Okay, here's the deal. I see that a few has guess that I already owned my own domain, which is http://www.jaselee.com. Damn, Anand keeps spoiling the broth! Anyways, this account is shared amongst the photogs so we have ample spaces to play around.

I guess that's it over here. Just click over to http://www.jaselee.com and you'll get my latest post...

p/s: Updated - the page will automatically forward to my new page after inactivity of 5 minutes.

Well, the job here is like a warzone. People from other department is trying to kill you in anyway they can. These agents under me never seem to see that the outside world is trying to kill them, while me and my partner in crime is working hard to protect them.

What's up with this few days? I've been busy fighting the war on the backend that I was left exhausted washed ashore of some abandoned beach.

I think this is going to be my last post on Blogger. Why? Well let's say that sometime cooking up...

Recently a bunch of us photogs has been invited to go for a photoshoot session with the Buddhist Association of Penang in Botanical Garden. It was led by a master and a lot of apprentices appeared to take shoot the model. Despite of many new learner showed up, a few masters showed up as well, those having professional camera equipment to even a point and shoot.

And that's where the fun starts. It seems that the group are fun bunch of people dedicated to make the photoshoot event a success. The lighting was great, and we're able to make do of many of the model's appearence. The masters do provide some insights about world of photography but hell, do we need that? Alright, I was just joking. I can't help but to stand to listen up to some lecture the masters are providing.

Other than that, the main events are the models themselves. This is the first time that we have 3 models shoot at a go! We tried very hard to juggle between them but it seems the last 2 was taken up by most of the photogs, so a bunch of us are only left with one (picture as above).

For more of the swirling action, here's the link.

More of the recent model shoot? Here's Teetoo, Bonus Chan & Bitbytes9.

This new job is getting more pilling. If my dear reader can check out my post, it seems that I scarcely have the time to even add in a new post. Very sorry on my part, as my skills in time management really sucks and therefore got stuck with a lot of work. Okay, let's get on to this blog.

I was here at work when one of stupid Sales escalated a case. And it goes like this:

1. Customer is having one of our notebook.
2. Customer is having problem read/write to his network.
3. Same thing duplicated, found no problem on our own network
4. A new driver download from the manufacturer seem to fix the problem.

Now, the customer contacted the stupid sales person and she asked me how come there were no drivers update on our side? I checked and found indeed that there is no driver. Told her that we tested the same configuration but found no problem on our part here. Sadly, she still persist on the matter why the new driver is not updated and was frustrated that she contacted her manager to escalate me.

Alright, if she wants to play it that way... let the game begin!

The manager wrote a very long nice intimidating email to the queue manager. After a check, found out the manager also has rejected her case due to the fact that there is no way of us updating the driver if it fits to the normal circumstances. Apparently, the sales woman is trying very hard to please her customer by having one of us being the fall guy.

Escalated to a higher party where our development group are responsible for drivers testing. After asking her a few questions, it seems that the sales woman stopped replying her email...

Okay, before y'all start thinking what is this shit... WOW is short for World of Warcraft. Yes I admit recently I went over to the dark side and start spending my time on the MMORPG¹. How does it fare? Well, aside from being like many other MMORPG games out there, WOW actually takes the meaning MMORPG to a whole new level.

One interesting about WOW is that it relives from the story from Warcraft III. It has excellent race/class/profession balancing. Why I say this? Imagine you have to play as Warrior or Hunter. Both have totally different ways to handle your character. However after playing for a while, I somehow realize that they are all aimed towards the same goal, but somehow in a rather skewed way to approach them.

Well, that's all for now. Lemme play WOW for now. Think I'll have very less updates for time to come...

¹ MMORPG = Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

I'm very sorry dear reader but my time doesn't permit me to blog as much these days. You see, being in my working level not only demanding a lot of stress handling but a lot of data handling coupled with a lot management attitude handling.

All these management drones love nothing but data. They have nothing else to fight on but to argue about data. I've given like half of my life to data discussed by the management and how to augment them. And their higher ups even lived solely for data. So, there I was explaining to the manager for my men's incoherent for the taste of word fight in the management meetings.

So how does it fare?

It suck. I prefer the time talking to stupid customer and provide my utmost attention to them. Being in my position doesn't have a lot pros but the cons are overwhelming. At one hand I have agents banging on my cubicle demanding for solution while on the other hand, the management is breathing down my neck demanding why our performance is not par to the standard as indicated in the data.

I got so tired that on the weekend, I want to make sure that NONE of it are work related. I have fun taking photoshoot session recently on the Botanical Garden, organized by some local Buddhist association as some old masters are guiding some young appretice in the ways of photography.

