Busy with paternal affairs....

Phew! Almost a month without any blog updates...!

The past couple of weeks has been really hectic. Whenever I get the chance, I whisk right over to my mother-in-law's place, where my wife and little baby Charmaine are staying during the confinement period. That's roughly 30-45 minutes drive away, depending on traffic conditions. Given that it takes me 15 minutes to get to work, that's more than twice the distance I need to travel in one direction. Just recently had the full moon celebration, a month after Charmaine was born. Traditionally, we also bought some full moon cakes and distributed to friends and colleagues. So for that day, I sent cakes to 4 factories and 1 house - all during lunch time!

Let's see. Anything happening on my favourite subjects?

Photography:
Nothing new here. I've got my Sigma 10-20mm super-wide angle lens just in time for some wild shots. Compared to the widest lens I had before - the Tamron 17-50mm, the perspective is really something. Don't mind some critics who say this lens is not sharp at the edges. I've never really needed to print anything out larger than 4R before.
Well, Charmaine is lucky that her dad is an avid shutter bug, I think that I have now more photos of my little girl than anyone else.
On the down side, my venerable Coolpix 5700 was sent for repair. Flash cannot fire. It's back already but I can only find the time to pick it up from Fotokem next Wednesday during the Melaka Historical City Day.

Cars:
Nope. Nothing much happening here either. I've got a couple of mods lined up at KL Auto, but that'll have to wait until I can find the time to go down to KL. Sometime last week or so, we did have a TT at the Asian Havana Cafe in Melaka Raya. Got to test drive Hanne's Civic, which was outfitted with the Camcon H to complement his Unichip Q. Found that from idle to 5Krpm, there was a significant LACK of power. Only above 5Krpm, did the tuned K20Z2 come to live and roar all the way to the 6800 rpm redline. Based on the performance characteristics, I'd say the loss at low end was probably due to the change in the exhaust system. So far, I've not yet seen any modification which significantly increases the torque at low end. So I guess the old addage holds - "there's no replacement for displacement". When I tested out his ride, I found that his suspension was firm and enabled me to turn on a dime at a particular U-turn. Brakes and tires were super-efficient at stopping the car in record-braking distance, minus the feeling of losing control as in my case (where my comfort-based 16" Yokohama tires are struggling to keep their grip on the tarmac).

Computing:
Well, finally got my company-issued Dell Lattitude D630 Laptop. Fortunately, I got one with an Intel T7800 2.6GHz processor, which is slightly slower than my 3.2GHz Desktop PC. At least it came with 4GB of RAM. The down side is that I'm now using Windows Vista, which is a little strange at first, but I'm getting used to it slowly. Worst thing about Vista (apart from the fact that not all 3rd party software works on it) is that it's always asking for adminstrator permission for every mundane task. Enable network adaptor? Need permission. Try to personalize here and there? Need permission. Someone obviously paranoid about security....

Upcoming events:-
Tomorrow (Saturday), going to Genting Highlands on a company trip, organized by our recreation club. So, gonna bring my camera along and snap some other photos for a change!