SG50 National Day Observance

Date:  Aug 9, 2015

Today is Singapore’s 50th National Day!

Happy Birthday Singapore!

Early morning, we are heading to the National Day Observance event @ Teban Garden.  

We tried to ballot for the NDP, but we did not get it.  We got it in 2013.  I guess there are too many people balloting for it.

We are are on red top today.

Some friends ask me, “I thought you are Malaysian?"

Well, my wife has converted to be Singaporean for our children sake.

And both my sons are Singaporeans already.

One of the thing that I teach my son is “You have to love your country."

That is why as a father, I will have to go all the way to support the Singapore national day events, and make my sons to be as patriotic as possible.

After all, they are Singaporeans.

No point to teach them politics.  Just ask them to be a good Singaporean who love their countries.

When national day comes, there is no line drawn.  No PAP, no ??? (oppositions).  All is about loving your countries.

This is what they have to know today.

When they grew up, and when they become older, and they can think, then, they will think for themselves and they will make their own observations, and make own judgement which side they want to choose.

Quite cool they decorate their HDB like this.  At Teban Garden.

So many Singapore flags.  Must be here la.

A lot of people are here already.  The band is from Commonwealth Secondary School.

We don’t know what is National Day Observance.  

Oh…. oh….

It is a small parade.

There are uniform cadets marching, etc.

More and more people arriving.

Here come the guest of honour, Ms. Foo.  The MP.

Shaking hand with all the residences.

Oops… She spotted both Jay & Kay.

Then, she put here hands on Jay’s shoulder, and ask her guys, “Let’s take a photo here!"

Too much publicity.  Don’t like. hahaha

Raising the flag.

They are broadcasting the Mr. Lee Kuan Yews proclamation in 1965 live across the whole Singapore at 9am. 

Then, the MP gave National Day speech in 3 languages.  Wow, I am impressed with her Malay.  Click below to listen a bit.

https://instagram.com/p/6JJryLsk--/

She also get to inspect the uniform groups.

Jay Jay was happy to be here.

The cake is here.

Kay Kay also very happy.

My two boys.  They have grown so much.

The three Singaporean at home.

3x S and a M.

Let’s light up the cake.

Got flag, got SG50.  Its perfect.  Let’s take a photo.

Happy Birthday Singapore!

How I Manage My Digital Photos

Date:  Aug 2, 2015

[For Apple Mac Users only]

This is always a hot topic.  

But I think I have finally crack it, and I know what I should do to manage my photos and videos.

In the past, we use this.

Every time you have a camera in your hand with either 24 film or 36 film, human being knows what to do, by instinct.  

We post for the photos.

 

When digital camera, smart phones camera comes in….

We took tons of photos naturally.

That means we took a lot of photos in sequence.

And all these photos are now sitting on your Photo App on your iMac.

Then, you will take lots of lots of photos.

kids drawing, you take.

iPad games, you take screen shots.

Every meal you have, before the meal, you feed your smart phone camera.

You end up with a lot a lot a lot of junk photos.

It is good to keep some of these sequences of photos.

Because it tells you about what happen in the event.

But seriously, 10 years later, do you really take a look at these photos again?

And if you end up > 100,000 photos like me, where do you even look for the photos?

Where do you even start to look for? 

I don’t know about you, but this has got to be stop.

So, I am still processing my photo events and album.

But I would like to share what I did.

I have almost 400Gb of photos in my photo app.  That is about > 100,000 photos plus videos.

So, I am going thru every photos.  Year by year, month by month.

It is going to be a long process.  But I am starting some where.

For example.

We went to Botanical garden on May 30, 2010.

It is great to have all these photos here.  Almost 90 photos were shot during that day.

But seriously, do you need to keep all these photos on your Album or Photo App?

Some photos are not focus.

Some photos are blur.

Some photos are not relevant.

And these the the photos that clog up your Digital Photo Album.

And sometimes, you run out of disk space because of you keeping so many photos.

Before you do this.  

You need to have a proven method to do backup for your photos.

All these photos are your precious photos.

So, you need to copy it somewhere that is safe.

But that some where is not really safe if you are talking about digital storage.

1.  I setup a Synology NAS (Network Area Storage) with the usual RAID 5 settings.  If anything wrong with the hard disk, simply pull out the hard disk which is at fault, and plug in a new hard disk (compatible one), the RAID 5 system will auto repair and populate all the data back.  Let’s call this Diskstation 1.

