Remains of the Day

A new photography

A beautiful, curated set of photos from Google Street View, as well as an assessment of its artistic sensibility. Google Street View deserves an exhibit at MOMA, the Google Street View camera more analysis from photography blogs and review sites.

[linking to an article that is several months old feels embarrassing for a blog, it's like receiving the "Microsoft will donate $1 for every copy of this e-mail that is passed on" from your parents, but I'll do it when it's good.]

On the topic of photography, it's long been said that an artist's tools affect the art created by it. What has been the impact of the last decade of photography technology on that field? Looking at some of the major technology changes.

• Digital photography, with its use of Photoshop and computers for post-processing - HDR? Photographic forensic analysis? Perhaps the greatest impact was on the idea of a photograph, now mutable, ephemeral, but in its ghostliness, infinitely more mobile. And it will only increase as cameras allow us to upload photos directly to Facebook or Flickr, or to send them directly from the camera into e-mail and out to the world.
• Digital SLRs - in a way, digital SLRs introduced a new generation to the advantages of the SLR as a camera form factor over the digital point-and-shoot. Back in the heyday of film, far fewer amateur photographers saw the need to upgrade to an SLR. Ironically, it was the ubiquity of the digital point-and-shoot that may have dragged digital SLR sales up. The poor quality of digital point-and-shoot photos (small sensors and slow lenses not allowing for shallow-depth-of-fields, long lag times between button presses and photographs, poor color rendition, among other problems) coupled with a huge upsurge in the desire to shoot and share meant a huge new consumer base interested in how to take better-looking photos. Whether right or wrong, for most people that meant upgrading to an SLR. As with all movements, it's both good and bad. Many more people took an interest in the possibilities opened up by an SLR. I've had more people ask me about what model of SLR to get than ever asked me about my film camera. But for most, the interest is shallow, with few actually caring to learn the fundamentals of photography that enable them to capture the full potential of the SLR. If you still shoot 100% of the time in Program mode on your SLR, you're like the hack golfer who spends $400 on the latest golf driver instead of taking golf lessons.
• Digital point-and-shoots - see above under digital SLRs. Overflashed portraits is one obvious outcome of the explosion in digital compacts. If I never get another link to a gallery of one hundred portraits taken by a photographer holding a camera out and pointing it back at themselves and the person they have their arm around, I'll be happy, though I have long thought that some photography museum should mount an exhibition of just such a set of photos, its aesthetic is so widespread now. We've always had portable cameras, disposable cameras, but pair them with websites that allow for instant uploading and sharing and we're now inundated by a photographic tsunami from amateurs who have yet to learn that curation is part of the professional photographer's craft.
• The shitty iPhone camera - you can lump all mobile phone cameras into this category, though I pick on the iPhone for its prominence as the predominant "smartphone" in mindshare. Make no mistake, I love my iPhone, it is still a miracle to me how much better it was than all phones to come before it, but the camera is undeniably lousy. Its primary virtue is its integration into a device I have with me all the time. I've learned to embrace its terrible quality, though, and in that way it's the digital successor to earlier generations of low-quality cameras with quirks, like the Lomo or Holga. In fact, more often than not, I use one of the iPhone apps (ToyCamera, Hipstamatic, e.g.) that simulates those old cameras to give my iPhone photos a random look that masks the cameras deficiencies by embracing them. That in itself can be a mannerism, but the photos are generally more interesting.

As for what's on the horizon, I predict that in time, with storage space cheap and video sensor resolution growing every day, we'll just all shoot video and extract the stills we want. It removes the burden to capture the decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson termed it, and that's something most amateur photographers struggle with. We already have magazine covers like the Megan Fox Esquire cover which were shot this way.

Madeleine

I met Betina and Justin's new baby Madeleine today. She is adorable. And sleepy.

If had $70,000 lying around...

...I'd put a bid in on this Sotheby's lot.

I started shooting some pictures with the long lens. All of a sudden she came up to the edge of the pool and she didn't have the bra on. What immediately went through my mind was, when are we going to see it all?

Lonely no more

Jack Kerouac's favorite photo from Robert Frank's seminal photography collection The Americans was the one of the "lonely elevator girl". He noted as much in his introduction for the book, asking "That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name and address?"

Well, years later, through a twist of fate, she has been found.

So now, 54 years after Frank snapped a shot that would leave a great American poet yearning, I can finally bring it all full circle and tweet:

@kerouac: name is Sharon, Pacific Heights, and no longer lonely. Adios, King.

(via Design Observer)

Low light digital cameras

Ryan Brenizer and David Pogue highlight new compact cameras meant to perform better in low light situations. These manufacturers have done this by moving down in megapixels rather than up for the first time. This is a good sign. For far too long digital camera manufacturers have continued to release new models that increase megapixels when what most photographers needed was not more "resolution" but more "effective resolution".

The Panasonic LX3 earned a following last year among serious photographers as one of the first compacts focused not on increased megapixels but improved low light performance. I bought one and still use it as my carry-around, though it is not quite as slim as the ultra-compacts many people favor these days.

Of the new cameras announced, the Canon S90 sounds most attractive. It has some great features:

- an f2 lens at the wide end like the LX3, great for those really dim environments, which seem to be most of the ones I'm in when I find myself reaching for a carry around camera.

- a sizeable 3" diagonal LCD screen in back.

- two programmable control rings. I'm old school this way but I hate having to press buttons on compact cameras to select functions, I far far prefer physical controls that can be switched quickly. I switch ISO and aperture constantly on my cameras, even my LX3, and on the LX3 that requires using a little joystick.

- thin profile, small enough that I'd consider it pocketable.

It's smaller than the LX3 in body size, and if I didn't own an LX3 and an iPhone I might buy one of these. I might still get one (it pays to be in my family, you inherit lots of good trickle-down electronics as I succumb to gadget lust or early adopter syndrome).

Happy birthday Ivy

Rest of the photoset here.

Audrey

Two pictures of Audrey Hepburn. Still and probably always will be the most regal and kind famous person I've ever met.

Nikon 24-70mm f2.8

Ryan Brenizer lauds the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 zoom lens. I agree as it has become my go-to everyday lens on my SLR.

It's not light, in fact it's a bit of a beast, but then again when I bring out my SLR I'm usually not optimizing around weight but around picture quality. If I want a light carry-around camera I either use my phone or my Panasonic LX3.

The Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Zoom Lens is not cheap at about $1,800 each right now, but most beginning photographers make the mistake of spending too much on the camera body and too little on lenses. Two reasons this makes little sense:

• The lens, much more than any of the modern SLR bodies you're likely to buy from Canon or Nikon, is responsible for image quality. SLR bodies from Nikon and Canon have reached a point where you really can't go wrong. But there are still shots you just can't get without the right lens. Now, at the margins, and for specialized uses, for example if you're a professional sports photographer, the SLR body makes a difference. But even there, the most important piece of equipment they own are their fast, top-grade lenses.
• Great lenses, or "good glass" as photographers refer to them, retain or increase in market value, camera bodies start losing resale value the moment they hit the market. Whereas Nikon and Canon will replace an SLR every year or two, roughly, the great lenses in their lines are often around for many years. Some lenses have never been replaced with a suitable equivalent and become highly coveted collectors items selling for thousands of dollars on eBay (for example, try to find a Nikon 58mm f1.2 on eBay, and if you do, it's likely selling for $3K).

Hong Kong

Miscellany

The new tv show Lie to Me is based on the real-life research of Dr. Paul Ekman into facial behaviors, or how muscles of the face reveal underlying psychology through microexpressions that are nearly unconscious or involuntary.

Ekman's system is called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and its companion is the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID). I first heard of Ekman's work through a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker titled "The Naked Face".

You can purchase the training system for $260. Maybe it will pay for itself through your weekly poker game?

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Chase Jarvis offers 5 tips for shooting better pictures with your iPhone. He also recommends two apps for the iPhone, CameraBag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), both of which I use and enjoy.

I put the prices there because I know some people don't like to pay for any apps, but if there's one thing I urge people to do this year it's to pay for things that provide value, even if they're things you can obtain illegally for free. Whether it's software or music or movies, with the Internet it's easier than ever to reward people directly for work you appreciate. When apps for the iPhone cost less than a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, there's really no excuse. Do the right thing, fight the recession, reward people who do great work that improves your life.

Two other iPhone photography apps that I recommend: Photogene ($2.99) and QuadCamera ($1.99). The iPhone camera is not going to win any prizes for picture quality, but the use of these apps should improve your snaps noticeably. Your Facebook and Flickr friends thank you in advance.

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Speaking of iPhone apps, I've reached the nine page, 144 app limit. I don't use all the apps all the time, so it's not a problem to delete a few, but the limit seems somewhat arbitrary, and at some point in the near future I can see having more than 144 apps that I'd use semi-regularly, or at least often enough that I wouldn't want to have to be deleting and installing apps all the time.

Paging through nine pages of apps doesn't exactly play to the iPhone's interface strengths (some ability to group apps or nest them in folder would be handy) but it's certainly not unusable.

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Amazon's Universal wishlist feature allows you to add products from other websites. Not sure when this launched, but it's an idea I recall being bandied about at Amazon many years ago.

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Metacritic compiles top 10 lists from movie critics across the land (they need to fix their HTML header as it still reads 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists in my browser tab). I'm still waiting for their year-end compilation graphic that assimilates all these top ten lists into a master best-of list. I'm not sure if they're producing it again this year, but I hope they do.

Three links

How Porsche made a killing in the financial markets by creating a short squeeze on VW stock. That is just crazy.

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Why Obama's tax rebate may work to boost consumption where others have failed.

The key factor in these kinds of distinctions, Thaler’s work suggests, is whether people think of a windfall as wealth or as income. If they think of it as wealth, they’re more likely to save it, and if they think of it as income they’re more likely to spend it. That’s because many people tend to base their spending not on their long-term earning potential or on their assets but on what they think of as their current income, an amount best defined by what’s in their regular paycheck. When that number goes up, so does people’s spending. In Thaler’s words, “People tend to consume from income and leave perceived ‘wealth’ alone.”

So what does this mean for making a rebate work? If you want people to spend the money, you don’t want to give them one big check, because that makes it more likely that they’ll think of it as an increase in their wealth and save it. Instead, you want to give them small amounts over time. And you want the rebate to show up as an increase in people’s take-home pay, because an increase in steady income is more likely to translate into an increase in spending. What can accomplish both of these goals? Reducing people’s withholding payments.

It's great to see actual policies from Nudge being put into action, though perhaps not surprising given that one of the authors, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law prof, has been appointed Head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (reaction to that appointment here).

I think Obama's team has done a great job facing an epic challenge so far. They haven't been afraid to change their strategy quickly if they feel it's necessary, whereas the Bush administration hewed unwaveringly to their policies even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Can you imagine if the Bush Administration were still in place and forced to face this economic crisis for another four years? I think I really would pick up and move to Paris. The food and wine is great there, you have three hour lunches and world class museums, pregnant women drink and smoke...

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The Big Picture covers the Inauguration. Seeing photos of people watching from all over the world, I can almost picture the Nike tv commercial.

I wonder if photo #48 is the book of secrets, as seen in that National Treasure movie.

The Big Picture

You just knew The Big Picture would have some great shots of our next President.

Obama is the coolest cat wherever he goes. He never looks anything less than like some cinematic dream of a President. It's almost surreal that he is actually our next President.

That photo of McCain with his tongue out at the end of that last debate, all those pics of his eye-rolls and tongue juts, I don't recall a single photo of Obama like that. I half expect Obama came out of the womb not crying but giving fist bumps to his doctor and mother and pointing to nurses in the delivery room to thank them for their work.

That photographic contrast is just one of the many factors that fed into this landslide. One of the candidates looked like the guy you wanted to lead you out of the crisis, while the other looked like the hothead who would've gotten you into it.

It's not the tool, it's the craftsman

Alex Majoli is a Magnum photographer who has shot in China, the Congo, and Iraq, and he has won honors like U.S. National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism Magazine Photographer of the Year Award (boy do they need an acronym).

His tool of choice? A simple Olympus digital point and shoot.

Some of his photos and some elaboration on his techniques here.

Connor

Joannie and Mike were in Temecula this past weekend visiting the folks, so I went down to visit them all and check in on Connor who is now over a year old.

He's still a serious and cautious little guy, but we managed to get a few laughs out of him during the weekend. I learned that he enjoys walking up small hills and mounds. Up and down, up and down. And, for a minute or two, at least, he found the swing set amusing.

By the way, adjustment brushes in Adobe Lightroom 2? Awesome. Worth the price of the upgrade. How long, I wonder, before they migrate to Photoshop?

HD video from DSLRs

The Nikon D90 and the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (Canon's SLR names are way too convoluted) both shoot HD video in addition to serving as DSLRs.

But one problem of shooting HD video with a CMOS is that since there is no real shutter like on a motion picture camera, each "frame" is captured by simply capturing lots of images per second with that CMOS. If you read it 24 times a second, you get 24 frames.

But if the CMOS doesn't refresh fast enough and the camera moves while the CMOS is refreshing, the bottom of the CMOS might be reading part of the image from a different time than the top of the CMOS, and that rolling shutter produces a bad motion wobble or skew (what Jim Jannard calls "jelly movement") as in this sample video footage from the D90.

Here are some sample unmodified Quicktime movie files from the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Suffice it to say no serious filmmaker will be throwing away a camcorder after purchasing either of these DSLRs (unless that child you're filming doesn't move much; what, little kids run around?).

I'm sure they're fine still cameras, though. So few people make large prints anymore, so digital SLR resolution has been sufficient for their primary purposes: web galleries, 4x6 prints.

Filter madness

What happens if you take a normal picture and then apply every Photoshop filter to it, one after another?

Red working on a DSLR competitor

After taking on the motion picture camera industry, Red is now coming after Nikon and Canon with a DSLR replacement targeted for late 2009. They're calling it a DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera), which brings to mind the recently announced Nikon D90.

What is the Red DSMC? No one knows yet. Jim Jannard says its the product in their pipeline that he's most excited about.

Intriguing.

Tech product reviews: Kodak Zi6, Microsoft Photosynth

Positive review of the Kodak Zi6, which is the little handheld video camera that's like the Flip except it shoots HD (720p up to 60fps).

I'm curious about the audio quality, but I have a Flip, and if the Zi6 combines the Flip's simplicity of use and portability with HD quality it seems like a handy little gadget. Not even film school students and camera snobs always want to deal with busting out a full-sized camera and pro-level gear.

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Walt Mossberg reviews the upcoming Microsoft Live Labs release of Photosynth (releases this Thursday to the public for free). The demo seems to have floated around for years, and I'd long since given up hope of seeing it in the wild (when's the last time anything from Microsoft Labs made it into the public?). So to hear it will be released as a website for free for anyone to use is a pleasant surprise.

Mossberg has mostly positive things to say. Sadly, the Mac version is not ready yet, so it's Windows only for now.

I've been testing this service for about a week, and while it has its flaws, I believe that Photosynth offers a dramatic new way to use your photos and to share them with others.

Photosynth works within a Web browser, using a small plug-in you install. Currently, it works only in Windows, using Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser or its rival, Firefox. A Macintosh version is in the works, but for now, you can't even view others' synths in the Mac operating system.

When Photosynth works right, the results are wonderfully satisfying. But it takes some skill to get a set of photos the service can match up well, a quality Microsoft calls being "synthy." Ideally, portions of each slice of a 3-D scene should show up in at least three photos, with 50% overlap between them. After you upload your pictures and Photosynth does its best to make them into a 3-D scene, the service assigns them a percentage number that indicates how synthy they were.

Interestingly, you can only run Photosynth on a Mac if it's running Windows XP or Vista via Boot Camp, not via Parallels or VMWare Fusion. The error message if you try to use Photosynth on a Mac:

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet.

8 short notes on the day of Phelps' 8th gold medal

You wouldn't think a man would have much leisure time in a race in which he sets a new world record of 9.69 seconds, but Usain Bolt had enough of a lead at the end of the men's 100-meter dash to blow out finger pistols, flash Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella triangle hand sign, and check his watch.

If I were racing against him, I'd be intimidated just seeing "Bolt" on the back of his jersey.

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I thought I saw Michael Phelps ride across the pool to his last medal ceremony standing on the backs of two dolphins, holding a trident.

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I was wondering about something at dinner yesterday and saw that someone else had asked Marginal Revolution the same thing: for such a populous country, why has India won so few Olympic medals?

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Visual evidence that Nikon has made a huge comeback against Canon in the professional sports photography market. Look at the lenses in this shot of the press photography area at the Olympics.

Black lenses are likely Nikon's mounted on D3's, while the light gray lenses are the Canons that used to dominate.

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Is it worth carrying an airline-mile credit card? Probably not unless you are a big-spending, high-flying, elite status traveler. I ditched mine several years ago in favor of various cashback cards.

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Is it really possible Anthony Lane didn't know right away which actor was playing Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder? From his review:

He is a doughy, balding monster with big spectacles and even wider hand gestures, all his power distilled into profanity: a grotesque update, if you will, on the movie executive with the shock of white-hot hair, brought to life by Rod Steiger, in “The Big Knife,” more than fifty years ago. It took me half the running time to realize who was playing this new beast, and it was only his voice that triggered the recognition; I suspect that there will be gasps during the end credits, as people see his name and find themselves rethinking the whole movie, marvelling at what could have inspired so stiff an actor to unfurl and bounce around.

Roger Ebert also thinks some people will not recognize the actor behind this cameo:

The movie is a send-up of Hollywood, actors, acting, agents, directors, writers, rappers, trailers and egos, much enhanced by several cameo roles, the best of which I will not even mention. You’ll know the one, although you may have to wait for the credits to figure it out.

Really? I think most every person in the theater will know who it is right away.

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As if it wasn't already hard enough to tell what people really look like from their carefully chosen and touched-up Facebook profile photos, soon we may all have access to software that can automatically enhance facial attractiveness. This SIGGRAPH paper discusses the technique and shows some results which were validated by independent ratings.

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Ah, only in Texas.

Literally, a photo finish

Sports Illustrated has a series of photos showing just how close Milorad Cavic came to upsetting Michael Phelps in the 100-meter butterfly yesterday. It's easy to see why, to some outside the pool, it looked like some conspiracy that Phelps won. He was so far behind before that final half-stroke that chopped the wall that it looked like an error when they superimposed that #1 graphic in his lane on TV.

I don't understand the advantages of wearing the high neck Speedo LZR Racer suit versus just the legskin, but I wonder why Phelps only wore the legskin for this swim, and whether that would have made a difference. Cavic wore the high neck bodyskin.

Fail

When I saw this photo of Spain's Olympic basketball team making slanted eyes in an ad, I thought there couldn't be any possible way they could have known what that gesture meant. How could anyone be so blatantly racist? I haven't seen that gesture since the playground days in elementary school, and the feeling it evokes has evolved. Then, it stung. Now, it angers.

But the Spaniards have not apologized, and participants like Pau Gasol are quoted saying, "It was supposed to be a picture that inspired the Olympic spirit."

Huh?!?

Jason Kidd is right, if the U.S. team had done something like that, David Stern would have disciplined them. But no one, not even FIBA, has done anything, not even a public rebuke.

I'm rooting for the U.S. Olympic hoops team to remedy this by meeting Spain in the finals and kicking their asses up and down the floor.

Babar's USA

A photo of mine, one of the Hollywood sign, appears in this Babar children's book, and it's on the cover, too.

I don't get anything if you buy the book, but I was happy to contribute because, well, you know, I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.

Sure, Whitney Houston sang it, but I live it.

How artists work

A long set of links to articles or interviews in which various artists describe how they work.

Opening Ceremony: The Big Picture

Was hoping The Big Picture would cover the Olympics Opening Ceremony, and they did.

Best. Opening. Ceremony. Ever.

Related: Some of these photos by Li Wei remind me of moments from the Opening Ceremony.

That intersection

No spoilers. In The Dark Knight, there's one scene in which some vehicles go from traveling above ground in Chicago to a down ramp that takes them to the underground street levels in the loop. If you've seen the movie you'll probably know which scene.

I stood out there a few years ago and took a long exposure picture of that ramp down to lower Wacker Street. I recognized it in the movie because of the Lyric Opera sign.

PDN Photo Annual 2008

The PDN Photo Annual is always worth flipping through for some photographic inspiration.

"The Last Lace-Up"

Image by Kelly Shimoda for the NYTimes for an article on 66 year old Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights, which closed last year.

Nikon vs Canon

James Duncan Davidson writes about Nikon's comeback versus Canon in the battle for digital SLR market supremacy. The first salvos were Nikon's release of the D3 and D300, and now it's the D700. And sometime later this year, perhaps the D3X. Meanwhile, after years of seemingly being always a step ahead of Nikon, Canon is suffering a tough year.

The truth is that for the average photographer who has committed to either Nikon or Canon, switching is possible but a hassle, especially with a significant lens investment. You can sell your lenses and camera body on eBay and cross brand lines, but for most people the hassle of doing so and learning new controls would be prohibitive. And on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't really matter.

The biggest advance with the new Nikon FX sensor SLRs is the low-light performance. Not having to use a flash except for fill is life-changing.

Connor attacks

With my Achilles on the mend, my nephew Connor is racing me to be the first to walk.

Style icons

June 14 weekend I was in Chicago for Jae and Esther's wedding and to visit with Joannie and Mike, who were moving back to Chicago, and Karen, who was in town for a wedding also.

Here are some pics from Jae and Esther's wedding which was held in Woodstock, a town I haven't visited since I was in grade school, when a family friend used to live out there. The wedding was held on Esther's parents apple orchard.

My favorite photo of the weekend came from a table setting and was of Esther's parents James and Ae Soon. James, in Seoul, looked up Ae Soon, a nurse, for a hospital tour.

If you look at the photo below, it's no surprise that they were married three years later, in 1976. His generous shirt collar coming out to grab some sun, his left hand on his belt, his right hand casually tucked behind her waist--he's the Korean Stetson man. She's rocking the stylish specs and hip handbag, and her expression says she's not playing second fiddle.

Seeing this photo I just feel like going shopping.

Dream portrait assignment

If I were Annie Leibovitz, or Richard Avedon, or some other photographer to the stars, and I was offered the opportunity to shoot any TV characters, I'd want to photograph Jamie Hector, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and Felicia Pearson, AKA Marlo Stanfield, Chris Partlow, and Snoop from The Wire.

Just three fantastic faces.

Innovators and innovation

Lots about innovation this past week. The May 12 edition of The New Yorker was the Innovators Issue, and one of the better ones in recent memory.

It features an article by Malcolm Gladwell, ostensibly about Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, a sort of idea-generating patent-filing machine, but really about the radical idea that innovation or innovative ideas may not be as rare as we think, may not be the result of genius and eureka moments. Can you capture innovation or ideas merely by dedicating time and resources to searching for them?

The issue also features a profile of someone who I've never heard of but whose work I've undoubtedly seen dozens if not hundreds of times: Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost digital retoucher of fashion photographs.

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs.

I'm aware that most fashion photographs are worked over in post-production, but seeing an example of Dangin's work in the actual print copy of the issue surprised me with how much he actually alters body parts and features. Manipulating the truth, or giving the public what it wants?

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Also profiled: Grant Achatz, head chef at Alinea, one of the more famous restaurants in America, and perhaps the most famous outpost of the molecular gastronomy movement in the U.S. I ate at Moto many years ago, just before Alinea was set to open, and already there was a several month waiting list for Grant Achatz's first restaurant of his own.

Achatz is trying to fight his way back from tongue cancer, a particularly devastating illness for someone who depends so heavily on his sense of taste. I'd still love to eat at Alinea which, along with French Laundry and El Bulli, are the three restaurants that top my dining hitlist.

Achatz is putting out the Alinea Book, a cookbook, this fall.

Lastly, and not from The New Yorker, was this popular article (free registration required to read it) from McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Pixar's Brad Bird about how he and Pixar foster innovation.

A great interview, from which a few points stood out to me.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

This is true in so many walks of life, from the office to the film set to the locker room. What's difficult about achieving this, though, is that it's so easy for senior management/directors/coaches to be oblivious to the morale of their companies/cast and crew/teams. This is perhaps most true for the business leader.

The very nature of being senior management insulates one from the troops. The most common shape of a modern business org. structure is a pyramid, which is designed for efficiency of downward communication, but not for the reverse. CEO's sit in gilded offices on the top floor of ivory towers, and access to them is restricted by intimidating assistants. The power structure in companies means that even if morale is down, no one lower down on the org. structure is likely to be honest in front of the CEO or the head of their division for fear of being seen as a malcontent.

It's a real challenge. It's not easy for the top dog to be just "one of the guys" to use an old and somewhat sexually dated saying. I'm reminded of Henry V in Shakespeare's play, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, disguising himself as a commoner and walking around his camp to both gauge and raise the morale of his men. He does so with the recognition that it's the only way his men will speak honestly with him. In fact, the first question posed to Henry V as he wanders in disguise is from a sentinel, Pistol:

Discuss unto me; art thou officer?
Or art thou base, common and popular?

It's an interesting choice of words, "common and popular," and it speaks to the difficulty of being both powerful and popular, derived from the Latin populus for "the people."

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

On the Hulu development team, we've tried to counteract both the insulation and communication issue by all sitting in one communal cube farm. Everyone, regardless of title, has the same setup. So far it's worked out great.

First of all, there's a collegial feeling fostered by all sitting together. Communication is sped up; rather than fire off e-mails, many exchanges can be handled by simply strolling a few feet to a colleague's cube, or just by swiveling a chair. News travels really really fast in dev heaven, the nickname of our little office neighborhood. Many times, one of us overhears a conversation between some colleagues and can jump in with a suggestion or solution.

If our setup weren't enough to encourage interaction among the team, we also set up central snack or food areas in the center of dev heaven to encourage more foot traffic and casual encounters. We keep several rolling whiteboards in the area to allow for quick, mobile meetings or brainstorms.

We keep one or two communal offices nearby for those times when people need to do jump on conference calls or make personal calls. It's not the conventional setup for development teams, what with Peopleware extolling the virtue of private offices for every developer, or even for normal companies, but in a startup that needs to stay nimble and move quickly, it's been a plus for us.

One last point from the Brad Bird interview:

Brad Bird: Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Amen.

Extra extra

Interesting rumor: 24.4MP Nikon D3 replacement on the way? Or are some D3s 24.4MP cameras in waiting?

Unused script by Michael Chabon for Spiderman 2. (UPDATE: link to the full script PDF was removed, sadly)

New York state passes bill forcing Amazon.com to start charging New Yorkers sales tax. Ouch.

Steven Spielberg acquires the rights to make a 3-D live action version of Ghost in the Shell.

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

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A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

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PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Misc

Who is Jimmy Carter endorsing? Seems pretty clear it's Obama.

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Is it possible to go out both with a whimper and a bang? This may be the business equivalent. RIP ATA and your dirt cheap airfares which I've taken advantage of a few times over the years.

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One of the cooler hacks I've encountered recently: hack your portable Canon digital camera to enable new functionality like RAW file formats, live historgram displays, unlimited interval shooting, high speed shutters, and much more. I'm so going to do this once I can track down a card reader.

Happy birthday Sadie!

I was shooting a classmate's film recently, and there's a line in her script about how the first ten years of your life go by slowly, but every decade after seems to accelerate. There's something to that.

