A Day In The City

Untitled

Year In Review

I have lived yet another year.(Just don't jinx it.)

IF YOU DISAGREE THAT JUST MEANS YOU ARE WRONG AGAIN.

Man Of The Year. Me.

Metal Of The Year. Lead. It's everywhere you don't want it to be.

Song Of The Year. 聽說愛情回來過 - 彭佳慧

Movie Of The Year. Se Jie.

Book Of The Year. Captain Underpants series and any book by Pilkey.

Operating System Of The Year. Ubuntu 7.10. Free is good. And finally you don't have to know jack to get something done in Linux.

Camera Of The Year. Nikon F5, since its introduction in 1996.

One Saturday Afternoon

Happy Birthday Mr. vl1982

Happy Birthday. It's the end of the year, and like any year, GS likes to remind the rest of us how puny we are making. The news is out: GS is handing out $18 billion in bonus, averaging $600K per employee. No wonder the real estate market is still booming in the tri-state area.

Dan Fogelberg, Aug 13, 1951 - Dec 16, 2007

Singer-song writer Dan Fogelberg died Dec 16, 2007 after battling with prostate cancer for years. He is survived by his wife, Jean. He was 56.

His unapologetic soft rocks live on YouTube. Growing up in Hong Kong, I remember the radio loved Dan's corny tunes, "Longer" and "Same Old Lang Syne" got plenty of airplays. Back then some kids still enjoyed English pop songs and Canto pops had not been as prominently overwhelming as now. I especially remember Longer for some idiosyncratic reason. I think some DJ might have jokingly or actually pronounced the song as \ˈlȯŋ-jer\. You know that was before we have Siu sir to correct our English mis-pronunciations. I guess I was too young to appreciate Dan's movie like unfolding lyrics.

I didn't know he was such a "rebel" until I read this part of "Same Old Lang Syne"

We bought a six-pack at a liquor store. And we drank it in her car. ... The beer was empty and our tongues were tired ... And I watched her drive away.

So we have alcohol consumption, activities that make the tongues tired, driving intoxicated probably in snowy or raining weather ....

If only I knew what he was singing I might have given him more accolades.

Apple Store on W14 Street

The lowdown is it doesn't have a bathroom, nor does it have an auditorium for presentation. The Soho store has both. When nature calls, one has to trek one block north to the Chelsea Market, where there are three unmarked bathrooms for the public.

Untitled

1.06 minutes.

Untitled

30 seconds

Season's Greetings

Merry Christmas

Because of the subprime induced economic downturn, we downsized our Christmas tree this year, from a whopping 5~6 feet to a mere 4 feet one. It's a balsam if I am not mistaken, not that it means a lot or anything anyway.

New York Times Can't Print Color

The New York Times should just give up on printing their papers in color. They can never ever print their color right, I am not saying bad colors. I am talking about ghosting. I haven't seen anything this consistently bad for so long. It's a disservice to the photographers especially those who risk their lives to take pictures in the world's most dangerous areas.

No Country For Old Men

Photo culled from rottentomatoes.com. Copyright Miramax Films.

A serial killer who wears a parted bowl cut and has the biggest head. That's all I got from the movie.

Ken Just Said It

There, Ken just said it.

Good news for D300 users is that the D3 isn't any sharper in JPG. Scuttlebutt is that people may need to shoot NEF to get optimum sharpness from the D3; too bad if true, because other cameras like the 5D give perfect sharpness direct in JPG.

Perhaps it's not too hard to believe.

His website is still whimsically in a pre blog format, so the link has better chance of not working in the future.

Happy Birthday

Sid, Happy Birthday, whenever that is. I know it's around or may have passed.

Jobs Spawned In Meat Packing District

Today is the grand opening of the 3rd Apple Store in New York City. Free gifts and all. When you are on the vertigo inducing 3-story spiral glass staircase, get ready to loosen your wallet to pay over priced mp3 players and all.... I may even go there. I want to look cool and hip too.

Kimura Takuya and D300

The once almost effeminate long hair boyly man dude Kimura Takuya is hawking the Nikon D300 camera in Japan. The kissing is really disturbing. It degrades or elevates Nikon as an object of desire rather than a tool for the professionals. Maybe it can be both. But first and foremost, it has to be a professional tool first then an object of desire second. Never the other way round. We aspire to be the professional, the real McCoy just like celebrities pretend to be professional singers or actors. I can see celebrities endorsing consumer goods like Kate Moss for Coolpix or Maria Sharapova for PowerShot, but for professional equipments, I don't really think so. Perhaps the D300 is catered for some rich celeb lounging in some bar shooting candles and dead animals.

