Friday, November 30, 2007

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.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

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.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

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.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

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.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

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.

Monday, November 12, 2007

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.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

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.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

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.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

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.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Some Macro Shot





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

Apple Quietly Upgraded its MacBook

The MacBook now can max out to 4GB of RAM and has a 800 MHZ front size bus. I don't know what they mean but they sure sound great to my ear. Previously the maximum RAM is 2GB and the front side bus is 667MHZ.

As reported at macrumors.
From Apple Store.

ImageMagick

 I don't remember if I installed that via Homebrew or MacPort. I might have installed using MacPort.  But it's kind of messed up as ...