Good to be back

Despite having a nice chess holiday break at the CitiTel MidValley Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, there's nothing to beat being back home in Penang and boy, it's really good to be back home among familiar surroundings. I've got loads of photographs to transfer from the camera to the desktop but I'm not too confident about their quality because all of them were taken in rather low light conditions. The lighting in the hotel's ballroom was way too dim for my liking and I had to hand-hold the camera at speeds as low as one-third of a second. So, I suspect that most of the photos will turn out blurry.

I was very happy to have spent two days of quality time with my daughter too. She came down from Petaling Jaya to the hotel on Saturday and I took the time off to wander with her here and there. And of course, the meals we took together. I enjoyed myself and I hope she enjoyed herself too. I can't wait for the next time to see her again.

Of course, met with a whole gang of chess friends from far and near, to name but only a few of them that I can remember off-hand here: Hamid, Gregory, Ibrahim, Tse Pin, Andrew, Soon Keong, Wahid, Bernard, Najib, Jimmy Liew, Mok, Chern Ee, Subramaniam, Chin Seng, Yee Weng, Nicholas, Marcus, Tick Hong, Beng Keong, Christi, Min Wang, Giam, Khairunisa, Hairulov, Fadli, Larry, Eric, Tze Han, Jimmy Ng, John Wong .... and of course, not forgetting Dato Tan. His looming figure continues to cast a huge shadow over the whole of the Malaysia Chess Festival.