Pages of INK

For various work and e-banking website compatibility reasons, I moved off Firefox about a year ago and have been using IE extensively ever since. Lately though, because of weird Facebook behaviour in IE (e.g. constantly flickering comment box anyone?), I decided to revisit an old friend and downloaded Firefox 11. The most immediately annoying thing that struck me was how Firefox decided to incorporate Ask.com as it’s default keyword search engine!

Defaut keyword search – typing search terms directly into the browser address bar rather than in the search bar. In fact, IE9 has done away with a separate search bar entirely.

In order to change the keyword search from Ask.com back to Google, this is what you need to do:
1) In the address bar, type about:config. You might get a weird warning but it is ok to proceed.
2) Search for the keyword.URL config string and change the value to http://www.google.com/search?q=
3) Done!

It’s been 2 years since we last put up the Christmas tree (due to space constraints or overall laziness) but upon Ashley’s insistence, we put up a smaller version in the bedroom this year. The fun of digging through layers and layers of boxes in the storeroom aside, I must admit, having the tree up with sparkling lights and lined with presents underneath did spruce up the place considerably!

Ashley counting down to Christmas every night instead of counting sheep.

I had to attend a wedding dinner this year so didn’t get to join the family for the annual Christmas Eve dinner. Wifey was nice enough to bring back leftovers like lasagne and cheese cake though which I gobbled up for breakfast the next day. There’s no escaping those calories!

Christmas Day was spent attending church service in the morning followed by lunch at Marche at Somerset 313. Alicia got into a bit of a fight with another older boy at Marche over a toy at the play area and bonked him on the head with a woodern horse! So much for being nice and not naughty.

The highlight of the day was returning home to open presents! Here are some pictures before and after.

On your mark… get set…

Go!

All done!

Being a part time photographer, it was only a matter of time when I would run out of storage space again thanks to the massive number of RAW files in my archive. So, over the weekend, I made an attempt to replace the four Western Digital 2TB Green drives (WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 80.0) in my TS-459 Pro with four Hitachi 3TB drives (Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 MKAO). The drives were running in RAID-5 configuration meaning that I would end up with 9TB of usable space, up from 6TB.

Strangely though, after swapping a WD drive for the Hitachi one (after selecting the Expand Capacity option and clicking the Change button on one of the drives), my NAS would not recognize the 3TB drive and kept prompting me to “insert a disk”. Luckily, there is a solution thanks to this post on the QNAP forums.

For me, I didn’t have to run the Hitachi GPT Disk Manager at all. These are the steps that worked for me. Note that I’m running Windows 7 64-bit with all the latest patches.

1. Plug Hitachi 3TB drive into an external drive bay connected to my main PC via eSATA. Note: I’m sure this would work too if you connected the drive via internal SATA.
2. Go to the Disk Management tool.
3. Upon loading, a pop-up will appear prompting you to initialize the disk. Choose the GPT (GUID Partition Table) option.



4. Once done, create a New Simple Volume on the drive and do a quick NTFS format as part of the process.
5. After formatting, you can plug the 3TB HDD into the NAS. Wait for a few seconds and it will be recognised and the RAID array would start rebuilding.

I hope this post helps whoever is upgrading the drives in their NAS too.

As an aside, I happen to be one of the lucky ones who never had problems with the WD Green drives in my QNAP at all.

Update 27 Sep 2011: Ok, it looks like the above only worked with Bays 2, 3 and 4. Bay 1 just refuses to detect my 3TB drive no matter what. I have contacted QNAP via their online support form so let’s see how long they take to reply and what they say. Not feeling very optimistic now…

Update 29 Sep 2011: I totally take back what I said during my earlier update. The very next day after filling out the support form, a QNAP engineer contacted me and offered to remote desktop into my PC to troubleshoot the problem. So that’s what we did today morning using tools like TeamViewer (for remote desktop) and PuTTY (for SSH into the NAS). After running a number of commands, swapping in and out the 3TB drive, reboots, he finally managed to resolve the issue (some corruption with the partition table). The NAS has spent the whole day rebuilding the RAID, and subsequently extending the total space from 6TB to 9TB which took around 10 hours in total. Double thumbs up to the QNAP folks for their excellent level of service, technical knowledge (it’s a BIG difference getting an engineer to look into your issue vs some customer service rep over the phone who knows ziltch about the internals of their products) and quick turnaround. I know which brand I’m sticking to when I need to upgrade my NAS!

