It’s that time of year again. Halloween means trick or treating and donning costumes. Some may remember the times you had as kids, going out in the neighbourhood, getting candies and sweets and some scares – generally suitable kids stuff. And when you’ve thought that as adults you’ve outgrown Halloween, you’d be absolutely wrong, especially in New York. It’s in New York where adults take costumes (and the trick and treating) to a whole other level. Costumes are outlandishly creative and elaborate, and apparently the carousing/costume parties that go on afterwards are of legend.

Monday night will be host to the annual Village Halloween Parade (wiki article), the largest Halloween festivities in the US of A.

I’ll try to get in this year and take some photos, but the last time we were here (in 2007), we had a chance to see it with our own eyes. You’ve been warned that some are hilarious and some intended to shock. For a taste of what you’d see, check out the photo gallery.

Special ballot paper for mail-in votes for the Canadian federal election

Having lived outside of Canada for almost eight years now, it’s easy to get disconnected to the political issues, wranglings and manoeuvrings that go on at “home”. Although it’s more of a challenge to follow the political news, I’ve had the opportunity to vote in by mail with special mail-in ballots. For those who haven’t seen such a ballot, have a look here.

A view of the congregation from the stage at the Evangelical Church of Bangkok (ECB) during the Easter service on 24 April 2011 in Bangkok, Thailand. Easter service was a full house.

When doing photo gigs, whether at concerts, weddings, church services and events, photographers usually attest to being wrapped up in elements of taking (or making) photos. This thinking through of any technical details (which is made more difficult if flash photography is involved, not that I know much about it, nevermind mastering it) consumes the photographer – meaning we don’t fully listen in to the message or content. However, there are times when we’re fully engaged in what’s going on without missing a thing. This Sunday started with me being engrossed in photo taking, then realizing I was missing out on the celebration that was going on. I gradually became engaged by the celebration worship and then the photo taking became a backdrop to what was going on.

The slide show is below, you can click on the image to download and/or purchase prints. Click through to the photo gallery for those on iDevices or any other mobile devices.

So what happens in almost 3 years since my last blog post? Life has gotten busy, work has become more challenging, other activities consuming my spare time – if not spent investing on my (relatively newly-) married life.

I’ve been wishing and dreaming and planning to redesign my website, blog and photo gallery, as well as the top-level tshin.com site. Art and I have a ton of photos that we’ve been wanting to share (and showcase) to friends, family – and the world, and it would be great to return to writing, too. The winds of web technologies are changing with XHTML is giving rise to HTML5, so it was quite shameful my top-level site had just GIF text in a table-based layout.

So, “too bad”, for my blog languishing in disrepair, as my hopes and dreams (or grandiose plans) of reviving it slowly became dormant, possibly because the scope of my imagined redesign was over-ambitious. There had been some familiarity and comfort in having a voice online, whether for sake of soapbox or whatever, but with the advent and continued rise of Facebook (followed by Twitter and other social networks), it was more effortless to “have a voice”. Facebook et al. make it easy to micro-blog, but is what is blogged and tweeted all that meaningful?

“Content is king”; that I knew since having started blogging in 2002 as my blog posts were scoring quite highly on search engine hits – even without having to do any search engine optimization (SEO) work, which is now a multi-billion dollar area of work.

When I had started blogging, it was being hosted on a home-built server running OpenBSD; later I decided to use a hosting service by Dreamhost. Even after that migration, I hadn’t managed to move the photos in a bunch of my blog posts over it. Later on, I had dabbled in a photo gallery, using a custom MovableType template, but it was only a half-hearted attempt. Now as a user of PhotoShelter for my archives, there’s a great opportunity to “put it all together”.

So over the last month or so, I have:

• migrated my blog from MovableType to WordPress (actually it was done quite a while ago, but the MT system was still live)
• integrated my blog with my PhotoShelter image gallery,
• started initial clean-up of the top-level tshin.com site.

The details of such an endeavour are numerous and very technical. Without spilling too many beans, I’ve had to learn to master some domain (DNS) stuff to get a WordPress MultiSite installation going (Ruth and Ben‘s blogs are also running WordPress and will get moved over to the main WP installation in the next month), SSL for secure access, juggling caching plugins to make the site render faster, customize sites with themes from Graph Paper Press, write a long htaccess script to redirect over hits from my old URL and some more hacky stuff that belongs in geekdom. So maybe I’m now more qualified to be a highly-paid WordPress consultant… ha ha.

So, I’m back… I’ll be introducing galleries from my photo archive, which will have accompanying stories. There is still much to do, so little evolutionary changes will happen along them way. So, sure, stay tuned.

Please share the 12simplethings.org website with your friends.

