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.

Handball In The Snow

pdn PhotoPlus Expo 2011 - Miscellaneous

Leica, so expensive only retired LIRR pensioners on disabilities can afford them.

Lady has been on Expo since time immemorable.  Video rig for Nikon DSLR.

Pulitzer Prize winning wildlife photographer ...

Is spelling out the word professional so hard?  Stingy film give-away.

Real camera, man.  Real camera.

Rockwell's archenemy ...

Big man on a smaller venue.  Vincent Laforet, he's still presenting the same old slide show he does every year since 1900.  They just seem a bit staled, albeit good.

Watch out, BMW is onto the photography business.  Or is it Mercedes-Benz?  Oh no, it's another clever ripoff design from my fellow country men.  If BMW and Mercedez have an illegitimate son, that's going to be TRIOPO, it's tripod except misspelled on purpose.  I want a TRIOPO.

It's not camera shake, it's 3D Handycam.  Look something's popping out.  3D glasses mandatory.

pdn PhotoPlus Expo

The Canon 1DX naked.  It feels light in the hand

Basically it's a machine gun.

Imaginary conversations follow ...

"I don't know much about this ... I just had an hour training on this but it shit I mean shoot like a machine gun.  It's just freaking awesome."

"Does it focus?"

"You mean does it focus right?  Correct?  I don't have a clue but it has like 100 focus points so yes.  Anyway, it shoots like a machine gun so it's just awesome."

On another more serious, disturbing and disappointing note:  Nikon has no new flagship products on display.  And alarmingly some of the products I tried on were iffy.  I tried the million dollar Nikkor 35mm 1.4 with nano coating and the shit just didn't autofocus on a D700.  OKAY, the guy thought it might be the camera.  Then mounted it on a D7000.  Still no good.  Then tried on another smallish DSLR, then the thingy came alive.  This just confirmed what I read online.  Good thing I never bought the million dollar 35mm f1.4 with that special nano coating.  So the lens or the camera or some combination thereof was kind of iffy.  (Some say it's just bad contacts, well if I pay $2000 on a lens and $2000 on a body I want them to just work and not to have to get out an eraser to clean the contacts.)

pdn PhotoPlus Expo

I don't go out much and when I take pictures outside I just do it on my own.  I don't know it has become a trend that people use lens hood and like to have them pulled back or actually mounted in reverse.  I think that looks pretty odd.

Make sure the lens hood doesn't cover the front when shooting ... so what's the point of using a lens hood?  I just don't get it.

Smallish lens hood

Biggest lens hood

pdn PhotoPlus Expo

Nikon always has the best models each and every year.

The Nikon 1 camera seems pretty nifty and speedy in operations.  I was shooting with the Fuji x100, I had some unrealistic expectation of that thingy.  And it turned out not what I thought.  I am old school and I thought the camera doesn't have the right mass for its size to inspire confidence, I'm sure it's easy on the hands and shoulders.  The write speed is just atrocious.  Everything seems slow.  But I do like the view finder.  And Nikon 1 seems pretty smart or I am just not so informed and aware of current technology, the viewfinder just comes to life when I put my eye and look through it so I think that's pretty darn smart.  I always enjoy a good viewfinder.

1 in vomit pink

V1 in black and with flash

pdn PhotoPlus Expo

On my way to the expo on 34th street.  My favorite subject.  Basically anything that's inanimate, banal and mundane.

pdn PhotoPlus Expo

Honestly, I don't know what it's called anymore.  You have photoplus, expo, pdn.  It's all very confusing.  I think it just failed in terms of branding.

Instant photo taken using a Fuji camera and scanned by my Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner using iScan software on a Linux AMD 64 bit machine running Ubuntu 11.10.  Fuji seems to be pretty generous this year.  I asked the man behind the film counter to make sure they don't give out samples as I saw no free sample sign at all but he did give out 3 120 Reala 100 to me.  So a big Thank You to the guy.  On the other hand Big Yellow got kind of stingy: one roll only, which I think is very understandable and reasonable but that doesn't mean that I like it.  The Big Yellow guy manning the free sample counter was like cool and detached.  Well you are a marketing person.  The second one seemed somewhat better.  I got my Ektar 100 both in 35mm and 120 formats--I was a return customer, went there twice just to get two rolls of film, I know I'm just pathetic.

