At the Shore of Peace

"At the beach, life is different. A day moves not from hour to hour but leaps from mood to moment. We go with the currents, plan around the tides, follow the sun."

Sandy Gingras

Do people still keep photo albums or are all our photographs squirreled away in the clouds of the internet? Have they gone the way of the VCR, pen-pals and immoveable house-phones - in the museum of yesteryear and obsolescence? Would my four-month-old son understand the crescent phone receiver symbol on our smartphones and the sealed envelope in our e-mails, when neither of these objects have features that look anything remotely analogous to those symbols? I remember weekends when I would make my great-grandmother show me her yellowing photo albums filled with sepia memories and have her explain the story behind every picture - because photography used to be expensive sorcery that people employ to capture the light that important moments reflects, so there are almost always stories.

Just before I bought my new digital camera, I dug up my old one to see what I could scavenge from its carcass. I was delighted to find my old 8-gigabyte SD card entombed within it and after plugging it to the resurrecting electricity of computer, I found that it was still holding on to the last pictures I took before my old camera turned into a paperweight. It felt as if I just re-discovered a long lost photo album. It felt as if I restored memories I never had like some kind of amnesiac time-traveller.

Amongst the pictures were some I've taken one morning at the Damai Beach at Santubong, just half-an-hour's drive outside of Kuching. The Exif data embedded in these pictures dates them to 28 December of 2011; another testament of the superiority of data over human memory.

Santubong River on the way to Damai Beach.

I thought some of the pictures were none too shabby and wondered why I had let them languish in data hell for so long until I came across some pictures of Ex-Girlfriend the Third™ interspersed among them, but she dumped me about one month after these pictures were taken. What you won't see in the Exif data of these photos is information telling you that she was standing just outside of frame in all of them.

Maybe that's why I hadn't bothered to take them out of the SD card in the first place. Maybe that person who was me two years ago was grieving. Maybe I was just lazy. Just two years have past and I can't remember which.

Damai Beach. "Damai" means "peace" in the Malay language.

A lot have happened in the two years since that morning at Damai. I met someone else. I got married to her. We had a baby boy together. Now, our kid is four months old (but has the build of a six-month-old and the drool-producing capacity of a full-grown adult St Bernard). At the time, it felt like I would never move on - the same as how I felt when I broke up with the girlfriend before the last (the one I dubbed the Ex-Grrrfriend™). We are really myopic, aren't we? Why do we get so hung up over things which we probably wouldn't care about just a few lunar cycles down the calendar? Why do they throw our lives into disarray? Why do we throw our lives away on account of short-term miseries?

Small blue-and-purple crab spotted at Damai during low tide.

HALP, I AM DROWNING.

At that time, I had just moved to the city of Kuching for my first real job as a House Officer at the state hospital and after I had settled down, I invited my then-girlfriend to come and visit for Christmas and to celebrate our fourth anniversary (which is on Boxing Day as the Exif data on one of the other pictures in the SD card testified). I have taken these pictures for keepsake and remembrance, for when I need help to reminisce about our brief time together at the end of 2011's December that punctuated the marathon of our long distance relationship. These pictures meant something to me back when they were taken. They were important. They had stories to tell a future me.

A tiny hermit crab.

Now, they are just some pretty pictures.

Without a second thought or even much of a first thought, I had deleted all the pictures that my ex-girlfriend was in. I held shift and pressed delete and just like that, they are gone beyond recovery to the Great Big Data Sink in the Sky. Doing that might have pained me two years ago because they were precious and irreplaceable - they were the only evidence I have of the four years I have spent being with this girl - but now, I couldn't even pretend to care. They were relics of another life and I have trouble believing that that life was ever mine.

Perhaps, after the passage of another two years, I wouldn't even remember why I was at the beach on the 28th of December, 2011.

A goby of some persuasion.

Time and tide. We pair them in our proverbs and aphorisms because they are a bit like each other - they represent the relentless erasure of the past. Memories are but lines in the sand. With enough time and enough tide, they would disappear without a trace, only leaving behind salt-washed blankness. It would be as if they were never there to begin with.



P.S. All pictures taken with Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ15.



A frequent forgetter,
k0k s3n w4i

This Is Not a Review of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ40 Camera

"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."