I remember Sadie turning 1 and trying ice cream for the first time, and now she's 5 and ready to enter kindergarten. Meanwhile, the last 4 years of my life are smeared across my memory like some broad, impressionistic paint stroke.

I think we get along because she reminds me of me as a kid, somewhat shy.

Technorati Tags: photo, birthday, sadie

Bershon

It's wonderful when you discover that there's a single word for something that, until that moment, you could only describe with many words. The word crystallizes it, makes it singular and whole, and gives the feeling or phenomenon some permanence.

Sarah Brown introduced the blogosphere to the term and defined it thus:

...the spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers’, was permanently frozen in this expression.

A beautiful description, but if you're still unclear on the concept, the Flickr group I'm so Bershon will more than clear things up for you.

Connor

Connor makes you earn his smiles, so we document each of them with great care.

Technorati Tags: connor, photo

Some random links perused over the holidays

Tyler Cowen lists policy areas in which his views are uncertain. It's refreshing that even an economist of his stature can admit that he is uncertain on so many issues. Cowen links to Arnold Kling's list of what he is certain about.

Vladimir Putin is Time's Man of the Year? Interesting.

RIP Borat, RIP Ali G. May you live on through the annoying and lousy impersonations of thousands of young males across the world.

Google, without asking permission, decides to share all your shared items in Google Reader with all of your GMail contacts.

Warner joins the DRM-free movement at Amazon's MP3 store.

M. Night Shyamalan has another of those twist movies in the works, releasing next June: The Happening.

Sleeveface is the art of augmenting the art on a record sleeve with your own body. You can't do that with a CD cover, unless, of course, you are a really small person.

Holiday spirit

When young children ask me if Santa exists, I reply, "Yes, of course. He works for Coca Cola."

Technorati Tags: photo, christmas, santa

Ivy

Ivy auditioning for a future role as the ingenue. She has grown up so quickly from a tiny baby into the cutest, sweetest little girl. Poor Jason is going to have his hands full when his angels reach their teenage years.

Technorati Tags: photo, ivy

Connor

I visited Connor in DC the weekend after Thanksgiving. He is a mellow kid whose smiles are fleeting, but thanks to high speed continuous frame rate shooting modes on my digital SLR, I was able to capture a few or his elusive expressions of happiness.

By the way, you do not want to get into a staring contest with Connor, he will wait you out until your eyes are watering something fierce. He has an amazing poker face, and I expect we'll be sending him to Uncle James at an early age to begin his training.

Technorati Tags: connor, photo

Available light photos shot at high ISO on Nikon D3

Via Daring Fireball is this post with some JPEGs of pics shot in available light at high ISO using the new Nikon D3.

It's a bit hard to tell for sure because the photos aren't blown up larger, but even so, compared to previous Nikon digital SLRs, the noise levels at these ISO's are unbelievably low. For photographing weddings, as this lucky photographer did, the D3's high ISO performance will be an unbelievable boon. Concert photography will really benefit, too. Goodness gracious.

Technorati Tags: camera, photo, photography, Nikon

Smile

My nephew Connor is learning to smile, a welcome feature to go along with his high decibel crying. Too cute. I wish I could be there for firsts like this, but until then, I must make do with the occasional photos from out East.

I wonder if I can make him smile through a video chat.

Technorati Tags: connor, photo

D3...serious hotness

Workaround for sending MMS messages using your iPhone. The iPhone camera isn't that hot, but sometimes you just want to send a photo to someone on the spot. Being able to send a photo of decent quality to someone instantaneously using whatever you used to snap the photo is one of those things I would have thought would be commonplace by now, but it's not. Some people have camera phones, but the photo quality is terrible. Others have decent phone cameras, but then the recipient can't view the photo in high resolution. Or you have a digital camera that doesn't have wireless access and a keyboard for typing in contacts.

Speaking of cameras, Nikon and Canon continue to pound the living daylights out of each other on the digital SLR cage fight. Canon introduced the EOS 1DS Mark III, with a 21-megapixel full frame sensor. Today, Nikon came back with the D3, with a near full-frame sensor (a first for Nikon in its digital SLR line), but more importantly, a max ISO rating of 25,600, or "64X what was commonly regarded as high-speed film." It shoots up to 9 frames per second with Autofocus tracking and up to 11fps without.

ISO 25,600? Criminy, that thing will see in the dark. 11 fps? HDMI video output? A virtual horizon function which lets you know when the camera is perfectly level? a 920K dot LCD?!

Once you start collecting some lenses by either Nikon or Canon, it's tough to justify switching, and both are close enough in performance that there's no reason to. But I'd been jealous of Canon's full-frame sensors on its digital SLRs. When Canon announced the 21MP 1DS MKIII, I was a bit envious, but the features on the D3 are much more exciting to me than the 21MP's. That ISO setting, if it's actually usable, may mean leaving your flash at home for so many more situations. Even if it relies on some digital voodoo like the D2X required to reach ISO 1600, the D3 has a still impressive 6,400 top end ISO if you don't resort to digital shenanigans.

Also, the Canon 1DS MKIII costs a jaw-dropping $8,000. Yes, it may perform at medium format quality levels, but at that price you could just buy a medium format camera.

Check out the DPReview preview of the D3 which streets in November. Here's Ken Rockwell's preview.

I wet my pants reading about the D3. All I can say is me...want...now. If I get one, I'm going to set it next to my iPhone in the hopes they mate and spawn some of the sexiest gadgets ever.

Also among the Nikon announcements: an AF-S 14-24mm f2.8 lens. I want one of those, too, as Nikon has really been lacking in the wide-angle lens category for its digital SLRs because of the multiplication factor on its previous sensors.

A photo of mine in Travel + Leisure

A picture I snapped while in Dubrovnik, Croatia last summer appears on page 158 of the Aug. 2007 issue of Travel + Leisure, on newsstands near you. It's a cropped version of the pic below of the Buza bar which hangs on the side of the cliffs outside the city walls. I've had a few pics in magazines before, but they were mostly cycling pictures in odd European magazines I'd never heard of. This one comes with a paycheck which counts at some sort of mini-milestone.

I don't get anything if you buy the magazine, but I picked up a copy for posterity's sake and it looks to be a useful issue for travelers as it features their annual World's Best Awards.

I highly recommend Dubrovnik. I meant to write about it after the trip but I was having too much fun just traveling, and then I got back and school started, and now it resides in my brain as a happy memory, one that triggers a smile whenever I jab it. Dubrovnik is the choice for Europeans when they want to get away for a vacation and hide from the hordes or summer tourists descending on their hometowns.

Derek and I had just finished our Eastern European travels when I left for Dubrovnik where I was to meet up with Jason and family. On arriving at my hotel, I took a bus into town. Jason and I'd loosely agreed over e-mail to meet at an Internet bar outside city walls. Even so, there's something special when it works out in a foreign country, when you can't just call each other up over a cell phone (is this how we had to meet up in the days before mobile phones?).

I was walking up to the cafe when a newly shorn Jason called out to me on the sidewalk. He'd already been there a night or two, and the first stop he took me was Buza bar. We sat down on the balcony (if you look at my photo below, we were sitting at the open table that's just above the guy in the blue shirt on the steps) to catch up over a beer. The Buza is rumored to be a favorite of folks like Bill Gates when they're in town. Looking out on the ocean with the crisp air brushing past my face, an ancient castle city above my head, and an ice cold Eastern European lager in my hand, I couldn't help but think it was one of the truly epic bars in the world.

Technorati Tags: photo, photography, travel

Two for Tuesday

Trailer for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman).

I saw a demo of Microsoft Labs' Photosynth a long time ago. It looked amazing, and now it's in beta. Unfortunately for me it only works for Windows Vista or XP users running IE or Firefox, but if I qualified I'd be putting it through its paces.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, photography, software, trailer

Spiderman the musical?!

Marvel is in pre-production on Spider-Man the musical, to be directed by Tony-winner Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge.

Nice Flickr collection of the evocative name placards on apartment complexes here in Santa Monica. I agree with the photographer - these are the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise fugly apartment architecture ubiquitous in Santa Monica (and Los Angeles in general). You've never seen so much stucco and old shag carpet.

Kaoru Kubo is the famous voice heard on Airport Limousine buses ferrying passengers from Narita Airport to Tokyo. Very soothing.

A montage of beautiful title sequences by Kuntzel+Deygas who did the titles for Catch Me If You Can, among others.

Classified government report says Al-Qaeda is the strongest it's been since 9/11. How did this country ever elect Dubya? Perhaps Bryan Caplan is right.

Technorati Tags: LA, musical, photography, politics, travel

The fabled f1.2 58mm

Every now and then, though not often, a Nikon 58mm f1.2 AI-S lens comes up for bid. Oh baby do I lust after one of these.

Technorati Tags: camera, gadgets, lens, photography, nikon

Required a not-so-modest amount of work

[via Photojojo] A couple Modest Mouse fans got together and entered a stop motion video in the band's "Missed the Boat" contest. They printed out each of the 4,133 frames of footage provided by the band and then incorporated those printouts in stills shot on their digital SLR which were then fused into this video. Very clever. This required a huge amount of work--I sure hope those guys won the contest.

Technorati Tags: music, photography, video, youtube

iPhone--it was who we thought it was

David Pogue publishes the first official iPhone review I've seen yet in the NYTimes. Very comprehensive and worth reading for all who want a balanced report from someone who's tested it firsthand. Some highlights and lowlights:

• the glass screen doesn't scratch easily though it smudges
• the software is fast and beautiful and simple to use
• the phone is fun to use; once you buy the phone, you choose your phone plan at home in iTunes
• call quality is average and dependent on your AT&T signal strength
• e-mail and the web browser are great, and so is the battery life (Pogue suspects you'll recharge once every other day); however, someday the battery loses its charge and will have to be sent to Apple for replacement
• no chat program, voice dialing, or memory card slot
• you can't install programs from anyone other than Apple
• web browser can't handle Java or Flash
• the 2MP camera is good, but only for motionless, well-lit subjects, and it doesn't capture video or send MMS photos (i.e., picture messages). =(
• a biggie: typing on the screen keyboard can be frustrating, and Pogue doesn't see it besting the BlackBerry on that front
• the biggest issue all along for me is confirmed, to my dismay: AT&T's network is lousy
• the EDGE network is super slow; web browsing will be painful

After the crush of hype, it turns out most of what was rumored and suspected about the device turns out to be true. Since I always carry my iPod and cell phone with me, the iPhone is attractive as a way to consolidate gadgets, and it sure would be great to get the real-time traffic reports via Google Maps here in eternally-congested LA. However, I had such a lousy experience with AT&T (in its Cingular guise) that I feel comfortable not waiting in line on Friday. I really wish Apple had found a better partner for this venture.

UPDATE: Walt Mossberg has his review of the iPhone up now as well. Here are some of his thoughts, which confirm my worst fear, that the iPhone is held back by being tethered to AT&T's network (when it isn't connected via wi-fi). Overall, he still liked it, but like Pogue, notes that it isn't a grand slam:

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.
The Apple phone combines intelligent voice calling, and a full-blown iPod, with a beautiful new interface for music and video playback. It offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone, and robust email software. And it synchronizes easily and well with both Windows and Macintosh computers using Apple’s iTunes software.

It has the largest and highest-resolution screen of any smart phone we’ve seen, and the most internal memory by far. Yet it is one of the thinnest smart phones available and offers impressive battery life, better than its key competitors claim.

It feels solid and comfortable in the hand and the way it displays photos, videos and Web pages on its gorgeous screen makes other smart phones look primitive.

The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks. When you have access to Wi-Fi, the iPhone flies on the Web. Not only that, but the iPhone automatically switches from EDGE to known Wi-Fi networks when it finds them, and pops up a list of new Wi-Fi networks it encounters as you move. Walt was able to log onto paid Wi-Fi networks at Starbucks and airports, and even used a free Wi-Fi network at Fenway Park in Boston to email pictures taken during a Red Sox game.

But this Wi-Fi capability doesn’t fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability, because it is impractical to keep joining and dropping short-range Wi-Fi networks while taking a long walk, or riding in a cab through a city.

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Short interview with Atul Gawande in the Freakonomics blog.

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Today is the day of silence for Pandora and other Internet radio sites to protest the increase in licensing fees for online radio (a move driven in large part by the RIAA). Save Net Radio!

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The Beastie Boys' are on Flickr.

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Paul Shirley, having played with both Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, assesses the possibility of the two of them playing on the same team:

Having spent a similar amount of time in the semi-intimate company of both men, I can say confidently that two people couldn't be more different. Kevin Garnett is one of the most impressive humans I've ever been around.

Kobe Bryant isn't.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, camera, flickr, gadgets, gawande, medicine, mobile, music, NBA, nytimes, phone, photography, pogue, puppy, radio, review, sports

Some footage from My Blueberry Nights

First trailer I've seen for My Blueberry Nights. You can find lots of stills from the movie if you click on the pic below and register on the forums at KFCCinema.com. I worry about the pic as it's WKW's first effort in English, and because the only time I saw Norah Jones in concert she seemed to withdraw under the gaze and attention of the crowd. But some directors you follow wherever they go.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, photo, trailer, video, wkw

Little bit of that

Seeing beyond sight: photos by blind teenagers.

It's been apparent to everyone that this season of 24 has been the worst yet. I gave up on it a few episodes in. The good thing is that low ratings have forced the show producers to take notice.

The Golden Ratio for making your butt look great is being employed by a jeans mfr called The Proportion of Blu:

I used to think those commercials by Citicard about credit card theft, where a criminal's voice would play over the lip movements of an old lady or other credit fraud victim were quite remarkable, the lip matching was so perfect. Then I used VocAlign with Pro Tools at school and realized it wasn't that technically difficult to pull off after all.

Now that the whole HD-DVD code story is a day old, the hot blogosphere story of the day seems to be this article in the NYTimes which cites an economic study (PDF) by Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price finding evidence of racial bias among NBA refs, namely that white refs call fouls at a higher rate against black players than against white players. The NBA did their own study that they claim shows that refs are not biased, but their refusal to release the underlying data from their study really weakens their position. Steven Levitt looked over the Wolfers/Price paper and found it sound. I suspect that if you'd asked a bunch of NBA fans and observers beforehand if they'd expect the study to find bias, and if so, how much bias they'd expect, they'd come up with numbers higher than Wolfers and Price found in their study. In other words, the study isn't that shocking.

Technorati Tags: book, economics, fashion, math, NBA, photography, race, software, tv, video, youtube

I'm still alive

Winter quarter, first year film school, they own me. Just two more weeks to go, though, and I'll be back to a more humane schedule. For now, though, immersion is the word that comes to mind. Cheers.

Adobe plans to offer an ad-supported online version of Photoshop within the next half year. That's a better idea than Photoshop Elements, the neutered version of Photoshop. It will be interesting to compare revenues from Photoshop Elements (most of which is probably a bounty paid to Adobe by other companies who bundle PS LE in with their products) with ad revenues from an online version of Photoshop.

If you want to shoot slow motion, it's best to do it "in camera" as opposed to in post in Final Cut Pro or some other editing software. To see why, watch this video displaying the results side by side.

Fascinating article in this week's NYTimes Magazine about the quest for an evolutionary explanation for the belief in God.

Useful tips from a former Verizon sales rep.

A great tip to speed up Apple Mail, and a follow-up on how to automate that process.

Final Cut Pro 6 on slate to be announced at NAB. Also rumored is Final Cut Extreme, a hardware-accelerated version of Apple's video editing software to compete with Avid. A few years from now, an interesting HBS case study can be written on the battle between Apple and Avid in the non-linear editing market.

Ouch.

Technorati Tags: adobe, anthropology, Apple, cinematography, email, evolution, film, Mac, mail, photo, photography, photoshop, howto, software, tech, tech, traffic, video, web

Trams

I like this photographed painting "Trams" by Andre von Morisse.

Technorati Tags: art, painting, photo, photography

grab bag

Fun surrealist photography by chema madoz.

Another cautionary report on global warming. It doesn't seem like the argument is about whether or not global warming is occurring anymore, but instead about how severe and sudden the consequences will be.

Photos of tin tabernacles.

Some mischievous pop art paintings, e.g. a Brokeback-esque Batman and Robin.

Technorati Tags: globalwarming, photo, photography, art, weather

2-Double-0-Seven

In this week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell examines the difference between a puzzle and a mystery and argues that Enron's business model and much of what U.S. foreign intelligence face today are more mystery than puzzle. To solve a puzzle, you simply need more information, but more information may only add complexity to a mystery.

Also in this week's New Yorker (a good one), David Denby does a diagnostic of Hollywood, the state of the business. The article makes mention, at the end. of the ArcLight, perhaps the nicest multiplex in the country, at least in terms of sight and sound.

Most sports fans already saw the highlights, but for the few who didn't, Boise State won the Fiesta Bowl using, among other trick plays, a Hook-and-Ladder and a Statue of Liberty play. Here's another angle which also includes the following: after scoring the game-winning 2-pt conversion, Ian Johnson ran over and proposed to his girlfriend, a cheerleader. He converted that one, too. Just an unbelievable game, maybe the most entertaining college football game I've ever seen. Here's a compilation clip of all of the 4th quarter and OT highlights. (Sorry about the clip quality--YouTube and its Flash video is really suboptimal for sports clips; let's hope that by the end of 2007 there's a high quality video streaming site for sports highlights).

The Apple menu command key comes from a Swedish symbol used to indicate interesting attractions in campgrounds.

How do you like your coffee? With a mushroom cloud drop of milk, please. Cool photo.

100 things we didn't know last year. "In a fight between a polar bear and a lion, the polar bear would win."

I'm not usually one to make New Year's resolutions, and after being named Time's Person of the Year in 2006, I'm facing some brutal year over year comps, but one goal I have for 2007 is to be carbon neutral. It was easy to do while in NYC, when I took public transportation everywhere, but it will be a challenge in LA. There are a variety of Carbon Calculators on the web if you want to participate. It has been so warm in NYC this holiday break. Pieces of arctic ice shelf are breaking off or just plain melting. It feels to me as if the impacts of global warming will descend upon us quickly, perhaps not as quickly as this, but quickly enough that it's perhaps already too late for us to act. One way to start is by purchasing compact fluorescent bulbs to replace the incandescents you likely have in your household. I don't love the light of compact fluorescents, but I'm going to try living with it.

Technorati Tags: apple, design, environment, football, gladwell, globalwarming, photography, green, sports

Twas two nights before 2007

The NYTimes 2006 Year in Pictures.

After seeing Pan's Labyrinth, I couldn't help thinking of Insect Lab, a studio which combines dead insect bodies with antique watch parts and electronic components.

Okay, so NYC is not perfect. One problem being that is populated by lots of people like this.

LifeHack's 50 best hacks for your life from 2006.

Technorati Tags: hacks, insect, nyc, photo, photography

Among the many similarities between me and 007

The black and white sequence at the start of Casino Royale was shot on Kodak's Double-X film stock. That's the same film stock I shot my first quarter student project on (The 35mm version of Double-X, used in the Bond movie, is Kodak product code 5222, and the 16mm version, which I used, is 7222).

I was after a particular look, especially given that my location, a cafeteria on campus, wasn't exactly the most gorgeous setting. Double-X allowed me to work around the drab colors inside, and the film stock handled hot sunlight with aplomb. Shooting with the Double-X also allowed my makeup artist to achieve a dramatic, almost vampire-like contrast for my actress' face, the pale skin accented by near ebony eye shadow and lipstick.

One movie I had in mind when thinking about how I wanted to shoot my movie was John Cassavetes' Faces, also shot largely on Double-X. I had my DP shoot handheld, and I tried on a smaller scale to have my actress channel the emotional instability of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence.

Another way I could have gone, especially if I'd wanted to preserve the option of showing my film in color, would have been to shoot on color stock and drain the color in post production. Some of my classmates shot on Kodak's Vision2 500T color film stock (5218). It's decently fast, simplifying the lighting, and if you're going to release the movie in B&W then you don't have to worry about the blue tint it will acquire when shooting in sunlight (the T after the 500 indicates that the film is designed to be shot under tungsten lights).

Good Night, and Good Luck was shot on 500T. Selling off the rights to a movie in Japan these days requires shooting in color, but that's not why they chose to do so on that movie. A lot of the sets, I've heard, were painted in shades of grey anyhow because Clooney knew he wanted the movie to remain B&W in every format.

Shooting color and and then desaturating in post is what many digital photographers do now. Shoot in color on your digital SLR, then use the channel mixer in Photoshop to create a black and white print. The only problem with that is that it's difficult to achieve the high contrast look and grain of shooting in B&W film in the first place. I find that many photographs shot this way contain too much in the midtones, requiring extra work in Photoshop. There's something ironic about trying to use cutting edge camera hardware and photography software to create the same look you could create with an older film camera and film stock with much less work.

Technorati Tags: film, filmschool, movies, photography

Wordloaf

Among the many cool-sounding shows I haven't had time to see recently is "All About Walken," a show featuring a bunch of Christopher Walken impersonators.

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta releases this Friday. Rumor has it that the Universal Binary will "scream" on the new Intel-based Macs.

Monthly upload bandwidth lifted from 20MB to 100MB for free accounts at Flickr. I though they should have lifted those a while ago, but better late than never.

I was fuming mad at the world today, well, mostly Bank of America for their shoddy (read: nonexistent) integration between branches in different states, and then I went back to watch episode 6 from this season's Simpsons, and by the end of the episode I was smiling again. Go grab a torrent. With guest appearances by Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen, and another comic turn by J.K. Simmons reprising his J. Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman movies, it's an instant classic. And yes, I don't watch much TV anymore which is why I'm recommending an episode that aired sometime during the Kennedy administration.

Technorati Tags: animation, humor, photography, photoshop, simpsons, software, theater, tv

My nephews

From our family's Thanksgiving weekend gathering in Temecula.

Technorati Tags: nephews, Evan, Ryan, thanksgiving

Sundry

At Broad Nightlight is a small collection of nighttime photos of Berlin, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. What's peculiar about these is how few people are visible.

The upcoming issue of Wholphin will contain Alexander Payne's film school thesis, The Passion of Martin.

10 innovative ad campaigns in Tokyo train stations.

The Amazon plog for the book How Lance Does It contains some interesting points. In one post, author Brad Kearns quotes Dr. Glen Gaesser on how to identify the most talented athletes. Said Glaesser, "Go to a race and stand at the finish line. Then...see who crosses the line first. There is the most talented athlete." Kearns also writes a passionate post defending Lance Armstrong: Why Lance is Clean. But my favorite quote is about Lance's successful approach, and it's on the back cover. "Lance hates losing, but is not afraid of it." That sums up a lot of all-time greats in many sports (remember the Jordan Nike ad "Failure").

A man sold everything he owned, took the cash, and bet it all on one spin of roulette in Las Vegas. This is what happened.

It doesn't appear that this chair is available for purchase yet, but already I want one.

An interview with Eiko Tanaka of Studio4°C, the company in charge of adapting Taiyo Matsumoto's classic manga Tekkon Kinkreet into an animated feature.

Technorati Tags: advertising, animation, anime, Berlin, film, film school, filmmaking, gambling, gaming, goods, HongKong, Lance, manga, movies, photography, products, psychology, marketing, sports, Tokyo, travel

When You Were Young

My classmate sent me a link to these photos of animals in the womb. Stunning.

These are from an upcoming TV program Animals in the Womb which will air on the National Geographic Channel in the U.S. next month.

Technorati Tags: animals, photography, nature, science

We're on

The first three of my group's shoots were two weekends ago. We rotated through crew positions for each other, and I started out as the sound mixer. Consciously or not, I channeled the demeanor of other sound mixers I've seen on set before and spent most of my time with my headphones on, trying to stay out of the way of the gaffers and grips running around.

On the next shoot, I was the AD, a position which reminds me of program management in the technology world. As an AD, you spend most of your time running around keeping people on task, running a series of mental calculations to ensure the director gets all the shots needed in the time available. Most people don't like the AD, but there's an art to it. I enjoy the job in small doses, but it's not a position I aspire to. Since our first shoots are given a time and film constraint--from call time to wrap, we have four hours and four hundred feet of 16mm film--the AD has to be particularly tuned into where the shoot is in terms of film and time. Four hours has seldom felt shorter.

At the same time, all those years working at Amazon.com accustomed me to maintaining a certain zen-like focus in a maelstrom of stress and emotion. It's like trying to launch a website on time by facing down a series of bugs. Movies do not occur naturally; they require an infusion of directed human energy.

The third shoot came the same day as the second shoot and started in the evening. We were all running a bit on fumes by that point, but counteracting my exhaustion was a burst of adrenaline because I was DP'ing the shoot. If it's nerve-wracking the first time an AD calls the shoot and every one on set looks to you as the director for some answer, it's just as if not more intimidating to have the visuals of your classmate's directorial effort in your hands.

Up until each moment I turned on the camera, everything around me was a chaos of human activity. Lights going up, equipment and props swirling all around the sound stage, people shouting light meter readings, actors or boom operators asking questions. And then, when I flipped the Arriflex camera on, the gorgeous sound of the film being pulled through the gate would fill the air like a flock of birds taking flight, and all else would go quiet.

That chatter of film being pulled through a mechanical motion picture camera surely must be one of the most magical sounds in all of art, one of the beautiful pieces of analog feedback that's lost when shooting on video.

On my DP shoot, I had a taste of everything. The first shot was on a tripod. The second started on a high hat, but when that didn't work, I squeezed up against a wall and shot it handheld. Then I had a shot down from up on a catwalk, a PA holding onto me so that I wouldn't fall over and drop to the stage below.

The final shot, though, was a real doozy, or the coup de grace depending on how you looked at it. My classmate wanted a crane shot to descend from overhead onto a couple lying in bed, with the camera tilting and panning so that it ended up in a side profile shot from just off the side of the bed.

We didn't have a crane for this shot, so to simulate that we had to pop the bed upright and secure it to a wall. Then we staples the sheets and pillows to the bed and shifted all the wall dressing--photos, posters, a cross--to a false ceiling. Then the couple would stand up and act as if they were lying down, and to simulate the crane shot we'd dolly in at an angle and pan the camera as we moved in. It reminded me of what Michel Gondry did for much of his video for Massive Attack's "Protection."

We had about twenty minutes left when we finished the previous shot. I did not think there was any way we'd get the shot off, so I suggested just shooting a wide shot and then pushing in for a MS or CU so that she could just cut them together in the final edit. I didn't want her to have to live without any footage of her opening scene. But she believed we could get the dolly shot. She wanted us to go for it. Inside, I was glad. I wanted to try to get it.

The tech office had given us a special tripod head to mount the camera on horizontally, at a 90 degree angle. But try as we might, we couldn't get the tripod head to tighten on the camera. With ten minutes left, I suggested just shooting the shot handheld. But the director still had faith. We'll get it, she insisted. People were running around the set like villagers fleeing a horde of pillaging invaders, trying to set up lights and secure everything to the set.

With three minutes left, there was no time to fix the tripod head. I said I'd lay the camera on my shoulder. We threw the camera and tripod on the doorway dolly, and I jumped up beside it. We would not have time to rehearse. The gaffer shouted a couple quick light readings to me. I did some simple math in my head. The lighting was suitable for our T-stop. There was no room on the dolly for my AC, so I estimated the focus by eye and nodded to the director. This would be an all-or-nothing effort.

