Super Moon

The bottom picture was taken yesterday.  The top one was taken just moments ago.  I didn't reset my camera clock, so the exif data aren't exactly right when time is concerned.  Anyway, it's much harder than I thought taking a good picture of the moon.  The above was cropped at 100%.

Froot Loops

I thought he couldn't finish it.  But I was wrong.  He finished everything.

Week in Review

FUBAR

Black Friday

Nothing Compares 2 U

I never quite figure out what she is sad about.  Is it a bad breakup?  Is it her mom's passing?  Or both?  I just want a clearer mental picture from the lyrics.  A live cover of this song is equally awesome but crazier.

Snowdrops

Change Oil

Sent from my thumbs.

When I need something done to my car, this is the go to place.

Outback Dinner

Sent from my thumbs.

Pancake Breakfast

Bryant Park, NYC

Service What?

Service interrupted, delayed, screwed up. Not change.

Mini Chirasi

Udon

Portable Commute Hanger

Kind of feel like "home."  I saw this hook hanger everywhere (you know those places I went and transportation I took) when I was in Hong Kong.  First time I saw it here in NYC.  This fine piece of gadget finally landed in North America on one of the suckiest subway systems on earth.  I expect this gadget will totally take over the NYC subway.  Everybody uses one.

Pink Lady

OKAY, fuchsia if you insist.

Rose embroidered gloves.  Love.

Subway Sucks

For two days in a row, there is this signal problem.  And you just don't know where the train is going to take you, if it takes you at all.

Birkenstock London

Bought in 2001.  I wear it like Boston, that's without the counter like a pair of slippers.  It's not exactly comfortable or uncomfortable but it's definitely not durable.  My driving shoes, my take the garbage out shoes.

Chirashi

Timberland Boat Shoes

Timberland was hugely popular in Hong Kong in the 80s. A big part of it was people saw me wear them I believe Chow Yun Fat was seen wearing them. In one of the TV broadcast charity events, Chow was seen performing a stunt: stepping on cartons of eggs without breaking them or trying not to. In between the eggs and his bare feet was a pair of boat shoes by Timberland. Not the ones with lug soles shown here but the more traditional much thinner soles that are designed on deck top walking in a boat or a yacht. Not that I would ever know as I never go yachting.  Nor would I know if they are any good to walk on eggs.  When I came here, a couple of my best friends sent me off with a pair top of the line Timberlands thinking maybe one day I may go yachting or need them to walk on eggs.  Thanks dudes. Unfortunately I have the magic touch of turning everything precious into poop. A female friend of mine actually thought all along they were a cheap pair of imitation. Well what can I tell you, I look cheap and everything looks cheaper or simply cheap on me. The pair shown here was bought probably in the 1900s, I mean circa 1994. Back then it was made in the USA. It most likely is not the best mocassin construction out there but still it's all leather lined inside.

Original Musk

I don't know why I bought the musk.  I don't wear scent, maybe once in a while when the moon is blue.  Because I find it aggressive, intrusive and borderline rude to put on any scent in public.  While you think whatever you put on is deliciously and definitively fantastic, others may very well think you smell absolutely repulsive.  Plus there is not really any female deer or human to attract.   I just like to leave it in the bathroom, as a decor.  Or as an air freshener.  The WD-40 smells equally refreshing.

Georgia Boots

I probably bought these logger boots in 1993 or 1994.  Back when Georgia boots only had its logo embossed discreetly on the leather upper.  I just checked out their new boots.  It's disgusting.  They have their logo on the tongue and on the side.  I never took care of these boots, I wish I had.  Got to oil the leather up.  I remember the first pair I had was defective, the leather near the heel area just broke on one of them.  I wrote to the company together with a picture proving the defect, mind you, all done the old fashioned way with no email or jpeg.  The company sent me a brand new pair no questions asked all the way to Hong Kong.  I think that's customer service.

Nice Guys Finish Last

We didn't set out to build the slowest derby car.  But like Donald Rumsfeld says "stuff happens."  The car weighs in at exactly 5.00 ounces, so I have high hope that it will perform amiably.  At the same time I also know the wheels are kind of out of alignment.  I tried a few times trying to adjust them properly so much so that I actually cracked the bottom where the axle (nail) and the wood meet.  I just glued it back and called it a day; keeping my fingers crossed that it won't be too bad in the run.  Wishful thinking doesn't help.  At it turns out, out of some forty cars in the race, and in a total of four runs, our car turns out to be the slowest, a feast that is just equally difficult as being the fastest.  Well we got the trophy for being the slowest.