Ambrose Bierce

Ever since my camera died in 2011, I have not sought to replace it. Then last year, I married Cheryl and her Nikon D5000 and it was my first time handling a DSLR. I did not like it. It was bulky, it can't fit in my pocket, and I was forced to handle it as carefully as I would handle a porcelain kitten - and the thought of lugging it around when I go travelling sounds masochistic and sisyphean to me. It also takes too long to whip it out of its carrying case and remove its lens cap before I can shoot, making it terrible for brief candid moments that have tiny shooting windows. Needless to say, I wasn't terribly sorry when the wife sold it online.

When we decided to travel to Laos last month, I started looking into getting a new camera again and I find myself missing my old dead camera - a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ15. No respectable photography hobbyist would even look at a camera from this range. It has its problems - the chief of which, in my experience, was its poor performance in low light but for my purposes, it was perfect. I use the photographs I take to supplement my blogging pastime. Pictures I exhibit are at most presented at 640 x 480 pixels so that hides a lot of sins. I use my camera most when I travel so I mostly shoot in excellent light, but being on the road also meant it has to be able to take a lot of punishment (so it shouldn't be too expensive), portable, compact, and boasts a decent zoom. I enjoy a decent degree of control over my camera so most lower range point-and-shooters with their preset modes and mediocre picture quality do not impress. At the same time, I am also not skillful or knowledgeable enough to take advantage of the fine controls that DSLR's give to their users. So, I'm looking for a pretty niche in-between sort of camera.

I then looked up the descendant of my old TZ15 and found the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ40 - and lo, I found that it was perfect for my needs and skill level! It had everything I appreciated in the TZ15 but way, way better.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ40 with its 20x Optical Zoom LEICA DC Lens extended.

Initially, I tried looking for it in Kuching but after visiting countless photography and gadget shops, I found a total of just two Panasonic cameras in the entire city and neither of them were the TZ40. Everywhere I look I see Canons, Nikons, Olympi, Sonies and even Samsungs - but no Panasonic. So, I decided to order one from an online store based in West Malaysia. It arrived yesterday and I immediately started getting acquainted with it as soon as it was charged up.

Now, this is not a review of the TZ40. If you want that and want to find out what its exact specs are, you can look here, here and there. This is also not an exhibition of my non-existent photography talent but I thought I'd share some of the pictures I took while I test-drove its functions. Since the TZ40 has a full manual mode, I thought I'd try applying what I've read about apertures, shutter speeds and ISO's as well.

Darwin at 122 days of life, sitting on a bean bag.

Sophie in a predatorial mood on the balcony.

Darwin's eyes in macro mode.

Sophie's nose in macro.

Sophie again, sleeping on the floor.

The view from my 8th floor apartment overlooking Kuching. See that white triangle in the middle of the picture?

That's Kuching Utara's City Hall, taken at 40x zoom (20 optical plus 20 iZoom, which Panasonic claims is not your regular shitty digital zoom). And I took it without a tripod (I was literally just holding the camera in my hand and my elbows were not resting on anything either). The Power Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) tech that the TZ40 packs is really something. The image is a bit lossy, pixelated and smudged, but it still shows quite a lot of details.

The TZ40 has some cool in-camera creative filters (which is basically a crude photo-editing software). Here is the street below my apartment in Miniature mode. There is also a Panorama function that allows me to take panorama shots as I pan the camera across a scenery - it sure beats me doing it manually on Photoshop.

A photograph of the view from my apartment at night with a 30 seconds exposure with the camera mounted on a tripod. However, I can only manually control the shutter speed up to 4 seconds. To access longer exposure time, I have to use the preset Starry Sky scene mode which only gave me the two options of 15 seconds and 30 seconds of exposure.

I just need to get myself decently familiarised with my new camera before my February trip to Laos. I can hardly wait.

My wife also has a Samsung Galaxy EK-GC100 smart camera which is a pretty decent compact but I find it a little bulky and less pocketable. What is worse is that it takes forever to start up (it needs to load up like your Desktop Windows or your smartphone) and the lack of physical buttons and dials further hampers the response time for quick on-the-go photography, even with its very intuitive interface.

Of course, any pointers on how I can improve my photography technique would be much appreciated.



Not a real photographer,
k0k s3n w4i

A Valentine Getaway in Northern Laos

"I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full."

Lord Dunsany

Cheryl and I got married more than a year ago, and we are finally going on a holiday together - just the two of us - for the first very time. It all started when Cheryl was checking out flights back to Penang for the Lunar New Year and we started talking about vacationing somewhere in South East Asia. I wanted someplace that is not on the usual tired list of regional destinations, someplace that both of us have never visited. Almost immediately, we decided that we will go to Laos in February.

