When I was in Japan about a year ago, i found that many camera prices were rather attractive, almost 30-40% cheaper than what I would pay here in Malaysia.  But the camera language is in Japanese, and there is no option to change it to English or any other language.  There are “International” versions, but they cost the same here.  So, this got me thinking.  How about, we get the camera in Japan, and then get it refreshed with an English Firmware? Would that work?

So, I appeal to camera enthusiast out there, do you know if this works? If yes, then, the next thing to figure out is how to get a ‘friend’ to purchase one back here…

After using Wordpress for so long, I have got acustom of this CMS engine and grew out of Movable Type. My long standing photo blog which was previously powered by movable type have been migrated to wordpress. The migration was fairly simple, just export from MT and inport at Wordpress and it was done. I manage to tweak the 555 photoblog theme to customize it to my liking and what you see above is the fruit of my customization. In addition, I have also moved from /pblog to the root of my domain. So, now who ever comes to wekgna.com will first come to my photo blog, which fits into what I want to maintain of my personal existance on the web. When I first start blogging years back, I hate to write, and I only post photos, and hence the my photoblog was born. I was on blogspot then. I could still remember, I first subscribe to a free host 100mb that host perl, and movable type was free for all at that time. I name my blog Sweet & Sour, witih the notion that life is full of sweet and sour memories, and they are captured through my photos. After some revisions of movable type upgrade, wordpress starts to spring up on the side. I started to use wordpress out of curiousity and created my ‘blog‘ named ‘My So Called Life’ with wordpress. By that time, I started to write more and took photo less. As my ‘blog’ on wordpress grew, my photoblog powered by movable type starts to be neglected. I have also moved into my own new domain called wekgna.com, which is my name spelled backwards. Not untill a few days ago I tried to post a photo and found issues with movable type. I have upgraded to the latest version and it seams to be so much complicated. So, I decided to ditch movable type and migrate my entire photoblog into wordpress. This brings us here today to this post. I would like to annouce that my old photoblog at wekgna.com/pblog has been shutdown, and now moved to the root of the domain, which is www.wekgna.com. Enjoy the photos, and subscribe for new postings if you like my style of photography.

After going through 1.3k of photos, I have streamline it down to 600 over photos to be shared. The photos can be found by clicking on the picture above. Initially, I wanted to share the photos through a flash based viewer, but found that there are limitations to that, and many are limited to not more than 50 photos, and so I turn to Java Scripts instead. The trip was great, and there are many things to share. I will share them as we go along, there are just too many things to put into one post. Many friends have asked for the photos, you can find them above. All I can say for now is that everyone in their lifetime, must plan for a trip to Japan.

Still thinking of Gwen’s concert, the atmospheric stadium environment, I am sharing a new set of wall paper by manicho. Its photos taken during a packed concert and the photos are amazing. Enjoy.

Stand aside Myspace, here comes Virb. Similar to Myspace, Virb is a social networking site, with a good taste. I have always thought myspace is ugly, and how could so many people in the world put up with such ugly theme for their blogs or sites. The thing about Virb is that, it is more than just a blog or social networking site, it is an Art Festival. From Photos, to Music and Video, it is an all in one web presence. If you ever want to leave myspace for a better application, Virb is the one. Within minutes, you can create a Web 2.0 look type of blog, and I am so jealous of it, it made me thinking of dumping my paid host to join Virb. Virb users are given a great deal of flexibility to configure their site with CSS, and if you dont know what CSS is, there are also easy drag and drop menu to use. Just to give you a taste, check out the screen shot below of Musician Andy Davis. See the difference between Myspace and Virb?

Musician Andy Davis @ Myspace:

Musician Andy Davis @ Virb:

Virb is not new to the web scene, they are the same people who brought you purevolume.com, and this explains why they look quite alike. Purevolume.com is a site that provide musicians the means to share their musics online. These days, almost all musicians, especially those without a label, owns a myspace site and they share their music, interact with fans and blog. UMI (Unborn Media Inc), who started purevolume.com must have seen the success myspace have brought to the musicians. Since they already have a succeful music sharing platform, why not take it a step further and embed in the blogging and social networking features, and finally, throw in web 2.0 features and look. This should be enough to wrestle myspace, but with countless numbers of social sites, Virb is in a crowded room.