Fiona Apple

Criminal
Across The Universe

Draft Mode in Blogger and Mobile Web

For those who still use blogger as their blogging platform, and like their blog mobile enabled all you need to do is to pay somebody to create a lousy app.  Or not.  Just enable the draft mode in blogger.  That is it.  Or if you are like Apple who pretty much pioneered and championed mobile browsing by inventing the iPhone but still insist on the full web site experience then suit yourself.  The end.

Bill Cunningham New York

Cunningham, an octogenarian, must be flattered that people are still interested in his sex life or at least want to know if he is gay or not.  As it turns out he is married to his work and is never romantically involved with anybody.  So I guess the answer is even he himself can't be sure if he is or isn't homosexual.  Sometimes I wonder why someone's sexual orientation weighs so much on one's life.  But it sort of always does especially if one is not heterosexual, it's like your whole life is defined by your sexual orientation, well I digressed.  There are a couple of things that surprise me.  The number one being, not the homosexual question, but about his religion.  Cunningham is Catholic and goes to church every Sunday and when asked about his religion he seems badly shaken and on the verge of a meltdown and for a few seconds he just keeps his head down and can't utter a word, which is unusual given his usual cheerful predisposition, at least on the documentary though the few times I saw him in real life he seemed seriously detached, not unfriendly but not warm or anything probably he needed to stay focused when he's at work which I am sure he was as he is at work twenty four by seven.  The second surprise is how jocular Anna Wintour is when talking about Bill Cunningham.  She is chatty and warm and doesn't hide behind her sunglasses.  I think Cunningham certainly suffers for his art though he says he enjoys it, his work ethics is next to none: he won't even allow himself to eat or drink a glass of water in those high society parties he covers as that would be inappropriate.  When nowadays people, like the Sartorialist, causally brag about pageviews, CPM and quarter million dollars ad revenue, Bill is decidedly humble and frugal and vows to never sell out.  As he says if you don't get paid they can't make you do things. Or something.

PS:  I think Cunningham shoots with some FE or FE2.  But the latest is, judging from a post/picture I saw from the Sartorialist, he might be shooting a Nikon D7000 with a manual lens attached.  Good luck with the focusing, CHILD.

Times Square Micky and Minnie

Tim Gunn

Making it work. Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

Land Camera

Land camera by Anton Corbijn via The New York Times.

A World of Sizing Confusion

I found this most helpful in the sense that it's informative and will get closer to what you look for in terms of sizing.  In this world of online ordering, I think if you really want to get ahead of the game you should supply the actual measurements to your customers.  A simple number like 8, 9, 10 or size S, M, L simply doesn't cut it anymore and yet most sellers online simply don't bother.  It's just bad business.

Size matters.

Conversion chart that is closer to the "truth."

Ubuntu 11.10

Ubuntu 11.10 code name !@#!@$!%$!@#$ whatever.  The upgrade/installation is mindblowingly frictionless I felt like I was not challenged in any way whatsoever.  This shit just worked.  So there is really nothing to fix or talk about.  I probably use 1% of the OS and the only app I use is Chrome or Firefox or any given day.  And Shotwell to suck the pictures out of the SD card.  That's all folks.

Summer 2011

#ows Broke Twitter?

#ows gets violent.  Police motorbike crashed into crowd?  via 1010 win news.

caption from 1010 wins website--> New York City police officers runs over a Legal Aid Society observer as Occupy Wall Street demonstrators march through the streets near Wall Street, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) UPDATE: OKAY, it's more of a scooter than a bike.

iOS5 Upgrade And Miscellaneous BS

I never like iTunes and I never bother to understand the iTunes sync.  It's like you plug in the thing to your computer and then make sure the thing doesn't sync anything.  Or all your pirated music will go up in smoke.  Or something.

I updated some of my iOS devices to iOS5 not because I have to but because I can.  I just plugged them in and did something and then something happened--updated iTunes then iOS5, frictionlessly smooth until I wanted to try the iCloud backup which came with 5GB free storage per iCloud id, after that the price goes ridiculously high just like everything that's Apple.  Like most other Apple BS, it simply doesn't work, at least for the first n times.  I don't know why it didn't work the first n times but if I were to guess I would say:  the server had been too busy?  It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  Anyway, after much verbal threats and exposing its suckiness on twitter (see my twitter feed on the right)--, iCloud backup all of a sudden started to work.  I was able to back up my device for free which is all that is important, free as in I don't have to pay.  Not that I really needed to back up anything, I did it because I can and it's free.  I never backup any of my iOS devices.

