Poetry in Motion

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

If... by Rudyard Kipling. A beautifully composed guidance..

The Name of the Rose

I'm reading this beautiful piece of literary fiction book of Umberto Eco 'The Name of The Rose'. While the book is categorized as fiction piece, it's actually based on real characters in history dated back to the 12th century. A story that is crafted with gorgeous words that captured the essence of the period, full of murderous thrills as well as engaging pursuit of the killers that led me to stay awake late at night to finish even just a couple more pages to feed my ecstasy to solve the mystery! I did warn you that it's going to be torturous read until you're in the final page of the book!

Well, since the entry title today had to do with fauna it's then more than befitting if I put some macro shots of plentiful of colorful flowers around anywhere in NZ. These photos mainly taken with Pentax DA f2.8 100mm, with some taken with my loyal Pentax SMC f1.4 50mm. Enjoy the smell of the spring (and sometime summer) spectrum around NZ!

(SMC f1.4 1/250) (DA f5.6 1/250) (DA f2.8 1/100)

(SMC f2.8 1/100) (DA f2.8 1/250)

happy new year!

and here's my first entry of the year...

glittering summer people!

just back from summer break, and boy wasn't it hard to unhook myself from the relaxing sun bathing on the beaches and barbeque fun!

so i decided to post some pictures from the summer break, taken with my loyal and reliable pentax k10d. i'm very much amazed with its capability to take about 300 pictures without leaving the battery dead flat. so here they go:

Cape Reinga at sunset (F22, 1/6)

Taputaputa Bay (F22, 1/60)Ahipara at sunset (F 8.0, 1/250)Whangarei Stream (F 22, 2 sec)

Faith without fear

The statement 'Faith without Fear' is indeed a powerful one. On my way to university recently I noticed the flyers lying around--'Islam Awareness Week'. I've been meaning to look this up over the Net many times, but only got the chance to read it after my teacher posted up this link, and I continue the quest reading up the materials from this website via Google search. It's a powerful enlightenment, fresh awakening as well as challenging my belief.
The material that I got hooked on afterwards is the section "Anti-muslim Writers". I was curious on what these writers have to say about Islam. While I do think that there are several writers listed are devout propagandists of anti-Islam, I see most of them however the true lovers of Islam and its teachings. Some of them, Tawfik Hamid, whose articles in particular 'When I asked my Muslim friend 'Why do you hate Jews?'' touched my heart and let me see how love can transcend the insurmountable unimaginable boundaries around us today. My friend, Muslim or non-Muslim, I encourage you to read up the websites and maybe see the new birth of reformed view of Islam.

Seeking refuge..

It has not been 2 months since I bought my second hand camera from one of my friends. It's Pentax K100D. To be honest, it's quite a bulky(and heavy too!) camera for a small girl like me to carry around. My first thought when deciding to buy the camera was "well, I'll get used to the weight!".

Indeed I've now. Apart from the weekly outing that I planned for pictures taking (weather dependent), and occasional outings outside of Auckland, I guess I'm not an active photographer just yet. Well, if you don't go out often, what will inspire you to take pictures anyway?!

Of my many friends who take pictures as a passionate hobby, it seems to me that landscape and street photographies are their favorite snapshots. Their pictures are mostly vivid with colors and lively too, and I absolutely fall for them! Their shots effects are contagious and tingling, they creates new persona each and every time you look at their pictures. Of course, some photoshop tips may help inducing the effects too, but great pictures if enhanced give greater pictures too!

My favourite shots will be flowers and floras. To me, they're beautiful as they are, and snapping them still is a very easy task. All that is needed is the amount of light that strikes the object of desire. Good amount of lighting, especially natural lighting, bring forth lively waves to the eyes of the audiences. It creates not only fantasy feeling, but also satisfaction over the many color blends as well as the innocence shots of these pretty little things.

With my current collection of lenses SMC Pentax f/1.4 50mm and SMC Pentax-F f/2.8 100 mm Macro, I should be able to upload some pretty pictures of the flowers found during the harsh winter season here in NZ soon.

