Who was the best boss you’ve ever had?

Fe Susan Go, a Cebuanese American who was my boss at Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

She’s a very nice lady, gave me a wonderful job with good pay, even increased my salary without me asking for it.

Occasionally she would treat me and my co-workers to some sushi lunch in downtown Ann Arbor. As sushi is one of my favorite food, this was a big deal for me.

I only worked for her for two years before I had to to quit because my student visa expired.

Thank you, Susan, for those wonderful two years. It was a pleasure working for you.

Ask me anything

Don’t Drink and Teach

Fourth of June, the whole school took a break from the mundane teaching-learning activities and instead let the teachers dance and drink on stage.

Ok they eat bananas too. Oh and they’re all just bottles of 100plus.

For more photos of the telematch (yes, it was a telematch, the teachers don’t do all those stuff for no apparent reason) you can go to the Picasa web album or the Facebook album.

-ihsankhairir-

Salmon Binge

All-paid-for, all-you-can-eat lunch…

Part of the menu?

Smoked salmon…

Salmon skewer…

Heavenly.

Seconds? You betcha.

I had my salmon binge during the buffet lunch session for the 8th International Conference on Fracture and Strength of Solids held at Hotel Istana last week.

Best lunch buffet ever. When will I ever get to have a (free) buffet like this again…

Teachers Kicking Balls

World Cup Fever! No I haven’t contracted it yet. Nor do I plan to.

Anyway…

Just sharing some photos I managed to take of the football match during Teacher’s Day celebration at Sri KDU a couple weeks ago…

For all the pictures, I used my 35mm f/1.8 lens. As you may already know, it’s not a zoom nor a telephoto lens, so I had to either take photos from a distance and crop later or be in the thick of it all. I did both. Some of these photos were severely cropped during post production since I need to have all the focus on the players and the ball and not the surrounding area / background. Luckily the large aperture helped with blurring the background, otherwise the main subjects would’ve been lost in the crowd / background details.

For more pictures of the football (or soccer, if you speak American) match, you can visit the Facebook album or the Picasa web album.

-ihsankhairir-

Shooting with the Popup and a Torn Piece of White Paper

Isn’t it funny when your equipment starts to fail exactly after their warranty period ended?

It’s as if they were programmed to fail or break at that exact moment in time when you are no longer eligible for that free-of-charge repair / replacement. The products served their purpose and they served it well. No, not for the consumer by performing flawlessly for the past [insert warranty period here]. For the seller and the producer for being sold and setting themselves ready for repair / service / replacement once the free period ends. Which maximizes the revenue for the manufacturers, sellers and service providers. They’re cons doing piracy. Conspiracy!

…

Last Saturday my SB-600 Speedlight failed on me. I was asked to take photos of my ex-roommate’s engagement and just when I was about to start shooting the flash failed. I was sure it wasn’t because of the lack of battery power because I just put in a fresh set. It was the speedlight that refused to work.

I was stricken but I didn’t panic. The popup flash on the D60 can still provide artificial lighting. Problem is, it’s harsh, and I lose control over the direction of the light and having bounce light from the ceiling. I don’t want my shots to look too amateurish. I had to improvise.

I attached a torn piece of white paper in front of the popup to diffuse and soften the light. I set the power to manual 1/2, and took control over the exposure manually by setting the ISO, aperture and shutter speed for each shot and lighting conditions.

It wasn’t easy.

With the SB-600 I can just use Aperture-priority and bounce the light of the ceiling and the pictures would turn out fine. With popup this wasn’t an option. I had to punch in the controls for every shot. In some ways, the experience taught me a lot about setting exposures on-the-fly. Before this I only relied on the camera to set the correct exposure every time. This time I had to do it on my own. And fast.

Improvisation, coupled with some post-production in Adobe Lightroom, managed to produce some decent photos that I can safely present to my friends who got engaged that day. I was worried that they won’t like the photos because of the bad lighting and all, but after I put the photos up in Facebook I got a call from my friend and he said they both liked the photos I put up, so I felt relieved.

Here are some of the photos I shot that day with a popup flash and a torn piece of white paper.

Eira and her friends before the engagement ceremony. This was shot in a room with bright green walls and a green bedside lamp. I had to reduce the saturation of the greens in the photo so that the color of the walls won’t stand out too much.

Notice the harsh shadow behind her. Without the torn paper softening the light from the popup flash, the shadow could be worse.

In the two photos above, although there’s no shadow behind her, you can see harsh shadows underneath her chin and on her neck. It’s subtle, but experienced photographers (not me) would notice that instantly.

Either I get another flash (maybe a Nissin or a Metz) or have the broken one serviced. Either way, I’ll be losing munny over this, but I really want to be able to be in control of the artificial lighting, and I can only do that with a dedicated external speedlight. Replace or repair, I haven’t made my decision yet. I shall seek counsel with my wallet and bank account first.

…

Anyways, congratulations Idzuddin and Eira for your engagement! Looking forward to the wedding next year!

P/S: I kept getting asked “when’s it your turn?”. I feel indifferent to such queries already, having been asked questions of the like for the past 5 years.

Would you rather swim in a pool or the ocean?

Pool if I’m thinking about safety. 

credit: ahsansyed.com

Ocean for the beautiful wonders of nature.

And octopuses! (octopi?)

photo source: wikipedia

These cephalopods are my favorite marine animals of all time!

Ask me anything

If you could master one skill what would it be?

Pleasing everyone. Impossible, I know.

Even the best of human beings weren’t able to please everyone.

Therefore, I can only try my best at pleasing the ones that matter most to me.

And make those who aren’t pleased with me understand why I am who I am.