Backbone

I enjoy reading stuff that is written in earnest, if not in earnest then in irony, if not in irony then in style.  David Foster Wallace's feast is he can achieve all of this, and more, at the same time.  Backbone published in the current New Yorker is an excerpt of his soon to be posthumously published The Pale King.  Backbone is such a weird story--a boy trying to kiss every inch of his own body since he's six, with even more weirder writing style.  Personally my favorite line is:

The written evaluations of his socialization described the boy not as withdrawn or aloof but as “calm,” “unusually poised,” and “self-containing” [sic].

I have seen grade school teacher confuse "every day" with "everyday."  So I can relate and do enjoy the humor and irony.  Backbone is peppered with anatomy vocabulary and interjected with historical anecdotes of which I find interesting.  Reading "Backbone" would have never prepared me what the Pale King is about, at least superficially.  According to Little, Brown, its publisher, as reported by The New York Times, The Pale King is about "a crew of entry-level processors and their attempts to do their job in the face of soul-crushing tedium."  Wow, that sounds interestingly boring to the max.

Indian

Derby Car

Best Costume

Oh Yeah. Some people like to wear costume or costome-like outfit every day because life is just a stage? I just want to say sure Black Swan and The King's Speech are worthy contenders, but The Social Network, the hoodie, the sandals and the unforgettable bathrobe are just well chosen, contemporary and relevant. It's just more subtle more nuanced, and for the untrained eye, it could be bland but for those who can appreciate the exqusite beauty of the mundane, can separate the noble from the gaudy, The Social Network is definitely, beyond a doubt, has one of the best costumes in modern cinema.

Homepage

For people who don't know much about HTML or anything and yet want to have a homepage, I would say a blog is the easiest way to go. Wordpress, Blogger, tumblr or whatever free tools you can get is the correct approach. And that's what I suggest if you were to ask me. But of course if you have the money and want to spend a few thousand dollars to jolt the ho hum economy, that's even better. But for cheap skates, I prefer free tools.

Blundstone

They're on their last leg. I need to find another pair. Or switch to something else. It's my third pair already.

Update:  There were made in Australia.  Not anymore.

Tuesday

I hate Tuesday because it's garbage day.  I have to search the whole house, collect all the garbage and take them out.  It's a chore I don't enjoy and but grudging do.  And worst, there is something called  recycling, the glass, the plastic and the newspaper.  I have yet to learn the perfect knot to tie the newspaper.  I miss the days when everything is just garbage.

School Winter Break

When your kids are on winter break that means you are not.  Even if you don't do any pre break arrangement like finding the cheapest after school programs or dumping your kids to your friends but at least you have to do some more driving around, I know I do.  Thanks for GPS, even a direction-less driver like myself manages to drive around in the cut throat morning commute.

Men At Work

Skiing

Lunch

Blue Mountain

D7000 NEF TO JPEG

There is a 40pixel wide band to the right of the image when NEF is converted to JPEG using UFRAW.  The image above has that band removed already.

Everybody Is Outside

Spring-like Weather

iOS 4.2.1 And Ubuntu 10.10

Despite whatever people say, iOS 4.2.1 (8C148) is not working on my Ubuntu 10.10 AMD64.  It's able to mount, to see everything that is there (i.e. read only) but I simply can't sync it.  No way no how.  This is the conclusive reference for me as of now.  Based on what I read, it's because of libgpod.

Fifth and 42nd

I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords

Ken Jennings provides us a much needed quote for the three-day man against machine Jeopardy! when he jokingly writes "I For One Welcome our New Computer Overlords" below his answer to the final jeopardy clue. With or without our welcome, Watson has arrived. It bested the best human players ever in Jeopardy! namely Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson is a harbinger of what's going to come from Big Blue: truly intelligent machine that can augment or replace human intelligence.

Off-Brand Lenses

Personally I just don't do that. If my camera says Nikon, I use Nikkor. Of course there are exceptions like if it's a Carl Zeiss or when I was 17 I bought a Tamron 70-210 for my Nikon FE.

iPhone is The Internet

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images via nytimes.com

The iPhone comes to represent the Internet (or the ubiquitous device to the Internet)  in the mind of young Egyptians.  IBM is just giving up and instead gets into this game show business using Watson.

What is Toronto?????

Watson is such an abomination.  Or at least some super computer afflicted with savant syndrome?  Despite his excessive smartness which is unlike any average American, and like many Americans young or old, he is very bad at geography and can't tell Toronto is not an American city.  In an effort to make light of his own lack of common sense, he does what teenagers do best--abusing punctuations, adding extra question marks at the end of his answer or question.  His equally robotic human contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter got the answer or question correct. (I know it's confusing.  In Jeopardy! one has to phase the answer as a question so the question is the answer.)  Human kind still has hope.