To leave or not to leave

Some friends had posed this particular question to me numerous time: would you consider moving out of your home country? Leaving your home is not as simple as ABC, as some of you might know.
Lets face it. Migrating to some other country is more often than not considered "betraying" your country, depletes the country resources and often you're sneered at as a "traitor" by your fellow countrymen. You've got all the good reasons on why you'd want to be absorb into your new country, but some people just don't get it and hold firm to what they want to believe.
A question to be pondered by these pessimists is: Should we blame the others that are leaving the country for a better life? If our government cannot provide the environment and resources to these people to excel, why should we stop them from the attractions provided by the other governments?
You may argue, that by letting them being traitors, they're not participating in changing the system, but at the same time, keeping these individuals hindered them from going forward.
I see these pessimists as selfish and pathetic. Their attitudes towards migration out is blurred by disgust, and hence clouded their perception of apathy. Therefore, trying hard as we might to let them see the brighter picture of the whole situation will end up nowhere. We can talk until the cow comes home.
We must realized that all Malaysians, whether abroad or at home, can continue to have Malaysia at heart. In that, we hope that all parties can do what we can to bring change to our country. After all, leaving home is never an easy decision. One has to go through emotional stress, as well as letting go the good ole Malaysian food. All these were not done in a snap of a finger, and by putting more strain on the leaving individuals, we might lose not only their presence, but also their hearts.
So, you want to know my answer to my friends' question? I'd stay and work towards the betterment of our system back at home. And if it did not nudge the crook system even a bit after many attempts, maybe then only I'd look for other countries that welcome (not suppress) ideas and innovations.

Fast, but not good enough

As I sit in front of my computer typing out my thoughts, thinking as fast as I could what's the next word to be typed, frantically re-typing typos made, and re-thinking of another better words to express my incongruent thoughts again.  All these, while may take me a couple of hours to dedicate to lay down my ideas, I wouldn't have mind those hours.  I believe these hours will not ceased into the nothingness, instead as a matter of obvious fact, they will contribute to make better of self-rantings and musings at the same time.  Practice makes perfect, yep!

To learn from a brilliant physicist, Thomas Edison who found one way to make a lightbulb works, yet wasted many ways (thousands of hours!) on how not to get it working.  It's a combination of passion and determination despite pitfalls that championed all odds.  I firmly believe that!

I often complaint, many times of the day in fact, how things are moving slowly, sometimes even slower relative to what my thought experiment (Gedanken Experiment of worse case scenarios) predict they should be.  I become impatient while waiting for the overdue buses to go to my destination, to the extent comparing the total time wasted waiting/hoping/sitting in the bus to the time I would have spent walking/running to the same place.  I became grouchy over the additional minutes I've wasted on the bus, and regretted the thought of taking the bus in the first place.  In my mind, why invent these buses route that seems to take forever?  We're in the 21st century now, it should be fast!  I become restless when my programs takes more than 2 minutes to run on my computer.  Mind you this computer is designed to perform at a rate 3.0 GigaHz, and I expect things to complete in few miliseconds the latest.  I complaint about so and so along the way, how things never improved when they're possible.  I am confident that I am entitled to raise my selfish concerns with sour faces and at the same time probably increase my blood pressure and on the verge of failing my self-devised anger-management strategy.

Yet, I can't complaint on the rate at which I'm disbursing my notions now.  I can't say it's because of the unsupportive surrounding (it's pretty chilly at a moment of this writing), or my ever-stagerring typos, or my inability to find words that matches, clarifies exactly what I think of now.  Every second of this writing counts towards the flavor of this article.  None of them wasted in pursuit of the joy of jotting down, the extreme stretch of brain-storming ideas and words, the glee in my face as I will finally end this.  All I need from now on is a couple of thousands of hours to practice, tens of Hz typing rate (minus typos), full-pledge power to be passionate and enthusiastic about what I want to get across.

I found reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins has somewhat altered my view on how influential a religion can be to a cultured human.  To the point of self-destructing oneself, rather than making a person whole, inside out.  Many my fellow friends do not agree with my newly reviewed vision on how a religion works, most of whom I trust, and whom are themselves avid learners of Science and moral philosophy.