Ask me anything

Multiplicity

It’s been almost two months since I last wrote anything here. Quite frankly, I have no idea that people still visit this place, nor do I think that anyone cares if I’m still around or not. The recent shortage of resources barred me from actively participating in a lot of things I love, such as photography and blogging, and therefore a forced, unannounced hiatus was therefore automatically in place.

Until now.

Still, it won’t be easy.

I left some unfinished business for a new position just to take care of the difficult situation I am in, and now that I am committed to this new position the unfinished business is still left unfinished. Should I want to attend to the unfinished business, which by itself would require a lot of my time, I would have to abandon this new position I have. But I need this new position for self-sustenance and independence. To dedicate my time to both these things would require me to be in two places at once.

Sometimes I wish there were two of me.

Imagine being able to be two persons doing two different things at two different locations.

Oh, I don’t need to imagine. Michael Keaton. Multiplicity.

Maybe it will make things easier and simpler. Or harder and more complicated.

Until we can figure out instant cloning of human physiology and memory (not to mention the human soul), I guess my occasional wish for having two of me would just remain a wish (more like a rant).

The next best thing? Wishing for a servant who can do stuff for me. That’ll work. Someone like Dobby, the elf-servant, who’s always obedient and can appear anywhere anytime to attend to your every whim.

source: Harry Potter Wiki

Oh wait, elf-servants don’t exist. *sigh*

Universal Studios Orlando Florida

Our last day was spent in Universal Studios Florida. Since we got to have whole day here we decided to not rush things and just enjoy the moment.

Woody Woodpecker. I remember enjoying Woody Woodpecker cartoons when I was little. I think he’s like Bugs Bunny. All he does is just annoy people around him and still he comes out on top at the end of each episode. And I loved it. Especially his ‘taunt’ or laugh, I can’t quite represent them in typed words.

Anyway, I guess nowadays you can’t create a cartoon character for kids with a name like that. Woody Woodpecker. Hah.

Lining up for the Shrek 4D show. I love the promotional posters that spoofs real-life movies. Like Pinnochio being the star of Liar Liar. 

 
The Mummy ride was awesome. We waited in line for like 45 minutes for this one, but it was worth it. The pyrotechs in there, you can really feel the heat on your skin. If the waiting wasn’t so long you can be sure I’d go for a second ride.

That ‘Pharaoh’ on stilts… he was in character the whole time. Never smiled at all, even when a bunch of girls tried to tease him. One girl got so scared she ran… and the ‘Pharaoh’ chased after her… into one of the shops. It was so funny… her friends was laughing the whole time. I wonder if she’d find it funny. I wonder if she was actually genuinely terrified. 

 
The MIB ride, we decided to take the Single rider line, which only cost us 2 minutes of waiting. This is the smarter way to do it I think. You might not get to ride the same car as your friends, but you exit the ride about the same time and you get to share the same experience anyways, so what’s the difference? It’s not like you’re going to be talking to them in the car, you’d be too busy trying to shoot all the aliens around you.

I got to be on the ‘disabled’ car and since there were no disabled person on the ride, the seat next to mine was empty. Every rider gets his/her own gun, but I got to dual-wield 2 guns, which was awesome, made me feel like a badass ambidextrous super-agent. I was shooting different targets in different directions the whole time, which was totally exhilirating. I got around 100 as my score, another 2 riders in my car got about 150 each, but a young 8-yr old girl got only 9 points, so it brought down our average greatly. It was fun though, coz the group we were up against have 6 people in their car (we had only 4) and they got only a below 90 average. So we were declared winners. 
    
The Back to the Future ride has no Single rider line, so we waited in line for about 30 minutes I think. I especially like this one because we got to ride in a ‘DeLorean’ and the screen was so big it was actually a whole sphere-shaped theatre screen (I dunno what to call em). I know that this ride has been there for quite a while, so the ‘movie’ wasn’t in high def so it felt less real than I hoped it was, but still I enjoyed the experience enough to come out of it satisfied. Most of my friends say that the ride made them a bit dizzy but not me, I was pumped up and high after that one.

    

After that we just walked around being silly and take pictures… a lot of em.

   
    
I especially like this one… where I got to pretend to pry open the jaws of the shark called Jaws. That thing was huge, I think hanging by its tails it was about 25-30 feet tall. Maybe even more. I’m not really good at feet and yards. I’d say it was like 10 meters perhaps.

I think it was safe to say that we took one picture every 45 seconds of walking…

Then we headed to the Hard Rock Cafe Orlando, said to be largest Hard Rock Cafe in the world.

Next to Hard Rock Cafe was an NBA store, so I went there and got myself this….

I am in no way comparable to Billups… but I do like to play the way he plays.

  
A couple of pictures before we left for the day…

…

The next morning we left Orlando for Ann Arbor after 5 days and 5 parks – Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney MGM and Universal Studios. I wish we’d stayed a little longer so we’d get to get on more rides in each park, but we knew that time wasn’t a luxury anyone had, and you had to choose the ones you really want and not regret not taking the ones you didn’t so that you’d enjoy the day more. Which I think was the smart thing to do.

Ah, it was fun. 

I Returned to Magic Kingdom Just to Take a Picture with the Castle!

After Epcot we returned to Magic Kingdom because some of us did not get the chance to go there last time, so we took the monorail and headed to Magic Kingdom.

This time I made sure I took some pictures with the castle.

 
If you look closely it says ‘Hong Kong Disneyland’ (look at where we’re pointing). That panel and the picture above it changes every few seconds… basically shows the history of Disney parks for the past 50 years.

 
Finally got a picture of me, the castle, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. You won’t believe how long I waited until this spot clears for me to have a photo of myself taken.