MONOLOGUE

Australian Liberal Party just got a new leader, because its previous leader Mr. Malcolm Turnbull was agreeing with Rudd government's idea on Carbon Emission Trading Scheme.  Apparently that's a big deal with the Liberals. On the other head, NSW's Labor Party kicked out Mr. Nathan Rees and elected new NSW leader Ms. Kristina Keneally. Although they aren't related, but I find it funny both party has things like this happening at the same time. Tomorrow we're going to have a by-election, and I'm going to vote.  My wife is going to vote in Australia for the first time as well, may be interesting.  Australian election campaign is never "noisy" like Taiwan's, and that is good.

Recently (well one incident not that recent), I had to called into my banks.  One is HSBC for my visa card and one is Westpac for my business account. I must admit, I had better experience with Westpac than HSBC. I contacted both banks for different reasons with different circumstances and mood.  Therefore it is correct to say that I'm biased a bit since the start.  Nevertheless, my experience was that the call centre staff from Westpac are more courteous and speaking softer, making me feel much relaxed and better mood when talking to them, even though it's relating to some account fees I may be paying .  I definitely like to give more of my business to them in the future. Good job to Westapc's Call Centre staff.

And we Face Life.

AGE, TIME, SCAR, LIFE.

I am currently using Pentax K100D.  I will switch to Pentax K-7 when I have the money saved up. I have always thought Pentax won't put out a 135 Full Frame DSLR when they have released a bunch of new DA lens.  When the news of 645D is in development, this made me feel the days of having a Pentax 135FFDSLR will be even further in the future. Why?  Hoya owns Pentax now.  Hoya doesn't want to lose more money (it already lost some last year as we can see from the financial statements). K-7 being it's top of the line DSLR now is it's first try to get more market share back for Pentax Brand.  Every other camera body can be lower model because they will more or less base on the cost down version of K-7/K20D.  Cheaper to develop and when they get onto the market they can sell cheaper and maintain the market share. 645D on the other hand is a very different story. There is NO other major (Canon,Nikon) Japanese camera manufacturer makes such large format digital ca...

Read an interesting news article today about a call by Labor MP Kelvin Thomson that Australia should reduce its intake of migrants so that each migration applicant would be able to go through a much thorough security checks.  According to the article, Mr. Thomson claims that would reduce the chances of letting terrorists successfully coming to Australia. It sounds logical.  Is it going to hold up if we ever going to do what Mr. Thomson says?  I do not know.  However, if my memory serves me right, recently, the terrorists who had been the culprit of London Bomb Attack in 2005 , out of four, three of them were born and raised in the United Kingdom.  Were the security checks done upon their parents/grandparents/ancestors able to find out they were going to bomb London if the checks were 1000 times more thorough?  I doubt it. Link to the reduction of migrant to Australia?  Well I just think Australia has always been a migrant country and should remain t...

It has been a while since I last write anything long.  I blame this mostly due to Plurk ...a nice little micro-blog site that is addictive.  There you can share your thoughts and find/make friends easily.  Most of the time you don't know who you're chatting and the topics are usually of no major importance/meaning in your life. From time to time there are also useful information or discussion being made.  When you have a good net friend there, it is easy to discuss a topic that you don't get to talk in real life.  Because of this easiness to talk...I write less and less now and I read less books too...don't think this is a good sign but I suppose I will have to find a way to change this soon. Anyway, this topic of Japanese trial-by-jury system came up in the news and I had this discussion with Walkinggeek.  The sentence given by that jury (after one juror quit the case due to health issue and a replacement juror came in) was to have the defendant...

Never really a big fan of his music, but I do have a copy of his History album. Maybe it's a good time to dig that out now...

Manly Food and Wine Festival...packed with people, nice food and wine around, but too bad I couldn't have the wine... From 20090606 - Manly Seafood Risotto at Cafe Brisa, my wife and I loved it. NICE! From 20090606 - Manly Not many people on the beach... From 20090606 - Manly Everyone was further back... From 20090606 - Manly Rest of the photographs can be found here...

Rating: ★★★★ Category: Restaurants Cuisine: Steak / Seafood Location: Manly, NSW, AUstralia http://www.eatability.com.au/au/sydney/cafe_brisa/ We quite like the food there. We had Steak Sandwich and Seafood Risotto. My wife loved the risotto. I think it's well priced with good food.

Rating: ★★★★★ Category: Movies Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy Latest Star Trek series. After few movies on the the Star Trek: The Next Generation, it's now back to the original, classic version of the Star Trek, without the original cast (except Leonard Nimoy of course). As with the movie itself, I like the fast pace, action packed style with many nicely-done CG scenes. The spaceship battles are done nicely even though I would like to have some more. Although the design of the star ship is old but it's redrew and modernised, making it look a lot nicer. Since I have read the storyline of the Star Trek Countdown ( http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Countdown,_Number_One ) before I watched the movie, I felt I could understand the villain captain Nero a bit more. Erica Bana certainly did a good job but I felt he was not mentioned enough to make people who did not know Countdown to fully feel about his action. Certainly this movie is about Kirk and Spock and little bit of th...

From 20090425 - Brightmore Reserve Our friends asked us to goto Brightmore Reserve today. There's a track for kids to ride their bike on.  The weather is very lovely today so we went.  Also got to know a few new friends, there are more and more young Taiwanese families and kids in Sydney North Shore now.  Really happy and hopefully when these kids grow up together they can be good friends. The scenary is nice near the park too. From 20090425 - Brightmore Reserve Little lala is very manly~ From 20090425 - Brightmore Reserve More photographs can be found here. 20090425 - Brightmore Reserve