About

A place for the irrepressible Maurina who shares her thoughts on the improvements that should be made to Brunei, her blog also has little snapshots of her life.

- The Brunei Times, 13th October 2006, “Brunei bloggers put Sultanate on the world map”

Truthfully? This is just another WordPress blog really.

However, I like to believe that it is the WordPress blog that you will visit everyday and enjoy so much that reading it becomes part of your morning routine.

If you are a Bruneian, you might find some of my articles interesting, or perhaps not, depending on who you are and how much you like current issues.

Sometimes, when the extremely small community of Bruneian Bloggers Worth Reading (as LSM had put it) generate enough traffic about one particular topic to do with the country, I write about it in a non-profit website called the Global Voices Online.

I write about what I think and sometimes, about what I do. I used to think that I could be a hair salon blog, or a food blog, or perhaps a gossip blog. But I felt more pressing matters need to be voiced and who’s to say that I must restrict myself to only one particluar genre? The blog’s name is inspired by the rose, which can be put in diverse contexts, and so is the blog.

Hey, enjoy. And maybe, leave a comment.

For more information on the tools I use for blogging, do read below.

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A friend suggested that I add some technicalities concerning the blog’s “behind the scenes”. So here it is!

Operating System

From its inception in 2004, Turquoise and Roses was pretty much operated from a white Apple IBook G4, named Baby.

It lived for a very long time, through 1 battery replacement and 1 charger replacement. It was never reformatted and never had any virus problems. However, one day it had problems with its screen, whereby the laptop was on, but the screen will not display anything, deeming it rather useless.

Repairwork was too expensive so as of this post in 2009, Turquoise & Roses now mainly operates on a Macbook 13″.

Turquoise and Roses is a proud advocate of the Mac in general and openly disdains the Windows platform.

Images and Cameras

Believe it or not, this blog started with a donated Camera Phone.

One day in February 2007, readers were treated to a visual upgrade with the acquisition of a Sony Cybershot DSC-W30, also named Baby.

Unfortunately, in September 2007, we had to mourn the loss of this amazing camera as it was abducted by stupid people.

R.I.P

As Turquoise & Roses has since become an image-heavy blog, photography is important. Almost immediately, this blog’s biggest fan has donated a new camera, Darling, a Sony Cybershot DSC-W35.

It had pretty much the same features, physical properties and output quality as Baby, except maybe better. Most had not realised the change, but I learnt to never leave my camera out of my sight!

From these two cameras, I only have the best of words for Sony and specifically Darling. She has served me well, for about 2 years or so, but unfortunately these little digital cameras are not built to last, especially when they have been subjected to heavy duty photo capturing as Darling was. It went trekking all over Asia and performed so well, even better than I expected! So for that I thank Sony. I have only the utmost gratitude for their awesome budget digital camera line.

As of September 1st, 2009, due to a faulty lens that’s too troublesome to repair, Turquoise & Roses have left the world of Sony and entered the realm of Canon. A Canon with 10 megapixels of glory to be exact!

Meet now, Turquoise. (And I am Rose, geddit geddit???). As I was very Sony-fied after almst 4 years, this camera helped me learn the ways into Canon’s inner workings a lot. It produced some of my best images!

Unfortunately for Turquoise, it was bought during my Infamous Gap Year where I went to dive and snorkel in the ocean a lot. One day, my underwater casing was faulty, and Turquoise drowned in seawater. Despite cleaning it immediately with fresh, clean water, the salt has gotten into the nooks and crannies of its unmentionables. Turquoise overheated before eventually dying, lens out.

So as of this post in October 2010, I saved up enough money finally for an amazing new camera.

Meet her semi-pro successor, Sexy.

Photo Editing and Hosting

My photos used to be edited and touched up using a very basic, open source software called Seashore.

Back then I was VERY free, and didn’t know better. Then I started to become smart and took a more holistic approach to photo editing by using iPhoto.

IPhoto was really cool! It organises everything by dates and has an awesome plugin that uploads stuff to Facebook and Flickr according to sets/albums for me. I loved the convenience of iPhoto!

Then one day, I transferred my albums to a hard disk to back up and archive. When I finished, I deleted the iPhoto albums to clear some space on my laptop. However, iPhoto synced with my online albums and  automatically deleted all my online albums.

As I host all of my photos on my online albums in Flickr, and Facebook, that meant some blog posts’ photos are also deleted giving me a big huge heartache!!!

Eversince then, I have uninstalled the piece of shit from my laptop, officially boycotted iPhoto and vow to never again use it!

I now happily use free Google software, Picasa for Mac!