Flowers on Sidewalk

Man vs Machine: Jeopardy!

While Apple, Google, Facebook and twitter are grabbing eyeballs and even credited for toppling regimes, IBM is quietly building a machine that can play Jeopardy! (to win some prize money to offset the dismal sales ...) Watson made its official debut yesterday and played a game of Jeopardy! with two of the most celebrated contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. According to pcmag , Watson has specifications like below:

• 90 IBM Power 750 servers enclosed in 10 racks
• 16 Terabytes of memory
• A 2,880 processor core
• Linux system
• While not officially disclosed by IBM, Watson is estimated to have cost $1-$2 billion
• Uses "DeepQA": a technology that enables computer systems to directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge

All of these are just (futile) attempts to match the human brain which according to IBM researchers can fit inside a shoe box and is powered by a tuna sandwich.

The result of the three-day contest is a well guarded secret. But my bet is Watson will win on the third day.

More on Watson from Big Blue.

New York Public Library

Proudly taking boring pictures since 1974.

The Internet Shall Kick Your Butt

The Internet has changed how everything is marketed and consumed, including the latest revolution in Egypt.  A legion of young technorati, armed with notebooks (notably the Apple MacBook Pro that seems permanently and surgically attached to Wael Ghonim), using Facebook and Twitter and sure their unwavering love for their country, was able to topple Mubarak's 30-year old autocratic regime in eighteen days.

Note to Zuckerberg:  Don't even think about opening an office in China.

Nokia: The Beginning of The End

Nokia partners with Microsoft to make smart phones.  The End.

Mubarak Transfers Power to VP

C'mon!  Like that would satisfy "all their demands."  I don't think that assuages any anger of the anti-government movement, at all.

All Protestors Demands Will Be Met

The American and The Expendables

Every now and then George Clooney likes to remind us movie goers, in addition to making blockbuster crappy movies like his bread and butter the Ocean movies, he is amply capable of making pretentious artsy movies that are seemingly deep but are actually just interminably drab and weary.  The American is one of those.  The only saving grace is the movie has quite a few nude scenes, a stark contrast to your regular nude-less American movies, I think that's the only good European touch The American has to offer, which nevertheless could not possibly salvage the movie from its utter slow paced bore.  Since I am a fan of anal retentiveness, so I sort of enjoy Clooney's character Mr. Butterfly's (what a pretentious name) demonstrably encyclopedic knowledge of fire arms and hands-on experience--believe it or not, his character is able to fabricate a rifle silencer out of parts from a tiny chop shop in a god forsaken little Italian town.  Is he a genius or what?

The Expendables is the polar opposite of The American.  The Expendables is either a wet dream come true or a nightmare of a movie--aging action heroes join force to fight bad guys.  Maybe I have outgrown action movies, I find the story incredibly tired and the action scenes pretty forgettable.  Mickey Rourke probably has it the easiest.  He doesn't even need to fight, all he does is mumbling and he calls that acting.

Ghonim Speaks

Ghonim says, "Definitely.  This is an Internet revolution.  I'll call it a revolution 2.0" when asked by CNN's Ivan Watson.  Dude likes Pringle of Scotland so much so that he has two of the same polo T-shirts in blue and burgundy.  And he's always seen with an Apple MacBook Pro.  Dude is rad.  But you see material goods just aren't enough.  People need democracy, the ultimate Western (or American?) export.  See how he got pissed off when he mentions Omar Soliman says Egyptians aren't ready for democracy?  Dude got emotional when talks turn to people who made the ultimate sacrifice and says he is ready to die for his cause.  Wow.

See it yourself.

New York Public Library, Again

New York Public Library

I am not a big fan of the fish net over the facade of the New York Public Library.  It's just not good for photography.  I am sure the pigeon there concurs.

Technical nobody really cares:
I applied curve to adjust the exposure.  And I found in general the D7000 jpeg files pretty easy to work with, and no post sharpening other than in camera sharpening +6 is needed.  The 105mm f/2.5 AI lens offers plenty of sharpness, that's if you can hold and shoot it steady.  With the D7000 16MP, I found any fault in focus and camera shake very revealing.  It's almost impossible to shoot close and handheld with this 105mm lens, as steady as I am, when viewed 100% the image is simply technically faulted--obviously not in focus and blurry.  With digital, you can increase the yield somewhat by either carefully shoot your subjects like with a tripod or shoot with CH, a successive burst of images with a fast enough shutter to minimize blur.

I'm taking a second look to the picture.  Notice how properly horizontal the picture is?  I was handholding the camera with a 105mm lens pointing upwards.  So I am glad.