After many headaches with Brinkster over the years, I finally decided to migrate my blog to Bluehost and domain hosting to Go Daddy today. What disappointed me was the outdated version of PHP used which meant that I couldn’t upgrade to WordPress 3.2.1 and MySQL which prevented me from using MySQL Workbench. The migration took a couple of hours, involving the transfer of my domain name and blog content, themes, plug-ins and settings. So far so good and I’ll be monitoring if Bluehost is an improvement over Brinkster during the next couple of days.

One thing that I’ll miss about Brinkster though is their excellent 24×7 online chat support. Their operators are usually very responsive and helpful but often times held back by poor infrastructure. Let’s hope that I’ll not need to contact support so often at Bluehost.

After coming down with tonsil infections 5 times this year, I finally bit the bullet and consulted an Ear Nose Throat (ENT) specialist to find out what was wrong with me. Five infections in a year is not normal and each incident was worse than the previous one in terms of duration, fever and pain. I had the feeling that antibiotics were becoming less and less effective too when the most recent infection was still not healed after 2 weeks. Thus, when surgery was proposed, I jumped on the thought of fixing the problem once and for all.

On Friday 17 Sep 2011, I had tonsillectomy done at Gleneagles and the operation was over in around an hour. I had a look at the Swedish meatball-sized tonsils that they removed afterwards and was really glad that they were out of my system. I then spent the next 2 nights in the hospital recuperating and enjoying the excellent hospital service. I’m really glad I chose Gleneagles to have my surgery done at as post-op care was excellent. The nurses there were very attentive and made sure that I was always as comfortable as possible. They were very swift in responding to requests like prompty stopping my Morphine drip after I started complaining of nausea the next morning and bringing me ice cream/milk/toast in the middle of the night. They also have free wi-fi, cable TV and daily newspapers so I was never bored. Wifey, Ashley and Alicia also visited me on Friday and Saturday to keep my spirits up.

Now on day 7 into my recovery, I’m glad to report that the pain isn’t as bad as I feared. My throat is still pretty swollen, making me sound odd when I talk, but at least the sharp pains are few and far between. I think the medication prescribed (antibiotics, Arcoxia and Panadol) really helped with that. I heard that the pain would get worse when the scabs start to fall off but we’ll see! I’ve also been drinking McD milkshakes and eating ice cream almost every day (can’t think of a better excuse to do so!) which is really soothing on the throat (but probably not so good for body fat). If all goes well, I should be a-ok in a few day’s time.

The only not-so-good news – the $7k+ hospital bill. Luckily, some of it is covered by company insurance and Medisave, but still… ouch!

28 – 29 Dec 2009 – I have many fond memories of Blenheim from our honeymoon back in 2003. Blenheim is situated in the Malborough region, a place famous for its many vineyards and wineries. Blenheim seems to have grown quite a bit since 2003 and is no longer the small town that we remembered. Unfortunately, our stay this time was pretty short so we didn’t have a chance to go on any wine tours. Not a big loss though; it took us almost 7 years to finish the two bottles of wine that we bought during out last trip so buying wine wasn’t very high on the agenda.

We arrived in Blenheim to really gorgeous golden evening light. Thanks to that, we made a snap decision to drive up to the hills to take some pictures for Project New Zealand. After consultation with the motel owner, we settled on Wither’s Hill Farm Park, a short 10-15 minute drive away from where we were staying. The hike up the hill was another thing however, and by the time we reached the middle, the sun had already started setting. Such a pity!

Ashley walking up Wither’s Hill Farm Park while trying to avoid the many clumps of cow dung.

Probably the only decent shot we got halfway up the hill. This was taken at around 8-9pm and the moon was already up in the sky.

Ashley getting in on the picture.

On the way down, Ashley tripped on some gravel and scraped her knee pretty badly. I’m not sure if it was the pain or the sight of blood but she ended up crying all the way back to the motel. Luckily the motel owner had some first aid supplies so we managed to clean the wound and get her knee bandaged. I remember teaching her how to play cards that night to distract her from the pain.

