Good Morning

Revival

I have three main interests and from that three sister blogs had spawned over the years. The first of the three was photography, and I had always wanted to aggregate all my photos into one site. Not for hosting - I have SmugMug for that, plus Flickr for the social side - but as a gallery.

As I was a beta tester for Squarespace, I was given a good offer to use their services. I used that opportunity to create photobyharis.com. It has a fantastic interface, but unfortunately, I never had the chance to really tweak around with it. Since I had some time off, I finally had the chance to look things through.

First out was the planning of the site, plus uploading the material. And they were tons of them. Fortunately, with the bandwidth I had at the apartment, that part was easily taken care of.

Next came the finishing touches. And this would be the one which I would struggle with. But hopefully, the site would be ready by the end of the weekend ........

As for my other two interests - tech and Haematology news - that would have to wait. A lot of work ahead then.

Switching to the One

After putting off the switch for quite a while, it had finally became official. I would be retiring my Nexus 4 in favour of the HTC One.

After using the One for the last couple of months, the difference became rather obvious. First of all, the speed as far as blogging was concerned. The main drafting app I use is called Writer. The speed between the two devices were very obvious when I type. The One was definitely superior.

Then came the camera. Not much difference between the two camera-wise although One took better photos off the sensor, but when it post-production, using Snapseed was definitely a better experience on the One. Since the file was smaller - the sensor chip was only 4 MP - editing was snappier.

But the main killer was battery life. It was abysmal on the Nexus 4. Snapdragon Battery Guru helped a bit, but not much.

I might still be visiting the Nexus especially if it had the 4.3 upgrade pushed down first. But for daily use, I had to use the One. There were just to many reasons to switch.

Berbuka at Latest Recipe

Last week, I confirmed an invitation for iftar from a Pharmaceutical company. The problem was, the iftar would be on a post call evening. And that particular call happened to be a busy one. But being Ramadan, I didn't really mind the extra hours I was awake. I was munching away most of the time I was up.

When it was finally time for iftar, I was already very tired and grumpy. All I wanted was to be in bed. At home.

It turned out to be great, with great company. And the food was good.

Clever way to present the fruits

The iftar was at Latest Recipe, one of my favourite hotel cafe. It was at Le Meridien, KL Sentral. It had local, Indian, Japanese and a bit of fusion food. But what was great was despite the number of people, there were food aplenty, and the crowd control was good. The cafe itself was relatively small and we were seated by the lift.

What did I have? I started out with some sashimi. If you think that was bad, there were some on my table who opened with oysters. Next, I had some chicken rice - which was nog great. The Indian selection was good, so was the teppanyaki and pasta.

But the highlight was definitely the afters. There was plenty of local fruits - I had a feast of rambutan. Puddings, ice cream, ais kacang. You get the picture.

Those are not test tubes! They contain the dressing for the salad.A surprise birthday cakeWe also had a surprise birthday for one of the Pharmaceutical Rep. Cakes and all. Plus the hearthy singing from my Boss.

This wasn't the first time I had iftar at Latest Recipe. The standard was still up there as far as food was concerned. Crowd was always a challenge and reserving a seat can be difficult. If somebody were to offer me iftar in town, Latest Recipe would definitely be high on my list.

Private School Fair

Private school is big business in Lembah Kelang. Increasingly parents could afford private school, and some do so due to be coming disillusioned with the Ministry's actions over the years when it comes to medium of instruction. It was in English for Math and Sciences until recently. Then came the scrapping of UPSR. One never could guess what would they come up next.

The decision for me was straight forward. I feel that getting them proficient in English from an early age is important, and the local public school our kids were assigned to was well below par. We could do what other parents do, appeal, use some connections to get into better school or even resort to using an alternative home address in areas where good schools were available. In the end, we decided to enrol into private education, and with Sri Utama round the corner from our place in Gombak, it was the easy option.

Last weekend, we went to a School Fair at Mid Valley to look at other options. Irfan was upset however as he was not keen to switch school. But the reason why we went was to look at secondary schools later. There were a few schools which now offer boarding. They actually looked tempting, as I don't think our boys would be able to secure places at government public boarding school coming from private primary.

List of participating schoolWe spent more than an hour looking around the fair. Spoke to a few schools. And then the boys got excited when they saw their headmistress at their school's booth. She must be wondering what we were doing there. She might be suspicious that we were thinking about switching school.

On the whole it was a good outing. At the very end, we came across a booth by an afterschool agency called The School. It is located at Jaya One and will be opened later this year. Children can go there an enrol into music lessons among other things. And Idlan was excited to join.

The Fair was scheduled to be done yearly. This time, it was doing Ramadhan which curbed our enthusiasm somewhat.