris Ibrahim - the intention of the gathering is to put an affirmation that Malaysia is consisted of people of various races known as Bangsa Malaysia.

Upon registration, the form, which every attendee has to fill up has something very interesting - on your discretion, you have the right to say no, irrelevant or something else on certain fields that you usually see in signing a form - that is race, religion and sex. Which was why everyone was warned earlier to read the instructions before proceeding on.

The get together started at 8.30 p.m., but I thought that there could only be light refreshments like tidbits and drinks so I had dinner before coming over. I could have accepted Edmund's invitation to join him for dinner with his family but I couldn't accept it over this meet.

The rest of the photos can be seen at my Flickr photo page.

Of course the usual lot is there, with Jeff, Bernard, Tony Yew - there are three Tony's there BTW, Rocky, Nathaniel, YL, Marina and Tony Pua there. But the ones I met there are new faces including Chris (Mob) who was working under Patrick Teoh - mum's friend, Clifford Tan (Ghost line), the organizer, Harris and a few more including Eric Woon and Stephen Francis.

An interesting fact, according to Bernard, Clifford actually caught a cybertrooper red-handed attempting to plant a seditious comment over his blog. He managed to trace the identity of the person involved and through some common sense.


Howsy (The Sensintrovert) showed me a trick to pull more attention - by pinging the portal called the Petaling Street project. Something worth to try out but it seems that I need to wait for a few more days before my blog is added to the directory. TV Smith, the famous satirist was also there, and it was a big chance for me to meet the man in person as one of my favorite parodies written by him would be the MOB Blog.

Of course, the show starts and ends with the National Anthem. There's food and drinks and dedications to the nation by singing and poetry recital. Jeff did the rectal and Azmi and a few more youngsters sang some songs dedicating to the nation.

We're facing a lot of problems in society and they have launched a initiative called PELITAR -Penyayang Legasi dan Inspirasi Tunku Abdul Rahman, which aims to achieve what the Tunku idealizes for the nation. Overall, it is a very enlightening experience of being there to celebrate the spirit of Merdeka among the bloggers who aimed to achieve a better Malaysia.

Test Photos

In my previous post about DSLR, I have done some testing by taking landscape photos at the nearby lakeside yesterday evening. I've testing in terms of lighting and colors.

I did some tweaking to the tones and the RGB levels to achieve some picture effects. Although the tool accompanied with the package is not as great as Adobe Photoshop, none the less, it has the essential features that includes crop as I like to compose my images in the 2.35:1 style images and improving the shots from the raw image.


I had these settings used when capturing the raw images - see the sample above.

1. ISO of 200 - usually used at outdoors day time.
2. Shutter speed of 500. I thought of 320, but I am worried that the images will not be captured nicely.
3. Aperture of 2.8 on wide angle and 3.2 in telephoto mode. I feel that the bigger the aperture, the better the images are when captured with natural light.
4. No flash at all.
5. I used the Neutral color setting to achieve actual reality images.

I went home and did some and I find it behaving nicely. The only problem I have is night time shots, something which I did by doing a test shot in the room with one small light source but it is a little too bright.


I noticed that the composition above is like the un-squeezed widescreen frame - 1.85:1. The raw image here is that there is no blue tones here. It's more or less the cloudy, greyish look unlike this. It was also slightly bigger at full frame. I added more blue tones in there with a little red so that the picture above looks like it's shot in morning magic hour.

Magic hour is somewhere between 7 to 8 in the morning and 6 to 7 in the evening.

Unfortunately, loading this picture up here on the post is a little long. Maybe about a few minutes despite having a good connection. That's because the size of the file is at 1 MB plus, given that it is shot at 8 MP.



This self-portrait was re-framed as the squeezed widescreen format. I added sharpness of about 30%, 0.25 pixels and 5 levels.

Overall, I think that the Canon ZoomBrowser did at least accomplish the basic features but isolation of the picture element is not possible. But if you don't want to get the hands dirty on, it's okay. But cool thing about this is learning to do everything yourself - without the advance guide included in the package!

Photos From The Tournament

The photos from Saturday's company tournament.

That's me posing with some colleagues before starting.

That's me with one of the company directors winning the team event.

That's me with the winning team, Felicia, Raj, Emma and Mariah

Finally, me winning the individual event.