Everyone went silent, and then the director shouted "Action!" My dolly grip began pushing in, and I began panning with my right hand as we neared the bed, while with my left hand I pulled my own focus, trying to estimate how far to pull just by looking through the viewfinder. When we got all the way into the bed, I was twisted up like a pretzel, trying to maintain my balance and hold the camera still while the actors kissed and chatted on the bed.

"Cut!"

My director looked at me. Did we have time for one more take? The TA gave us the go-ahead, so we rushed the dolly back to one. And again, without slating, we rolled. My dolly grip pushed in, and I panned and pulled focus and tried to keep the camera steady on my shoulder. It was utterly insane, and completely exhilarating.

And then our time was up, our film was done, and we had no idea if we'd captured anything. I spent two and a half days feeling a bit cold inside, wondering if we'd gotten it. Had I pulled focus properly? Was the pan smooth? Did the shot really look as if it had come down from overhead?

A few days later, we gathered to watch the dailies from the first weekend's shoots. I was bouncing in my seat the whole time, waiting for the footage to come up on screen.

When the shoot I DP'd came up on screen, I felt a knot in my stomach as the grey card appeared. I'd never seen film I'd shot projected before. It was stomach turning both in a good and bad way. One thing I miss from the days of shooting film is that gap in time between taking a photo and getting the slides or contact sheet back from the lab. It's maddening, but if you feel like you got off a beauty, it's like waiting a few days to unwrap a Christmas present. During that time, it sits there all wrapped and pretty and full of possibility, and your imagination runs wild until you forget exactly what you shot so that when you finally see the finished product, it's a surprise again.

The other good thing about shooting film is that it forces you to think when you're framing. An entire generation is being raised on digital photography, using the camera and cheap memory cards to just snap one picture after another until the right one shows up on the LCD screen in back. That's fine, but it transforms photography into a brutish trial-and-error art, and it doesn't work well if you're trying to capture a fleeting moment.

That crazy dolly/pan/tilt shot? We got it. By some miracle, we managed to get the shot the director wanted. If you hadn't known what we'd done, it would appear as if we'd shot the scene from overhead. I felt sixteen levels of relief and two of joy when it appeared they'd be usable.

Next time it won't be quite so tense. But you can't ever match the rush of the first time.

Technorati Tags: film school, filmmaking, movies, photography

"The Hardest Button to Button"

Michel Gondry's video for the White Stripes' "The Hardest Button to Button" (Quicktime) was, as is par in Gondry's world, brilliant. The Simpsons' tribute to said video? Pretty damn good, too.

A team of Italians calling themselves HAL9000 has created an 8.6 gigapixel photograph of an Italian fresco by stitching together 1,145 pictures from a Nikon D2X. At 96,679 x 89,000 pixels, it's likely the largest digital image in the world, and on their website you can browse and zoom in on the image.

I know I'm late with this, but such is my school workload that I'm really out of it these days.: here's that controversial photo taken on 9/11 by Thomas Hoepker of Magnum Photos. Frank Rich wrote about it in the Times, then on Slate David Platz disagreed with Rich's interpretation, then two of the people in the photo wrote in to defend themselves against Rich and Hoepker's reading of the photo, and finally Hoepker himself weighed in. So in this case, a picture really was worth a thousand words or so.

1001 books you must read before you die--the list. Note that the book that the list is pulled from is not on the list itself, so it's a good thing the list is published on the web.

Hallelujah! Undercover Economist articles are finally available for free on the Financial Times website as of late September. Tim Harford is part of the transformation of economics into a sexy field.

How to turn your photos into Lichtenstein-esque pop art.

Moo

At long last, Verizon activated DSL at my apartment and I'm back online though it will take me a good week to catch up on e-mails. Actually, wiith seven classes and about 475 boxes to unpack, it may never happen. But I'll try.

***

Moo.com is offering the first 10,000 Flickr Pro users who respond 10 free MiniCards which are like business cards with one of your Flickr photos on one side and text on the other. For non-pro users it's $19.99 for a set of 100, and you can print a different photo on each card if you want.

Finally, I will have 10 business cards to pass out to all the new people I'm meeting here in LA.

***

Audrey sent me a link to this M&M Dark Chcolate product launch movie puzzle online. It's a poster with visual clues for 50 "dark" movies (horror, for example). Good fun, though I'll have to tackle this in earnest some other time when I have a free block of time (which, judging from my courseload, will be sometime in mid 2007).

Dark chocolate M&M's? Sounds tasty to me. I was a dark chocolate Kit Kat addict when those came out, and occasionally I still have to satisfy my cravings by sourcing them through eBay. Because dark chocolate melts at a higher temperature than regular chocolate, it can completely transform a once familiar candy, often in a wonderful way.

***

Cinematographer Style is a movie about, yes, cinematographers, following in the tradition of Visions of Light. Documentaries about filmmaking specialties seem to come in twos, e.g. The Cutting Edge and Edge Codes.com, both documentaries on editing. I was sad that I was unable to catch a screening of Cinematographer Style at the DGA theater in LA tonight. I just love this type of stuff, especially now that I'm in the biz, sort of.

***

Some economists surveyed 3,200 high school seniors and estimated which of two colleges students would choose if they were admitted to both. The resulting matrix is here. Harvard was the one university that won its head to head matchup with every other college in the survey.

A night of surprises

About a minute before I was due to enter the tent with the sister of the bride on my arm, one of the other groomsmen asked if any of us thought Mark would cry. I had seen him just a short while earlier, and he seemed calm. This is a guy I'd lined up with many times in college to play "no pads" tackle football, and I'd seen him hit people so hard that they were found wandering around campus muttering to themselves (true story; the guy Mark hit was later diagnosed with a concussion).

"I'll lay three to one odds against Mark crying," I said. "He'll be fine."

The wedding coordinator gave me the cue, and I entered the tent. I looked down the aisle to the front of the tent.

Mark was crying, and Howie was handing him a tissue.

"What the...holy...I lost already!" I whispered. His naked emotion seemed to shrink the tent, drawing all three hundred odd people in attendance into a tight emotional circle.

Thankfully no one took me up on my odds. I had about 78 cents in my pocket.

Last Wednesday, my last afternoon in New York City, I lingered with my nephew Ryan for too long and missed my train to Newark Airport. So I hopped in a cab and told him to floor it. Upon arrival, he announced the fare: with tip, it came to $65. I started counting the cash in my wallet. $67. I was leaving NYC with pockets turned out.

Back to the wedding. I continue to underestimate the magnitude of the wedding day, how it can overwhelm the hardest of souls. When I had a moment alone with Mark later, he confessed that seeing all those people from all over the world and from all the years of his life sitting out there, looking up at him, was overwhelming. No explanation needed, buddy.

Last night, I was up late chatting with Stacey, who I'd only met a few times before. She and Mark are the ones I'll lean on most in my transition to this new place, and having them close by is a real source of comfort.

She laughed at my lousy prognostication.

"I knew Mark would cry and that I wouldn't," she said. "Mark cries when he watches Extreme Home Makeover on HGTV."

One of the cool activities from their wedding was one of those old school photo booths, rented from Red Cheese. The line for that thing never dwindled, and even passive observers enjoyed watching the screen outside the booth to see what wacky poses were being struck inside the curtain. Everyone left with one or more of their four photos as a favor, leaving behind the others in a photo album for the bride and groom.

During the slideshow, we all witnessed something that was more surprising than the tears during the ceremony. Mixed in with some video footage of Mark playing safety in high school football, covering a wideout and running up to put a hit on a running back, a young, skinny guy appeared on screen. The footage was so desaturated as to be almost black and white.

Was that...no...it couldn't be...could it? Yes, it was a young, willowy Mark, twirling across the ice on skates, executing a spin, then releasing into a glide, arms floating up at his side. At some point in his youth, Mark was a figure skater? What the?

He's never going to hear the end of that.

Moving pictures

5 tips for being more photogenic.

How to make your own rotoscoped movie (like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly). This tutorial may sound labor intensive, but it's actually much less labor intensive than the way they animated the two Linklater movies. Unfortunately, the sample output from this tutorial shows that there is no real shortcut (for now) to achieving the psychedelic effects achieved in a movie like Waking LIfe, in which every frame was hand rotoscoped by animators. The slight imperfection in the edges from hand animation give every edge and surface that pulsating movement and life.

Japanese trailer for the two Clint Eastwood WWII movies coming out this fall and winter, The Flags of Our Fathers (October) and Red Sun, Black Sand (December). Both tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the former from an American perspective, the latter from a Japanese perspective. Flags of Our Fathers focuses on the lives of the six men who raised the American flag, an event immortalized in a Joe Rosenthal photograph, supposedly the most reproduced photograph in history.

Nikon D80

Nikon announced their latest digital SLR, the D80, which will be available in September 2006. 10.2 Megapixel, 3fps, 2.5" LCD, will retail for $999.95 without a lens. Throw in another $300 and you get a very useful kit lens, an AF-S DX 18-135mm F3.5 - F5.6G ED. This SLR looks to be the successor to the D70s. Unlike the D70/D70s, the D80 will be compatible with a vertical grip/battery pack, the MD-80. Just reading the specs, this camera looks pretty sweet, and it may eat into sales of the D200 which costs $700 more. The only bummer from my perspective is that they've shifted to using SD and SDHC cards instead of Compact Flash, so D70, D200, and D2 series Nikon users who grab a D80 will have to purchase yet another set of memory cards.

This review of fans is timely considering the heat wave that has swept across the U.S. this summer. The winner? The Bionaire Metal Tower Fan.

Places, spaces, races

Wal-Mart pulls out of Germany (thx to Derek for the pointer). Though Wal-Mart international is still the fastest growing segment of the behemoth of a retailer, it has learned that it's formula needs to be customized for specific markets.

In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

Wal-Mart’s German experience also taught it to use local management. The company initially installed American executives, who had little feel for what German consumers wanted.

“They tried to sell packaged meat when Germans like to buy meat from the butcher,” Mr. Poschmann said.

Some of Wal-Mart’s missteps — selling golf clubs in Brazil, where the game is unfamiliar, or ice skates in Mexico — are so frequently mentioned, they have become the stuff of urban legend. But even more subtle differences in shopping habits have tripped up the company.

In Korea, Wal-Mart’s stores originally had taller racks than those of local rivals, forcing shoppers to use ladders or stretch for items on high shelves. Wal-Mart’s utilitarian design — ceilings with exposed pipes — put off shoppers used to the decorated ceilings in E-Mart stores.

Beyond the ambience, Wal-Mart’s shoes-to-sausage product line does not suit the shopping habits of many non-American shoppers. They prefer daily outings to a variety of local stores that specialize in groceries, drugs or household goods, rather than shopping once a week at Wal-Mart.

“They have stacks of goods in boxes,” said Lee Jin Sook, 46, a housewife sitting on a subway in Seoul. “That may be good for some American housewives who drive out in their own cars.” But Koreans, she said, prefer smaller packages: “Why would you buy a box of shampoo bottles?”

Wal-Mart is also not the low-price leader in many international markets.

***

A preview of Mac OS X Leopard. Spaces will be useful for my multi-tasking work style, though I'm not sure I need anything to encourage my hyperlink-fueled attention-deficit disorder. And also from WWDC, the Mac Pro, which sounds like a worthy successor to the Powermac G5.

***

Magnum in Motion features multimedia essays from Magnum photographers. Here is one example, on the Tour de France, with some gorgeous black and white photos of France.

***

Forgot to post this last last week, when Ken pointed it out to me, but the FDA finally approved Mexoryl for use in the US. Mexoryl is the magic ingredient owned by L'Oréal that has made L'Oréal's international sunscreens more effective than US sunscreens at blocking short UVA waves. US residents went to great lengths to get their hands on L'Oréal sunscreens, from purchasing it from online Canadian pharmacies to paying three to four times the retail price to obtain it from certain Upper East Side drugstores in Manhattan.

The first L'Oréal product containing Mexoryl to be sold in the US will be Anthelios SX, a daily moisturizing cream. Look for it this fall. As noted previously here, you can also go with Neutrogena's new Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock or Age Shield Sunblock.

A/C, Tenacious D, Rainier C

Finally, I have air conditioning in my apartment again, and all is good again. A handy phrase to learn, one I learned from my sister, who is a lawyer, is "warrant of habitability."

Trailer for the upcoming Tenacious D movie The Pick of Destiny.

I found Rainier cherries for $2 a pound in Chinatown. They're my favorite, the queen of cherries, but seemingly not as widely known here on the East coast. Some people I've spoken to here think they're discolored Bing cherries.

Sometimes, mainstream media is late to cover topics, like the NYTimes here on HDR photography.

Photosynth

Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Live Labs, looks very cool. It's a bit difficult to explain, but it can take multiple photos of a place and build a 3-d model of that location using the photos. Then it places those photos back into the 3-d model so you can explore the scene using the photos. This video does a better job of explaining the technology.

At Eric and Christina's wedding, they printed out flash cards with vector art cartoon pics of each of them for a game we played during the reception. They used a technology from Microsoft Research that can create vector art from still photos. Also very cool, and hopefully something that will be released as consumer software in the near future.

Screwing around with faces and heads

Every time I arrive in L.A., I think two things. First, as I exit the airport, I think, "Oh the weather here is unbeatable."

Then, as I pick up my rental car and merge directly into a never-ending queue of traffic, "Oh, *%&$@#!."

Two random reader contributions. From John, MyHeritage is facial recognition technology for photographs. Their conversation starter for now is a feature that matches uploaded faces to the celebrities they most resemble. As you can imagine, I rated as a high probability match for a composite of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but then you didn't need such advanced technology to anticipate such a result.

From Mike:

The Amazing Screw-On Head, a humor comic from Mike Mignola (who
created Hellboy), is being made into an animated series on the Sci-Fi
channel. They have the pilot episode on their website:

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

It's about this robot-type guy whose head can screw on to bodies. He
works for Abe Lincoln taking care of weird supernatural problems. It's
voiced by Paul Giamatti and the main bad guy is voiced by David Hyde
Pierce, so the acting is good.

Lovecraftian humor and steampunk adventure? I'm there.

The header from the footer

The Daily Mail hires a lipreader to decipher what Materazzi said to Zidane to provoke the header heard round the world. It turns out Materazzi called Zidane the equivalent of n***** and then said "we all know you are the son of a terrorist whore." And then, "So just f*** off." Given Zidane's Algerian background and quick temper, the headbutt is not at all shocking. I'm none too fond of Materazzi; he's a well-known punk. Still, I think if you're Zidane, you hold off on retaliation until after the game. Then, at the exchange of handshakes, you pull Materazzi's jersey over his head and then pound his face into the turf. It's not like this is the first time someone has used truly offensive trash talk to take another team's best player out of the game. If they miked more players in sporting events, people would be shocked at the type of things you hear on the playing field. [from Kottke]

In New York Magazine this week, a quick and dirty guide to happiness, with lots drawn from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, which I've just about finished. Among the tips of interest:

• Those who seize the first option that meets their standards (which don’t have to be low, just defined) are happier than those who insist on finding the perfect solution.
• Don’t go to law school. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions.
• Send the kids off to day care, summer camp, and boarding school. On a day-to-day basis, caring for children creates roughly the same level of satisfaction as washing the dishes.
• Take the local, and don’t wait for the express. Inaction gnaws away at the mind relentlessly.
• Order from the same takeout menu every time (as long as you're not ordering takeout every night of the week). Variety is the spice of life only for heavily repeated experiences.
• Take advantage of your exercise machine’s “cooldown period,” because adding a slightly less grueling epilogue to a grueling but valuable experience—like a workout—makes you more willing to repeat it in the future.

Bubblesnaps, a quick and dirty way to add speech or thought bubbles to your pics.

For Mac users, a way to play Quicktime videos in full screen without paying for Quicktime Pro.

An interesting dialogue at Slate between Jason Furman and Barbara Ehrenreich on the merits of Wal-Mart for the American working class. Decision goes to Furman, I think, though it's a bit of a mismatch as Ehrenreich acknowledges.

Ninja lessons [from Thrillist]

From Skype, for its US and Canadian users, 3 weekends of free SkypeOut calls to the UK, Mexico, and Japan.

Some nifty covers for download.

A more secure shoelace knot. I use another method that may be equivalent. I don't make two loops to tie my shoelaces. I make one loop and then tie the second lace around it once before pulling the second lace through to form the second loop. If I just swing the second lace around my thumb twice instead of once before pulling the second lace through, the knot never seems to come undone.

Parallels for Desktop for Mac is $49.99 through July 15, then its price goes up to $79.99. ArsTechnica gave it a positive review.

Our entire future lies behind us

World Hum's list of the top 30 travel books. I always try and read a book about the area I'm traveling to, or a book by an author from that region, but I've only read the Bryson and Twain off of this list (Bryson's next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, releases Oct. 17). The obvious cure, of course, is to pull out the passport and head back out into the world.

***

Speaking of travel books: download the 2000 through 2006 editions of the CIA World Factbook and Factbook on Intelligence for free as PDFs. Very cool reference.

***

Aymaran people of the High Andes think of the future as behind them, the past ahead of them, different than most everyone else, perhaps because of differences in their language. I have a conceptual metaphor for time as well. My mental map of the years looks something like this:

It's a bit more involved than that (if you imagine it as a flat board, the right side of the board is actually pushed further away from me so that the entire board is at an angle), but that's the best 2-d representation I can come up with. 1974 is the start b/c that's the year I was born. When I think of sports events of importance to me, I think of them as falling on this spatial representation of my life. 1984, Cubs lose in NLCS to the Padres. 1985, Bears win the Super Bowl. 1991, the Bulls win their first championship.

When I think of an individual year, my spatial representation is a vertical one, with January at the top, December at the bottom, the days of each week running horizontally, from Sunday at the far left to Saturday at the far right, one week above the next. I suspect this arises from the idea of a wall calendar whose pages are torn out and affixed to the wall, one month above the next.

When I think of 24 hours, my mental image is of a 12 hour circular clock, like an analog watch, with 12:00 at the top. The same with a minute, it's a circle with 0 and 60 seconds falling at the top.

***

Flickr still maintains a 20MB per month upload limit for its freeloading customers. Having just returned from a wedding, I had set up a Flickr group for everyone to use to compile photos for the bride and groom, but then the groom pointed out that the service is all but useless to people without pro accounts because they can only upload a few pics. Flickr needs to raise the upload bandwidth for non-paying customers.

Their pricing seems to be based in a world where printing was not possible. They should up the bandwidth limit but offer cheaper printing prices and longer storage of photos for Pro members. You want to hook people by getting them to upload pics, then convert them to paying customers by giving them strong incentives to stick around.

***

Is football (soccer) boring? I used to think so, but I'm coming around this World Cup (from the television ratings, it appears I'm not alone). I don't have the appreciation for the sport that an actual player has, but my love of cycling has opened my mind to sports that are usually described as appealing only to practitioners. A few things appeal to me. The sheer athleticism and coordination of some of the players is stunning, like watching Reggie Bush in the open field, but if he had to dribble a football. The format of World Cup once it moves into single elimination raises the stakes. Every goal that is scored seems a miracle, and many seem gorgeous in their angles and athletic execution. And the Brazilian female fans? Yet another justification for high definition television.

The global appeal of the World Cup leads to some great gatherings to watch matches. In Beijing last Saturday, as Jed and I were strolling down a dark street after the wedding, we came upon a group of Chinese twenty-somethings gathered around the blue-white glow of a television on the patio of a cafe. They had beers in hand and we were screaming with delight at every twist and turn. If I could have felt my feet, I am certain that I could have joined this group of strangers and been sharing Yanjing beers with them in no time. In 1994 I attended one World Cup match at Stanford Stadium, Brazil - Russia, and from start to finish it was one of most raucous sporting events I've ever been to. I spent almost the whole match jumping around, trying to learn some Brazilian chants and songs.

Still a few things about the sport put me off. Watching two subpar teams battle to a scoreless tie, the ball turned over time and time again, holds about as much appeal as watching professional darts. The theatricality involved in diving is just absurd; they should make players who dive exchange their soccer shorts for skirts for the next match. And using penalty kicks to determine winners in matches that are scoreless through overtime seems a poor method for determining the superior team.

I've often heard that he U.S. loses its best athletes to sports like basketball and football. I'm curious to see some athletic profiles of the best football (soccer) players. How tall and heavy are they, and what are their times in the 40? Vertical leaps? Strength? What types of American athletes would fare best if converted?

***

Please, please, let it end.

How to photograph fireworks

A few tips. Happy 4th!

HDR

Nathan Myhrvold on the future of digital camera technology. A while back at a wedding, Jeff mentioned to me that he'd returned from a conference at MIT where he'd seen demos of a camera that would take three exposures of every photo, basically automatically bracketing every photo to address exposure problems with scenes of high dynamic range (HDR). That technology hasn't even launched yet, but impatient photographers have leaped ahead with a partial solution, taking multiple exposures manually at different exposures, then blending them in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix, or both, to create HDR photos. This is despite the fact that HDR displays are too expensive for mass-production.

Having a camera that could bracket shots near simultaneously would solve the issue of trying to handhold for multiple exposures, though you couldn't do it by varying the shutter speed given that you only have one lens. What you'd have to do is have multiple sensors, each with a differing sensitivity. Or you could just have one sensor with a much wider dynamic range. Being able to capture HDR with just one photo would solve the problem with creating HDR pics right now, which is that your subject has to be, for the most part, stationary.

One area where this type of technology would be particularly useful is wedding photography. Trying to capture the brilliant white of a wedding dress and the ebony black of a tuxedo side by side is a photographic challenge. Expose properly for the dress and the groom's tux looks like a solid block of black. Expose for the tux and the bride looks like a face nestled in a blinding explosion of white. Most wedding photographers have switched to shooting digital, and the speed of the digital workflow certainly benefits the photographer. But to my eye, black and white film still does a superior job of capturing the dynamic range of most wedding portraits. If one was to be married this year, I'd recommend asking one of the wedding photographers to shoot medium format film, especially for bride-groom portraits.

I have not played around with HDR much, but last last weekend while in DC visiting my sister I came across some dramatic cloud formations moving with urgency over the Mall. I bracketed a few shots so I could experiment with HDR in Photoshop CS2, clouds being perhaps the most popular element that drives photographers to turn to HDR processing (the texture of clouds disappears when photos are overexposed which is almost always in single exposures since landscapes below tend to be darker). I didn't have a tripod, unfortunately, and so I had to handhold. Not ideal, but I don't enjoy hauling a tripod around when sightseeing.

This one I shot out a window of the Hirshhorn seemed to come out the best, though I still need to play around with the settings in Photoshop and Photomatix to learn how each affects the final output.

Photoshop seems to produce more natural-looking images, while Photomatix can leave you with more saturated and dramatic HDR but also more artificial-looking images. Do a tag search on "HDR" in Flickr (over 25,000 results and rising) and you'll find some truly bizarre-looking HDR photos of images that don't require the effect. The end result often resembles some garish, digitally drawn watercolor.

Here's another one from this past weekend, when I took a visitor out to see The Statue of Liberty.

ScarJo, Shiloh, and the Mosquito

I finally started trying to plow through the two-feet-high stack of magazines that accumulated while I was in E. Europe. One of the first things I noticed was that Esquire was running its annual Sexiest Woman Alive mystery feature. That has to be Scarlett Johansson, though I don't mean to imply that I recognized her solely from that photo. Ahem. The current poll to guess the mystery woman shows Renee Zellweger in the lead with 60% of the vote, ScarJo in second at 28%. Without even looking at the photo you'd think the average Esquire reader could see how absurd those figures are.

Rumors have Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt selling the rights to their new baby Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (which, by the way, sounds like a champagne I paired with oysters at dinner last week) to People magazine for $4.1 million and to Hello! magazine in Britain for $3.5 million. The Jolie-Pitts plan to donate the money to various charities. What's intriguing about the selling price is how it compares to the selling price of other pieces of art. You couldn't have purchased Roy Lichtenstein's Sinking Sun for that price, but you could have snagged Mark Rothko's White, Orange and Yellow. It says something about the world we live in when a celebrity couple can raise $7.6 million merely by selling off their baby photos. Not necessarily something bad or good, but something interesting about our culture. If only Andy Warhol were still alive. In the meantime, the social imperative for Brad and Angelina is clear. They must procreate like rabbits; with the funds their baby pics would generate, they'll cure world hunger within a decade, and in the meantime, they'd be raising the world's sexiness quotient.

Good overview on how to deal with mosquitos. I am one of those people that mosquitos love, and their bites leave huge, swollen welts on my skin. The sound of a mosquito buzzing near my ear late at night will rouse me from the deepest sleep, sending huge pulses of adrenaline through my system. At that point, I can't sleep until I've crushed the damn bugger with my palm.

This day online

A copy (PDF) of the affidavit from the investigation into Human Growth Hormone use by Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley. He names lots of other players who use steroids, but those names are blacked out. If MLB believes that the taint of steroids needs to be removed from the sport, they will need tougher policies, otherwise the hits will just keep on coming.

Royals hire Tom Emanski to teach then the fundamentals of baseball. I love those Tom Emanski commercials, from the wooden endorsement from that paragon of defense, Fred McGriff, to the hypnotic video of 14 year olds with perfect fundamentals executing relays and pivots at second base.

At long last, Google releases the Google Video Player for the Mac.

Slate compares and rates photo websites on their self-published photo album services and judges Shutterfly the winner. Flickr wasn't even mentioned, an odd omission considering its popularity as a poster child for Web 2.0. Flickr doesn't allow you to print hardcovers, but through a partnership with Qoop you can print glossy Photobooks.

Microsoft pooh-poohs Google Spreadsheets' functionality, as expected. Most people I know who use spreadsheets use a fraction of Excel's functionality. Excel is super expensive, and now those folks have a free alternative. A few years back at Amazon we tried sharing an Excel spreadsheet over our network, and it was a disaster. I'm not saying Google Spreadsheets' collaborative features are superior (the invite they sent me yesterday didn't work until just this morning), but I can see using it to share spreadsheets with lots of people who don't have a copy of Excel from work. Just in the next week I'm going to test it to figure out travel expenses with a friend and to analyze a potential fantasy baseball trade. Google Spreadsheets isn't going to replace Excel for corporate users. If you have to build a sophisticated model, you're not going to use Google Spreadsheets. Frankly, I'm looking forward to more of these web service apps to fill the basic home user's needs, ones which have been overserved by expensive, bloated applications like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

Speaking of online spreadsheets, an alternative to Google Spreadsheets is EditGrid. Here's their product comparison, built in their own product. Looks pretty nifty, but facing off against Google and then Microsoft, they'll be a bit like the Devil Rays trying to catch the Red Sox and Yankees.

Implanting a magnet in your fingertip provides a sixth sense, an ability to detect strong electromagnetic fields. The magnet was implanted in the author's ring finger because it was deemed least valuable of the fingers. The procedure sounds sketchy; body mod practitioners just use ice as the anesthetic.

OS X and Win XP, live together in perfect harmony

Parallels is not free, but it's an even niftier way to add Windows to your Intel-based Mac than Boot Camp. You can run the two in parallel, as the name suggests, and XP bootup from OS X is a speedy 15 seconds. You can also run Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, any versions of Windows back to 3.1, or even MS-DOS.

I'm eyeing the MacBook Pro like a shark circling a sinking cruise ship, wondering if I should eat the first passenger to float away from the ship or if I should wait a while for the ship to sink further and scatter some meatier fare.

