A Day In The City

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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.

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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

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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.