D3 Review By Michael Weber

Here is pro shooter, Michael Weber, who almost exclusively shoots JPEG for his assignments, has this to say about the Nikon D3:

The 3" VGA is a stunner, tack sharp, with vivid colours.

Full article here.

ghorse, this is it. A D3 with a VGA lcd monitor is just what you want.

Report From A Cheapskate

If you are a Starbucks regular, then you knew this already.

I got a couple of Starbucks giftcards for free yesterday, so today I decided to enjoy some gourmet fancy coffee. I ordered a Tall vanilla latte, and the price was a whopping $3.50 plus 0.29 sales tax to a great grand total of $3.79. Holy Moly. Thank goodness that was on the house.

How to Refuel a Plane

The Japanese way and the Chinese way.

The author James Fallows says, and I quote

The emphasis on the right way of doing things is re-surprising on each encounter with Japan. And the determination to do things in China, no matter what, commands respect, despite the obvious complications and problems it creates.

Read the whole article here.

This is sourced from Greenspun's blog post.

One commenter Mark remarks on philg's post:

Phil,
My money’s on China.
I’ll take can-do over anal-retentive any day.
Regards,
Mark

Untitled

Just to see if the hyperlinked picture will be opened in the browser or to be prompted to open in a separate application or downloaded.

D3 High ISO Comparison

Ken Rockwell got his Nikon D3 and did a quick IS03200 comparison with his D300, D200, 5D, the result is what most people expect and pretty much reflects on the price: D3 is the champ.

Here is his quick comparison. The site has some old school charm, by that I mean he doesn't do blog and everything is a bit disorganized. Hope the link survives his later update.

UPDATE: Ken did a Quickie Sharpness Test
Ken is at it again. He did a quickie sharpness test using the newish D3, D300 and Canon's 2 year old 5D. And 5D is the winner. And judging from the pictures he posted, he is right. The link is here. See for yourself.

UPDATE: More updates from Ken (I give up keep updating after this)
So far he has by far done the most works on comparing 5D and D3. And I have to say from the pixel peeping perspective, 5D just beats D3, not by a big margin but still. That said, there are myriads of things that make a picture looks good. So for all intents and purposes, the tests are really for online photographers like myself who got nothing better to do but reading reviews. I know it's pathetic. And I can never afford neither cameras.

Posted Images Dont Open They Ask To Be Downloaded

I tend to think of it as my fault, who else can it be? I was suspecting that I must have done something wrong on my part or because of the latest Firefox update. Anyhow, bottom line is new images don't get to open in the browser but got prompted to open or download using another application. I am talking about opening the hyperlinked pictures in Blogger.

A little search brings out the truth. And here is the workaround from Blogger. It works for me. But I am not going to edit every picture's HTML code. The last picture, that's the award winning snow shot from from previous post now works after some HTML editing. If you are totally not comfortable with HTML, you might as well leave it as it is.

UPDATE:
I received tons of requests to fix the below pictures, so I fixed all the HTML codes to render them within the browser. Enjoy the pictures.

UPDATE:
Oh Crap, now the JPGs are gone. Thanks for the work-around...

UPDATE:
The pictures are back but no automatic fix yet.

UPDATE:
12/4/07 AROUND NOON, Blogger pictures crapped out again.

Oh My God, Holy Cow

It's snowing.

UPDATE:

More pictures from my backyard.

Yesterday we went to Barnes & Nobles. Harry got his Pikey books and were happy, Alex got yet another Pokemon book, he was happy too. Jin was busy with her PTA fund raising stuff. I read some magazine and some book. I was tempted to buy the Life of Pi ($14) because literatus extraordinaire mentioned that before but I figure chances are I won't be able to finish it so I put it back to its shelf in the end. I hate to buy books just to decorate my bookshelf. I might as well leave it in the bookstore. If I really want to read it, maybe then I can borrow that from the library. I still have one book to finish, which is taking forever. I should have read it when I was between 17 and 27. Anyway that's another story.