***

If, like me, you bought an Epson Inkjet printer in the past several years, you might qualify for benefits from the settlement of this lawsuit. Epson was sued for indicating that ink cartridges were empty before they were really empty, thus driving up replacement cartridge sales (where the profit margins are much higher). I really love the prints from my Epson, but printer manufacturers are like beefy home run hitters or politicians. When they're accused of impropriety, people lean towards guilty until proven innocent.

The settlement offers $45 of credit from the Epson store, $20 by check and $25 of Epson store credit, or 25% off the Epson Store with a max discount of $100.

***

After the tilt-shift simulation craze in Photoshop, next I plan to participate in the HDR photography craze. It may mean lugging a tripod and giant ball head along with my camera to E. Europe, but it should be fun. The best HDR photos have a gorgeous, semi-artificial look.

Tree Hugger

Sony Playstation 3 to launch in November, 2006...this and more news from the PS3 conference. Blu-ray DVD playback, HDMI output, 60GB HDD, full backwards compatibility. No price announced, though.

Set up your Netflix account to default to HD-DVDs. Not sure why they haven't distinguished between HD and Blu-ray, since those are incompatible formats. Not a whole lot of titles on the docket, but you can sign up to be notified when the initial titles release at Amazon's HD DVD store or its Blu-ray DVD store.

Keepvid.com, for preserving those treasured videos from sites like Google Video, YouTube, Vimeo, and others of that ilk.

My sister had to mock up a fake videogame box cover for a class project. Her game was a satire of first person shooters, an eco-terrorism game called Tree Hugger. Yep, that guy who just tossed his empty soda can on the sidewalk is about to be lined up in the crosshairs. Severe? Perhaps. Similar policies in Singapore seem effective. I was taken aback mostly because this is my little sister we're talking about. Yes, we are one crazy family. You can click on the image for a larger view.

You might not be the only one betting on college basketball this week.

Tutorial on simulating tilt-shift photography using Photoshop. So much fun!

Hiroshi Sugimoto

The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. is hosting an exhibition of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. My favorite of his works are his blurred photos of architecture. He explains why and how he achieved the effect:

Early twentieth-century modernism was a watershed movement in cultural history, a stripping away of superfluous decoration. The spread of democracy and the innovations of the Machine Age swept aside the ostentation that heretofore had been a signifier of power and wealth.

I set out to trace the beginnings of modernism via architecture. Pushing out my old large-format camera's focal length to twice-infinity—with no stops on the bellows rail, the view through the lens was an utter blur—I discovered that superlative architecture survives the onslaught of blurred photography. Thus I began erosion-testing architecture for durability, melting away many of the buildings in the process.

Maria

The annual World Press Photo winners. [via Kottke]

"AAAAAA! Why won't Eugene return my phone calls?!?!" "Someone turn on the lights so I can see the ball!!!"

Sundance

Here are a few of my pics from Sundance, where I've been since Friday. This is my third straight pilgrimage to Sundance for my birthday (yes, sometime this weekend my odometer turned another notch, damn it all to hell), and navigating the fest now feels like secondhand nature.

I'll try to post a few more pics later this week, but that depends on whether or not I can clear some space off of the hard drive on my now ancient laptop. Everytime I try to open one of my RAW image files, my computer clicks and whirs and coughs like an old smoker.

Highest wattage celebrity about town: Jennifer Aniston. Jason saw her the first day, and I caught a glimpse of her yesterday (or was it the day before? it's all a sleepless blur) emerging from one of the celeb giveaway stores, and a nanosecond later she was consumed by a mob of people with cameras.

Biggest movie acquisition: Fox Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine for $10.5 million and 10% of gross. Biggest Sundance deal ever, and a sweet deal for the creators who had put up a hefty $9 million to get the movie made. Beyond that, no movie has emerged as the clearcut gem of the festival yet, though studios tend to judge the festival on pics of commercial appeal, and there does appear to have been a dearth of movies fitting that description. Most of the ones I saw which seemed destined for commercial success (Thank You For Smoking, Lucky Number Slevin, The Descent) already have U.S. distributors.

Most fun movie screening: Last night I attended a midnight screening of Neil Marshall's The Descent at The Egyptian Theatre. Last year I saw Oldboy, Three Extremes, and Wolf Creek at this Park City at Midnight series, so that gives you an idea of the type of fare showcased in this series. The movie is already out on Feast should come out later this year, caught up as it was in the Weinsteins spinoff from Miramax.

Favorite movie thus far: No single movie has been the revelation that, say, Pulp Fiction was back in the day, but probably the movie that contained some of the most enjoyable and enjoyable micro-moments was the latest by Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Rumor has it that Warner Independent snatched the movie up just a half hour after the World Premiere. It won't have the mass commercial appeal of Gondry's previous movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the movie is destined to split audiences: just look at its early ratings on IMDb), but Gondry still captures the child-like quality in all of us better than almost anyone, and his depiction of male insecurities about women is dead-on in a way that could only come from someone who has lived with them much of his life. The movie feels autobiographical in many ways, and Gondry revealed that all the dreams in the movie are ones he has had. Gael Garcia Bernal, besides seeming like a really pleasant and mischievous guy, proves himself to be a gifted comic actor, and he had to wrestle with French and English in addition to Spanish throughout the movie.

My favorite brush with celebrity: If you walk up and down Main St. enough, or if you attend enough movies, you can't help but satisfy run into someone famous. While waiting in line for the Weinsteins party really late one evening, just as the clock passed midnight and ushered in my birthday, Scarlett Johansson (accompanying Josh Hartnett) walked past me. Yes, my embarrassing crush on her, dating back to the days before she became a sex symbol, is common knowledge, and so my birthday was a good one, even though I could no longer feel my feet.

Runs in the family

Happy birthday to my nephew Ryan, who turned 3 on Sunday. Last Sunday was all about him. By the way, if you're struggling with a gift idea for a 3 year old, I suggest a fish. Jen got one for Ryan, and a fun time was had by all watching Ryan carry on a conversation with his new companion, who Ryan insisted on naming Dorothy even though the fish was male. I believe that's a product of the marketing efforts of The Wiggles, with their character Dorothy the Dinosaur, and Pixar, who featured a fish named Dory in Finding Nemo.

As for this coming Sunday, Ryan (um, he's the littler one below) left little doubt as to what that's going to be all about. That's right, I'm going to be drilling him on the Cover 2. There comes a time in every child's life when he must trade in his Wiggles t-shirt for the uniform of his favorite sports team. As far as sports allegiances go, the father's genes are dominant.

At an early age, we should have noticed the signs.

"What's your favorite animal, Ryan?" we'd ask. And even though his vocabulary didn't include Urlacher yet, his gestures left no doubt.

Bob Loblaw

What foods to buy organic (lots of fruits, meats, and baby food), and what not (seafood).

Analysts guess that Sony's Playstation 3 will cost $499 when it's released, as opposed to the $399 that the Xbox 360 theoretically costs now, though if you want one right at this very moment you'll probably pay a lot more than that on eBay.

Skype 2.0 for Windows offers free video calling. Non-Windows XP users don't get the video calling feature, but that means we get to continue calling in the nude, so we've got that going for us.

Nikon to halt production on all but two of its seven film camera bodies, phasing them out one by one. My old Nikon film camera is already starting to display that healthy antique glow.

No go on running Windows XP on the new MacBook Pro, at least for now, but you can run Vista if you can somehow get your hands on a beta copy.

John Madden Arrested for possession of turhumanheaducken (I've flirted with the turducken for many a Thanksgiving now, so James just had to pass this along to me).

Digi-portraits - Sweet! I want one!

Kobe vs. Lebron tonight, though it's really lame in the NBA that star players almost never guard each other, so it's really more like Lebron and Kobe tonight, on the same basketball court and occasionally within a few feet of each other. John Hollinger compared the two statistically (ESPN Insider subscription required), and to summarize, Lebron won out by the slightest of margins.

Apple of my eye

Oh, new MacBook Pro, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways (starting with $2,499 of them). Will you be my Valentine?

The Webcomics Examiner's Best Webcomics of 2005.

Anthony Lane looks back on the year in movies.

Download the Mac beta for Adobe Labs (formerly Macromedia) new application Lightroom, a competitor to Apple's Aperture. For many people who just need an application for photo retouching and processing, either Lightroom or Aperture is likely a better choice than Photoshop, which has always been bewildering in its complexity to newbies (I say "likely" because I've yet to try Aperture or Lightroom, though I'm downloading the latter now; I wish Apple offered a tryout copy of Aperture).

The pre-beta version of Filmloop is available for download. This is photo-sharing software that pushes pics in a slideshow to other people's desktops. Apple today announced that iPhoto in iLife 06 will include a feature called Photocasting, which allows users to push iPhoto albums to other iPhoto users through .Mac. I'm surprised Flickr hasn't released something similar (Flickr allows you to publish your photos as an RSS feed, but that doesn't pass the grandma ease-of-use test). If I ran the show at Flickr, I'd have a lot of people focused on cranking out an app like Filmloop ASAP. This all reminds of PointCast, the first popular push software for the web. It went kaput, but everything old is new again. For Christmas I wanted to get my parents one of those digital picture frames that could display pictures all of their kids would upload. I did some research on the Ceiva service, and it turned out to be a massive disappointment, with outrageous annual subscription fees. So I got them something else, with the hopes that I could just find a way for all the kids to publish photos to their desktop instead. And without even a request to the Lazyweb, my wishes are nearly answered.

IMDb plot summary for Roberto Benigni's next movie Tiger and the Snow, to be released in 2006 in the U.S.: "A love-struck Italian poet is stuck in Iraq at the onset of an American invasion." I'm all for the resilience of the comedy and the human spirit in the face of tragedy, but jeepers creepers.

The humane way to kill a lobster, a short article dedicated to David Foster Wallace as a response to his essay "Consider the Lobster," an article originally written for Gourmet and which provides the title for his latest essay collection. Besides being humane, that is just an impressive move with which to show off your chef's knife.

If you want a copy of Flash Gordon by Mike Hodges on DVD, you can find it on Amazon Canada. I saw this on television in Taiwan in 1982 during a family trip, and it's one of the earliest movies I saw that left specific scenes impressed in my memory. In one scene, some sort of competition, Flash and someone else take turns sticking their hands in holes in this giant mound of dirt. I forget what happened if you chose poorly; some creature chewed off your hand? In another, Flash and his adversary wrestle on a moving circular floor with spikes that would emerge intermittently. If you fell off the side off the floor, you fell to your death, I believe. Finally, at the movie's conclusion, Max von Sydow's Ming the Merciless is impaled by the spike on the nosecone of a spaceship, a fitting end for the criminal in a cheesy, kinky, quintessentially 80's movie. I wonder why this DVD is out of print in the U.S.; I'd like to see it again.

Bleaghh

Monday, at the gym, I felt nauseous on the treadmill. I stumbled home, then spent the next 24 hours curled up with a water bucket nearby, hovering on the edge of puking my guts out. I disobeyed two of Anthony Bourdain's precepts from Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly: I ordered seafood on Sunday, and that seafood was in the form of mussels from a chef I did not know personally. Never again. On a positive note, my calorie count was quite low that day.

NBA to create a searchable database of all its video footage. We'll all be able to spin our own highlight reels, depending on how well the footage is indexed.

Before you visit MoMA in NYC, grab some audio tours or podcasts for your iPod. For example, grab an MP3 Acoustiguide about the latest special exhibition, Pixar: 20 Years of Animation. MoMA even encourages you to create your own audio tours of your favorite works of art there, for others to enjoy, complete with images from MoMA's online collection. I'm sure some good ones have been created already; it's on my to-do list now, too.

Microsoft's inability to manufacture more Xbox 360's for their holiday season launch is a huge misstep. They finally got release position on Sony, then failed to press their advantage. Even Steve Ballmer's kids don't have one.

You can buy extensions for your powerstrip to avoid the annoying loss of an extra outlet to a bulky transformer, or you can just purchase a next generation powerstrip like the PowerSquid.

Paris by night, a gorgeous nighttime panoramic shot of the City of Lights (1.8MB file). More visual foie gras here. Damn I miss Paris. [via Me-Fi]

Trailer for Mission Impossible 3, or M:I:3, I guess. No director ever has ever had to utter the words: "With more intensity, Mr. Cruise."

One of those strange ways the world has ceded some privacy online is through WeddingChannel. Every wedding I've attended the past several years has posted all its registries online for the world to discover through a simple name search on bride or groom. You can even look up old registries, as for Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, or those of some ex you're still stalking, to see if they're tying the knot, and if so, what sort of cookware they'll be using in the home they're making with someone else. Fun way to kill a few minutes.

Every release of Firefox justifies a revisit of the most useful Firefox Extensions. SessionSaver is the most useful to me because of the sheer number of tabs I have open at once, and NoScript makes web surfing a much more serene experience, but it's the aggregation of all of my extensions that make Firefox my browser of choice.

First full-length trailer for The Da Vinci Code. There's nothing subtle about this trailer, which basically is the equivalent of a freaky albino monk coming to your front door and dragging you kicking and screaming to the movie theater to turn over your $10.50.

Exhale on the way up

I finally got the GRE out of the way last night. After you've been out in the real world for a while, standardized tests are even more of a pain in the ass than they were in high school or college. Thank goodness that's done. Now I have several hundred esoteric vocabulary words taking up room in my head, most of which will never see the light of print again.

Poking my head up above ground, I find a cold and rainy NY. Okay, back into the cave for another week or so of asceticism.

***

At long last, photo printing through Flickr, though only for folks in the U.S. for the time being.

The latest MP3 blog I'm digging: Out of 5. A different themed mix every week, 10 songs chosen by 10 different people. You can download each week's mix as a zip file, but there's no archive, so tune in weekly.

Jackie Chan's iTunes Music Store celebrity playlist reveals that Apple's music store offers more than a handful of Chinese tracks. Jackie on "Jia Xiang de Long Yan Shu": "A memorable song representing a noble mission saving sight." Huh?

The first and second seasons of The West Wing on DVD, for only $19.97 each, or 67% off. That's a pretty damn good deal for the two best seasons of what was, at the time, the best show on TV.

Among the top 10 forecasts from The Futurist in its Outlook 2005 was this strange one: "Worm shortage ahead. Increasing worldwide demand for fish is creating a shortage of worms to supply anglers and fish farmers." That's right, a worm shortage. You heard it there first.

The James Randi Educational Foundation offers a 1 million dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper conditions, evidence of paranormal or supernatural powers. No one has ever passed the preliminary tests. I can make one of every pair of my socks disappear gradually over time. I wonder if that qualifies. [from TMN]

More from Flushing

I attended three sessions of the U.S. Open this year. Twice I was there on days when Sharapova was scheduled to play. Once I visited during the evening, and she was scheduled in the day session, and the other time I attended during the day session and she appeared in the evening session. I realize that if she seems me in the stands she might just quit tennis and elope with me, but this conspiracy to prevent me from seeing her in person is getting out of hand.

Not that the pro women's tennis tour isn't stocked with other tall, leggy, attractive blondes. I'm resigned to the fact that it's impossible for the general public to obtain decent seats in Arthur Ashe Stadium, so I spent much of my time at the U.S. Open this year strolling the outer grounds instead (a grounds pass is a good value that first week because so many to players are pushed to the outer courts). There aren't as many seats outside Ashe, but the views are far superior (some of my US Open pics here on Flickr).

Everywhere I turned, I encountered gigantic model-sized women's players from Russia and Eastern Europe. Among all professional female athletes, tennis players probably have the most normal and attractive (though extremely fit) physiques. Tennis doesn't produce any disproportionately sized muscles or odd body shapes. More than just looking good, though, these girls can play.

Based on my scouting, the one to own in your keeper fantasy tennis league is Nicole Vaidisova (warning; loud, repetitive techno music on her temporary homepage) of the Czech Republic, only 16 years old but already 5'11" and a client of IMG. I watched from courside as she and Mark Knowles pulled out a third set tiebreaker to win their first mixed doubles match. She's been hyped as the next "it" girl on tour, one to follow in the footsteps of Sharapova with her combination of game, height, and looks.

Afterwards, she hung out courtside, and I chatted with her briefly. Several people interrupted to ask if she'd pose for photos with their kids. She was generous with her time, not at all unapproachable like many baseball players, to pick on one sport. For a 16 year old, she has big all-around game, including a big first serve. Project her growth, both of her game and her height, and the forecast is sunny. Did I mention she's not ugly?

I also caught matches starring some of the Russian contingent of top women's players. Elena Dementieva always wears a saffron/pumpkin dress and matching visor, her long hair tied in a pony tail or braid. She has huge quads that help her generate massive pace off of her groundstrokes, but she's most well-known for her shaky second serve. She throws her toss way out to the right and hits a feeble but heavy spinning slice serve that often flutters into the net.

I've always had a soft spot for Dementieva because of it, even though it's something she could and should correct as a professional. It's like watching a defiant bird with a clipped wing. Simply having to contemplate hitting it, knowing everyone in the stadium, including her opponent, is anticipating it, is a heavy mental burden, but to her credit she has learned to live with it. For a serve that travels so slowly, it's unexpectedly effective. I watched both Capriati last year and Davenport this year struggle to attack it, both of them falling to Dementieva in the semifinals. And once the serve is in play, Dementieva just crushes the ball.

I also caught bits of matches with Daniela Hantuchova and Anastasia Myskina. Hantuchova is a giant. What are they feeding the kids these days? Lebron James, Maria Sharapova, Dwight Howard...if someone offered to let me relive my youth with an extra 6 to 12 inches of height in exchange for not having one of my fingers or toes, I'd have to spend a weekend thinking about it. Hantuchova doesn't hit as hard as you'd expect of a 6 footer, and at the age of 22 she may be over the hill. Just kidding. Sort of.

Myskina is exasperating to watch when she's struggling. She's always berating herself, shouting at her coach, screaming at her racket, gesturing in disgust. She's like the hot-tempered, somewhat inconsistent poker player at the weekly game whose a lot of fun to be around when they're winning, but who always blows up when the inevitable collapse occurs, leaving everyone around them to stew in an uncomfortable silence.

I saw Gustavo Kuerten ("Guga") play, though only briefly, on court 11, as Tommy Robredo dispatched him in four sets, leaving Guga's contingent of Brazilian fanatics all dressed up in face paint with nowhere to go.

I also saw Roger Federer play again. Last year I saw him annihilate Tim Henman and Lleyton Hewitt in the semifinals and finals to win the Open. It was the best tennis I'd ever seen from anyone, ever. He made Hewitt look like a club pro in the finals, breaking the little Aussie battler three times to win 6-0 in both the first and third sets.

In the match I watched this year, Federer beat Nicholas Kiefer in four sets, but it was a sloppy four sets. Federer even tossed his racket in frustration once, a rare display of emotion for the usually level-headed Swiss superstar. He still moved on. Some players just put others out of their comfort zone, and perhaps Kiefer is one of those nuisances for Federer.

Federer has dominated Hewitt recently, but Hewitt is playing near the peak of his game. If Federer plays like he did versus Kiefer, Hewitt could beat him, but if Federer plays like he did just two days later versus David Nalbandian, then no one left in the draw can touch him. I watched Hewitt dominate Dominik Hrbaty in straight sets. Hewitt's not my favorite guy - the racial incident with Blake and that line judge still lingers in my mind, all those "C'mon's!" when he's beating up on a lesser opponent are ridiculous, and he just reminds me of a silver spoon country club brat - but there's no denying that he's a fabulous hard court player. He resembles a video game tennis player in his impenetrable consistency, and seeing him advance was the lesser of two evils considering Hrbaty's pink shirt. That's quite possibly the ugliest sporting outfit in the history of tennis.

I caught Andre Agassi on center court against 6'10" Ivo Karlovic, a Croatian with perhaps the hugest serve in men's tennis. He doesn't get it up over 140 mph like Roddick, but it's a more consistent and deceptive serve, if you can call a 137 mph serve deceptive. He was bombing it into the corners and aced Agassi 30 times. To cut off the huge bounce of the Karlovic serve, Agassi had to move up to try and catch the serve on the rise, which is like moving to the front of the batter's box against Randy Johnson. Agassi's return is so good that he actually got a few. One Karlovic serve came in at 137 mph to Agassi's forehand in the deuce court and came back a millisecond later at about the same speed right down the line for a winner. Karlovic had soft hands at the net and should have serve and volleyed every point. Neither guy could break the other, so it went to three straight tie breaks, all going to the American.

Agassi, if he can overcome Ginepri, and if he has the legs, has enough power from the baseline to attack Federer, who is still prone to some errors off his backhand wing. Plus, Agassi has Gil Reyes, one badass looking personal trainer, in his corner. Just having a guy like that in the stands, in his dark, pinstriped suit and black shirt, has got to be worth a few points. I'd just like to see two players at their peaks in the men's final instead of a blowout.

The fans at Flushing Meadows appreciate an underdog which means they usually root for Federer's opponent. But more than that, his personality hurts him with New York fans. He's not demonstrative, he wins with an effortless ease, and he rarely shows much emotion. He's like Sampras in that way. It's too bad; he seems by all accounts to be a good guy, a generous one with charity, and his game is just classically beautiful. New Yorkers like their demonstrative, almost histrionic players (witness their support for an almost boorish Jimmy Connors in that legendary match against Aaron Krickstein), but they should rally for a classy guy in Federer.

Another up and comer who I caught on the Grandstand was #1 seeded junior boys player Donald Young. He's a 16 year old southpaw, just 5'9", 145 lbs. He looks slight, like a young kid just hitting around on the playground, but then he unloads a 131 mph serve up the middle and you realize he's got some game. He's feisty, a perfectionist. Everytime he missed a shot he held his hands up towards the sky in supplication and disgust. Someday, after he finishes growing and maturing, he'll be back at Flushing Meadows in the men's draw.

One thing I like about tennis players as opposed to golfers is that tennis players can deal with noise while they're serving, playing. During the match between Agassi and Blake, fans gasped and shushed and screamed during points, but the players never lost a beat. The average overpaid pro golfer (hell, even a recreational player) has a conniption if a mosquito passes gas, and this is with their target sitting motionless on the ground instead of moving at 100 mph with movement. No players on the outer courts complained as I snapped pics with my SLR during their matches.

One tip for making an Arthur Ashe match more enjoyable, especially if you're in the nosebleeds, is to use your American Express card to rent one of the free radios they offer. The radios allow you to listen in to the USA Network television commentary (usually of the Arthur Ashe match), and the color commentator these days is often John McEnroe, one of my favorite announcers in any sport. It also adds a lush aural environment, amplifying the audience murmur to an "ocean-in-seashell" level of white noise, allowing you to hear the thwack of the ball, cheers of the crowd, and grunts of the players more clearly than the annoying banker two rows behind you, blabbering on his cell phone. I rented one this year and will never watch another center court match without it.

McEnroe is a great tennis analyst. He and the always incisive Mary Carillo help to carry whatever tennis novice CBS employs as the play-by-play guy, usually Dick Enberg. Replace the bland commentary of Enberg with the dulcet English tones of Cliff Drysdale instead and you'd have the strongest announcing trio in any sport. I spotted Johnny Mac hitting around after announcing two matches during the day session and snapped a photo or two of him through the fence. He's the same old Mac, with that corkscrew service motion and hot temper. After missing one serve, he cursed, "Shit!" The first week of the tournament, he has a great work schedule. He stops in at Ashe to announce when he wants to, and if he's bored he seems to have free reign to go off and hit.

The outer grounds are fairly nice, with shops where you can buy anything from the Sharapova tennis outfit to Roger Federer's racket to a $40 giant tennis ball by Wilson, the most popular item for collecting player autographs. The food is passable but crazy expensive. Prepare to pay $10 to $15 for a burger or sandwich and $4 for a drink.

AOL sponsors an indoor entertainment center where you can test the speed of your serve and participate in a variety of other tennis challenges. I stepped into the net cold to test the speed of my serve and nearly tore my arm out of its socket just to hit 92 on the gun. If you're going to go for Roddick-type serves, make sure to warm up first.

First impressions of Shanghai

I felt good about my recovery from jet lag yesterday because I managed to stay up all day, from about 8am to 10pm, despite only four hours of sleep. Still, I wasn't completely symptom free. For some reason I thought it was Wednesday and thus ventured all the way up to 138th and Riverside for a kickball game that actually takes place tonight, a trip that wasted an hour and a half of my day.

I awoke at 4am this morning and have been staring into the darkness ever since. Since I fly out to Seattle tomorrow for my annual golf trip to Bandon Dunes, I have another few hours of time shifting left to plant myself in the Pacific time zone. More than a few times during the last two weeks I've felt like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.

New York, all five boroughs put together, feels tranquil and quaint compared to Shanghai. That's how sprawling and dense and manic a city China's economic hub feels. Shanghai contains more buildings over 25 stories high than any other city in the world, and depending on who you ask, anywhere from a fifth to a fourth of all the world's roof mounted cranes call Shanghai home.

One of the first stops during my visit there was the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. On the third floor there is a massive scale model of the city as city planners foresee it looking in 2020. It's stunning in its size and density. My first night in Shanghai, I couldn't see water or trees or anything beyond the horizon in any direction from my 29th floor hotel room. High rises and office buildings and skyscrapers stretched out seemingly to the ends of the earth. The model at the urban planning museum confirmed that my suspicions weren't too far from the truth.

That Shanghai even has an urban planning museum speaks to its developmental aspirations. It's as close to urban planning pornography as I've ever seen. On every floor, massive scale models of some of its most famous sites (like the new Pudong airport; every city in China seemed to have a new airport of steel and glass) share space with 3-D CGI animations flying around, over, and through future constructions, all set to throbbing techno music. Next to the 2020 scale model of Shanghai is a display called Windows on the World, depicting famous landmarks from around the globe, like the Eiffel Tower and NY City skyline; the juxtaposition marks the height of the city's ambitions. A more literal marker is the work-in-progress that is the Shanghai World Financial Center, intended to be the world's tallest building when completed. On just one day-trip, Su took me past the world's first high-speed mag-lev train, up the world's tallest hotel, over the world's longest steel-arch bridge, and under the world's largest Ferris wheel.

Few cities of have grown faster than Shanghai in the past fifteen years, but the extent of the progress is dubious. The skyline is an incoherent blend of gaudy structures, each one more eccentric than the next in an attempt to distinguish itself. Many of them are simply hideous by the aesthetic standards of this era or the next. And as all these high rises and skyscrapers have moved in, the city's low-income citizens and more historic architecture have been moved out and razed, respectively. From the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower, every low-lying plot of land in Shanghai looked to be marked for bulldozing. It will soon be so crowded you won't be able to see the trees from the forest; every skyscraper will be flanked by several other monstrosities of equal height.

No building represents the worst of Shanghai more than the Oriental Pearl Tower (images), the most prominent structure on the Pudong side of Shanghai's skyline. Depending on your vantage point, it looks like anything from a sci-fi shishkabob, a spaceship, or the world's largest phallic symbol (Su pointed out that from one spot on the Bund, the Pearl Tower rises up from between two giant globes like...well, look for yourself). Even the few attempts at preserving the city's historic architecture can't dilute the city's epidemic of modernization. Xin Tian Di, a historic redevelopment project that reconstructed some of Shanghai's historic Shikumen tenements, is primarily a collection of fusion restaurants, clubs, and retail restaurants. It's less a preservation than a repurposing of the architecture of the past. Both Xin Tian Di and Yu Yuan (the Yu Gardens), two of the areas in Shanghai that still hint at the city's past, have their own Starbucks.