I've got enough experience to grasp their concept but it is always fun to review what you have know by listening to a teacher. However, the best things was there are 3 models for us to shoot and it's very interesting working with them. More pictures coming up later as I need some time to really chill out and ease my stress.

Realized these few days I have problem posting/editing my blog over Blogger. Well, in anyway I think Bloggar worked just fine. In anyways, just collected my paycheck and I'm actually eyeing some lenses for my camera.

In the beginning, I cannot decide whether I would like to go for the telephoto zoom or just go for the quality of a picture. After much model shooting and serious consideration, I decided to abandon the telephoto zoom and concentrate on taking better portrait photos. I have put a lot of research into this Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lense.

And to top that off, I need flashes as well, so I'm considering the SB-600 due to the fact that I'm quite low on the cash and that's the only cheapest flash for my Nikon D70.

Alright, I guess that's the equipment I needed for some serious photoshooting. There are some better lense and flashes out there but I don't think I have the money to afford that. However, like what Ken Rockwell always emphasize on, it's always the skill of the photographer that has to frame the picture in his mind, to make it appear into a photograph.

Recently, we photogs have another photoshoot which was held at the Botanical Garden. We took hold of some secluded area which host some variety of Japanese garden. This time our model is May Ch'ng, which came here with her boyfriend to do her photography session.

She was pretty stiff at first, most probably she don't know what our expectations are. However, after about half-an-hour of shoot, she's beginning to loosen up and that's where our model started to shine very well.

After the session is over, we realized we took very few photographs due to the fact that most of us are controlling our shots. In other words, that means we strive for quality instead of quantity. I'm very proud of the shoot because:

1. I learned a lot about playing FULL MANUAL control.
2. Over casted lighting is excellent for taking outdoor shots. Camera can easily take the sun's spectrum which in turn produced a very accurate color matrix.
3. Get a chance to play with Teetoo's Tamron 70-300mm f/4.5. Quite an excellent product but the bad part of the lense is that it has trouble focusing other than the centre point.

Saw Teetoo's result using the fixed 50mm f/1.8 and it has a huge impact on potrait photography. I just got to get me one of those. Aside from the hardware specification, I'd say that the morning has been uneventful in which we truly enjoy our newfound place to shoot.

Updated: I wasn't able to prepare the link because Blogger's web interface suffered some difficulties and does not allow me to republish my post. Anyway, here's my direct link to the May's gallery.

Can't get enough of her? Try Teetoo & HCLee.

Phew, it's after lunch and I'm glad to have lunch with Tai-Kar-Cheh and an old mate of mine working in the same company. Anyways, after I got back, I received a mail from the Tai Chi Queen stating that our agent need to put in the correct information so that the case can be filled in much faster.

Scream Queen got the email too, so she filled in the detail and sent it to the corresponding agent. After a while, an official mail is out as an instruction to the Technical Support department that the correct format should be filled prior escalating a case to them.

I sometimes wonder why is this necessary considering we already have a journaling system on our database and the escalation team could easily get the serial or case number, run it by the number and get the result. But does the Tai Chi Queen knows how to use them? Of course not! That's why she's getting my agent to do the extra work for her!

Updated: Don't know why this post didn't appear in my blog yesterday despite I've already updated it as Publish Post. In fact, I think Blogger has a few problems of it's own these few days...

Here's one customer that's been bugging Scream Queen in regards for his touchpad. Now guys, if the system went into a suspend and it resulted an erratic mouse movement, and after a while of moving the mouse to resolve the problem, what do you guys think it's the issue?

This is one small fry customer who's trying to act big trying to intimidate my agents. We know that this is only a software issue but the idiot expected that by buying on of the notebooks, he already owned the moon and the sun.

Since the customer was so persistent and there is no way technical speciality is able to help with the case, we pass this case over to the customer service.

Guess what?

This customer service agent, already known for her Tai Chi¹ action passed the case back to my agent. I was pissed that I sent an updated message, with all the action that we've done and pass the case back to her. What a lazy agent. She thinks just because it has to do with technical, she just pass it back to us without wanting to looking at the case first.

Too bad she went back early. Argh!

¹ Tai Chi is a discipline derived from a martial art in order to activate a person's energy (chi) that makes a person so healthy. However, the nature of Tai Chi is to 'borrow' the attacker's energy and divert it back to the attacker. In a basic routine in our office, a Tai Chi master can try to push back a case back to the escalator.

p/s: Before I forget, the stolen notebook case has a little twist on it. The thief is smart enough to rename another PC to the serial number on the notebook. That's why we've been pinging the wrong machine. A few L2s has already been dispatched on investigating the case but no clues turn up for now.