I seldom buy any coffee from Starbucks except when I am at B&N, you know when I am surrounded by books and all that, I need some good coffee to just to stay awake. So I ordered an over priced regular coffee. And since I am not familiar with the lingo and English is my second language, the cashier had to show me the cup size, and I resorted to pointing, No, smaller, no, still smaller, smaller; yes, that's the right cup size. I told him I am very happy with that small cup size and anything bigger I can't handle. I am such a cunning linguist sometimes. I asked him what's the official name for that size, he says it's called a Tall. That deserves a WTF right there. You have to be a dwarf to call that a tall. If you show that to any guy who works at McDonald's, he will definitely laughs his rear end off. So my small Tall coffee cost me 1.75 plus .15 tax for a grand total of $1.90. I added some milk, cinnamon and nutmeg. It did taste pretty good. I had some difficulty falling to sleep that night, I don't know if it's because of the gourmet caffeine or because of the $1.90, any astute reader of this blog knows that I am a cheapskate and that $1.90 means a lot to me.

Here are some more pictures I took at my backyard. Okay, my pants are on fire now, only one was taken in my backyard. The rest were like taken in or around Kissena Park which is actually like my backyard.











SELF PITY WHINING
D3 is shipping together with some new nano coated lenses. I am still shooting with my puny D70 with a meager 6MP and some old lenses which I insist are good enough. You know, good enough is never really good.

D3 Shipping Probably

I look forward to Bjorn's D3 review. By next week, the dpreview.com forum will be flooded with first shots from D3.

On another unrelated note:-
Ken Rockwell has done another side by side comparison for the cameras he owns. The 5D still rocks in terms of detail and noise performance. None of (his) Nikon's current lineup can match the 5D's image quality and that's my observation. It would be interesting to see how the D3 measures up. Gee I am comparing Nikon's latest and greatest to Canon's, what, 2 year old camera.

Some Pictures I Took

Six Year Old

Pony ride in our backyard. We invited Harry's first grade friends to come to our backyard to have pony rides. It was a pleasant day. The kids had so much fun terrorizing the animals.
Taking a break, just to reflect what fun they just had.... If you are pregnant or easy to get motion sickness, don't ride the yellow school bus. It's bumpy as hell. Hey, I have no problem though.
This is how I roll when I am in my backyard, a large tractor. This is even more bumpier than the yellow school bus.
My backyard in the fall. Nice, isn't it.

Breaking

If you are into Christmas, Christmas tree, Rockefeller Center, traffic gridlock, crowds, tourists, then tonight is the night for you. The annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony will begin at 7PM at Rockefeller Center.

You can attend the ceremony live or watch it at home from 8 to 9 PM on NBC, local station channel 4 or 704 on Time Warner Cable.

If Christmas tree is not your thing, perhaps you can find some firework in the CNN Youtube GOP debate hosted by Anderson Cooper, which is also airing at 8PM eastern time.

If none of these interest you, you can always fall back to whatever turns you on.... like the Internet or Sudoku for dumbos.

Nothing

It's almost over. 2007 is almost over and it's just like last year or the year before. I just get older.

Thanks for those who come visit.

And I apologize to those I might have inadvertently offended in the process of blogging, commenting, uncommenting and what have you.

Reading

Captain Underpants series
Super Diaper Baby series
Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot series

Almost anything by Dav Pilkey. Honestly those are the books I read.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is just a few hours away. I prepped my almost 13 pounds turkey already. Hopefully everything will be an OK tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone. Thank you thank you thank you.

UPDATES

The dinner; pictures usually look better with me behind the camera, but not this time. Oh, well. The big bird turned out good but Jin kept saying she liked last year's better. I guess she likes the citrus seasoning better. Maybe next year I will combine the citrus seasoning and the butter.

The Demented Cook. The turkey is close to 13 pounds, I threw the label away and I forgot. I put the sage butter underneath the skin, see the lumps underneath the skin? Those are butter pucks.

Preparing for the sage butter. Chopped up the sage. I happen to have some sage growing in the kitchen so I plucked some and chopped them up. I left two bars of butter at room temperature and let them soften. Mix sage with butter, make a butter sausage and put into refrigerator to harden. See the chef knife on top? You don't mess with me with that knife in hand.

Stuffing baked separately. This one is surprisingly good. The very first time I made any stuffing. I like the sweetness, it's not heavy, just right. The recipe is in foodtv.com and I recapped it in the comment section.

Ready The Camera Stance

If only all the Hollywood extras who play photojournalists in those big budget movies read this page, perhaps the movies will look more realistic. Way too often those extras don't even hold their camera right, with elbows sticking way out like a chicken flapping its wings. I wonder why those directors don't even care.