It's unclear how long this pace of development can last. When the real estate bubble bursts, the crash is sure to be spectacular. Roof cranes all over the city will come to a halt, and the unfinished frames of dozens of skysrapers will litter the city like the fossilized skeletons from some unrealized future.

It's not all bad. The flip side of all this foreign investment and real estate development is a vibrant economic hum. Just after arriving in Shanghai one afternoon, I attended a networking event at Barbarossa with Tony, an old classmate of mine. He's one of the tens of thousands of those who've moved to Shanghai in the hopes of carving out a personal fortune on the back of the macro growth trends there. I met dozens of people at the event, each of whom presented me with a business card and their two-minute fortune-seeking thesis. I felt like I was at a job fair, but the difference is that even the people who didn't have any idea how they'd capitalize on the growth in Shanghai beamed with genuine optimism. Shanghai has replaced Hong Kong as the sexy girl China employs to greet its guests at the door.

A city with a population of 18 million people shouldn't feel small, but the next night I ran into many of the same expats at Bar Rouge, one of the epicenters of the global clubbing scene right now. Nearly everyone I asked about what to see in Shanghai told me this was the club du jour. Su and I planned to head there on Friday night, but she had to fly out to Hong Kong and then back that afternoon simply to renew her Chinese visa, and a series of flight delays found me half asleep in my hotel room at 1 in the morning, watching movies in a bathrobe and fading fast. But just when I was about to write off the evening, she called.

I began to offer a mild protest, but she'd have none of that.

"I've been to hell and back today," she said. "You're coming out and having a drink with me."

When we arrived at 1:30am at 18 on the Bund, a throng of people waited outside, trying to cajole their way past the bouncers. We rang up Sam, one of those guys who's out clubbing so often that he's on a first name basis with every bouncer. He came down, parted the sea of hopefuls like Moses, and the bouncers ushered us in.

Located on the 7th floor, Bar Rouge was hopping. From the outdoor terrace, I stood under a Chinese flag blown sideways by a stiff breeze and looked out across the Huangpu river at the now darkened Pudong skyline. Inside, bartenders stacked martini glasses in a pyramid, then lit some unidentified alcoholic drink on fire and poured it over the glass pyramid so that the stream of fire descended to the bar and streamed six feet across the counter. I made quick note of the fire exit routes.

The rest of the night dissolved in bath of green tea and black labels (the local mixed drink of choice) and shots of one sort or another. All the building lights on the Bund and on the Pudong skyline turn off at 11pm (electricity is at a premium), but the youth remain lit until sunrise.

Brain dump

I've been out of town traveling, and my short stop back in NYC has been packed with errands and preparations for my trip to China. In a few hours, I'll head off to the airport for my flight to San Francisco, and then Beijing.

In an effort to get myself on the Beijing timezone, exactly the opposite of NYC's (Beijing is 12 hours ahead), I'm staying up all night before catching the flight. For some reason, one of the only ways I can keep myself up is by sitting at the computer and writing. Watching TV, reading, eating...they all put me to sleep. But typing engages my brain in a way that staves off sleep. This didn't used to be so, especially when trying to finish term papers the night before they were due, but then again, this isn't a term paper.

I had to use all my United frequent flier miles to book my ticket to China. August is peak travel month in China, despite the torrid heat, and so tickets were going for $1300 and up. Of course, United didn't have any coach fares available for mileage redemption, but the surprise was that all the business class seats were gone as well. So I had to push all in with my miles to snag a first class ticket. I've never flown first class overseas, and I'm looking forward to it. Fully reclining seat? Sweetness.

Before I leave, though, a quick look back at Nik and Maria's wedding from my visit to Chicago last weekend.

***

Congrats to Nik and Maria on their wedding! Theirs was the first Serbian-Polish wedding I'd ever attended, and if I have any say in the matter it won't be my last. Weddings that last more than a few days should really qualify as festivals. The day after my arrival, on a Thursday, the festivities began. I missed that first affair because I was at a White Sox game with Derek, but the next day I jumped in. After a rehearsal at a Serbian Orthodox church, we all drove to Nik's parents' mansion in the suburbs.

So many people were attending that we had to park all the way down at the end of the block. Walking towards their house, we saw a massive catering freezer truck sitting in the driveway. Always a good sign. More than half of the massive backyard sat beneath a circus-sized white tent. Inside, a Serbian band played, the lead singer about three weeks from giving birth, belting out tunes with a vibrato that I came to recognize as characteristic of Serbian singing. Six or seven gigantic coolers sat in the center of the tent, filled with beer and soda, and a series of long tables lined three walls of the tent. Serbian caterers dashed to and fro, placing drinks and dish after dish before us. Then, just after the last course and before dessert, Nik's relatives stood up and started a Serbian line dance.

I was watching and studying the dance steps when one of Nik's uncles, spying my digital SLR, pulled me out of my seat.

"Are you the official photographer? Oh, it doesn't matter." He waved his arms at the circle of dancing family members. "Get that. Do whatever you have to. Stand on the coolers, whatever."

I leapt into action, straddling coolers, weaving in and out of the circle of dancers, snapping away. Several of the people in the circle held the hand of the person next to them with one hand while in the other hand they held not only a beer but a cigarette. By evening's end, I came to believe that this was actually an official variant of the dance formation.

The next morning, we drove back out for another meal, a brunch in the same tent. Afterwards, we drove about forty minutes northeast to the church for the ceremony, which reminded me quite a bit of Ted and Joanne's Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony. Joannie and Mike, both in the ceremony, claimed Nik had to summon Jim Carrey-esque facial contortions during the entire ceremony to keep the tears at bay. If you know Nik, you'd realize how surprising that was, but the love of a good woman can do that to the best of them. We often jokingly refer to Nik as a cross between Brendan Fraser and Luc Longley, but what's most distinctive about Nik is not his height or his face but his jolly, goofy personality. Always joking, always the life of the party. Good times.

Nearly 500 people attended the wedding, and that meant remembering a lot of names, many of them challenging Serbian names. I quickly learned a handy shortcut: if I met a male whose name eluded me, I had a 60% chance of guessing right if I went with Milan. Just about every other Serbian male at the wedding introduced himself as Milan.

At the reception dinner and dance, the videographer let me borrow his flash bracket as he was a fellow Nikon user. How did I live all these years without one? No more unsightly shadows or flash hotspots. Even without the bracket, the new Nikon i-TTL flash system performed like a dream.

This evening, I would not play wedding photographer full-time. Professionals were on hand to handle that. I wanted in on the line dancing. After the official dances, including a fabulous father daughter dance by Maria and her father, set to Paul Simon's "Father and Daughter," I moved in.

The basic Serbian line dance step is not too difficult to master, but like the swing or waltz or any dance step, the complexity comes once you've mastered the basics. An older Serbian woman two to my right nodded in approval at my execution of the basic step, but then with a mischievous grin she left me stumbling over my feet like a drunk on hot coals when she added a couple skips and hops and double time moves.

Serbian songs are long, and they repeat, almost like rounds. After one nearly fifteen minute song I had to retire from the line dance drenched in sweat, ready for my Gatorade commercial moment.

The next morning, because we stayed overnight at the Lisle Hyatt, Joannie, Mike, and I visited Naperville. We stopped by my mother's grave and visited my aunt. We drove past some of Joannie and my old high school haunts. We even did a drive-by of the house I spent so many years of my life growing up in. The saplings we planted in the front and back yard so many years ago had grown into giant trees. The garage door was open, and a large pool had been set up inside the garage, in the shade, on this day when the temperature was 104F, heat index at something like Hell's fifth circle. Several young Indian children splashed and laughed in the garage.

Naperville was recently named No. 3 in Money Magazine's best places to live in the U.S. Back in high school, it all just seemed so dull, but then again it wasn't Money Magazine's best places for a teenager to find hot action.

After the literal trip down memory lane, we headed back to Nik's parents' house for one final event, a pig roast. In the humidity and heat, it was more of a collective roast, but everyone persevered, still buoyed by the previous evening's happy proceedings.

As for photos, I'll have to post them after I'm back from China, but I tossed a few up on Flickr for friends and family.

***

At one of the meals, I can't remember which one there were so many, a few of the Serbian dishes reminded me of dishes from other cultures. This recalled a conversation I had with Ken while in DC a few months back. Some foods seem to be universal. That is, every culture has some take on them.

One of these universals is some meat wrapped in a leafy vegetable. The Serbian version, with ground pork or beef wrapped in cabbage leaves, was quite tasty. The Greeks have their dolmades, the Chinese have their sticky rice and meet wrapped in bamboo leaves. Another universal is some sort of soft grain, so moist it's almost liquid in form. Oatmeal, grits, porridge, couscous.

***

Another thing I had to deal with while back in Chicago was all the stuff I had stored in Joannie and Mike's bounteous storage room. Eight or nine boxes held my childhood comic book and baseball card collections, old high school and college papers and yearbooks, photos, and even some textbooks. Comic books and baseball cards? Lousy investment in the 80's and 90's, and totally illiquid. I barely eked out 10 cents to the dollar for that junk.

***

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Well, I do know, though I hope you'll read the quiver in my lips as an effort to hold back a tear.

***

Off to the airport. How time flies when reminiscing. More from Beijing. Seacrest out.

Oodles of pixels

How many megapixels is your digital camera? Try 4 billion.
The gallery zooms in on tiny portions of the master image to show you just how much detail the camera can capture. Let's turn this on Nicole Kidman's face and see if she has any pores.

An opera composed by Tan Dun, with libretto by Ha Jin, directed by Zhang Yimou, and sung by Placido Domingo
Coming to The Met Dec. 21, 2006.

I applied for David Letterman tix online, submitting three free days off my calendar. Only a day later, I got a phone call from the box office. I had to answer a trivia question and two guaranteed tickets would be mine. I haven't watched Dave much recently, so I flubbed an easy question and missed out on seeing Tom Cruise on Letterman.

Elizabethtown trailer and music video

10 seconds from Peter Jackson's upcoming King Kong movie. The teaser trailer airs on the NBC networks tonight.

Chicago Police try to combat prostitution through public embarrassment, posting photos of solicitors online (via Freakonomics)

If I'm Hermes, I work quickly to cut off the Oprah PR disaster. Free purses for everyone in the studio audience! On the other hand, perhaps Oprah is the only one on set of her shows who can afford to shop there regularly.

James told me to tape the World Poker Tour Saturday, and I did. Scanned it last night to watch Doyle Brunson destroy Lee Watkinson heads up at the final table. A thing of beauty.

Trailer for videogame Alan Wake

Videogames and movies continue to converge in style and marketing

The 27th Annual Museum Mile Festival

Once a year, all the museums along Museum Mile in Manhattan open their doors for free for a few hours. Fifth Avenue closes to automobile traffic, allowing various performers entertain pedestrians up and down the street.

Much to my delight, the Merovingian from The Matrix Reloaded showed up to sing German cabaret songs. Okay, his name is Daniel Isengart, and maybe he wasn't the Merovingian from The Matrix Reloaded. Sure looked and acted like him, though. Of course, if he was the Merovingian, he probably would have brought Monica Belluci along to play the pianola instead of Daniel Pearl, and then you'd be looking at pictures of her playing the pianola instead . That said, Isengart's amusing blend of German Kabarett and French chansons had the crowd of mostly middle-aged woman gushing, and he'd be a massive hit on the wedding circuit.

As you'd expect, the lines to enter all the museums were long. It's the curse of NYC--anything good, and there's a lot of it, is overrun with people. The summer promises all sorts of iconic NYC experiences, but only to those willing to spend long hours in line. Shakespeare in Central Park, trendy new restaurants, outdoor movies at Bryant Park, free concerts in Central Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien. Everything except Last Call with Carson Daly. I think those are available for the taking; someone's always giving some of those away.

Thankfully, the street performers at the Museum Mile Festival weren't overrun. More pics from the festival over at my Flickr page.

Roast pork, docile elephants

After reading a stellar write-up of this joint in The New Yorker, I had to try Tony Luke's. Headed up towards Central Park, I stopped in along the way for a sandwich. It's most well-known for importing its cheesesteak ingredients (and a chef who apprenticed with Tony Luke himself) from Philly, but I opted for its other claim to fame, the Roast Pork Italian sandwich. With variations of just three basic sandwiches on the menu, Tony Luke's sticks to its specialties.

The restaurant itself is nothing to speak of, though people who know give it props for an authentic Philly atmostphere. White tile floor, fluorescent lights, and a counter and bar stools on the right and left lead to an ordering window at the rear of the shop. The woman behind it slid the window open, took my order, and slid the window shut. I felt like I was at a Western Union waiting for money to be wired over from family on another continent. A short while later, a different window opened, and a pair of arms passed me my sandwich.

The roast pork Italian is $7.95 and offers roast pork, provolone cheese, and broccoli rabe on foot long, soft-baked bread. They don't cheat on the length--I think mine may have been a foot and a half long--and they also don't cut the sandwich in half or offer any utensils. If there's an elegant way to eat the sandwich, it's likely limited to people with Michael Jordan-sized hands. I just stuffed my face with it, pork and rabe and provolone and grease spilling out in all directions.

Simple, and effective. The bitterness of the rabe, the sharpness of the provolone, and the saltiness of the pork form a beautiful love triangle, delivered on a plush bed of dough whose starchy taste stays out of the way. My one grips is that the restaurant offers only napkins. You need a sink with soap or at a minimum three wet naps to clean the grease off your hands afterwards.

Tony Luke's is on 9th Ave. between 41st and 42nd St. Next time I visit (after my arteries clear)? Cheesesteak.

Before stopping for a sandwich, I stopped at the Ashes and Snow photography exhibition (at Hudson River Park's Pier 54 until June 6). The exhibition is housed in a "nomadic museum" building designed by Shigeru Ban and built out of shipping containers and paper tubing (Ban is famous for building all sorts of structures out of cardboard tubing).

The photographs and 35mm film by Gregory Colbert reveal elephants, whales, cheetahs, falcons, and other animals living in peace and harmony with humans. In many of the photos, man and animal seem to be meditating together. Having lived without pets and in cities most of my life, the photos seemed fantastic, even artificial in the empathy depicted, but nothing I read at the exhibit indicated that the animals were anything but wild, or that the photos were manipulated in any way. In fact, one text said that the man free diving with the humpback whales was Colbert himself.

The 35mm film featured slow motion footage of the same subjects, but in motion they're even more mysterious. One shot showed a young girl lying asleep in a canoe, drifting down the river. The shot was from overhead and followed as the canoe passed below an elephant standing in the river. Was the elephant wild? How did they film some of these scenes? The large crowd of onlookers stood in rapt attention, like pilgrims in a temple.

If you're in NYC and looking for a peaceful way to spend an hour or two, Ashes and Snow is well worth a visit. If you're not in NYC, perhaps the nomadic museum will stop near you in the future, or you can check out more of the photos online or purchase some of the work here. A few more Colbert pics after the jump.

Wash D.C. photos, Adobe ImageReady color shifts

I uploaded a batch of new photos to Flickr, pics from my visit to DC. I tinkered with the white balance and exposure of the RAW files before using ImageReady to convert them to JPEGs for upload.

When I looked at the photos in ImageReady, the colors looked washed out as compared to the more saturated RAW files I had been working with. I should have stopped and investigated then. It wasn't until today that I found the source of this problem. Sigh. Perhaps they won't look washed out for you Windows PC users. I changed my Mac display gamma to 2.2; I like my world's color palette rich and saturated. Sometime I'll have to go back and correct these photos.

Off his Rocker

Rich passed along this photo from an article in the NYTimes, a shot of ex-Atlanta Brave pitcher John Rocker, notorious for his prejudiced comments against the riders of the No. 7 subway train to Shea Stadium:

I think the editor is still peeved at Rocker's comments and chose this photo as a comment on the state of Rocker's mental health. Otherwise, why choose this photo for an article about his comeback? If you can pry your eyes from his crazed expression or enormous mullet, you'll notice he's about to throw a breaking ball.

Scatterplot

The whole world's getting fat
The prime culprit cited is urbanization and the changes it causes in diet and lifestyle. People move to cities and drink more sugary soft drinks and food drenched in cheap vegetable oils, while automobiles and tv's facilitate more sedentary lifestyles. Also, the market value of processed foods is 3X that of the foods straight off the farm, so multinational food companies add cheap sugar, fats, and oils to agricultural products.

On a related note, the USDA released a new food pyramid...s
Only available online, the pyramid is customized according to age, sex, and physical activity, 12 different pyramids in all. Seems to confusing to be practical. I'm to eat 9 ounces of grains, 3.5 cups of veggies, 2 cups of fruits, 3 cups of milk, and 6.5 ounces of meat & beans daily. Probably not going to happen. Not that I expected a magic bullet, but if one of the criticisms about the old pyramid was that everyone ignored it, this new pyramid isn't going to do much better. That little stick figure needs to work on his calves, and he has no neck, hands, or feet, which is quite sad.

Divorce rates not as high as people think
The common saying is that one in two marriages end in divorce, but the actual rate has never exceeded 41 percent, and it is on the decline among college graduates.

A handy new mid-range zoom for Nikon's digital SLRs
I've been looking for a lightweight mid-range zoom like this, especially for shooting sporting events. The lens is slow at f4-5.6, but that doesn't matter as much with a digital SLR b/c of adjustable ISO as long as the focus is quick.

Highlights from last week's late-night talk show monologues
Letterman on Tiger Woods: "Congratulations to Tiger Woods. Won his fourth Masters golf tournament. What an amazing accomplishment, tremendous. I was not aware of this, but if Tiger Woods wins one more green jacket, he officially becomes a Christo project."

An animation using the recent and popular Craiglist/GoogleMaps integration to show that as you move up in price in New York rentals, you move in closer and closer on Manhattan

This latest entry at Postsecret (a site that displays postcards, mailed in by random people, containing secrets) is funny, and mean

A Boards of Canada remix of "Broken Drum" from Beck's very cool Guero

Dot dot dot

Not Pron - The hardest riddle on the Internet
Learn about your computer along the way. Good fun.

Directory of Open Access Journals
Over 1,500 journals, with nearly 400 searchable at the article level. Not all are in English, and you always have to wonder about people who write for free journals. What's the business model? Oh wait, thousands of people write for free on the web all the time, like yours truly.

Yo La Tengo's WFMU setlist is awesome
YLT just took requests for covers and played an entire concert of them. Where's the torrent?!

Annotated slideshow of photos by Sebastião Salgado

"The Parachute Artist" - How Lonely Planet changed travel
From this week's Journeys issue of The New Yorker. One article in the issue mentioned a class of traveler called the "budget travel snob," which brought a smile to my face.

I sold a used copy of Salò on DVD on Amazon.com for $200
Apparently it's out of print, and the authentic Criterion 29-chapter version with the frosted ring at the center of the DVD is very rare. Criterion DVDs are the Ferraris of the DVD market; they retain their value, and in some fortuitous cases they shoot up in value when they go out of print. Salò is described as "perhaps the most disturbing and disgusting film ever made," a "loose adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom."

The Narutrix
Audio from the Matrix movies, mixed with video from the anime series Naruto.

The Episode III l33t trailer
Video mash-ups/remixes are becoming commonplace. Every week brings a new one.

Google Satellite Maps has spawned a host of miles high voyeurs: interesting Google Satellite maps, Google sightseeing, baseball stadiums
With the U.S. dollar so weak, this is the state of American travel. Sad.

URLwell is a handy piece of Mac software for stashing URLs
Useful while surfing if you'd rather not maintain dozens of open tabs in your browser

Saul Bellow passes away

Saul Bellow, R.I.P.

Star Wars fans line up outside Grauman's Chinese Theater for the premiere of Episode III. One problem: that theater isn't premiering the movie (via Slashdot)

The Year of the Yao
A movie about Yao Ming. Who picked that goofy title?

MemoryMaps
Annotated photos using satellite pics from the new GoogleMaps/Keyhole integration

Yahoo's Toolbar now works with Firefox on the Mac

How does sleep compare with death?
I never thought of these tradeoffs. Fascinating.

Loose change

Watchmen, the movie
Coming in 2006. No pictures, though, so all I can see in my mind's eye is David Gibbons' art

Stream the new Hot, Hot, Heat album
I couldn't get the stream to play on my Mac, though

7:35 in the Morning
"So, what the hell is making me smile at...seven thirty-five in the morning?" More than one twist in this Oscar-nominated short

New Atul Gawande article about how doctors make money in this week's New Yorker
Gawande finds no answers to the tangle that is health care economics in the U.S.: doctors feel overworked and underpaid, patients feel robbed, and both patient and doctors despise their health insurance companies. Interesting survey of the topic, especially an anecdote about a surgeon who decided to stop accepting health insurance and to charge what the market would bear

Fantastic Four trailer from ShoWest
The more footage that releases, the worse it looks

A new New Order album, Waiting for the Sirens' Call, arrives April 26
Stream the album here. I had no idea they were still together. The last time I saw them was at Moby's Area One concert at The Gorge. Bill and I ran up to the stage when they came on, but most of the young kids hung out way back on the lawn and smoked pot, wondering who the overweight middle-aged dudes were on stage. I felt old.

The 2005 Tavistock Cup ended in a tie
Tiger Woods played for the first time in this golf tournament between two crazy wealthy golf clubs in Orlando, FL: Lake Nona and Isleworth. It's a private tournament but features ridiculous golf talent

If the heart does quit, from this mortal coil you must flit...the Johnny Cochran obit
What a crazy career, from defending P. Diddy to OJ to the Seinfeld gang as Jackie Chiles

A different type of child photography
Photos layered over paintings

Kibbles and bits

On her site, Aimee Mann is posting new tracks from her upcoming album The Forgotten Arm

Flickr confirms that Yahoo! has acquired them

An online stream of Beck's upcoming album Guero

Sarah Silverman: is there a comedian more magnanimous with her offensiveness?

A chamber music cover of Radiohead's "Creep" (MP3)

13 things that do not make sense (from New Scientist)

A to Z

Spike Jonze's new ad "Hello Tomorrow" for Adidas
The featured product is the Adidas_1 running shoe, the world's first running shoe with a microchip inside to adjust the cushioning based on how much the shoe compresses at each step. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Adidas running shoes since they sat on my feet during my marathon run last year. The Adidas_1 sold out almost instantly when a limited number of pairs was offered online. I wonder if airport security will flip out when they run a pair of these through the X-ray machine, what with a microchip and motor in its sole.

In case you were wondering what happened to Darius Rucker, he's doing commercials for Burger King

Fantasy baseball contest winner to earn job with San Francisco Giants

FlickrFox, a Firefox sidebar that allows you to browse your Flickr photostream

Gary Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who recently retired, is sick of Vladimir Putin and can't take it anymore so he's running for president against Putin in 2008

We should have invited Korea to do the Superbowl halftime show this year

I'm too old to collect toys anymore, but these figurines are cool

Lord of the Rings the musical?!

If a VJ could scratch like a DJ, the result might look something like this

The West Wing gets will return for a seventh season
I'd be surprised if Jimmy Smits isn't elected president over Alan Alda

Yahoo previews a beta of its blogging service, Yahoo! 360�

HD trailer for Legend of Zelda videogame
Videogames become more and more like movies, and as with movies, the trailers are usually superior to the games

this and that

Photos of famous male movie stars crying
I don't think Kris Kristofferson is crying though, I think he may have died!

Limited edition CDs of the final Pixies concerts in 2004

Limited Edition CD: Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966

Whole lotta mash-ups from Party Ben
The one that brought me to the page was the "Boulevard of Broken Songs" or Green Day "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" vs. Oasis "Wonderwall" vs. Travis "Writing to Reach You" vs. Eminem "Sing (For the Moment)" which samples Aerosmith "Dream On"

How to stop receiving credit card offers

Google has begun to organize movie review data from around the web, a la Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes

The Gates

The sun and mid-50's weather made an unusual appearance in February in NYC yesterday afternoon (or maybe not so rare in this age of global warming), so after cooking class, I rushed up to Central Park on the subway to catch Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates before sundown. I saw them for about an hour before the sun disappeared behind skyscrapers to the southwest.

I wasn't sold on The Gates prior to seeing them, perhaps because of the sheer volume of build-up, but they won me over as the afternoon passed. The more gates I walked under, the more at peace I felt. Is it the orange color? The feeling of returning to childhood evoked by walking under wind-swept swaths of fabric? The rustling of the breeze against the nylon reminded me of rolling in piles of leaves in the autumn, or of lying under bedsheets billowing in the wind sweeping in an open bedroom window. The effect of The Gates is not the visual punch in the face that results from sheer magnitude or scale but instead one of repetition and color (one can only imagine what the impact of the installation would have been if the artists had received permission to put up 15,000 gates, as they originally wanted, instead of the 7,500 they were ultimately granted). To my eye, they add something to Central Park (which I've never thought of as breathtakingly beautiful). Also, it's a treat to see one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installations in person in my lifetime. Since they're only temporary and since Christo and Jeanne-Claude funded them, I don't understand New Yorkers who grouse about them as if the city had been assaulted (one crazy woman on the subway yesterday asked me if I'd seen them, muttering to no one in particular that "they'd raped Central Park"). A more understandable objection, though the details are not clear to me, is the environmental one. Environmentalists worried about the work's effect on Central Park's birds.

A few pics here, with a couple more available on Flickr...

...

Fighting cancer with HIV

Best places for viewing The Gates in Central Park

Lance Armstrong to ride Paris-Nice this year
Awesome. He's also riding the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold, Fleche Wallonne, Liege-Bastogne-Liege as part of his renewed commitment to the one-day classics, i.e., he was bored of dominating the TDF

Interesting sports photo from the Paralympic Games
Lots of other great 2005 World Press Photos of the Year. Some others I like (here here here here here here here here here here)

Google Print
Google's answer to Amazon's Search Inside the Book

The year of poultry

Happy Chinese New Years to all. We now enter the year of the rooster ("year of the cock" jokes seem like they might be funny, but in actuality aren't), though the previous two lunar new years (nos 4700 and 4701) were very kind to poultry also. I was suffering from a head cold today, but not so badly that I wanted to risk the bad luck that might come from not having some Chinese noodles and fish in Chinatown.

What a madhouse. I wasn't even there for the parades and fireworks show, but I nearly lost my eye several times as young kids everywhere tossed those noisemaking poppers in all directions and drunken revelers pulled strings that launched confetti and streamers out of plastic containers. The streets of Chinatown were blanketed in confetti. Poor street cleaners.

I've always wondered why it is that anyone would believe that everyone born in a certain year or particular month (astrology) have the same personality. But if you do and are giving birth to a child this year, expect him or her to be aggressive, adventurous, and industrious. Famous roosters include Confucius and Britney Spears. Plus, everything will taste like your kid.

According to Chinese tradition, roosters are worst suited to rabbit year people. Famous rooster: Jennifer Aniston. Famous rabbit: Angelina Jolie. Wow, this stuff really works!

New version of The Apprentice, starring Martha Stewart

Open casting calls are this Friday for the next version of The Apprentice in which she takes the part of Donald

It's not illegal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission
Umm, oops

Life lessons from Warren Buffett
I enjoyed these

MOMA

Aaron, Roswitha, and Otto came to NYC, and, after an aborted attempt to visit the United Nations (closed for some undisclosed reason), we all went to visit the MOMA for the first time since its splashy re-opening. We visited on a Saturday afternoon, and as expected, a long line awaited. Individual tickets cost $20 each, and an individual membership, which allows you to purchase guest passes for $5 a person, costs $75. Purchasing a membership was a no-brainer, especially as I'm sure many more out-of-town visitors will want to see the new MOMA.

