Back

Last week and the weekend especially, I was occupied with the photographs I took during the last ASEAN Federation of Haematology. The meeting took place at the KL Shangri-La, starting on the Thursday until the Saturday. To top it off, we had a public education session for patients and caregivers living with Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML), hosted by the MaxFamily, a patient support group which I was privileged to be involved in. More about that in another entry.

A couple of weeks back, the then Society President, Dr Ng Soo Chin, a Consultant Haematologist in SJMC - now called SDMC of course - asked me if I can bring my camera along, just as I did a couple of years ago. He wanted me to take pictures of the events and later post them on the society website. I thought why not. It will also give me the time to use all the faculties I own, the camera of course, Lightroom to manage my workflow, then uploading them onto the SmugMug website and utilising the excellent flash slideshow system, posted them as web snippets on my hematologyPPUM.com site.

It went without a hitch, apart from a downtime on the part of SmugMug on the first day. Once the photos were up, a direct click on the photos will take them onto the SmugMug site and from there, it was possible to download the photographs for free. The resolution was good. The lighting inside the hall proved to be a challenge as there were purple tinge on the lighting system they used. Getting the right white balance proved to be tricky. The first morning was occupied with accompanying the VIP’s visit to the Pharmaceutical booths. Once that was done, it was back to the lecture halls. I caught some of the morning lectures and they were excellent, although can be rather overwhelming and technical to the non-Haematology inclined.

It was similar routine on the second and third days. I had to do the ward round on the Friday morning, plus the Friday afternoon, we had our Society AGM followed by an evening lecture and dinner. As I mentioned, the on the Saturday afternoon, I was one of the panelist for the MaxFamily session, more about that later. Off to UIA this morning to meet with a Masters Student there who I supervise. Luckily, the campus was only a 10 minute drive from my home. 

Day 2

It's the second day of the conference. The photos from yesterday were processed last night and uploaded just before midnight. Unfortunately tired and only finally completed the links just before my round this morning.

Finished the round pretty early, rushed back to Shangri-La for the second day of meeting. More photos. More processing tonight. Another long day with the MSH Annual General Meeting taking place later in the afternoon.

It has Begun

It has finally begin. Fearing traffic gridlock, I arrive. At Shangri-La before 7.30 this morning to make sure everything was in order. All my gears were checked and cleaned. All set.

The delegates were slow in arriving due to traffic. The proceeding started with the Bosco Memorial Lecture, delivered by Dr Lopez. Hopefully everything after this will continue on cue. It will be a long day!

Addicted

I solved that!During my time off, I was reacquainted with a long lost friend. It used to be a craze when I was in Primary School. It was the Rubik’s cube. I used to be able to solve it, with the help of some instructions of course. I remember guarding the sheets of papers with dear life. Being able to solve the cube will certify you as a genius of course, and I was really proud to show the skills off to whoever keen to humour me.

Well, more than 25 years on, we came across the cube while shopping at Pavilion a few weekends back and Idlan wanted to buy one. It was one of those high tech ones which tearing them open did not mean breaking them. You just need to twist the cube a certain way and the bits will open up easily. It also came with instructions on how to solve it but unfortunately it was more like literal translation from Mandarin into English. So, some of the parts were hit and miss. After spending the first couple of weekend solving the cube by breaking it and putting it back together, I decided to follow whatever instruction I can understand from the sheet, and ……. Ta-daaaa. I was a genius again!

SInce my isolation weekend, I can’t stop playing with it, and was now damn addicted to it! Help!

Gearing up

Since I was still technically on MC, I decided to stay at home this morning. After full day at the office yesterday, I was really drained. I decided to do some paperwork at home, but will need to get to UMMC this afternoon to see some trial patients. I spent some time modifying the website to accommodate photos to be uploaded for the upcoming Malaysian Society of Haematology (MSH) meeting. I will be the conference photographer and was just tweaking my workflow so that post-processing and uploading will be simple later. I was not really sure which website should be the platform, but after much deliberation, I decided to use the hematologiPPUM.com site. It will help to promote that site as well as increase traffic. The main host would still be my SmugMug account, via harisphotography.com.

I thought it might be a good idea to upload the pictures I took from the previous meeting into the site and open it to public. Therefore, it will be bandwidth galore this morning uploading all those photos. The photos from the last meeting can be seen here.

Update on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 9:58PM by Haris Abdul Rahman

Story of my life - now SmugMug was down! Hopefully that doesn't happen on the day of the conference. If so, then I will need to use either MobileMe or Squarespace to host my pics!