And oh yeah, like most computer stuff I did, I just did whatever to make it work without knowing how or why. Woohoo.

My first impression of iOS5 is yeah, twitter is now deeply integrated (fb being the illegitimate social bastard doesn't get the deeply integrated treatment in iOS5 and so are all others), just like Android is and gets a bit more or too literal: it actually makes a tweet sound or a whistle when you post a picture which is enchanting and at times annoying or even endangering as your boss doesn't need to hear the tweet sound.  Essentially Apple iOS gets just a tiny bit more social that before.  The new pull down notification is like Android's.  And of course iOS looks a bit more refined in the execution, to me, at least.  Eye candy and all.  iCloud is kind of iffy on the first few dozen tries.  And in the end, to make it really work you need to pay Apple because 5GB is hardly any storage at all--iCloud is very conscientious to remind you your storage is running low and to pay up.

Next: Ubuntu 11.10.

Albert Watson

Any work of art is a reflection of the artist himself.  I feel this is as much a portrait of Mr. Jobs as it is of Mr. Watson himself.  The analog picture was taken with a 4x5 view camera in 2006.

Picture taken from Apple's web site for illustration purpose.  Copyrights belong to its rightful owner(s).

I Like My Woolrich

I bought my first Woolrich when I was at college.  I just love the plaid.  Fast forward to 2011, the only Woolriches I like and can afford are from eBay.  This isn't exactly a negative as I can still find what I like if I look hard and being patient the entire time.

Jobs: "I wanted my kids to know me."

via 9to5mac
From Isaacson’s upcoming Essay in Time Magazine:

A few weeks ago, I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant. We talked about his childhood, and he gave me some pictures of his father and family to use in my biography. As a writer, I was used to being detached, but I was hit by a wave of sadness as I tried to say goodbye. In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

Siri The Eerie

I have to train Siri to understand Chinglish in order for her to work for me.

Once Upon A Time I Actually Wrote Something

http://writing.colostate.edu/textbooks/informedwriter/chapter5.pdf

The Sartorialist vs. The Style Rookie

What I fear most turns out to be true: The Sartorialist is a pompous prick.  The guy can't write and can't even use the ellipsis without looking clumsy. Basically he is a semi-illiterate.  But that's OKAY.  What is not OKAY, to me,  is his total arrogance and lack of good grace to acknowledge the success of a 15-year old.   Mr. Schuman is intensely original and hard working.  Like what Woody Allen says, being there is half of the success (actually it's more than half, it is eighty percent, "Eighty percent of success is showing up"); I give him that: for being there to take the pictures.  Other than that, he really doesn't have a lot up there photographically speaking; look at his editorial works or ad campaigns, the pictures look stunningly boring and aesthetically banal.  For him to pick on a 15-year old, I guess that just reflects pretty poorly on his part.  And to brag about how much money he makes from AA with that tone, that is just pure class.  If anybody reads anything Miss Gevinson has written, one (OKAY, at least me and myself) has to agree that she is original, smart and sharp for her age or any age for that matter.  And for him to slam her or her success being a conspiracy between her and the print media is just pure libel or extremely ill informed.  I mean The New Yorker has a profile on Miss Gevinson, all seven web pages for what is worth and they don't have one on Mr. Schuman the last I checked.

Tuesday Afternoon

Bostonian hand lasted Berwick Cordovan Oxford.

UPDATE 11/24/2011
I stand corrected.  It should be a pair of Bluchers.

Bike Racing

Crossing the finish line ...