I knew nothing about Laos. I only remember constantly misattributing its capital, Vientiane, to Vietnam back in high school because they are spelled similarly. After booking our flights, I popped out to a bookstore and got myself a copy of Lonely Planet's guide to Laos and began studying in earnest. We will only be there for a little less than a fortnight because we have decided to leave Baby Darwin behind with Cheryl's folks. After all, why take him when he's not even making memories yet? Anyway, we can't leave him behind for too long or he'll practically be a different baby when we see him again - all those clichés about how babies grow so so very fast are all horrifyingly true and then some.

Wat Pha That Luang in Vientiane.

In my last backpacking trip through the Indian Western Himalayas where I had a month to bum around in just a few selected locations, I could afford to travel with just a skeleton sketch of an itinerary. But this time, we only have eleven days and that short span of time calls for serious planning and scheduling if we are to see and do enough to make the trip worthwhile.

After a few days of agonising over what to include or leave out, I came up with a simple 3-stop route starting from the former French colony's capital, Vientiane, and then heading northward to Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang before snaking back down to Vientiane,

Fun fact: Laos is completely landlocked. It is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia.

I really wanted to include Phonsavan to visit the Plain of Jars but the detour proved to be too time-consuming due to Laos' lao-sy roads (heh). I am afraid that after spending so much time on the road, we will find ourselves in greater need of a vacation than before we had it. Cutting the Plain of Jars out also gave us more time to spend in the other places and to chill-lao. Some people could travel through Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in the time we are spending in just Northern Laos, but that sort of hit-and-run travelling style is really not my thing.

My old camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5/TZ15, had been little more than a dust-gathering paperweight for the past couple of years after it died on me so for this trip, I need a new travel camera. I have already ordered my old camera's grandkid, the TZ40, through an online store. It should be arriving any day now.

Vang Vieng's dramatic karst hill landscape.

At this point in time, our Laos itinerary (which is essentially a timetable I have christened The Laos Valentine Trip Masterplan) is pretty much 99% complete and it includes our fight numbers, our accommodations in each stop, the attractions, the timing of buses and even a breakdown of our total and daily budgets in three currencies - Malaysian ringgit, US dollar and Laotian kip. I am currently still optimising it - pruning it, adding to it and shifting things around. When it comes to backpacking, I can get a little obsessive.

My Laos backpacking trip itinerary is mostly complete. It is basically all temples, waterfalls, rivers, caves & Beerlao.
— Kok Sen Wai (@KokSenWai) January 1, 2014

And I am absolutely addicted to planning my travels through guidebooks, blogs, travel sites and travellers' fora. I can never understand why anyone would leave their entire travel plan in the hands of tour agencies which will take them to the touristy-est of sights, shepherd them to subpar eateries from which they receive commission, and force them to spend hours in tacky souvenir shacks. Why would people pay good money to be treated like that?

Tat Kuang Si near Luang Prabang.

After being off the trail for more than two years (thanks to my grueling, soul-sapping medical internship), I really can't wait till D-day - D for departure - to get back on the road again. I am definitely going to be doing this at least yearly from now on. For my sanity's sake.



Make Lao not war,
k0k s3n w4i

A Hundred Days of Baby Darwin

"Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories."

John Wilmot

Today marks the 100th day after Darwin was pulled right out of a bloody hole we cut into his mother's belly. Somehow, we two new parents with zero job experience managed to keep him alive and thriving for cien días with the absolute minimum loss of limbs (and by "we", I really mean "Cheryl mostly"). So far, he's coming along beautifully and is reaching all his developmental milestones punctually. We also have not seen any evidence to suggest that he is actually the second coming of Jesus, the Antichrist, or the Chosen One who would restore balance to the Force - but hey, it might still just be too early to tell.

Now, I know how clichéd it is for new parents with unfounded pride to try and get people to look at pictures of their babies and how annoying they can be. The following chronological series of pictures are not intended for you - unless you are Darwin, reading this post years in the future when you are grown and have finally attained the all-important life skill of keeping drool in your mouth. At some point, you are going to appreciate having these to look at and share with the people you love.

These photographs are also intended for my own viewing pleasure when I am old older, so I'll always be reminded how little he once was and how he used to think I am the most interesting, funniest guy in the world. Because I know one day, I wouldn't be.

