I'm back. 12 days away from everything was heavenly. Coupled with the exciting times at Melbourne and Sydney, it was the ideal year end holiday.

Melbourne skyline from the Shrine of Remembrance.

I'll start posting about the trip as soon as I settle down into my usual routine. But I would like to just thank the people who made this possible (in no particular order): Tzy Shih for organizing part of the trip and booking the accomodations, Ben for being such a good tour guide and letting us stay at his place, Adrian for taking us around tirelessly while we were there, Caryn for inviting us over for the wonderful BBQ, Junella for letting us join her cousin's birthday BBQ and for tagging along, Janet for inviting us over to her new place and giving us Sydney vouchers/brochures, and Rong Xiu and Gabe for finding time to meet up with us. Seriously, we had a wonderful time with you guys. Couldn't have asked for more.

Sydney Harbour Bridge from Milson's point during New Year's Eve.

Check back here tomorrow!

Be afraid, be very afraid when you fly next time.

Every year I make it a habit to try an plan a trip overseas. Last year it was Hong Kong and China. This year will be Melbourne and Sydney. Special thanks to Aunty Peng for sponsoring our trip!

I'll be flying off to Melbourne tomorrow with my brother for my year end holiday. Will be in Melbourne for about 5 days and then we'll be going on a roadtrip with Adrian and Ben to Merimbula, staying there for a night before continuing to Sydney. We'll be in Sydney for about 3 days before driving back down to Melbourne and then flying back to kl. So we'll be spending Christmas in Melbourne and the New Year in Sydney.

Some places in Melbourne to visit. We'll be going for the Great Ocean Drive as well.

The drive to Merimbula alone is almost 8 hours!

And some places in Sydney.

There's a whole list of places to visit so I'll probably blog about them when I get back. If anyone wants to reach me when I'm away, you can send an email to my gmail. I'll also post up my Australian mobile phone number here when I get it. Other than that, expect this blog to be on hiatus until I get back. Unless I have time to blog at Federation Square where they have free WiFi ;)

Enjoy your holidays!

Some photos from my visit to Times Square a week back. Very busy planning and packing for my trip next week. More on that tomorrow.

Christmas decorations on a tree.

Miniature Christmas. Fake tilt shift lens effect until I can DIY one.

I recently came across this advertisement posted on Econsave's flyer. Please tell me there's something wrong with the sentence underlined in red:

Now when you go for interviews they also check your role models. If let's say you have a bad role model like Bush or Eminem, maybe they won't hire you.

I bet you've seen this a million times but it's still funny. This one comes with subtitles so you'll understand better.

I just had 2 shots of Tequila and some Jim Bean so this is a perfect time to show why VR helps. The below photos were shot with an Nikon 18-200mm AFS VR. Thanks to Roger for letting me try out this nice lens. I didn't have the time to do a full review, but I hope I will be able to have the chance to do it in the future. My first impression of this lens is very good.

Sunset at 18mm.

Pretty good bokeh.

100% crop, hand held at 1 second. Look how sharp it is. Vibration reduction really helps.

I had the chance to try out the Nikon AFS 18-200mm VR a while back and I was quite impressed by the VR2. Although it was quite noisy (high pitched whine), it really works. Gives you almost 4 stops advantage when VR2 is turned on. Now I hope Nikon will follow Canon's footsteps by introducing a wide angle lens with f2.8 with VR.

I was reading the papers the other day and I was shocked to find out that one of my favourite song, Metallica's Enter Sandman is used to torture detainees at Guantanamo. No wonder they're not getting anywhere. If they really want to be more effective, I think they should start playing Paris Hilton's songs.

The Top Ten Guantanamo Interrogation Songs:

1. Enter Sandman – Metallica
2. Bodies – Drowning Pool
3. Shoot to Thrill – AC/DC
4. Hell’s Bells – AC/DC
5. I Love You, from the Barney And Friends children’s TV show
6. Born In The USA– Bruce Springsteen
7. We Are The Champions – Queen
8. Babylon – David Gray
9. White America – Eminem
10. Sesame Street – theme from the children’s TV show

Enter Sandman:

Today is the last day of PC Fair 2008 so naturally, En Thein flew all the way from Kuching to see us. We were there at around 1pm so it was too packed to take lots of good photos. Here are some of the girls.

En Thein at Nandos. A second ago she said, "don't take don't take".

Overall, bad day for shooting. Too crowded, didn't have enough time, too crowded.

My short 6 days holiday is over and I'm back to studying. I realized today that the Sony Ericsson W610i has got panoramic mode for its camera. It stitches 3 photos together to make a panorama, right on the phone itself.

I hate IE and Firefox for having different standards when it comes to rendering webpages. It makes coding a website a pain in the ass. You can almost never make them look exactly the same in both browsers.

Thunderstorm brewing during my drive to KLIA yesterday.

Looking forward to a relaxing weekend.