Blundstone 550

Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

Here is my 5th Blundstones I think. And what's special about this is it isn't Made In Australia(MIA) anymore. And it never was for this model. For the 500 and 510, they were made in Australia when I bought them. They were one of the few shoes or boots that actually fit me and I like. This 550 is supposed to be an improvement over the 500/510 series, leather lined and extra insoles for additional padding or replacement. In terms of kip leather, from what I can recall, the MIA 500/510 leather is greasier. This 550, made in Vietnam, has more of a papery feel to it. Is it better, same or worse, I can't say objectively but I would say it's a touch worse off than before. The MIA 500/510 has no or minimum leather lining inside the boots. Minimum, because there is a thumb sized leather lining on the front pull. This 550 has more leather lining so it's supposed to be easier to put on and take off and more comfortable. Though the inside (or called vamp) near or in the toe box is not lined with leather but some sort of fabric which I of course have no idea what it is. I read somewhere that the sizing of the 550 is supposed to be slightly roomier than the 500/510, not that the latter is not roomy though. I think the 550 is at least as roomy as the 500/510, which is important for people who have full sized feet (read: wide, high-instep and meaty feet). Does it matter Blundstones aren't MIA anymore? I will leave it up to you. But I have a difficult time finding the country of origin for 550. When I wrote to Zappos, the good folks there cheerfully told me to contact Blundstone directly and I thought they could just open a box and see what it says, so much so for customer service. In the end I contacted Blundstone and someone told me that it was manufactured some where not in down under. And another seemingly knowledgeable eBay seller also confirms that. The official Blundstone rep went extra step to infer that I was disappointed to find out that it was no longer manufactured in Australia. You know maybe that's true too. But I guess if even the brand doesn't take great pride in where their products are manufactured by being upfront, they shouldn't expect their customers to be.  I just want the brand to take pride of its production partners themselves, whether they are in China, Vietnam or Thailand.

11/17/2018
I don't have a lot to update.  But I'd just like to add that it's almost common knowledge that the soles can turn into tofu or sort for I don't know why.  Apparently it didn't happen to all of my Blundstones during the time I wore them, which was like decades ago but I did have that experience.  I don't know if Blundstones ever cared to address them.  I don't know.

And I just went to the Blundstone USA site.  Again, the site makes no mention where the boots are made, so there you have it.  If you think the quality is the same or better, say it out with pride.  I stopped wearing Blundstones because they just don't fit me that well now.  I still remember the time I bought them online via eBay from a seller from Australia.  I got a toy koala bear with it too.  The seller had since been gone for a long time.

Nikon 1 in Vomit Pink

Pepto-Bismol should make it their house camera.

Gotta have it.

from dcwatch via nikonrumors.

Nikon Lens Super-quite[sic] Autofocus - 1 Nikkor VR 10-100mm

1 Nikkor VR 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 PD-ZOOM


Snipped from Nikon-Europe

It is super-quite[sic].  Despite the super superlative.  It's still quite, meaning not really there yet.  So be prepared to manual focus.  Or simply buy a manual focus lens on eBay or Craigslist.  If you want quiet autofocusing you have to get the STM lenses.  All other lenses that have the Stepping Motor (STM) are written as super-quiet.  Though I don't understand why Nikon put the (STM) after "Stepping" instead of "Stepping Motor."

UPDATE: 12/30/2011
It's still "super-quite."  It looks like that's the correct way to say it as Nikon Europe has no problem with it.  Or they think the lens will be so short lived or nobody is buying or researching it so why bother correcting it. Bravo.

Apple Picking

These are scanned by yours truly using the state of the art crappy Epson Perfection V500 Photo running the iScan software on a AMD64 Ubuntu 11.04 machine.

220 FUJI RDP III PROVIA 100F.  I should have bought more of these.
Notice all the dust.  Scanning film is a pain.  And I am such a masochist.

Apple Picking

Randolph Engineering and American Optical

On the front, Randolph Engineering.  Back then they didn't need big logo.

In the back, the AO Original Pilot.

 Randolph Engineering bridge size emboss on lower bridge

Randolph arm, or bayonet, both left and right bears the same emboss.  In fact, there is no left or right, that's why one (left) arm's emboss appears upside down.

 AO right arm or bayonet from the eye facing side.

 AO left arm or bayonet from the eye facing side.

AO emboss on the upper bridge.

All shots are on tripod.  Unfortunately the arm shots were handheld, meaning, I held the arms of the glasses to move it back and forth in front of the lens to get to minimum focus distance.  Anyway, not the sharpest because of minute handshake.

People are demanding I make a comparison so here they are.  I thought I lost the AO but I actually had it misplaced.  This AO 57-20 is steel color and I have another newer AO pair that is smaller and in gold colored, 55-20 AO on the bridge, minus the USA emboss, on the right arm it says AO Eyewear, Inc.  no USA either.  So I am not sure if AO is still made in the USA, actually with just USA doesn't mean it's manufactured in the USA anyway.

Having lunch with my F-1

Canon F-1 Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android

120 Film

and a 220 too. Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android