Page 54 of the Nikon D3 manual. (17.3MB non printable pdf. When I first downloaded it at home at night, it went quite smoothly. In the morning, forget about it, it went insanely slow. So slow that I gave up). Notice that Nikon chooses to use a presumably female figure albeit a bit ambiguous (or simply a guy who discovers long hair and hair product) to illustrate its flagship professional D3.

Young People Are Inherently Beautiful

Picture from mingpaonews.com

Young people are inherently beautiful and they can get away with wearing their mom's boots from the 80s or 70s. The look is absofuckinglutely ghastly. But I guess youth and personality go a long way. They kind of look fine. Just don't try this at home.

Harry and Cheese Cake

Nikon D70, Nikon MF 50mm f1.4.

Amateur Photographer: Dan Chung Switched?

Award winning Guardian photographer Dan Chung, in an exclusive from Amateur Photographer, is alleged to switch back to Nikon after a decade with Canon. AP still holds dearly to its content and I guess its operation is still largely based on subscription and newsstand sales. As such I could not access the content online (because there is none out there?). I made a trip to the Grand Central area hoping that maybe I can read or buy this UK weekly publication the old fashioned way, but no luck there. Previously, on Dan Chung's blog, he does give accolades to D3 and goes on to say he's going to order a pair of them. I may need to check out Barnes & Nobles for this AP piece.

UPDATE: 11/17/2007
Just checked out Barnes & Nobles at Bayside, and they don't carry that magazine either. I guess not a lot of people here in US care about what amateur photographers in UK have to say.

Random Pictures

These two are from my library, as if I really have an image library. These are from my D70 NEF files converted using UFraw and GIMP. The thing with Ubuntu, it's so easy that you don't have to know what you are doing. Things just work, apparently my adulation over Ubuntu knows no bound, I totally forgot how my wifi didn't work just 24 hours ago. The whole Open Source thing is just great for cheapskate like me. I've read somewhere that the $199 gPC (green PC or Google PC?) at Walmart just got sold out.

Ubuntu 7.10

Just updated my basement server to Ubuntu 7.10
Linux mybox-desktop 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Sun Oct 14 23:05:12 GMT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

The blogger picture upload crashing seems to be gone.

But my wifi driver is not playing well with this kernel. It caused kernel panic when booting up. So I am now hard wired for the time being. On the other hand if I booted from an older kernel, the wifi just worked. Last time I unblacklisted the wifi driver, seems like this time, the kernel really can't stand that driver.

Wifi post, previously.

UPDATE (1/2/2008 and 4/27/2008):
I think ndiswrapper is now built-in in the GNOME menu. So all you have to do is to find the Windows INF file and dump it somewhere to use it. Again, they are making it easier to do wifi. Kudos to the developers.  ehhhhhh.  Not built-in, but I think if from Synaptic, you can type "ndis" to find the package and have it installed.  So, now, installing a Windows wireless driver is just a piece of cake instead of a pain in the butt.  Though this wireless feature doesn't even come out of the box in Hardy Heron, you still need to manually do so, and if you don't have a RJ-45 connection first, no worry, the ndiswrapper packages are on the Hardy Heron LiveCD, so just point your Synaptic manager there and you will be fine.

UPDATE (11/12/2007):

Get wifi working under my Ubuntu 7.10 box with kernel 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP (don't ask me I don't know what they mean, I just follow this thread from the ubuntu forum, the below is pretty much a rehash of the instruction found on that thread, kudos to the original poster m_bridge)

My card is the Trendnet 228PI with rtl8180 (or rtl8180L?) chipset. The module that comes with the distribution would cause kernel panic whenever I try to activate it. (Note: I don't know if WEP is a factor but I didn't test it without WEP)

The solution is to get ndiswrapper to nicely wrap around the driver designed for Windows. Don't say Windows is good for nothing. It's just a myth that Windows crashes left and right, I use XP and 2000, they don't crash. I digress. Remove the offending r8180 module. Configure the wlan, and that's it.

Here is the mini howto/cookbook (as I don't fully comprehend every step) from the thread mentioned above.

I have a RJ-45 wired network connection to do all these while the wireless connection is disabled.

Get ndiswrapper
System, Administration, Synaptic Package Manager
search for ndiswrapper, then check and install the found packages, in my case three of them.

