Whip Cream

Once Upon A Time

Drive

***********              SPOILER ALERT (does it really matter?)                        ************

Whatever An Education Carey Mulligen got doesn't prepare her for the existential jam she got herself into:  a working waitress and a mother of a young son whose father was in prison and almost immediately got killed after release.  Her white knight, the omni present Ryan Gosling, in shining white nylon jacket adorned with an oversize scorpion in the back (or in very form fitting Levi's trucker jacket or both) and neatly combed blonde hair whose only match is Mulligen's own coiffed bangs, despite being oddly affectionate and at the same time deeply repressed and sexless, good looking and handy turns out to be a dangerous sociopath who is too skilled to drive like a normal human being but too stupid to almost get himself killed.  Drive is an unapologetic and unequivocal film noir, that is, the sole purpose of its characters existence is to ooze coolness and violence in abundance.  To that end, Drive has achieved some level of success.  Is the movie oozed with coolness?  Yes.  Is the movie violent?  You bet.  Is the violence in ample supply?  Err ....  Personally I think it could add a scene or two or three more.  Nevertheless, the violence is well choreographed, it's quick, extreme but without the gore, which is kind of satisfying but leave me desired for more, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Drive is not about the drive, actually it got sued for not enough driving.  Drive is about a man who one day finds his life worth living because he finds someone worth dying for.

Ring Around The Rosie

10個彪形大漢在機場築起人鏈保護陳嘉桓，不讓記者埋身。（攝影：鍾偉茵）from mingpaonews.com

I didn't know you can play Ring Around The Rosie in the airport.

Just because they aren't midgets doesn't automatically make them "彪形大漢."

OWS

More from the NYTIMES.

Nikon D7000 Firmware 1.03

From Nikon rumors I learned that Nikon is rolling out a new firmware for the most beloved D7000.  Anyway I don't think I experienced any of the stuff it's supposed to fix.

However I do experience what I believe is a quirk of the system.  At aperture priority, ISO 100, ISO auto, flash on.  I was shooting about 5 feet from the subject.  However the system had the audacity to pick ISO 4000.  The picture was "acceptable" but unnecessarily grainy.  With the flash up I see no reason the system has to up the ISO to 4000, I think that's absolutely crazy.

UPDATE 11/11/11:
The update was painless.  It doesn't fix anything I wanted to fix (auto ISO flash and skin tones) nor does it break anything so far.

Passport Photos

You have to pay $9.99 plus tax if you were to go to CVS to have your passport picture taken and printed.  Even if you have your own image and just use their Kodak kiosk to print the picture the price is the same, $9.99.  I was in disbelief because a regular print is like 32 cents.  So to use that very special Kodak ID picture software to crop a 2 x 2 inch image and to use the green bars to make sure your face comes out to be at least 1 inch but no more than 1 3/8 inches long you have to pay $9.99.  And the nice guy manning the counter reminded me the picture has to be taken by a qualified professional from an establishment, meaning himself in a CVS.  I appreciated the misinformation and thanked him for looking after my interest.  I took my SD card and went home.  I had passport pictures of somebody else taken by them and they didn't seem anywhere near professional, the nice guy took the picture with a point and shoot which I am sure is adequate for that purpose but the picture looked out of focus and fuzzy.

So I decided to do it myself.

I have some understanding with dpi and GIMP, though not any where near proficient.  Here is the tutorial I found to be most useful Making Your Own Passport Photos.  The tutorial is self explanatory.  If I can do it so can you.  I have sheets of Epson photopaper, a camera, a printer so it was all good.  I test ran one on a regular sheet of paper and because I round downed too much, the image appeared less than 2 x 2.  The second trial came out just right, exactly 2 x 2 with a face only a mother can love in exactly no less than 1 inch but no more than 1 3/8 inches long.  I saved myself $9.99 and felt liberated from the tyranny of WTF CVS passport photos.

Update 11/25/11
Got my new passport in the mail. The passport picture is as ugly if not uglier than myself in real life but apparently the State Department has no problem accepting it.

Steve Jobs

I was somewhat intimidated by the thickness of the book and spooked by Jobs' infamous death stare and enigmatic Mona Lisa-like smile.  The cover portrait, by Albert Watson who is kind of blind and bears an uncanny resemblance to his subject, was taken using an analog large format camera of which Jobs was duly impressed.  I took the dust cover off before started reading.

The authorized biography by the renowned Walter Isaacson clocks in more than 600 pages with never seen before obligatory pictures of Jobs and families in the middle and notes in the end.  I thought it would take me some time to finish it but no, it only took me more than a week even though I had been extremely busy between eating my meals and using the bathrooms.

The book chronicles Jobs' personal and professional life, warts and all, through and through with vivid recollections from Jobs himself as well as from others and often time interspersed with Isaacson's own take on the events.  The Book of Jobs certainly confirms Jobs as an enigmatic dichotomy.  He couldn't code like Gates, not a brilliant engineer like Wozniak, but what he lacked he more than made up for with his intuition, his belief in himself being special and his relentless drive demanded from himself and others for perfection.  And of course being exceptionally intelligent helped too.  Isaacson is even handed and sometimes even goes overboard to expose Jobs' dark side or quirks.  He insinuates that Jobs was too busy to flush toilets in addition to his more well-known infractions: Job soaked his feet in the toilet bowl to unwind, cheated Wozniak, abandoned his own child, had no qualms took others' ideas as his and totally lacked social grace.  Despite or perhaps even because of all his faults, it makes Jobs even more fascinating or human--apparently Jobs reality distortion field is at work here, death or alive.  In the end, Isaacson sheds his biographer role and let Jobs have the last words, which are intelligent and thoughtful as always but also uncharacteristically graceful: summing up who he is, what he wants to do and what drives him, all directly from the horse's mouth.   The book is compelling and easy to read, because number one Jobs was a compelling person on so many levels, with spectacular successes and failures, and you will have to make an effort if you were to try to make him less compelling and number two Isaacson's chronological recounting of events is easy to follow and not get in the way of the flow of the story.  It's not easy to sum up anybody's life in a book especially one as fascinating as Jobs' but I believe Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" has done it.