I wonder if Otto, who I barely recognized he'd grown up so much in the six months since I'd seen him last, looked around at some of the Miro or Pollock paintings and thought, "I'll be painting something like that in about two years with finger paints." With his long locks, a few strangers confused him for a girl, he has the look of a budding young artiste.

MOMA has perhaps the most impressive collection of modern art in the world, at least that I've seen. So many works you'd study in any introductory art history class are on display here, and MOMA has hundreds of other works still in storage, waiting to be hung. Another great thing about MOMA is that visitors are allowed to take photographs as long as they don't use flash.

One of my favorite activities in modern art museums is guessing the titles of works, or telling friends the titles of three works and having them guess which is which. The level of abstraction in modern art can turn it into a guessing game.

Too many interesting works to recount, but one that particularly struck me was a video piece depicting the buildup to the scene depicted in Velasquez's famous painting "Las Meninas," or "The Maids of Honor," which I saw at the Prado several years ago. The video piece was silent, as far as I could tell, and it was haunting. I was reminded of paintings that would come to life at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.

Another arresting piece was a series of three videos, shown side by side, of views of and from Yoshio Taniguchi's other museums, all of which are in Japan. One of the beautiful things about Taniguchi's museums, and the new MOMA is no exception, is that they afford unique views of the environment around the museum. In the case of MOMA, windows on all floors allow visitors a great perspective on the density and diversity of buildings and architecture surrounding the museum.

We stayed until closing time, until a security guard ushered Aaron and I out of the video room. Though all the pieces can be seen in an afternoon, I'll have to return sometime to soak more of it in. The greatest drawback to the MOMA right now is its popularity, and the dense crowds stand in sharp contrast to the wide open spaces of the museum and the amount of white space granted each piece. Imagine visiting the museum alone, being the only person strolling through every room. Its the great paradox at the heart of NYC, that the great art and culture that the city's population attracts is also overrun by that same population.

Aaron and Roswitha are extremely knowledgeable about and appreciative of modern art, and art in general, so it was a special treat to visit the new MOMA with them.

Flickr

I certainly wasn't the first one on the bandwagon, but one of my favorite websites of 2004 was Flickr, the photo sharing site. I've slowly begun migrating some of my older photos onto Flickr, and in the future you can find all my pics at this link. If you join up, add me as a contact and drop me a line so I know to look up your photos.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of Flickr is it's free-text tagging system. Users can attach tags to their photos, and all that metadata allows anyone to browse through everyone else's public photos by tag. Pick a random word and see what photos it summons from the Flickrsphere, or browse a list of the most popular tags.

The site has many other useful features, but the tagging ability is my favorite. For now, an account is free and limited to 10 MB of uploads per calendar month. Upgrade to a Flickr Pro account and your monthly upload quota jumps to 1 GB, among other things. The annual price of $41.77 still feels a bit steep to me, but depending on how the site continues to evolve, I could see justifying that just as a way to backup high res copies of my photos and to offload some storage from my web host.

I'd be very surprised if Flickr survived 2005 without being purchased by one of the Internet alpha dogs: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay. Google owns Picasa, Microsoft could launch something similar internally, and Amazon has an alliance with Ofoto, so Yahoo is the most likely suitor. Yahoo also needs blogging software, so perhaps they'll target Six Apart or one of the smaller, still independent blogging software companies. Photo sharing, like weblogs, are one of the most popular uses of the web, and any company not playing in that space is losing a key piece of user mindshare.

Picasa has been in the news this week because they announced their first rev, Picasa 2, since their acquisition by Google. It sounds like a great photo management solution (Slashdot, to take one site, links to many of the web reviews), an iPhoto competitor, but for now it only works on Windows computers. If you own one, give Picasa a spin.

snowflakes

Cool little adventure cam for recording sporting events from a 1st-person perspective

AllofMP3.com to double its rates Jan 15, 2005
This, coming on top of the MTA fare hike in NYC, means my cost-of-living in 2005 is already increasing, and I haven't even finished with 2004

On your honeymoon, why not treat your wife to a breast enlargement and botox at the same time?

Gamer spends $26,500 on a virtual land in computer role-playing game

"Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia"

I finally watched the finale of The Apprentice stashed on my DVR. Really long, and not too suspenseful; everyone knew Kelly would win. If you're one of the final two contestants and Trump sends George along to follow you instead of Carolyn, you're screwed. The most interesting moment came when Trumps COO Matthew Calamari (like the appetizer?) stood up to advise Trump on which contestant to choose and choked up under the pressure of the moment, stuttering incoherently for a bit before Regis mercifully sat him back down. I really wanted Trump to fire Calamari on the spot, it would have been awesome, but alas, the show concluded conventionally.

Klein, Cartier-Bresson, Rutgers, and Macchio

I went New York holiday sightseeing Saturday with a friend. We went by Rockefeller to purchase a Christmas ornament at the Swarovski booth. I could have sworn the Christmas tree at Rockefeller was much taller in years past. Perhaps I've just grown taller?

Our next stop was the Met. One of the exhibits we visited was the compact photography exhibit "Few Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936-1966". It's not a large collection, but it contains work from my favorite photographer, William Klein, and a few of my other favorites, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. They had old, old copies of the books Life is good & good for you by Klein and The Americans by Frank behind glass cases, but not a copy of Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, an out-of-print book I'd love to own. The image to the left is perhaps Cartier-Bresson's most famous, "Behind Saint-Lazare station, Paris, France, 1932."

After a Xmas-tree ornament-hanging party Saturday night, James and Angela took me to Blue 9 Burger in the East Village. Good burger, often referred to as the NYC equivalent of In & Out, but not quite that good. A burger with a bit of grease or fat? That's okay, much better than a dried out patty. I always feel guilty eating burgers with Angela because she orders them without the meat; it's the anti-Atkins burger. I'm not sure what you call that. The man behind the counter said, "Oh, you want grilled cheese."

Sunday, I took the train out to New Jersey to meet up with Scott and Ruby and their golfing buddies for a round at the Rutgers course. We lucked out with a sunny day after the previous day had nearly brought snow. I haven't golfed since the end of September, which just means that I hadn't grooved my already ugly stroke. The first nine holes, I felt like a beginner to the game. I could barely remember how to grip my clubs, and I shot a 55, one of my ugliest nine holes in years. Then I shot a 39 on the back nine, maybe my lowest nine hole score ever (from holes 10-18 I went triple bogey, par, par, par, par, par, bogey, bogey, birdie) and actually had a ten or eleven foot putt for eagle on the 18th, a par five I reached in two. What a schizophrenic round.

It was my first round of golf since moving to NYC, and I now have a sense for what's involved: a long train ride out of Manhattan, with clubs in tow. Not the easiest thing in the world, but doable. I need to get in my rounds with Rob before he becomes a father (of twins, no less!). I know enough new parents to know what that means for one's free time.

Yesterday night, I went with friends to see It's Karate Kid! The Musical. With tickets costing $15 and set in Teatro La Tea in a community center on a somewhat sketchy street on the lower East side, I was fairly certain as I walked in that I wouldn't be seeing Sarah Brightman as Ali. And yes, at least a third of the audience were friends of the cast. This buyer be warned.

Now, Karate Kid is a movie that could be adapted almost straight up and serve as a comedy. It's a much-adored cult classic (at last check, a new first print of the DVD was selling for $99.99 on Amazon). I even remember seeing it in theaters with Tim Rush and his parents back when parents had to take my friends and I out to see movies. But this adaptation chose to dial the spoof up to 11. Almost every character in the musical was gay except Ali and Mrs. Larusso, who was bisexual. Picture Mr. Miyagi as a black drag queen, and his magic hand-rubbing-chiropractic-magic-move administered while seated on the back of a moaning Daniel Larusso and you'll have a good sense of what type of play this was. Don't bring your child if you don't want to be answering "What does [insert sexual obscenity] mean?" all night. The entire show is built on a conceit that doesn't hold up from start to finish (and I never picked up on any latent homosexual overtones in the movie; Top Gun, sure, but Karate Kid seemed fairly asexual to me), and the dance moves and music don't even attempt to aspire to Balanchine or Gilbert and Sullivan. The dialogue and lyrics were often difficult to make out as speakers fired the songs out in all directions in a somewhat echoey room. But the show has its moments. My personal favorite was "Miyagi's Lament," a rap tune that I'd love to get on tape.

The funniest moment, though, came when Scott told us at intermission that the actor playing Johnny Lawrence was the same guy that Scott had just beaten up at a restaurant a short while ago. Supposedly this guy and his friend were being extremely rude to Scott and his date, and so Scott had gone out to the sidewalk and chucked this guy into a car. In Scott's version of the story, the actor was the big guy, and his friend was a short bald guy.

After the second act of the show, Scott was certain this was the guy. So I looked up his bio in the program, and it turns out that this actor had most recently directed and starred in several Saturday cartoons for Fox, the Kids WB, and PBS, and was gay. When I'd first heard the story of Scott's altercation I was picturing the big guy as Vin Diesel, and it turns out he was a gay drama student. I'm going to blame the lighting--trendy New York restaurants are dark, so dark you can't tell if you're drinking red wine or tap water, beating up a bouncer, or one of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Fab Five.

Depth edge detection and rendering

This would be a cool camera to own, even if I really didn't have any use for depth edge detection and rendering. Also, when I was back in Seattle last time I ran into Jeff Bezos at a wedding, and he mentioned having seen a camera demo at MIT in which a camera would take three photos of varying exposure and then intelligently use parts of each photo to form a final picture. It would be a form of simultaneous bracketing and would be extremely useful in high contrast situations. No more having to burn and dodge in the darkroom, or selecting odd-shaped areas in Photoshop with the magic lasso.

Summer road trip pics

During my road trip from Seattle down to Los Angeles to deliver my car to Karen, I snapped a few photos. Many were shot blind as I drove, right hand on the steering wheel, left hand pointing a compact digital camera out the car window. By the way, I don't advise doing that unless you have multiprocessors in the brain. I swerved on to the shoulder a few times.

My last game at Safeco Field. Sang took me to see the Mariners play the Twins. I looked at the lineup and thought two things: "Johan Santana is pitching, and he's filthy, and Justin Morneau is a good young hitter." Santana pitched one run ball for 7 innings, and Morneau hit two homers. Santana went on to win the Cy Young, and he was the best pitcher in baseball this year. I was grateful to see him during his amazing second half run, to see major league hitters flail over the top of his daffy duck changeup. How does he grip it, I wonder, and how crazy is it that he can throw it 75 mph out of his palm when I can't throw a baseball at that velocity holding it normally?

Maelle and Sadie, at my going away BBQ. Maybe babies really do appreciate their awesome complexions.

Eric and Christina bought me this cake. It reads "NYC Ya Later Euge!" The entire outside of the cake was one solid layer of marzipan. Sinfully good.

Frankly, Otto found my imminent departure inconsequential. I pointed out that he had three chins. We reached an uneasy truce.

Taking this photo, I almost drove off the road.

Great weather for my drive down to San Francisco.

I think this is Mt. Shasta, though to be honest I can't remember anymore.

Almost thirteen hours later, I finally crossed the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, my legs having lost all feeling. Another thirteen hours later, I found a parking spot in the city.

Jon took me to catch a game at SBC.

Look where Barry Bonds' bat is relative to the ball. Would you believe he pulled this one foul? That's how ridiculous his swing speed is.

In Los Angeles, Karen took me to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl featuring music from MGM/UA movies (Sept 5). For some of the movies, film clips played on screen while the orchestra played. Maestro John Mauceri would introduce each movie and piece. For some reason, his voice reminded me of Phil Hartman, never more so than when he came out for an encore and then said, "Ladies and gentleman, we are honored to have with us here, Sheena Easton." And then she walked out and sang "For Your Eyes Only." If you had only heard this scene, you'd swear it was from an episode of The Simpsons. Of course, they played bits from Pink Panther, James Bond, Rocky, and West Side Story, but the highlights for me were the clips from Spellbound and City Lights.

Finally, I arrived in NYC, where I stayed with James and Angela. Gorgeous weather blessed us my second weekend there, and I met them in Central Park for a picnic.

Ryan's first Halloween

Sunday, the weather was gorgeous. I needed the surprising dose of sunshine, and fortunately my schedule contained a morning outing in Central Park with Sharon and my little nephew Ryan. With the marathon coming up this Sunday, deadlines for grad school applications hanging over my head, and the election tomorrow, I haven't been sleeping that well. The sunshine, family, and autumn-hued mosaic that was Central Park was a refreshing break.

I asked Ryan for a GQ pose, and he turned to the side, took a knee, and flashed the "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time" look in this first pic:

In the early evening, Ryan and his playmate Zoe went trick-or-treating in the building. Ryan was dressed as a Chinese man from olden times. Both of them are at the age where they can imitate everything they're taught to say, so they were able to say "trick-or-treat" at every door, though it sounded more like "twickrtwee."

Children's costumes sure have come a long way. The first costume I remember wearing for Halloween was one of those molded plastic masks with two eyeholes and a thin rubber band to secure it to your head. I was Darth Vader, with a mask and plastic cape. Good times, except for that lady who was giving out lone pennies. Even at the tender age of three or four, or however old I was, I discerned that little pleasure was to be had from a single penny, either directly or in barter.

Hey, what's this iPod thing everyone's fussing over?

Everyone knows by now that Apple released two new iPods today. One is the 20GB black U2 Special Edition iPod with the red clickwheel:

Black is the new white. Consumer electronics recycle through the same pool of finishes, and each is cool in inverse proportion to its ubiquity. There's glossy black, matte black, white, black with wood trim, several varieties of metallic from chrome to brushed chrome to titanium to aluminum, sport yellow, and gold. Black combined with bright red, though, is something I haven't seen before except on Air Jordans. Looks sharp.

The U2 designation is for the engraved signatures of the 4 band members on the back of the iPod, a $50 gift certificate off the The Complete U2, a digital box set collecting over 400 U2 songs, and a U2 poster. Personally, I'd rather just have the option to customize the color of my iPod and its clickwheel. And what's a digital box set?! That term should be reserved for music that comes in a really cool physical package.

The other new iPod is the iPod Photo. Here is a photo of a photo on the iPod, umm, Photo:

The 40GB version costs $499, the 60GB version $599. Steve Jobs said photos and music on the iPod make much more sense than video and music on the iPod, and I agree. However, the iPod Photo is slightly lacking.

The main problem? The only way to get my photos from my digital camera onto the iPod Photo is to first transfer the pics to my Mac laptop or desktop and then push them across via iTunes/iPhoto. I'm sure some third parties will introduce some media card readers, but I already have a gazillion media card readers and cables. I want less of those, not more. I would have preferred either a USB port for direct photo transfer or a media card slot (or both; I'm leaving wireless out at this point b/c it's probably too much to ask for). Then I could leave my laptop at home while traveling and simply xfer photos from my digital camera onto my iPod, using it as both portable music player and portable photo hard drive. While traveling, I could share photos in slide show format on the iPod or on a television without having to bust out a massive laptop.

The iPod Photo is cool, but only in an evolutionary, not a revolutionary sense. I'd love one, but with those price and feature set coordinates, I'm not in heat. I do need to put my 1st generation antique brick of an iPod on life support, though. During my twenty mile long run, the fully charged iPod went dead at mile 20, and so did my legs. My iPod can barely reach 3 hours on a full charge now; it needs some iPod viagra.

Delicious Library, on the other hand, sounds awesome, especially since it supports iSight scanning. Arrives in 13 days. Can't wait.

Mary Meeker's report titled Update on the Digital World is available as a PDF. I'm a Meeker fan and happy to see her research available for free online instead of available only to wealthy Morgan Stanley clients.

Finally, something to listen to on that iPod of yours, whatever its generation. My Nov. issue of Wired arrived yesterday with a Creative Commons CD inside. Cool track list. Those who don't have a subscription and are too cheap to buy a copy of the newstand can download the tracks online at a variety of sites. For example, here's the CD in 320 kbps MP3 form as a BitTorrent, or as 192kbps MP3s from Nixlog.

Frontline - The Choice A

Frontline - The Choice

A new process for coloring black and white films, employed by Scorsese in The Aviator.

Qurio.com is an interesting photosharing option for Windows users. It serves photos directly off of your computer, through your high speed Internet connection, so you don't have to upload photos to an external site.

What's yours is yours

Poker great Johnny Chan. "It doesn't matter to me if I'm dealt two aces or a three and a five," he says later. "In fact, I don't need any cards. I just play the person."

Breakable: A few days ago, someone in Bike Forums broke the story, so to speak, of how to unlock a U-Lock using a plastic ballpoint pen. Now the NYTimes has picked up on the story, writing that "Many cyclists erupted in disbelief and anger this week after videos were posted on the Internet showing how a few seconds of work could pick many of the most expensive and common U-shaped locks, including several models made by Kryptonite, the most recognized brand." After having two bikes stolen in college, both secured with U-Locks, I long ago recognized that U-Locks were nothing but an inconvenience for bike thieves, a way to slow them down. It's hard to believe many cyclists would still think a U-Lock is some foolproof security mechanism. The best security for your bike is to keep it next to you indoors or to own a bike so awful you wouldn't feel any sorrow if someone stole it. Here are links to the videos.

Stunning animation from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, opening this weekend.

The Law of Large Numbers: Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.

The predominant ideology of our age: anti-Americanism?

Nikon announces a new professional digital SLR, the D2X. The specs are sweet, but unfortunately it doesn't hit dealers until winter 2005, so this is all premature elation.

Amazon takes A9 out of beta; new search engine amalgamates results from a variety of sources, including Google and Gurunet. Bookmarks are a handy way to drag in potential winners from a search for future reference.

Google Accounts. Bwahahahahaha (maniacal laugh of Google emperor as his plans for world domination several years down the line continue to gel).

More from the Tour in 04

More of Paris

Paris

Omakase at Mashiko: a Seattle foodie's treat

July 1, Eric, Christina, and I went to Mashiko in West Seattle for their omakase dinner. Christina, my most passionate Seattle foodie friend, had heard good things. Her word is gospel to me, so we cruised over for a late dinner. An omakase dinner basically means chef's choice. You pay a flat fee like a prix fixe and wait to see what the chef sends your way. The omakase at Mashiko costs $35.00 a person.

Chef Hajime noticed us from behind the sushi bar because I had just received my new Nikon D70 digital SLR that day, and I'd brought it along. He came over when he noticed me snap a photo of one of our first dishes and asked if I'd mind taking some photos for him to use on a new rev of his website.

No problem, I said. It turned out to be a good trade, because Hajime proceeded to send some twelve or thirteen courses our way, and all were uniformly divine. Some of the highlights...

The sushi was some of the best I've had in Seattle
(from left: scallops, mackerel, squid, salmon, tuna)

The green tea tiramisu was incredible

An innovative sushi dessert

Hajime even created some edible art pieces

Chef Hajime is at the right, working on one of our courses.

By meal's end, I could barely walk, drunk on culinary bliss. As it was possibly one of my last visits to West Seattle, we stopped on the way home to gaze at the Seattle skyline at night.

I highly recommend this meal for foodies, especially Japanese cuisine lovers. It's the best omakase meal I've had in Seattle. If you're want more and larger photos, I've posted all my pics from the meal to a massive web page.

I've been Christina's foodie wing man on many occasions here in Seattle. She's the scout who finds out where the good places are, and Eric and I tag along. I'll miss having someone like her near once I've moved away. We had one last meal together at Lark last night. It wasn't as amazing as the first meal I had there, but it was still excellent.

Christina's about to embark on a family vacation, and a grand meal was a fitting way for us to bid each other farewell.

Taiwan glamor shots

The popular thing to do when traveling back to Taiwan? Pose for glamor shots. Apparently they're inexpensive back there, and it sure beats sitting in front of a pulldown autumn leaf background at Sears while wearing a cowboy outfit. My sisters both have a Taiwan glamor shot portfolio, and now Alan and Sharon and Ryan have them, too. They're the type of photos you claim to be embarrassed of but secretly love, and you bring them out at every occasion. I'm feeling left out. Why wasn't I informed of this while I was back in Taiwan?

We heard about them during James and Angela's wedding, and Alan even did this pose for us, but it was only after we all finally received the photo that we understood the true awesomeness of his work. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to post this, but I can't resist.

I'm going to hold a contest among my family to caption this. There are more where this came from, but I'm not sure the world is ready for them.

James and Angela

James and Angela were married June 12. It was a fantastic weekend in San Diego. Gorgeous weather, family and friends all gathered together in the same city, just good times all around. We outlet shopped at Carlsbad Company Stores, played No Limit Texas Hold'Em with poker chips purchased at Target, watched the Will Ferrell Architect spoof speech from the Matrix Reloaded DVD about 74 times, walked along the beach, and showered Ryan with attention.

Ryan is the first baby to enter our family, and so we all love to spoil him rotten. It doesn't hurt that he's ridiculously cute. He had a whole new arsenal of tricks with which to break us down. First, he can walk now. But when he prepares to run, he first gets down in a modified sprinter's crouch...

He can also do the fist pound now (the move where two people bump fists gently, a variation of the high five or handshake). Just hold out your fist and say, "Pound pound!" and you'll get some love.

Ryan has also learned some moves from Eric Carle's From Head to Toe Board Book. For example: "Ryan, what does a monkey do?"

"Ryan, what does a bear do?"

We could go on and on, believe me. Gorilla, elephant, you name it.

Ryan also knows where his head, ears, and nose are. If you ask, he'll point them out. And he's nailed the major baby sign language moves: more, please, thank you. They didn't have baby sign language back in my day. Now, when you do something to make a baby happy, they start giving you the "more" symbol. It's mind-blowing.

I played a round of golf on Torrey Pines South Course with Sharon's parents and one of my stepmom's family friends. That course hosts the Buick Invitational each year, and it will host the 2008 U.S. Open. The course sits on the cliffs that run along the Pacific Ocean. The course is difficult primarily because it's very long, the rough is impossible to hit out of, and there is sand all over the place, protecting every green, waiting halfway down fairways to swallow errant drives.

It was my first full round since removing the cast from my pinky, and my swing was shaky. By the end of the round, I started to feel better. On the par 5 18th, I hit a driver and 5-wood about 500 yards and had a sand wedge over one of the only lakes on the course to reach the green. The pin was tucked around 70 yards away with water in front and sand immediately behind it. I tried to finesse my sand wedge in.

Plop. In the water. I dropped and swung again, a bit harder. Plop. One more time. This time I hit the green, but my ball spun back into the water. Straight out of Tin Cup Finally I made it on and one-putted, ending up with a 104 for the round. Sigh.

Later in the week, all of James brothers and brothers-in-law had to decide whether or not we'd follow through on a goofy idea I'd tossed out at Christmas last year. My thought was that the four of us (Alan, Mike, Jeff, and yours truly) could perform a dance at the rehearsal dinner. It was just the type of goofball public humiliation that James would appreciate.

Karen choreographed a dance for us to Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson. We rehearsed a bit at Christmas after James had left, but nothing in between. So it was looking dicey when we arrived in San Diego, especially with Jeff and Alan not arriving until Friday afternoon.

But the bonds of family run strong, and late on Friday night, after the rehearsal dinner, Karen showed us the new routine, and we practiced in our hotel room until the wee hours of the morning, bleary-eyed, with Smooth Criminal playing from my Powerbook speakers. The next morning we found some fedoras at a costume shop near Mission Bay, and unless one of us blew out a knee during the ceremony or chasing down one of the appetizer waiters during cocktail hour (mmmmm, baby lamb chops) we had no more excuses.

The wedding itself was gorgeous, right outside the Torrey Pines Lodge, overlooking the 18th hole. The only distraction came from a golfer who missed his putt and shouted, "Damn it!" during the ceremony. From there, it was on to dinner and dancing. We danced, and then we did THE DANCE.

I have a whole new admiration for those who dance for a living. First we rehearsed outside again in the dark on the Torrey Pines practice green. But under the heat of the spotlights with an audience cheering, it's hard to remember your moves. A few times my mind just went blank. But we pulled it off...I think. Maybe someday I'll be able to watch the video.

Most importantly, James and Angela became husband and wife. James is my stepbrother, but our family is so tight we just refer to each other as brothers. He's the funniest guy I know; I think every other sentence out of his mouth is a joke of some sort. He is also a master magician, a vice president at a private equity firm in NYC, and as charismatic a guy as you'll meet.

Angela and James complement each other perfectly. Where James is animated, Angela is polite, sweet, and courteous. She is also extremely neat and organized. Her multi-page wedding schedule/itinerary was so detailed it blew us away. The wedding coordinator called Angela the most organized bride she'd ever worked with.

They're the hip, stylish, young Manhattan couple, and hopefully soon they'll be my neighbors.

I think of all these things now because I'm in the midst of the stress of moving, or at least packing up to go homeless for a few months. It's sweaty, time-consuming, and thoroughly unpleasant.

But the thought of being closer to family puts everything in perspective. Recently, I've had several friends lose fathers to cancer. I'm in the midst of a string of weddings. My college friend Polly become a mother to Emily Katelyn just last Saturday. All the workings of the world feel amplified.

My immediate family is like the Brady Bunch--how often does one get along perfectly with all of one's in-laws, step-siblings and parents, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces? Our family rocks and rolls. It's a miracle and a blessing. I made a DVD of photos and video clips from our Christmas together in NYC and from the wedding in San Diego, and when all this packing gets me down, I pop it in and laugh. Good times.

In memoriam

The next best thing to being at Reagan's funeral is this slide show of photos by Pete Souza, set to music. Powerful stuff, even if you weren't a Ronnie fan.

The military and the government--they sure know how to throw a funeral. The contrast between the very real human emotions of the loved ones left behind and the military precision of the formal ceremonies (like the soldiers standing at attention or the jets flying in formation) pulls everything into stark relief.

Daigoro!

My nephew Ryan is the next to last samurai. Here he is on his recent visit to Japan, surveying his empire.

Seeing double

While at the airport on the way to San Diego last week, I was surprised to see the same photo of Ronald Reagan (by official Reagan photographer Michael Evans) on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

Time applied some digital blush.

Pics, Polaroid and not

Some beautiful Polaroids by Andrei Tarkovsky, annotated by his son.

Next time you take an out-of-focus photo, tell people it's bokeh.

PDN Photo Annual 2004

Love at first sight

I lost my compact digital camera, a Minolta, while down in Miami for James's bachelor party. I've begun searching for a replacement because a compact digital camera that fits in your pocket is just too precious to live without in this day and age.

My main pet peeve with digital cameras is lag time. Digital cameras can be slow to turn on, slow to focus, slow to snap. Not endearing when what you're seeking to capture is often a fleeting moment in time.

Then came the Casio Exilim Pro P600...

Fairly compact, the specs that caught my eye were the 1.5 second startup time and .01 second shutter release time. Throw in the ability to snap 3 frames per second in burst mode, decent battery life, 4X optical zoom, exposure bracketing, and up to 6 megapixels in resolution, and I'm out looking for the engagement ring.

Fuji Velvia 100F?

Fuji is coming out with a Fuji Velvia slide film rated at ASA100 this summer. This is big news, because Velvia 50 (or what has been known simply as Velvia until now) is by far most popular color slide film among professionals, especially outdoor photographers. It produces incredibly saturated colors, almost surreal, and has the highest DMax of any slide film I've used. It's certainly my favorite, and I shot a million photos in Velvia in Africa, my first introduction to photography. It didn't disappoint, and never has.