2.  I setup ANOTHER Synology NAS.  Called Diskstation 2.  Exactly the same way.

3.  All those photos I decided to keep, I will place it on to Diskstation 2. 

4.  I will create a YEAR directory.  i.e. Photos/Year 2010

5.  I will create a folder with date on it to describe the event.  i.e. Photo/Year 2010/2010-05-30 Botanical Garden with Terrence

6.  Take note.  You don’t any how go and upgrade the Synology firmware on both Synology NAS.  This is very dangerous.

7.  Whatever photos I need to keep, I will copy it onto this directory on the Diskstation 2.

8.  At mid-night, I run a cron job or backup job to copy the photos and videos directory over to Diskstation 1.  It is a dump copy.  

9.  Like this, I am very sure I have 2 copies of the photos I want to keep which is safely kept on the two NAS I have which doing daily backup.

10.  I also have a 2TB hard disk (those portable one) connected to my iMac.  And that is my Time Machine. It is doing daily routines backup on all my softwares on my iMac.  So, if something goes wrong, the first place I will look for is this Time Machine.  From time to time, I will but a new hard disk and plug it in to create new Time Machine.  Then, I will keep these old one.  Well, if something really goes wrong, you know you won’t lost every thing.

11.  Now, you can start editing, deleting the photos that you don’t want.  Only keep those that is very important to you.

12.  Guess what… after all the deleting…  I left with 18 photos that I like to have it in my Photo App.  There rest of the 70+ photos all removed from the Photo App.  But these photos are still in my Synology NAS.  So, you are not deleting it away permanently, instead you make a copy, and you delete it from the Photo App.

13.  If you can do so, you will be happy to see your total hard disk space for your photos are reduced may be 1/2 to 2/3.  That is a huge savings on hard disk space.  And my aim is to reduce the total photos down to 20,000 may be… for the last 10 years.

14.  Wait, we are not done yet.  Since you are editing and deleting these photos.  Mind as well tag it.  Tag your favourite, give it a meaningful tags.

15.  Then, you go into individual photos and try to tag even more tags.  Why this is important, because, it helps you to find the photos fast.

16.  So, now, if you type “cute” as a search item, Photo App will show you all the photos you have tagged “cute"

17.  It is an easy way to organise your photo, and do a quick search.

That concludes my latest thoughts on how to manage your digital photos.

I have done a few months starting year 2010.  There are a few more years to go.

Especially during the birth of iPhone.  

You cannot believe how many “Bad photos” or Blur photos I have taken.

Tons of it.

And I need to get rid of them.

Only choose up to maximum 5-10 photos for each even.  Longer event of course you can have more photos.

But only choose then that is relevant and that is good quality.

I will update again once I have completed all my photos for the last 6-8 years.

And will proudly show my achievement.  hahaha

I Am A Young Botanist Badge

June 27, 2015

Nowadays, it is not easy to raise a kid, man.

This June holidays, Jay has a couple of school project.  It is voluntary project, but the kid says "must do”.

Because once you do it, you can get a badge.  “I am a young botanist” badge.  And this badge is given by Science Centre.

And the kid sure wants it.

It has a couple of categories.  You can either become a botanist, or a zoologist or a environmentalist.  But looking at the process of how to earn it.  It is NOT EASY man!

At the beginning of the term, Jay says he wants to be all three of them.  

And now, we figure out it is not easy.  And this term, we can only accomplish one of them.  Although I did bring them to the Zoo, River Safari and so on.

But after 3 weeks, we finally figure out, it is not easy project.  And it takes time to do it.  If the kids can do it themselves it will be ok, but the problem is, the parents need to give some guidance here and there.

That is what makes the project difficult for both me and my wife.  We need to travel and we need to work.  So, it will be impossible to finish all three of them.

But all of us were so happy when we finally done 23-24 stars out of the required 20 stars.

Here is what we did.

After discussion with Jay, we decided to do the Botanist project.

We have to find all kinds of seeds for him.  And luckily, I bought a lot of seeds from Taobao.  hahaha

Here is my seeds.

Let’s give it a box.

Place it nicely in the box.

The leaf press.  

Every day, when Jay is free, he will go downstairs to pick up leaves.  There are so many different kind of leaves.  So, it will be parents job to match the leaves to a name.

Not an easy job.  But slowly, cross referencing it here and there, and google it.  We finally got it done.

Here is the plant press.

Next is to make the Eco Bottle Garden.

We even let Kay Kay help Jay Jay to make the bottle plant.

The kids love the process of making the bottle plant.  Kay Kay has a larger bottle.  Jay one is small.  Well, just think about it, you still need to bring it to school.  So, the bigger the bottle the heavier.

Jay Jay hand pick his plants and seal it inside.  It is a eco system.

Don’t know what plants he picked.

But it looks nice.  He even took some of the moss I got back from Taobao.

Kay Kay one looks really nice.

It’s time to seal it.  

Few days later, the eco-system started...

Collections of ferns.

No joke.  He spent 1-2 hours every day just to collect and make all these collections.

So, hope that he will get 20 stars for all these efforts.  Let’s wait and see...