Day 1 of life: Darwin's first cry caught on camera. He was understandably upset because they totally mishandled his luggage on the way here.

Day 3 of life: Darwin's last day at the hospital. Here we see the evidence of evolution in modern humans. Even without knowing what a cellphone is, he instinctively knew how to put one to his ear.

Day 4 of life: First contact with Mikey. Not pictured was Mikey running for his life when Darwin wailed in his face.

Day 6 of life: Darwin in a motherly embrace. He's still trying to get used to having his head up and his butt down.

Day 14 of life: Darwin in his standard pose. I'm going to call it now - he's a rightie.

Day 22 of life: More than a week later, Darwin is still stuck in the same pose.

Day 28 of life: Darwin regarding his mother's face. And spotted a booger.

Day 34 of life: Darwin bonding with Mikey on the beanbag. Mikey wasn't tolerating him. He was just too lazy to move his Ragdoll ass.

Day 34 of life: Darwin reclining on Sophie. I am changing her name to Lazer-Dog and I am going to tell Darwin that that's her name so that's all he'll ever know her as.

Day 41 of life: Darwin squished against his mom's mom. Cheryl says that he'll never forgive me for showing this picture in public.

Day 45 of life: This is Darwin's first photographed smile. It is his most potent weapon against possible infanticide by his sleep-deprived parents.

Day 49 of life: The first thing that Darwin does when he wakes up every morning is smile. Unlike his mom.

Day 51 of life: Darwin loves pooping. It's like his favourite thing to do in the world.

Day 54 of life: Darwin at a Generic Overpriced Coffee Place while waiting to board his first flight ever to Penang. I remember the first time I flew, I was riding a bike when I hit a pothole, was thrown out of my seat and sailed several feet across the street.

Day 58 of life: Still bald like his mom was when she shaved her head for cats last year. Sorry Darwin, I don't think you can pull off having long hair without looking like Anton Chigurh.

Day 60 of life: Darwin watching soap with his maternal grandmother. Stahp! The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says no TV until 4 years old!

Day 67 of life: Darwin successfully gained enough motor control to manoeuvre his little fist into his slobber-hole. Achievement unlocked! He is now his own favourite flavour.

Day 70 of life: Still watching telly with his grandmother and improving his head control in the meantime. Just look at the level of concentration on his little face.

Day 79 of life: Darwin, out shopping with his gorgeous dolled-up mother. I wish I can literally pump calories right out of my nipples too and lose weight just as quickly.

Day 87 of life: Back in Kuching and in his little car seat. He quickly learned that he could put both his shoulder straps into his mouth at the same time.

Day 87 of life: Eating out with Darwin. He carefully inspects everything his mother eats, making sure that only the best ingredients are used in making his breast milk.

Day 87 of life: Darwin wearing my watch. He was smiling so slyly because he was going to put it in his mouth in a second.

Day 87 of life: Darwin and I reading Farm Sounds by Joe Grasso (illustrated by Allison Rose). It was not very good. The characters were all very two-dimensional and the dialogues were uninspired. The plot was threadbare and I saw the ending coming from a mile away. It has practically no re-reading value. And the strong language made it really unsuitable for children - I went green in the face when the rooster said "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO".

Day 90 of life: Darwin and Mikey. It is a pretty one-sided relationship.

Day 90 of life: Cheryl indoctrinating Darwin into the cult of Barney & Friends via YouTube. You can see the light in Darwin's eyes going dim in this picture as he laughs and claps to the seductive songs of the violet velociraptor.

Day 90 of life: Darwin holding his bottle on his own and chugging it. Can YOUR baby do this at 3 months of age? No? I don't think so.

Day 94 of life: Darwin lounging topless on the bed. What do you think? Is he diaper-model material?

Day 94 of life: Darwin romancing his squeaky rabbit toy that his mom just bought for him.

Day 97 of life: Darwin supporting himself on his forearms when prone. He's also enraptured by blinking lights. Babies are sooo easy to entertain. I'm just going to give him empty cardboard boxes to play with till he is old enough to go to school and discover that all the other kindergarteners are rocking Xboxes.

Day 97: Oh boy, look at that smile. Fine, I'll buy you the Xbox, you rakish devil you.

Day 97: Darwin in pink. On the fan he's holding are the Arabic letters for the sounds of "T" and "H" (I was told). It stands for Tabung Haji, the Malaysian hajj pilgrims fund board. I was on medical duty at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new installation for the organisation and the fan was in the goodie bags they handed out to attendees. I think I was the only Chinese guy there.