Get NET8180.INF
Go to Realtek Taiwan and do some search on rtl8180, I downloaded the one that says for Windows 2000 version 1.73 here. Unzip and put it in some folder /home/me/8180/NET8180.INF

fire up your Terminal

1) see the rtl8180 module got loaded
$ lsmod | grep 818
see something with r8180
2) remove the offending module and blacklist it
$ sudo rmmod r8180
$ gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
add this line at the bottom
blacklist r8180
save the file

3) Reboot machine and make sure the module not loaded anymore
$ lsmod | grep 818
there should be no results

4) Install the Windows driver NET8180.INF
$ sudo ndiswrapper - i /home/me/8180/NET8180.INF
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
I get net8180 driver installed

5) load ndiswrapper module
$ sudo depmod -a
$ sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

6) configure your wireless network
click on the little network icon on the upper right hand corner next to the date (assuming you are using the default nautilus desktop, and that's the one I know and use). At this point I removed the appending X to the ESSID that I added in order to make it work in 7.04. No more appending extra character for the ESSID.

7) if the card is working, and it "should" then do the following
$ sudo ndiswrapper -m
$ gksudo gedit /etc/modules
append below at the end and save:
ndiswrapper

8) reboot and it "should" work.

Daniel Nutty Day-Lewis

And in America, the articulate use of language is often regarded with suspicion. Especially in the West. Look at the president. He could talk like an educated New Englander if he chose to. Instead, he holds his hands like a man who swings an ax. Bush understands, very astutely, that many of the people who are going to vote for him would regard him less highly if he knew how to put words together. He would no longer be one of them. In Europe, the tradition is one of oratory. But in America, a man’s man is never spendthrift with words.

So it's all an act?

I always think Day-Lewis is a bit nutty and Lynn Hirschberg's piece The Frontier's Man in The New York Times just confirmed that.

Random Thoughts

iMac, so cool it just freezes

It just works. Oh, really?

In addition to the usual seven deadly sins, I just got to admit schadenfreude is probably my eighth.

While people who deeply care about aesthetics and computing as a life style and above all credulous enough to believe that "it just works" are enjoying their you can't be too thin or too powerful aluminum iMac ... as a fine piece of paper weight, still others are contemplating to get their first ever non PC, non Mac machine this holiday season.

The Everex gPC is an interesting piece of desktop equipment selling at $199. The Asus Eee Pc sub notebook is fetching $399.99. Both run on some flavor of Linux. If they somehow decide to re-purpose themselves as some ugly paperweights, you can simply toss them out the window or to the garbage bin or the recycle bin, okay maybe not the Eee Pc. Unless one is some kind of accountant or financial analyst who will simply drop dead without Microsoft Excel, I can't see any reason why any causal user not using Linux.

NOTE: The hyperlinks are pretty arbitrary and nonsensical, which just reflect the state of mind that I am in. I still feel morose over the premature death of my G3 iBook.

UPDATE: 11/15/2007
Look like a firmware update fixed the problem. As discussed here.

Kickys Restaurant

Kickys Restaurant.

UPDATE: 1/25/2008
I can't wait to try out their new menu. Gone are the French elements, in are the more Pan-Asian dishes.

Full text from Yelp.

New comer restaurateur Po (no relationship with the Teletubbies, but equally adorable), a friend of mine, together with Chef Robert Coll, CEC and master sushi chef Ming Yu bring culinary excellence and fine dining on route 34. It offers a very clean modern French-American and Japanese menu, with an equally impressive decor to match, that aims to please and satisfy the most demanding diners.

We ordered the Atlantic Salmon, Chicken Teriyaki, Salmon Skin hand roll, and Sushi for two. And for dessert, we opted for Creme Brulee, a cup of Cappuccino and some ice cream. The salmon is moist and nicely crusted. The Chicken Teriyaki is Chef Robert's reinterpretation of this Japanese staple, quarter chicken with bones fused with a hint of ginger and mixed with vegetables and Teriyaki sauce. The sushi is on par with some of the best sushi I have had in the city. This is not your also-run sushi joint. And my 8-year old Alex's verdict on the Salmon skin roll is "I like it," and that's from one of the toughest and pickiest eater. Alex also likes the bathroom experience, he has fun with the automatic soap dispenser. I digress.

Since I know and love THE GUY, what I review might be biased, I don't know and I hope not. But the whole dining experience meets and exceeds our expectation. Po, don't hate me, but I do think you can use a bigger mug for the cappuccino and fill it to the top, for a second I thought that was an espresso. Except for the cappuccino, all the dishes are of ample size and generous portions, and more importantly they use fresh organic hormone-free ingredients, health nuts rejoice.

Oh, and the bread basket and the butter are just divine.

Kickys kick ass. I say give the new comer a try.

Some Macro Shot

Shot using a Nikon D70 with a manual Nikkor 35~105 mm