There are localized translations in:

• Chinese (simplified)
• French
• Hindi
• Bahasa Indonesia
• and a Thai translation which will be published shortly.

Oh yeah, stay tuned to the website – the public service announcement (PSA) video will make its way there.

Technorati Tags: 12+simple+things, climate, carbon, climate+change, carbon+footprint, UNDP, development, environment, green

Now, guiltily, Ben is right that I have been blogging only nominally as of late. (Shame on me, but I think I’m redeeming myself as I have started up again last week after being clueless about where my round tuit had been for the last 9 months, which is the topic of my last post.) So it’s a fitting coincidence that this thread comes when I’m renewing efforts to start blogging again and also to update the tools and systems.

Ben is well informed enough on user interfaces to take MT to task for their clunky user interface, although I’ve found the latest version of MT (version 4) is much improved. This blog is still MT 3.x, however, I have just migrated Art‘s blog over to MT4 (although she hasn’t posted anything in about a year!). This blog post was composed with ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin, so I am dealing with a completely different user interface, which I find useful for composing off-line.

In the last two years, seeing WordPress take the blogging system lead, I’ve considered whether to stick with MT or make the move myself. One major consideration is that I had invested a lot of time learning and customizing my MT installations. I even started a test WordPress blog to learn about WP. I found the lack of a centralized plugin directory for WordPress, slightly frustrating. But I’m not sticking to MT out of inertia or sheer laziness; MT4 is actually a great product. Of course this can digress into some religious war pitting MT against WordPress, but I won’t go there. With my prior “investment” – it should be easier to edit the hacks, hard-coded links and template customizations when I migrate to MT4 than move wholesale into WordPress, given the seemingly scarcity of round tuits in my life. I just read
about on the upcoming 4.1 release, and I’m hoping it’ll be out when I start upgrading my own MT installation.

Personally, the licensing issue that SixApart waddled through was a blunder on their part, which probably alienated many MT users and developers, as Ben indicates. Although perturbed, I didn’t migrate. I give a lot of credit to the MT community, which I’ve found to be extremely engaged and a great resource in developing my own sites.

In the meantime, the Tshins will blog with both MT and WP.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, MovableType, ScribeFire, blogging

I’ve come to realize that I need to discipline my life, especially when life gets busy. Things can fall apart in busy-ness. The Canadian tire (or Canadian male muffin-top) reduction program needs constant attention, relationships need care (we’re just celebrating our first anniversary), photos need to be taken – and even more importantly, need sorting, editing and presenting.

All this requires discipline – the 15 minutes a day to 1 hour a day, easy-win kind of discipline. After walking through the 9 Days in the Kingdom photo exhibition a few weeks back, Enrique and I were lamenting the fact that while our own photography has matured and is more-or-less marketable, we haven’t put them out enough for friends to enjoy and perhaps for the world to notice (which amateur photographer wouldn’t want to finance equipment and travels with their photography). And our lack of self discipline is to blame.

Well, without much ado, here’s some of my recent work:

• A selection of calendar photos for the 2008 Evangelical Church of Bangkok calendar
• Photos from the wedding of one of my groomsmen Alan to Liz.
• Press conference of Professor Paulo Pinheiro the UN Human Rights Envoy to Myanmar
• A not-so-recent gallery from a shoot in Yaowarat (Chinatown in Bangkok) during Chinese New Year

Do enjoy. I’d love to hear if you have any suggestions and themes for any future photo shoots. Refresh your RSS subscription, I’ll have more to come!

Technorati Tags: blogging, photography, discipline

We arrived at the airport with lots of time to spare, but the lines were ginormous.

We persevered, and ended up getting an upgrade to Economy Premium, although we’re not in the same row. We’ll try nicely to get seats next to each other…

Anyhow, it’s a good 17 hour flight before we land at JFK and then taxi over to La Guardia for a flight back to Toronto.

Technorati Tags: Thai+Airways, upgrade, Economy+Premium, Bangkok, Suvarnabhumi

The message is sobering because as real development progress has happened in developing countries, violence against women has not been fully tackled and building a real awareness in developing countries is still a challenge. I believe that this major issue will be a drag against development and progress if it remains underground and/or ignored.

The photographs are highlighted in the featured story on UNAIDS website.

View the photo gallery

Technorati Tags: International+Women’s+Day, UNAIDS, Peter+Piot, UNESCAP, photography, violence+against+women

I’ve been very much absent from any writing and blogging as of late, so here are my so-called good excuses: I’ve gotten married, work is more-or-less consuming, my hobbies (photography) are starting to ramp up, and oh… I just got married.

I can’t believe it’s been over 3 months since our wedding, and time has really seemed to have flown by. During this time, I felt that my blogging and photo posts were on hold until I could finally get myself a round tuit. So, here’s a post to get the new year rolling.