The next day, we had lunch at the Montana Winery, a place where we enjoyed a really nice lunch in 2003. Sadly, the menu had changed and the food wasn’t as nice as before. There must have been a management change during these few years!

Lunch at the Montana Winery.

View the full Blenheim photo album here.

27 – 28 Dec 2009 – Christchurch was hit by a devastating 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Sep 2010, almost a year after we visited and I remember opening the morning papers to see a picture of how the tower at Christchurch Cathedral had collapsed. It was a sad sight to see as the cathedral was one of the most beautiful structures we had visited during our time in New Zealand.

The tower behind us collapsed during the quake. I wonder if they have rebuilt it yet…

Inside the cathedral – it was fairly empty as choir practice had just ended.

Ashley also had fond memories of spending time in the cathedral square playing on the bungee trampoline for two days in a row. I don’t know how she did it but she didn’t find being propelled 10-20m in the air scary at all!

Boing boing boing…

Apart from just hanging around the square, we didn’t really do much else in Christchurch. I hope we didn’t miss much!

Link to the full album here.

26 Dec 2009 – Nothing much happened on Day 4 apart from our epic 8 hour drive from Queenstown to Christchuch. Along the way, we stopped at familiar places like Lake Tekapo for lunch and to relax a little.

Driving along Lindis Pass. It’s hard to keep your eyes on the road with such nice scenery!

Taking a short break along Lindis Pass as Ashley was feeling quesy and threw up outside the car right after stopping. She kept complaining that she was uncomfortable but did not know how to say that she was giddy.

Picnic at Lake Tekapo.

Another stunning view of the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd.

How does it feel like driving for almost the whole day? All I can say is that I’m glad that my dad-in-law and I could take turns at the wheel or else it would have been very tiring!

The full Day 4 album here.

25 Dec 2009 – This being Christmas Day, a lot of shops and attractions were closed for the day. Not Puzzling World at Wanaka though, which was our destination. Wanaka is around a 1-2 hour’s drive from Queenstown along the scenic Crown Range Road.

The view along Crown Range Road. As the road goes pretty high up into the hills, you get a very nice paronamic view of the valley below.

Puzzling World is a great place for families to visit and you can easily spend half a day there just exploring attractions like the Great Maze and Tilted House. There are also optical illusions aplenty like the Ames Forced Perspective Room and Hall of Following Faces, the former displaying the same type of illusion used to make characters seem either taller or shorter in the Lord Of The Rings movies.

The objective of the Great Maze is to navigate to the four different towers on each corner of the maze. Not an easy feat and one that could take a few hours!

The Tilted House – believe or not but the seat would actually slide upwards due to gravity because of the tilt of the room.

After we were done with Puzzling World, we drove around a bit to take some photos of Zhiyi for Project New Zealand (She had her makeup and hair done while the kids were having lunch). Here is one of my favourites taken among the tussock at Outlet Road.

Link to the full Day 3 album here.

24 Dec 2009 – After spending the night at Lake Tekapo, we drove down to the adventure capital of New Zealand – Queenstown – to spend 2 days there. But before leaving, we woke up early to take some pictures at Lake Tekapo. Dad-in-law was kind enough to act as my photography assistant by holding the reflector! As you can see from the photo below, the lake has a very unique turquoise blue colour.

Zhiyi modelling for “Project New Zealand” – a collection of bridal photos for my portfolio.

Along the way, we stopped at a fruit farm/shop called the Jones Family Orchard near Cromwell. It’s a great place to pick up souvenirs (fruits, chocolates, nougats, etc) and try the natural ice cream. The blueberry ice cream we tried tasted so good and fresh!

Jones Family Orchard

Nothing like good ice cream to perk up! This was taken at the garden next to the shop.

The first time we visited Queenstown, I remember staying in a small cozy motel by the main road that looked a little like a tree house. This time round, we put up at the larger and more posh looking Autoline Motel. Right after checking-in, we made our way to the town centre and waterfront for an evening stroll. Needless to say, it being Christmas Eve, not many establishments were open though there were a lot of people strolling about to catch the nice evening sunset.

Sunsets are always so beautiful in New Zealand. Golden hour at the waterfront.

The little photographer springs into action.

Link to the full Day 2 album here.