Supposedly Velvia 100 will be more color accurate than Velvia 50. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I certainly won't complain about another flavor of slide film in the chocolate box.

Sleepless in Seattle

For my Seattle friends who find themselves with a free day...you can print out a map of all the Seattle locations featured in major motion pictures and TV shows.

A young Clemens?

Mark Prior's current most comparable pitcher according to Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA projections is Roger Clemens. The similarity score is only 39 out of 100, but still, it's a good omen.

Billy Beane

Looks like Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker) has excerpted his book Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game on Billy Beane and the Oakland A's in this week's NYTimes Magazine. Can't wait for the book, and the article just whets the appetite more. Beane is the personal hero of sabermetric statheads everywhere because he's living proof that the theories they have obsessively constructed actually work in practice. In a perfect world, he'd be the Cubs general manager.

As well-run as the Oakland A's are as an organization, someone should also do an article on the Mariners as the model economic organization. Got taxpayers to foot the bill for their stadium so they barely pay anything to use it to line their wallets, built their own team store so they could keep all the margins for themselves, signed Ichiro not just as a fine ballplayer but as a tourist attraction, and have wisely parted ways with huge stars like Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez when they knew they couldn't absorb the economic hit. As outrageously profitable as the Mariners were last year, they should have signed someone for the stretch run last year. Their window may have closed.

Tony Blair

Out of this whole impassioned debate, I've come out quite intrigued with Tony Blair, who I knew nothing about before.

Scatter plot

Have been spending time with friends who are moving away from Seattle. Lunch with Peter on Friday, just before he caught a flight to London to search for housing. The next time I see him and Klara will be in London. Aaron, who's moving to Germany. The next time I see him and Roswitha will likely be at their wedding outside Nuremberg. Attended two going away parties for Greg and Kristin. The next time I see them will also be in London. Spent an afternoon with Bean, who I'll see again, though by year end I suspect she'll be settling into a new city I know well.

This still feels like an inflection point of a year to me. Close friends and family quitting jobs, changing jobs, starting jobs, moving out of town, getting married, having kids, buying houses, selling houses...you might think the rate of change is always this great and I've been too busy to notice, but you'd be wrong. This is more than usual.

Incidentally, everyone who sees me remarks on how healthy I look. Makes me suspect that while I was working at Amazon my appearance was sickly.

Cheap long distance

Bigzoo is the type of company I always suspected existed, but had never bothered to research. Karen suggested I check it out, though, and the rates are amazing! I can call Europe, Asia, and Australia for less than I currently pay to dial long-distance in the U.S.

I purchased some credit, and I'll give it a try tonight.

Prep for Patagonia

Went to REI as today was the last day to spend my 2002 dividend and get 10% off of one item in the store. Patagonia's going to be cold, and I needed some clothing and trekking gear.

Have to hand it to REI--all of the staff there know their stuff. Most are serious mountaineers themselves, and they had me set up with a multi-day pack in no time, and with my dividend and 10% discount it was a steal. The bonus was coming across an Arc'Teryx Gore-Tex shell on sale for $100 off. I'd seen it in the store before and love given up hope of ever seeing it discounted.

Also grabbed some short story collections from Twice Told Tales on Saturday, and now I just need some film and I'll be set for South America. Lots of solo time in the remote wilderness awaits. Emotionally I'm not necessarily ready to head off. Everything here at home feels comfortable right now and there's plenty to do. Still, it's always better to be out ahead of these curves. The day after I return from South America is the first day I'm due back at the office!!!

We'll ignore that for now.

Pics from New Zealand and Australia

Yes, I'm behind on these. Scanning is laborious, and I've been trying to jot down my memories to go with the photos, and it's all taking much longer than expected. So much to recall. But I promise, it will be up before I leave for South America.

Warm weather, not so hot on the bike

Yesterday and today were the two warmest days of the year thus far in Seattle. 60's, slightly overcast. Woke up exhausted this morning--not sure why. Couldn't keep my eyes open all afternoon, and didn't want to follow through on a promised bike ride with Laura. Neither did she, I suspected. A movie would have been the easy way out.

But thankfully I censored my inner wuss and pushed for a loop around Magnolia. The warm spring air woke me up (it's good to sweat), as did the ride. I'm still as slow as a cow on the bike. Usually I've gotten a few hundred miles in on the bike by this time of year, and I think I just broke 150 today. It will take more than these occasional 30 mile spins to get in shape for the Alps of France in July. Oh, it's humbling in the saddle.

13.7 megapixel digital SLR

First comprehensive review I've seen of the Kodak Pro 14n, a 13.7 megapixel digital SLR. This one's a big deal for Nikon SLR users since it's the first 10+ megapixel SLR compatible with Nikon F-mount lenses and the first obvious Nikon-compatible competitor to Canon's EOS-1DS 11.4 megapixel SLR (the Kodak's $3000 cheaper, too, at $4999).

I'm still holding out for Nikon to come out with its own 10+ megapixel digital SLR. A year away? Let's hope so.

Until then, though, I think I'm going to give in and get an ultracompact digital camera, for those times when carrying a giant SLR body and lens is uncool and/or inconvenient. Like a night out at a club in Rio de Janeiro, or something like that. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm looking for something compact, that will fit in a pocket, with good low-light performance, but with enough manual exposure controls that I don't feel at the mercy of the camera's automatic exposure software. Also, exposure bracketing at preferably .3EV stops.

This Minolta Dimage F300 looks pretty sweet.

By the way, if you have a digital camera that uses AA batteries, you have to get one of these MAHA MH-C204F200 Smart Charger Combo Kits including four 2000mAH POWEREX AA batteries. Don't ask, just do it.

Mobile mobile numbers, imagine that

May be a reality in November. Very cool. Power to the people. This and the national no-call list in one year--at least we've got that going for us.

If you use an iPod when working out, you really need one of these Marware iPod cases. I just received one of the Convertible cases and it's a huge upgrade over the Apple supplied iPod holder. With the Marware, you can actually still get at the ports, buttons, and front dial.

Tiny!

Global roaming

This announcement by AT&T sounds promising, though I'll reserve hope for a bit. I just bought a new global cellphone, an Ericsson T68i, and my service is with AT&T. Given the amount of overseas travel I'm doing this year, being able to just pop in a new sim card into my cellphone like all the Aussies were doing in New Zealand would be awesome and preferable to renting a cellphone. The U.S. doesn't just stand alone in its desire to run over Iraq with military force, it stands alone in the wireless standards arena and thus we marvel over features our international brethren have enjoyed for years.

The main reason I bought the new phone, though, is to allow use of a Bluetooth headset. Rumor has it that everyone at Motorola uses headsets, and until more conclusive results are in, I'd just as soon stop radiating my brain or groin.

The T68i is a pretty nice phone. Reception on AT&T's GSM network has been fine thus far, though I have yet to test its limits. Perhaps this Thursday if I head out to Spokane to see Stanford in the first round of the NCAA's. The phone's buttons are a bit small, a problem with most such compact phones, but so far everything else has worked like a charm. I'm anxious to get voice dialing set up and to try out my Bluetooth headset, though I'll hold off on WAP and the digital camera attachment functionality until it proves economical.

The sad state of HD

Another area where the U.S. lags the rest of the world is in HDTV standards and programming. I finally got my HD (high definition) dish installed and it added a whopping three DirecTV HD channels to my lineup, Mark Cuban's HDNet, a pay-per-view HD channel, and an HBO HD channel.

That's not enough of a reason to buy an HD receiver. A few other reasons I upgraded: one, the availability of a moderate amount of HD programming from the majors, including NBC, Fox, ABC, and CBS, all accessible by connecting a $25 terrestrial antenna like one from Winegard to your HD receiver. The Oscars will be broadcast in HD this year, and quite a few sporting events as well. Some of the major sitcoms are in HD, and on a widescreen HDTV set the A/V experience in HD is a huge improvement. Secondly, now I can watch a program while taping another on my Tivo, an option which would have saved me some difficult choices during the past several months.

Relative to the rest of the world and what it could be, the options are sparse, disappointing. Until the U.S. can agree on a standard and push it, we'll be limited to the slim pickings out there. It's a shame, because HD done right is gorgeous.

True digital darkroom

On a more positive technological note, I've finally had the chance to try out the Epson Stylus 2200, generating some prints based on scans of slides from my trips to New Zealand.

Wow.

I have no idea what I'm doing, and I still managed a few gorgeous prints at 8 x 10. Even at that size the print quality rivals that you'd get from a photo lab, and the inks in the Stylus 2200 are archival, meaning they'll last long after you're dead. The digital workflow isn't exactly fast, given that each high quality scan takes me about 15 minutes, including image adjustments in Photoshop. Still, the control you have in Photoshop to manipulate photos is intoxicating. You can easily change color photos to black and white, or vice versa. You can sharpen or soften photos, turn them into watercolors, correct exposure errors, and so much more. I still don't own a digital camera, but most of the other elements of my digital darkroom are falling into place.

I have a lot to learn about color management and Photoshop, but the book Mastering Digital Printing promises to move me far along the learning curve.

Animatrix

This is going to be cool. Can't wait.

Can't wait?

Malcolm Gladwell is a prophet

Longtime readers know I love Malcolm Gladwell (I find myself writing that a lot now..."if you've read my blog before you all know I love this or that"). Well, thanks to a cancellation of one leg of my three leg journey to Rio de Janeiro, I'm stuck in Seattle an extra day, and so I went back and read an article from Gladwell's New Yorker archives.

It's a short article, and in the wake of the Columbia disaster, eerily prescient and relevant. As is his norm, Gladwell assimilates a number of related current ideas from a group of thinkers and pulls them together to shed light on a topic or event, in this case the Challenger explosion which had occurred 10 years earlier. In this case Gladwell tackles risk theory.

One of the ideas is that in complex systems, such as modern technological systems, many accidents are "normal." That means that they occur not because of one egregious error or failure but because of the interaction of a series of undetectable, minor breakdowns. These are often easy to diagnose and blame in hindsight, but for all practical matters nearly impossible to prevent.

The second idea is that of risk homeostasis, the idea that improvements in safety or changes that seem to reduce risk actually do not. They fail to do so because humans react to reduced risk in one area by taking greater risks in another. Gladwell cites the famous experiment in Germany in which the installation of antilock brake systems in a fleet of taxicabs in Munich actually led to more wreckless driving by the drivers of that fleet, giving them a poorer safety record than cabs lacking the new technology.

Risk homeostasis works in the other direction as well. When Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side of the road in the late 1960's (scroll down this page for a somewhat humorous account of the day they switched over and a list of all the countries of the world and their drive-sidedness), traffic fatalities dropped 17% for the first year because everyone drove much more carefully to compensate for their unfamiliar surroundings. I can vouch that I was extremely careful crossing the road in New Zealand and Australia because I had no idea which side of the road the cars were coming from. Maybe I should have rented a car and drove around the country there after all.

This is the last paragraph of Gladwell's article, which I highly recommend as it's only 7 pages and a quick read:

What accidents like the Challenger should teach us is that we have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life. At some point in the future-for the most mundane of reasons, and with the very best of intentions-a NASA spacecraft will again go down in flames. We should at least admit this to ourselves now. And if we cannot--if the possibility is too much to bear--then our only option is to start thinking about getting rid of things like space shuttles altogether.

He wrote that on Jan. 22, 1996. As Roger Ebert concludes in his review of The Right Stuff as part of his Great Movies series:

That a man could walk on the moon is one of the great achievements of the last century. But after seeing "The Right Stuff" it is hard to argue that manned flights should be at the center of the space program. In recent weeks the Hubble Space Telescope has been able to glimpse the dawning of the first days of the universe. Then we lost seven brave men and women who could do absolutely nothing to save themselves. To risk them while putting Hubble into orbit is one thing. To risk them for high school science fair projects is another.

Amateur

Now that I've had time to really examine my photos (when it takes about 10 minutes to scan a slide using 16 passes, at 12 bit resolution, time is all you have), I find myself less and less satisfied. Part of it is that I dropped my lens and cracked two of my filters, and without a polarizing filter and a neutral density filter it's difficult to get proper exposures when you have so much bright blue sky, bright white glaciers, and shimmering azure lake and ocean water to shoot. That's my punishment for being careless, and no amount of spot metering or center weighted metering would save me from lots of photos with some under or over exposure.

But my composition needs work. Too many of my photos from this trip are by the book, and framed for maximum boredom. Maybe it's because for once, photography was third or fourth on my list of priorities while traveling. Or perhaps I'm out of practice. Or perhaps I need lots more practice, and some time studying theory. Probably all of the above.

The third place

Joel on Software writes about the erosion of the third place, a place besides work and home to gather with friends to socialize. Examples of a third place include bars, pubs, dance clubs, coffee shops. He notes:

Over the last 25 years, Americans "belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often." [2000] For too many people, life consists of going to work, then going home and watching TV. Work-TV-Sleep-Work-TV-Sleep. It seems to me that the phenomenon is far more acute among software developers, especially in places like Silicon Valley and the suburbs of Seattle. People graduate from college, move across country to a new place where they don't know anyone, and end up working 12 hour days basically out of loneliness.

Sheesh. He even knows where I live.

Based on this, if one were to work out of one's home, it would be critical to have multiple rooms. One for work, one for sleep, one for TV, etc.

Feeling my age

Perhaps the only downside of my travels to NZ, and traveling in general in your late twenties, is that everyone around you tends to be younger. All my life I've usually been the youngest of the group, and the tables turned as soon as I arrived in NZ. Boy, did my new travel companions love reminding me of it, too.

Now I know how it feels to feel old. It will take some getting used to.

Young at heart, young at heart...

This chemical we call love

Reading a magazine on my flight back to the States from Australia, I came across a reference to a study on love, concluded in 1999. Basically, the conclusion of the study is that giddy feeling we call love, the feeling we have when we first fall for someone, is nothing more than a chemical reaction in our bodies. The catch is that this reaction is designed to last for only 18 to 30 months, and then it wears off. It's biologically set to that duraction as it's just enough time to meet, mate, and bear offspring.

By the time the feeling wears off, force of habit, or the children, keep the couple together in marriage.

Perhaps that explains the phenomenon of starter marriages. Because more couples these days hold off on having kids, they pass through this chemical giddiness with no responsibilities to bind them. With the low barriers to divorce in modern society, they move on to the next person, seeking to rekindle the chemical sparks.

Other interesting notes: men are more likely to fall quickly and deeply into love, and lovesickness is biochemically similar to obsessive compulsive disorder. On the basis of my own personal experience, all of this smacks of some truth, unromantic as it may be. I look back on girls I've been head over heels about, and in many cases I don't feel anything for them just a few years later. And love does feel like an illness, and has been equated with such by poets down through history.

Then there's the idea that we've found our soul mate through the workings of fate. The author of the research pooh poohs it: "Thanks to the intensity and tunnel vision of romantic infatuation, we enjoy the illusion that we choose our mate. The reality is known to zookeepers - the most certain way to get members of any species to mate is to house them in the same cage." I've often thought we could marry many people in this world, and that it was unlikely we'd meet all of them in a lifetime. Perhaps someone can take the population of the earth, calculate the average number of people we meet in during our courtship years, and calculate the % chance that we'll meet the one person who theoretically is the best match for us.

I'm tempted to draw some conclusions from these findings. One, date a person for at least 30 months before considering marriage, because you need to see how you feel after the chemical fog in your head clears up. Don't base marriage on that dizzy happy feeling of attraction when you first meet. It's the selfish gene talking. Two, find someone that makes you laugh, because it's one quality which has nothing to do with how good looking the other person is.

And while the idea that love is just a biological reaction may not seem like the stuff of romantic comedies, we need not concern ourselves with what causes the feeling, only that it's a lot of fun to experience. And those relationships that do last for life deserve our wonder, for in some ways they are wholly unnatural, a unique social phenomenon created by committed human beings.

I found an archived copy of an article (no longer available for free on the London Sunday Times website) which discusses the findings in more detail. Fascinating stuff:

SCIENCE has now proved what the band Roxy Music knew long ago - that love is a drug. The giddy excitements of mutual attraction are nothing more than a chemical reaction in the brains of courting couples, according to the results of research conducted in laboratory conditions.

Mercifully, though, the chemically induced insanity is temporary, as Roxy Music singer Brian Ferry discovered more than 20 years ago when girlfriend Jerry Hall dumped him for Mick Jagger.

Men and women are biologically designed to be in love for 18 to 30 months, says the author of the research, Professor Cindy Hazan of New York's Cornell University. She interviewed and medically tested 5 000 people from 37 cultures and found that love's limited lifespan is just long enough for a couple to meet, mate and produce a child - there is no evolutionary need for the beating heart and sweaty palms associated with high passion.

Hazen has identified dopamine, phenylethylamine and oxytocin as the chemicals which 'produce what Elvis Presley famously described as "that loving feeling".

These substances, though relatively common in the human body, are found together only during the early stages of courtship, Hazan says.

But, "like a drunk grows immune to a single glass of alcohol, the effect of these chemicals wears off, returning people to a relatively relaxed state of mind within two years.

'By that time, couples have either parted or decided that they are easy enough with each other to stay together. Love then becomes a habit, especially if children are in the frame. But those chemicals rarely return in the relationship' even 11 further children are required.'

Some lucky people become, addicted to the love cocktail, Hazan found, and they are usually men.

They fall in love more quickly and easily than women, who are also more likely to end a relationship.

"These kind of people [love- potion addicts] are not in the love-rat category,' Hazan says. "[Men] are genuinely in love, 'Or at least the chemicals make them think they are, which amounts to the same thing."

She also found that most people learn to fall in love because they feel the other person is in love with them.

'Thanks to the intensity and tunnel vision of romantic infatuation, we enjoy the illusion that we choose our mate. The reality is known to zookeepers - the most certain way to get members of any species to mate is to house them in the same cage.'

Hazan's findings offer a scientific explanation for many famous bust-ups, Including that of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who fell out of love soon after the birth of their second son. Another celebrity cited as proving Hazan's theories is golfer Nick Faido, 42, who dumped Brenna Cepelak, 24, bang on 30 months after their adulterous affair began.
Gwyneth Paltrow, who recently is won an Oscar for her role in the romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love, said of her failed three-year relationship with actor Brad Pitt: 'I was sure that Brad was the love of my life, and then suddenly one day 1 did not feel the same. Nothing happened, but doubt set in.'

The Cornell findings coincide with an Italian study published this week in Psychological Medicine and in New Scientist. It confirms the view that the feeling of failing in love is 'actually an illness indistinguishable from a common clinical psychiatric disorder'.

Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa, found that lovesick people are actually suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, which is characterised by "obsessive, intrusive thoughts'.

Mairazziti writes that she was struck by the fact that 'the persistent, one-track thoughts of OCD sufferers mirrored the musings of people in love'.

She found that the two conditions were biochemically similar. Along with the love additives identified by Hazan, Marazziti found that the two states were linked by low levels in the brain of serotonin, a chemical the body produces to deal with stress.

In tests carried out on students since the early '90s, Marazziti found that serotonin levels recovered at least a year after courtship began, with subjects reporting that initial giddy feelings were replaced with more subtle emotions.

Marazziti's study also offered an explanation for the attraction often experienced between drinking couples.

'One of the effects of drinking is to depress serotonin in the brain, creating a passionate haze that lures you into thinking the person at the other end of the bar is incrediblv attractive ' she writes.

Lost in time

I got on Seattle time this morning. Now it's about 5:15 in the morning and I'm back off of Seattle time. It just takes one long phone call to Australia to kill your schedule.

For the life of me I couldn't remember how to dial an international number from the states (you need to first dial the international direct dial code, which is 011). Hmm. Since the country code for Australia is 61, that meant I woke up a lot of people in what I presume was the Boston area. Yikes. To all of those people who cursed me out, and those I hung up on, my deepest apologies. I deserved every four-letter word. With the thick Boston accents I wasn't quite sure what was being said, but the tone of voice left little to the imagination.

Sliding down memory lane

Got all my slides and negatives back today. Most of them came out, too, save a few stray shots taken when my shutter was closed or that brief period when my batteries crapped out and every other picture came out black.

I need a smaller, lighter camera to take with me into places where I couldn't or wouldn't bring my F100. I see gaps in my pictures, events and people and places, and I wish I had some photos to keep them fresh in my mind. And when you're out at a club or a bar and just want a picture of you and your inebriated companions, who cares about picture quality? Especially when posting to the web. I need a really thin, small, digital camera.

Well, next time. And nothing beats looking at slides on a light table with a loupe. That's about as close to seeing it with my own eyes again as I can get. Tomorrow I need to write down as much of the specifics of my trip as possible before it fades into history. My photos will help refresh my memory. Given my past ratios of success, I'd say I did okay this time around. About a little more than half of the photos are decent and usable which is pretty good. Throw out the five hundred photos I wasted on obscure dolphin fins and sperm whales off in the distance and I'd say about 3 out of 4 of my pics were ones I'll keep. Since I shot 17 rolls of 36, that's a lot of friggin slides to scan into my computer.

New Zealand's scenery helped. It's what you call postcard country. Everywhere you point your camera and click the shutter? Instant postcard. If my PC doesn't drive me crazy tomorrow, you may catch your first glimpse of some of my NZ and Oz shots.

New Zealand and Australian soundtrack

Clubbing in NZ and Australia, you get a feel for what's going down in the music world. Wouldn't you know it, the cool kids overseas listen to pretty much the same stuff you hear on the radio over here.

Let's see, I have to start with Eminem. Lots of Eminem. It wasn't a night out if I didn't hear Lose Yourself at some club. Good tune, but it always inspires thug dancing and mugging. Not attractive.

Creed?! Sure, you can label someone a snob if they raise their noses at popular music, but when I have to put up with garbage like Creed out clubbing I can understand where they're coming from. Not only is it destined for tomorrow's trash heap, it's also impossible to dance to.

Red Hot Chili Peppers. Haven't heard their new album, but By the Way is a good tune. Not really a dance tune but you can jump around and karaoke.

Kylie. Grrrrrrrr. We'd be out clubbing, drinking, yapping our heads off, and then suddenly a tune from Fever would come on, and Kylie would appear on the video screen, 15 feet tall, and everyone in the club would stop and stare, transfixed. Australia's sex kitten, purring "Come....come....come into my world." Every guy was ready to follow. What a great dance album.

If Michael Jackson is the monstrosity plastic surgery wishes to lock in the cellar, Kylie Minogue is the its poster child. Good lord. Speaking of which, if you don't have a copy of Kylie singing Can't Get You Out of My Head over New Order's Blue Monday, get thee to a file sharer straight away to download it. She's performed that mash in concert, and it's awesome.

Nelly. Hot in Here. I thought it had peaked at clubs here in the US but apparently, as with movies, everything lags by about half a year there in the Southern Hemisphere. Can't stand ten seconds of it on the radio, but in a dance club context it's groovable.

Back to the negatives. NZ and Oz are not immune to dreck like YMCA by the Village People and the Ketchup Song. Stuff like that, most of which I've erased from memory. It's like the wave at a sporting event. Exercise your freedom as a human being and resist. They'll tell you you're having fun, but you really aren't.

Down Under by Men at Work. Hearing it in Australia put it in a whole new light for me because I finally had a taste of . Packets of it could be found at breakfast each morning, next to the butter and jam. I tried it and will do it a favor by labeling it the Spam of the Southern Hemisphere.

The highlight for me was the first bar we visited in the Bay of Islands. One stretch of classic techno--Alice Deejay, ATB, New Order...good stuff.

Sniff

Sharon sent me this pic today of Alan and my new nephew Ryan. How beautiful is that?

@#$*&ing Windows

Okay, Macs are slower, but I'm really about ready to kick my Windows desktop over the edge of the deck here. Since Windows XP crapped out my CD-RW drive I installed a new one today, one that's supposed to be compatible with Windows XP and Roxio Easy CD Creator 5. I updated all the drivers for Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 off of their website. All of this took hours since my PC now takes about 30 minutes to boot after the Windows XP upgrade and I had to restart it several times.

Go to burn a CD. No luck. Easy CD Creator 5 engine failed to initialize. Go to the Roxio website and they claim they've had a rash of these because of antivirus software. So I disable that and try again. Same error. I update some more drivers and reboot. Half hour later? No dice.

I also get these annoying "Your paging file is too small" errors everytime I boot. It tells me to set a larger paging file. So I do. Then I have to reboot. Then the same error comes up again. I'm flipping my computer the middle digit the whole time, with both hands.

Fortunately I finally found some random program that Sony included with its CD-RW drive. I think I've got it working. I'll need it to burn all the photos from New Zealand and Australia to CDRs b/c my hard drive is getting really full.

Yes, Macs are slower, but damn if my laptop didn't work beautifully the whole trip. I could take digital photos from my travel buddies and load them into iPhoto and have a slideshow going in minutes. I could import digital video from my camcorder and burn movies onto CDs for other folks in about half an hour. Yeah, sure, you can do all these things on a Windows PC but you'd be sweating driver compatibility the whole way. I'm not quite ready to sign up for a Switch commercial, but outside the business environment I dread having to go to my Windows desktop for anything.

Alas, that's the only platform my slide and negative scanner is compatible with. I have hours of fun ahead of me, what with Photoshop crashing after every four photos I open and edit because my virtual memory is too low.

The only book I buy every year

I should stop writing about baseball because I don't think any of you give a damn, but I can't help it. Little League and years of watching the Cubs on WGN have distilled baseball into my blood.

There's one book I pre-order every year and await with the eagerness of a groom on his wedding night, or a young child on Christmas Eve. That book would be the annual Baseball Prospectus. This year's version is the best yet, with a whole new set of statistics and expanded player coverage.

I'm not sure how many times I've plugged Baseball Prospectus, but if they'd start putting out crap I'd stop. Move up to the next level of baseball understanding and buy yourself a copy.

Blog as vanity plate

Katie ranted about the blog as self-congratulatory exercise in vanity tonight, and I must admit that much of what she said is true. There's a certain presumptiousness in boring the world with the mundane details of your everyday life, and who really cares what I think about this or that anyway? In that respect, I almost crave to keep the visitors to my site at a minimum. And maybe I should reduce the frequency of my posts--perhaps I'm guilty of using this as a writing outlet at times. Maybe 2003 is the year I cut back my posts.

You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to please your audience, too. Just who is my audience anyway? Random people from all over the place, who know me in all different contexts. Perhaps a large audience is a good thing. They keep you honest, because most will disappear if you sling too much BS. If no one was reading, would I still be writing? I had about one visitor a week for the first two months, and I never really publicized my site, but somehow one day suddenly all these random people were reading it. I have no idea how they found my site, and I still don't know who half of them are, but I read the traffic reports and they're there.

Of course, most my readers are too embarrassed to admit they visit my site, or if they do visit, it's a dirty secret. Boy, let me tell you, that's a great feeling. This must be what it feels like to be People magazine.

And what about blogging about blogs, like I'm doing now? That must be the ultimate in intellectual masturbation (I can't remember where I read that term, but it makes you cringe, and that's exactly the punishment you want to mete out to those guilty of perpetrating it).

I'm overthinking this. Why am I thinking about this right now anyway? Self-conscience is a terrible thing.

Jameson's

Johnny, my tour guide in New Zealand, was fond of Bushmill's Irish Whiskey, but tonight out at Mr. Lucky's I discovered the joys of Jameson's Irish Whiskey. Peter, clearly a scotch and whiskey aficionado, has set me on the path of goodness and there's no turning back.