Day 99: Darwin giving us his best impression of Edvard Munch's Skrik.

Just in case you didn't know, if you hover your mouse cursor over the picture, you can summon up extra secret captions via their hover texts.



RELATED POST:
The Second Hundred Days of Baby Darwin
The Third Hundred Days of Baby Darwin



Darwin's male parent,
k0k s3n w4i

How Religion Poisoned My Favourite Ramen

"God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"

The title of the late Christopher Hitchen's book

Close to three years ago, I wrote about how they changed the condiments of my favourite instant ramen - Nissin's Tokyo shoyu - from its tasty MSGooey seasoning sauce to something that they must've taken out of a boardroom ashtray. I had declared that the new Nissin noodles are made of suck and had chosen to boycott them until they restore my beloved Tokyo shoyu instant ramen back to righteousness. True to my word, I had not bought a single packet of Nissin noodles since then.

A few days ago, someone left a comment in that old post. It read,

Greetings from S'pore! This post is 3 years late, but hey I just stumbled into your blog. You may be surprised at what I'm about to tell you but here goes :

We have some things in common and it was our previous love for Nissin's Tokyo Shoyu instant noodles. I too used to love the previous ones with the liquid shoyu seasoning. I stopped after trying my first packet of the powdered version. How can the folks at nissin not be able to tell the difference?? It affected me so much that I actually wrote in to the company. The next thing I knew, they contacted me and thanked me for my feedback. They came personally to my house and offered me 2 packs of their other instant noodles to try.

I asked the guy why they had changed the formula and content and the reply was that they did it to cater to the halal market. The original had porcine content. Anyway, I stopped taking it ever since. I| really wonder if they have captured the halal market but lost many of their previous customers like you and me. Kekeke...

Hope things are great for you!

For years I have spoken confidently and strongly against the hegemony of religion and how its insidious influence corrupts everything it breathes on - and once more, I find vindication. Because of certain folk's imported Middle Eastern faith, they have wiped something good and beautiful off the face of the Earth. Like the destruction of the 6th century Bamiyan Buddhas (irreplaceable relics as old as the very religion of Islam itself) in 2001 by the Taliban, my newborn son will never get to witness these majestic monuments for himself.

The unique, irreplaceable flavours of Nissin's Tokyo shoyu ramen is lost to the world forever. Tell me that that doesn't at least make you feel a bit depressed.

There is only loss.

To be honest, the switch doesn't make sense to me because Nissin ramen had never been discriminated for its allegedly piggy content. I have never seen it being isolated at the non-halal section of any supermarket (as supermarkets are wont to do to protect the sensitivities of Malaysian Muslims because as everyone knows, pork can magically osmose through sealed plastic packaging). So, even if it is true that my favourite Nissin ramen did contain yummy, yummy pork, changing the formula isn't going to affect the Muslim market - because no one knew about it.

And since I did not know that its shoyu seasoning sauce contain pork elements when I wrote about the change in flavour three years ago - and its removal made it taste noticeably much worse - it objectively proved the inherent deliciousness of pork. I wonder how the loss of Nissin's Tokyo shoyu old fanbase affected Nissin's revenue and whether this unannounced switch to a halal recipe drew more patronage from the Muslim market (because if they do announce it, there is going to a shitstorm coming from their old Muslim customers who had been eating their ramen before the change).

This is similar to the recent hullabaloo surrounding the last minute cancellation of Ke$ha's concert in Malaysia costing the organisers 1.1 million ringgit in irretrievable losses. Why? Because she offends the "sensitivities" of  Muslims here with her body and lyrics, and that is after she agreed to change her song lyrics and wardrobe in accordance to Malaysian standards. If Ke$ha offends you (like how she offends my taste in good music), don't fucking go and see her. It is that easy. No one is forcing you to pay to see her perform but when you ban her, you are obstructing the enjoyment of other people who don't subscribe to the same backwards, over-conservative taboos you jealously guard. 

What kind of ridiculous reasoning it is? You deny others of a pleasure you are going to avoid anyway? Only in Malaysia, ladies and gentlemen.



P.S. Of course, I am only going on the words of Someone-on-the-Internet here regarding this story so if anyone else can help to verify it (perhaps someone from Nissin) I would greatly appreciate it.



Poisoned by religion,
k0k s3n w4i