A Quiet Week

This week has been rather quiet, I was rather busy in office with lots of things to do for Thailand office.  They have new requirements, old requirements that need fine tuning and some clarifications on existing features and requirement.

I've been not feeling well too from earlier this week due to the gastric pain which eventually settled down on Wednesday.  But guess what...  I got a viral infection in the eye and a sore throat.  Seems like I'm going to end up with flu sometime soon.  Singapore has been hot this week and I think I didn't stay hydrated much which contributed to these ailments...

Tomorrow's a new start to the week again. Hopefully things go well.

Here's a closing shot for this short entry.

Orchard Road From ION

~ Photo taken with LG G3 ~ 

Thai Biz Trip 2016

It's time for a business trip again to Thailand.  The first for the year in fact.. I should expect at least 1 more trip in June when the system they will use go live.  And it will be for a much longer duration...  This time I had to visit both Bangkok and Hatyai.  The trip took 5 days and 5 nights altogether.

So the trip starts from Changi as usual, flying with Thai Airways, smooth as silk.  Thai Airways is always one of my favourite airlines to fly with whenever I go to any destination in Thailand.  I'd go on Singapore Airlines too if their fares were cheaper due to some promotions.  

I didn't bring any cameras, just using handphone camera which this time is a Sony Z5 Premium.

The plane ready to go on the tarmac

Lindsay's 3rd Birthday

Lindsay turned 3 last month.  It was quite a simple celebration.  My wife had arranged for a small party at her playgroup class and ordered a special Hello Kitty themed cake.

Cute cake for Lindsay's candle blowing ceremony in class

Equipment Break Down

I did mention in my earlier post that my old VAIO's hard disk finally broke down.  There was a bad sector where I transferred the photos of my Surabaya trip.  I was able to recover up to 1st day only, the rest were from the backup in my phone.

To make things worse, I found out later that my D750 is being recalled because of a faulty shutter unit that causes reflection when taking photos against strong backlight.  It's now sitting in Nikon Service Centre and I have to wait for 2 weeks to get it back...... FYI, NIkon has had a string of recalls as of late anyway (I remember back from their D610, then D800, then their Nikon 1, etc, etc), seems like their engineering department need better engineers.  Well done Nikon...  well done.... (hope you catch the sarcasm there)

Back to my VAIO.. Since only the hard disk broke, the rest of the hardware are still pretty much usable.  The VAIO has a reasonably good graphics card, decent i5 processor and 8 GB of RAM.  Being the hands-on person that I am I decided to salvage the laptop by installing a Solid State Drive and a new Windows 10.

So I disassembled the laptop like follows.

Inside the VAIO

Surabaya Trip - Part 8

This will be the last entry for my Surabaya trip series.  Quite short too....  Day 9 was spent with the kids.  Again, I didn't bring my Sony as I wanted an easy day so I just used my G3.

We started the day by going to Livana to buy some spikoe cakes.  The cake shop is very near, just outside the roundabout in Jln. Mayjend Soengkono.  My wife, myself and the kids absolutely love Spikoe, so we never fail to get some whenever we're in Surabaya.  After that we went to Ciputra World to let the kids play around and just jalan-jalan.

On the way back Lindsay mentioned that she wanted ice cream.  That gave me an idea to try a new cafe in Kupang Indah.  It's a cafe specializing in matcha desserts and some Japanese food.  The place is called The Matcha Cafe (unsurprusingly....) - UPDATE: Matcha Cafe has since been closed.

Nutella parfait, green tea cake parfait, matcha latte - taken with LG G3

Surabaya Trip - Part 7

I spent day 7 for a day trip to Bali to take care of some things with my brother.  It was a rather unpleasant trip but it had to be done.  We left the house at 9 in the morning, arrived, did what we have to do and left promptly, arriving back in rainy Surabaya at close to 9 at night.  So that's how day 7 was spent....

Day 8 was relaxing as it was time for me to finally have dating time with my wife.  I didn't bring my RX100 Mk3 so I just made do with my G3 to record the happenings of the day.  

We satisfied a craving for Medanese kway teow at a famous restaurant called Apeng in Kedungdoro.  The exact address will be in Jalan Kedungdoro No. 267.  Between the two of us we ordered quite a fair bit: Hor fun, Chap Chay rice & dumpling noodle (which was immediately scarved the moment it arrived, I forgot to take the photos).  The conclusion, Mie Kriting 33 near our home is currently better than Apeng.  But if you're living near the city centre, Apeng is not a bad choice. 

Horfun & Chap Chay Rice, complete with menu - taken with LG G3