American bourbon? As Johnny put it, f***ing swill.

Use it or lose it

Speaking of Mr. Lucky's, I met a few friends out for drinks tonight. Just as Tour de France bike racers have to get out even on their two days off during the Tour just so their body doesn't go into shock from not being pushed to the limit, I need to keep my liver primed and active in anticipation of Carnival in Rio. I'm not doing my gut any favors, but I suppose another week won't hurt.

I'm less worried about drinking myself to death in Rio than of getting shot. At least four people sent me e-mail links to articles about the recent violence in Rio, suspected to be caused by gangs. City of God may hit a little too close to home this weekend. I'll have to keep my head down and steer clear of danger.

Speaking of drinking...

Must send out props to Laura, who was one of the folks who showed up for drinks tonight. She thinks she doesn't get enough airtime here, and yet she definitely rallies for fun nights out more than just about anyone else here in Seattle (and after 4 weeks of living large in NZ and Oz I'm acutely aware of how slow my social life here is).

So Laura, your very own post. BTW, Laura also organized a birthday dinner for me this year, and since it was my last day in the office it was a doubly special event. It's also the last birthday I'll ever celebrate since next year that first digit is supposed to change (and after 4 weeks of living large with mostly younger kids in NZ and Oz, many of whom like to remind me of my age, I'm really hyper-tuned to my life clock...TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK, what have you done with your life old man?).

Libeskind

The Libeskind design for a memorial at Ground Zero has won. The slide show outlining the ideas behind the design are really intriguing.

I don't profess to know much about architecture, but the various Frank Lloyd Wright houses and buildings I've walked through are so inspirational. There aren't many things in life I have to have personalized for me, but it would be amazing to design your own home with an architect. How sad, that we must always live in someone else's conception of an ideal shelter, especially when our physical reaction to space is so personal.

Someday, perhaps, a place of my own.

Writing reviews

One of the last things I have to do at work is complete a lot of employee reviews. I've been writing them for days now. I spent pretty much all day today working on them.

I take writing reviews seriously, and perhaps it's no surprise that I get writer's block while writing them just as I do when writing fiction. I also get the same pleasure from producing an insightful turn of words, or an appropriate metaphor or descriptive phrase. Writers take pride in everything they write, from e-mails to reviews to postcards and letters.

All this typing this past week is killing my fingers, though. My wrists are really sore.

Nephew

My new nephew Ryan...

Comedy

I caught bits and pieces of my first real episode of Joe Millionaire today. Unintentional comedy cubed. I'm not sure if Fox can keep this going because future contestants will know the premise, but this is reality TV executed at a very high level (some people will see that as taking us one step closer to the end of humanity).

So many things on this show crack me up. First of all, Joe is clearly no millionaire. I'm not sure what type of training they put him through, but it's hilarious to hear him butchering French words, gagging over fancy foods like foie gras, and saying things in his soliloquys like "And watching two women doing the tango, that lifted my spirits." I think he was supposed to have come into the money late in life, which is supposed to explain his lack of suavity and savoir-faire. By letting the audience in on the secret, a Hitchcockian device, we can laugh at his inability to hold his wealth.

Secondly, what's up with that goofy butler? His random and occasional unsolicited commentary is unseemly for a butler (hasn't he read the stories about Princess Di's tight-lipped butler?), and there's something salacious about him.

Thirdly...I can't remember what else I thought was funny. Maybe it's not that funny a show after all. Joe (whatever his name is) does seem like a pretty down-to-earth, nice guy. His commentary seems pretty heartfelt. To see him exploited in this way on the show does leave the viewer feeling guilty, and the catty, gold-digging female contestants won't inspire much faith in humanity.

Still, I have to laugh at the people who fret over reality TV and its influence over society. People have loved to revel in the faults of others since they could communicate. This can't compare to the conversation in an old Victorian salon.

Down with Love

Trailer for a new romance starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. Period design (I'm thinking Catch Me If You Can, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) seem to be in. Zellweger seems to be hanging out, knocking on the door of the elite tier of money-making actresses. The romantic comedy route seems to be her best bet, as opposed to the gravitas of, say, Nicole Kidman or Julianne Moore.

Spam

A whole bunch of brainy geeks met at MIT recently to discuss solutions to spam. As long as smart people are peeved enough about receiving spam to work on the problem. there's hope that one day our inboxes will be free. To date I've been too lazy to try whitelisting, so I'm hoping filters will continue to improve. I used Cloudmark's SpamNet plugin for MS Outlook and it works fairly well.

Still, it's not perfect, and some of the material from the conference sounds very promising. Paul Graham gave a follow up to his fascinating article "A Plan for Spam" which proposed using Bayesian filtering on the likelihood that single words appear in spam mails versus regular mails. If you know the word viagra is appears in spam mail 99.9% of the time and in a regular e-mail only .1% of the time, finding it in a message is very damning. His follow-up, Better Bayesian Filtering, has some thoughts on how to improve his filters. Very interesting, readable articles since Bayes' law is understandable to even those who only took intro to probability. Clever.

Even more promising is Bill Yerazunis' CRM114. With some training, it has achieved accuracies of 99.9%. It's available for free for those reading e-mail on Linux or BSD. If you use Outlook on Windows, Network Associates recently bought Deersoft and plans to merge SpamAssassin Pro with their own McAfee SpamKiller. CRM114 can be used with SpamAssassin.

I still think strong legislation against spammers is needed. It's not as if the spam I receive is useful advertising. Usually it's so evidently disguised to try and get me to visit a porn site (spammers now disguise their e-mail as personal messages, using language like, "Hey, I finished that web page you asked about. Check it out: [insert porn URL]") that it clealry crosses some ethical line. And when you just receive overt pornography in spam it's just plain offensive. Either way, I'd love to see spammers nailed with big lawsuits and jail time.

Of course, the ugly truth is also that enough people click on these sex ads and marketing offers that spamming remains profitable, and perhaps that's the saddest truth in all of this.

They came bearing gifts

There are people who claim to not like receiving presents. When their birthdays come around, they ask you not to bring gifts to parties they host. If you ask them what they want for their birthday, or for Xmas, they say that your company is present enough.

What's wrong with these people?

I love getting presents. Things wrapped in colored paper. Cards, hand-written notes. Sometime later, after reading this, you may suddenly feel, "Gosh, that Eugene, he's a swell guy. When's the last time I showed him how much I love him? I need to get him something."

You'll want to act on this impulse. Trust your heart.

But instead of getting me something, what would really make me happy is if you'd make a donation to the American Cancer Society. Everytime someone I know loses someone to cancer, or someone I know passes away after a long battle from cancer, I think to myself that cancer is the most cruel teachers of the randomness of tragedy and suffering in this mortal sphere. Not as sudden as a heart attack or a fatal car accident, but longer, slower acting, more painful to the ones you love. it's not a sudden shock to your system. It begins as a shock to the system, then it's followed up by a series of emotional setbacks, then one final loss that you're almost numb to but aren't because you've convinced yourself that anyone that hangs on that long will pull through somehow. Physical and emotional attrition. All the time, you can hear the question being asked: do you still believe?

Music from a dream

The music in the new Two Towers trailer is from Requiem for a Dream. Good soundtrack, that was. You hear the music in this context and think it was from an action or adventure movie, but no, it's from an ensemble epiphany (think Magnolia) where a whole bunch of drug addicts are suffering from all sorts of horrific trauma.

Google Viewer

Can anyone get this Google Viewer to work? I just get a whole bunch of Javascript errors.

Google Labs are constantly cranking out wacky new services, like Google Webquotes. Must be a fun group to work in.

Hasselblad H1

So yes, I've slowly lost patience over the past few years. So the part of me that used to relish scanning negatives and slides and editing the images in Photoshop and then posting the images to web pages? It's dying. For a gadget freak, I've been very patient in holding out on the whole digital camera craze. The quality just hasn't been what I'd want yet. But cameras like the new Hasselblad H1 are oh so tempting. Fortunately this one would cost eighteen grand with a Kodak digital back so it's not as tempting as it could be.

Motorcycle wearable airbag

Saw this in slashdot today: a wearable motorcycle airbag vest. I've got to get one of these to wear during snowboarding! If I had one of these, who knows what sort of crazy things I'd be launching myself off of in the mountains.

As a motorcycle safety device? Well, I'm not sure how much good it would do. You'd bounce into the street and lay there like a giant bubble before a semi truck would run you over.

Digital cameras--is it their time?

Luminous Landscape has done a field test on the new Canon EOS 1Ds 11 megapixel digital camera. Exciting results, as it appears that digital is making huge inroads on film. Of course, some people will continue to raise the flag of analog, much as some people refuse to buy CDs while hanging on to their LP collections for dear life.

At some point, though, the cost equation will work out such that digital is more economical. Perhaps not at the price of this Canon (currently list price is $8,999!) but very soon. I really wish Nikon would come out with a high end body with this type of resolution soon. Even more exciting, these new digital cameras will shoot full-frame, without any magnification factor. It's a huge leap forward in the digital camera arena.

This, added up with the fact that you can preview digital photos, change the ISO on the fly, never have to worry about what type of film you have in the body (color or B&W) or carry two camera bodies, and avoid the delay and cost of film processing and scaning means I'll be in the market for the next high end Nikon digital camera body if I can afford it (the Kodak DCS Pro 14n is based on a Nikon body and promises 14 megapixels, but I haven't read any reviews of it yet).

I...love...football on TV

Sometime over the weekend, maybe it was last week, the intro to Sportscenter consisted of a spoof of those Coors Light football commercials. You know, the ones that go, "I...love...football on TV...shots of Gena Lee...and those twins." Or, whatever it is they say. Anyone, some news anchor clearly spent a lot of time writing up that intro, and I just want to applaud his creativity. I wish I had it on tape. Anyway, instead of those blond twins, the anchor substituted the Minnesota Twins.

All the underdogs have won in the baseball playoffs so far. The perfect rebuke to Bud Selig and his pronouncements of doom.

Go Twinkies.

Published!

That photo of Lance and Beloki I snapped on La Plagne at this year's Tour got posted on Lance's website.

Cure for poor customer service

For the most part, I've had a good time ordering online, and I'm a fairly prolific online shopper--I rarely go out to shop anymore. Occasionally, though, I still have that bad experience shopping online, and one bad experience will stick in your craw for months. The only relief in these cases when I can't get any help from the company itself is to complain about it on my blog. In a few weeks, several hundred people will see my gripe and think twice the next time they decide to do business with company XYZ. That means some more lost sales and market share for that company, and it feels good knowing you've hit them in the wallet and their reputation.

So here are a few of my recent gripes:

• Don't ever buy from PCNation: I made the mistake of getting all bug-eyed over a low price on PCNation for a photo printer. I placed the order in July, when the availability was listed as 1-2 weeks. Well, I haven't gotten my product yet, and I've only received a reply to half of the four e-mails I've sent to customer service over there. They don't have any information on when my product will arrive. At this point I just want my money and credit card # back from them. Sites like this remind me of why people buy from Amazon, because it's a name you know and trust.


• Dell: I received an e-mail from Dell pushing a 15% off memory promotion. Well, with all the massive file sizes I deal with while photo editing, my PC has been slowing down quite a bit and even crashing, so I decided a RAM upgrade was a good idea. I went to the website, punched in my serial #, and Dell pulled up a few memory chips based on their stored profile of my computer. Pretty nifty, I thought. Here's where customized customer profiles were going to simplify my shopping experience. So I ordered another 128Mb of RAM. Got it, plugged it in, turned on my PC, and...nothing. Didn't register. So I call Dell up, and the guy says that for my computer I have two channels and both must be filled with RAM for things to work. Funny, that wasn' t in any of the fine print. Fine, so I order another 128Mb of RAM. Plug that in, crank up the PC, and BEEEP. My computer doesn't even boot. Just beeps at me. I try reversing the RAM, shuffling the four DIMMs around, pulling them back out. I rummage through online documentation at Dell.com, and finally I find an old PDF file that says I must have the same size memory DIMM in every slot. Since I have 2 256MB DIMMs in my current PC, I have to buy two more. My two 128Mb DIMMs are worthless. Great, thanks for the heads up. So much for Dell's customized ordering wizard. Turns out if you don't return the memory within 30 days, you can't. Well, I ordered the first DIMM more than 30 days ago because the guy on the phone told me to order another one, so they better let me return both. I tried calling customer service today, and some guy who'd clearly been drooling on his keyboard in a slumber told me the computers were all down and to call back in the morning. Stay tuned on this one. Dell has a reputation for great prices and an innovative business model, but they need to make good on this one.


• Adorama: very impressive selection of photography equipment at this site, but a small incident recently has me peeved. I ordered 3 photo album binders from them. Each came with 100 sheets of sticky photo paper. Well, once they arrived, I used one and set the other two aside. Recently I developed a few more photos and tore open the shrinkwrap to the second binder. The binder rings were broken. They didn't close. So I called Adorama up for an exchange. No good--they had a 10 day exchange policy. Here's a site that might make hundreds of dollars off of me in future business on equipment like Nikon lenses, and they wouldn't exchange a simple photo album binder. What a short-sighted policy. I'm taking my business elsewhere until they make good.


• Air France: still haven't received an apology from them for not having delivered my bike and clothing for the first 5 days of my 7 day trip to France for the Tour de France camp in July. Hey, I defend the French when people denounce Parisians as rude and snobbish, but their damn airline isn't helping their cause. In fact, at this point, a damn apology isn't good enough. I'm making it a point to encourage all my cycling friends to fly another airline to France for next year's Tour, or for their next bike trip. Frankly, I've never met an airline I've liked. People think lawyers are evil, but at least some of them will get you out of jail in exchange for your money.

Aaaaah. I feel a little better already. Thanks for listening.

De Le Hoya vs. Vargas

Saturday, HBO re-aired the De La Hoya-Vargas fight from the previous week. I've never seen De La Hoya fight, but the story behind this fight was the stuff of high drama.

Vargas, the young, powerful up-and-comer, taunting the veteran De La Hoya for years, trash-talking, calling De La Hoya out. Vargas potrayed himself as the fighter who stayed true to his Mexican roots, representing his people against De La Hoya, who Vargas demonized as the rich, pampered pretty boy, corrupted by his wealth and the comforts of America, drained of ambition by his beautiful wife. De La Hoya, who many regarded as a finesse fighter with the quick hands, against Vargas and his pure punching power. Even their faces seem to conform to the story lines: De La Hoya with the softer features and handsome, boyish face, while Vargas had the fierce scowl and sharp, defined features of someone who survived the mean streets, the tough neighborhood fights.

Vargas goaded and prodded and shouted for years, and finally De La Hoya could take no more. Vargas had called him out, and they'd settle things in the ring. Nothing like a fight between two men who deeply hate each other. De La Hoya was the one with the most to lose. He had the greater reputation, and if he lost after being called out by Vargas, his reputation and legacy in boxing would be tarnished, perhaps irreparably. That De La Hoya put everything on the line after not having fought for 14 months is gutsy.

That's what I love about boxing. You put on a pair of gloves and settle everything in the ring. Talk isn't just cheap in the ring, it's free.

The first few rounds, Vargas came out in a fury, bloodying De La Hoya in rounds 1, 3, and 5, and the crowd was in a frenzy, chanting "Vargas! Vargas! Vargas!" De La Hoya had to be wondering what he'd gotten himself into. Or that's what I thought, looking at the blood dripping from his face. But De La Hoya continued to box, stayed calm, fought back his fear, and somewhere in round 6 or 7, Vargas began tiring, and De La Hoya knew it. Then he began to just box Vargas to death, left jabs and hooks peppering Vargas' face in rapid flurries.

In round 10, De La Hoya staggered Vargas with a left hook, and as De La Hoya moved in for the kill, the bell rang. In round 11, De La Hoya saw the opening. He waited and waited, and then Vargas threw the jab, and De La Hoya cracked Vargas in the head with a left hook. Down went Vargas, and he popped up just as quickly, but De La Hoya smelled blood. He moved Vargas into the ropes and then unleashed a non-stop rampage of left-right-left-right punches to Vargas' head--we're talking about Agent Smith with the body shots on Neo in Matrix--until Jose Cortes, the referee, rushed in to save Vargas who was just holding his fists to his face helplessly.

The interview was fascinating. De La Hoya is a good interview, extremely well-spoken and honest. He admitted Vargas was a strong puncher, and he admitted to accepting the fight because Vargas had finally gotten under his skin. When asked what he thought when he saw Vargas bleeding, he confessed, "I know it sounds brutal, but when I see blood, I want more."

There aren't many sports which have the confrontational drama of boxing. In basketball, stars routinely avoid guarding each other. In football, offensive players from each team don't play against each other, they play against the other team's offense. Mono y mono keeps everything pure and clean. Sure, you have your ringside support, but it's a bit ridiculous sometimes. You've just had your head knocked around by your opponent for 3 minutes, you're bleeding from your nose and both eyes, sweat is burning your eyes out, and your coach is slapping your face and shouting at you, "C'mon, man! Whatchoo doin? Get out there and whoop his ass! Move your feet! Don't let him hit you!" I can't wait for the day when some boxer gets up, throws his stool out of the ring, and shouts back at his coach, "Why don't you get your ass out there in the ring? Yeah, that's what I thought. Now shut up, give me some water, and let me rest!"

De La Hoya and Vargas. Great fight. And I didn't pay for it, unlike the Tyson Lewis fight, which cost $55 and was barely a contest.

Fantasy Island

Off to the San Juans for a weekend of R&R at Juli's family condos. Honey!

Toni's tying the knot tonight, and I've volunteered to be wedding photographer. Hmm, this should be interesting. Kinda wish I had the Nikon 85mm AF portrait lens, but gadget lust is a never-ending hunger. At some point, there's just the craft. I've been perusing the Joe Buissink site for inspiration.

Long haul

Good luck to my coworkers running Hood to Coast today. They're crazy, of course, and it's fantastic. The corporate weekend warrior is an easy target, but what's wrong with a desk jockey who makes the most of time outside the office to combat the ravages of time? It's a beautiful thing. It's a fine line between laid back and lazy.

A movie lover's fall

This summer's movies have not been all that exciting, but the fall brings hope...

At long last, Disney is bringing out the American release of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Disney and Miyazaki is a good pairing; he is Japan's premier animator and purveyor of wonder. The Quicktime trailer is gorgeous.

I have it on DVD, but I've been waiting until my receiver returns to watch it. Can't can't can't can't wait.

Another can't miss event for film buffs everywhere: the digitally restored Metropolis (Quicktime trailer). I really hope it comes to Seattle. It inspired a Japanese animated film which fell far short of the original. Fritz Lang was a mad genius.

Moving on, we have the last in Godfrey Reggio's great "Qatsi" trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, with another sure-to-be-wonderful score by Philip Glass, arrives October 18. Naqoyqatsi is "life at war," while his previous two, which arrive on DVD in mid September, were life out of balance (Koyaanisqatsi) and life in transformation (Powaqqatsi).

How about a film from Werner Herzog, with a score by Hans Zimmer? That is the promising creative force behind Invincible. Also stars the always sharp Tim Roth. I didn't even realize Herzog was still making movies. Amazing. His Nosferatu and Aguirre: The Wrath of God are movie hall-of-famers.

Of course there's Punch-Drunk Love, Heaven by Tom Tykwer and starring Cate Blanchett (first of the Heaven, Hell, Purgatory trilogy originally planned by Krzysztof Kielowski, Bubba Ho-Tep (Bruce Campbell plays an aging Elvis who battles mummies!!!) and way off in the distance, The Two Towers, which I'm just about to finish reading again, and Gangs of New York. It's not a historic lineup, but it contains enough nuggets to keep it from being a dismal second half.

Entertainment news

Hard to believe the fall is just around the corner, with football and Fall TV. I arrived back to Seattle from France and it felt like summer was just beginning. Then the second day back it was about 55 degrees and rainy.

The season premiere of of the second season of 24 has been set on Oct. 29, a Tuesday, at 9pm. The entire first episode will be commercial free. Maybe we'll see Jack Bauer have to use the bathroom during that episode.

Sarah Michelle Gellar likely won't sign on for season eight of Buffy, so next season's it. Good long run for Joss Whedon.

Baz Luhrman has thrown his hat into the Alexander the Great ring. He's now competing with Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson to be first to market with a biopic on Big Al. Very strange how everyone in Hollywood is always converging on the same ideas. I can guarantee that if there are four movies on Alexander the Great, not all four will succeed.

Stupid Stupid Stupid Human!

Aaaaaaaaaaaa! So I lug my camera and my big 80-200mm lens over to France for the Tour. The last time I used my camera, I was at a wedding, and it was dark, so I decided to shoot my 400 speed black and white film at 800 and then push process it later. Well, being the idiot I am, I didn't bother checking the rating when I loaded new film in France during the Tour. I shot two rolls of Provia 100F at 800 speed and the slides all came out predictably underexposed. Noonan!

I think it's partially Nikon's fault for not flashing an alert or resetting the speed when a new roll of film is loaded. Damn!

Fortunately, my one good shot of Lance was shot on 400 speed film. Everyone in the camp was so impressed watching me with my giant lens, lens hood, and monopod, running back and forth across the street to get angles on the incoming cyclists. They're going to have a good laugh at this one.

Best of the streaming music services

Listen.com's Rhapsody online music subscription service is supposedly the best out there. Their musical catalog is impressive, and you can play an unlimited number of tracks each month, but you're limited to burning ten tracks a month. That means most of your music listening still has to occur at your computer. Not my preferred mode of listening to music.

Pressplay finally unveiled unlimited downloads and streams for $14.95 per month.

All these services are inching their way towards usefulness, which makes it somewhat more palatable that the file-sharing services online are crippled. Still, lots of problems remain. The quality of downloaded streams is not CD quality, only 128kbps for Pressplay, for example, and streams are just at 96kbps for customers with the fastest online connections. That's weak, and insufficient for music like classical or jazz which counts lots of audiophiles among its audience.

These services try as hard as possible to not tread on the turf of CD sales, and that's their downfall.

Numero quatre Lance brings home

Lance brings home number four. Awesome. The man is like a machine, which is so impressive because he is so much a human in so many ways. Maybe the French will finally show him some respect.

Photo gear for the Tour

Famed cycling photographer Graham Watson posted photos of the equipment he uses to cover a typical race.

I brought along some camera equipment to the Tour as well. Not as much as Graham, but coincidentally, some of our gear overlapped. I used some similar film: Fuji Provia 100F and Fuji Velvia. I also carried the same flash as Graham (#3 in his photo: SB28) and two of the same lenses (#8: the 80-200mm f2.8 and #11: the 16mm fisheye f2.8). I wish I could afford some of those other lenses, but as an enthusiast it's hard to justify the expense. Someday.

Blech

CBS owns the rights to broadcast the last stage of the Tour. Well, they showed about a few minutes worth of actual riding from the last stage today. Basically, they showed Robbie Mcewen sprinting across the finish to win the stage and the green jersey. American cycling coverage is terrible.

Getting good buzz

A positive shout from Time about Episode II. Looks like they bagged the early mainstream media exclusive with Lucas and company on this one.

JetBlue--the next Southwest? I've heard about its leather seats and its cheap fares to New York.

Nikon D1X. I don't have a digital camera yet, but if I did, this is the one I'd want.

Random fame

On the web, it doesn't take much to get a massive infusion of traffic to your site. Make sure your computer has its sound turned up.

Fashion forward

Juli, my fashion consultant, helped me to pick out a pair of glasses on Saturday down at Marketplace Optical. As Susannah, the lady who worked there, explained, Marketplace specializes in frames that are "fashion forward." That basically means glasses that don't make you look like a geek.

Juli is a graphic designer, an illustrator, and one of the most stylish dressers I know. I highly recommend that you get to know someone like that to help you pick out clothes, glasses, artwork and furniture, etc. If I were wealthy and famous, I'd probably have names of people like that in my Rolodex (er, Palm Pilot, perhaps, in this day and age? that might be passe now also) for all occasions. I'm not, but I still have Juli, and thank heavens for that. Shopping will never be the same again.

I've never really worn glasses, but I'm a big fan. I can't wait to get my specs and transform into, mmm, someone else. Not quite me. Someone I'd like to be. A better me. Clark Kent.

le sangria-froid

Hola mis amigos. I'm back. My body exists in its own state of biological synchronicity, thus I am up at 5 in the morning. It's always easier for me to fight jet lag by staying up late, as is usually the case on the journey home, than to try and sleep, which is the case on the way over. Still, it will be a long day. Lots to catch up on around the house.

Oh, I'm loving this American keyboard. I was thinking, maybe they use punctuation in different ways, thus leading to a different optimal keyboard design. Fewer questions, less need for colons, stuff like that. I'm glad to say I fought that design for my week and a half there and continued to punctuate as necessary.

[Aside: Speaking of grammar and punctuation I've been browsing through my
new copy of Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which is genius, and must point out a useful entry on the misuse of "aggravate for annoy or irritate." Garner recommends that this usage "be avoided in formal writing" as "strictly speaking, aggravate means 'to make worse, exacerbate'". I only note this because I heard it used on the trip a few times...if some of the Spaniards I encountered could speak English, they would be saying "gringo dumb American, you aggravate me." I would not have had the heart to correct them.]

My roomie Rich has taken a new job and is leaving for New York to study finance for five months. So much change happening around me. I'm glad I took a vacation, otherwise I'd feel like a slug considering the life changes folks around me are diving into (job changes, marriage, kids). Getting away helped me to clear my head and think some more about what my next steps are. One idea I had was to make a movie--I even have an idea for a short film. And an idea for the female lead, though I wonder if she'll want to act in it. Hmmm. As most amateur film directors know, finding good actors is one of the elements most out of their control and thus one of the most frustrating things about that field. I wonder which of my friends would make good actors.

I think my entire trip has influenced my aesthetic sensibility. I had a dream just now, before I ran to the computer, where I saw in a Spanish traffic circle the perfect composition for a photograph, and I woke up desperately groping around my bed for my camera. I started to hone my sense of composition with the camera while overseas. Don't know why I didn't think of it before, but I tried to make it a conscious consideration more. It's part instinct, of course, but I'm still a novice so I have to experiment and play around and see what I come up with. But I definitely think my photos from this trip will be better than those I got in Africa. My first few rolls of transparencies (i.e. slides) show some promise, though I got some vignetting in the upper right corner of my shots. Damn. Must have been the two filters I put on my lens. I definitely have to figure that out.

Flipping through some photography compilations, like that of William Klein, has helped me with my own feel for photography.

So so nice to put vacation messages on voicemail and answering machine. Come back to very few phone messages. E-mail, on the other hand, is another story. I'm not even going to begin downloading messages until I get into the office tomorrow.

Crisis of faith

Currently going through some soul searching. Haven't felt like writing in my blog. I think I really need to get to Spain. I'm totally out of focus.

A few random thoughts.

Watch Wong Kar Wai's BMW Film Follow just to hear the rendition of "Unicornio" he uses on the soundtrack. Lovely. Not sure if you can buy that version, but the original is pretty good.

William Klein's photos of New York are great.

Supreme Court ruled that Casey Martin could ride a golf cart on the PGA Tour. The sad thing isn't that he won the decision. The sad thing is that the Supreme Court had to rule on that on the first place. The PGA Tour should've given Casey Martin an exemption long ago. Then it wouldn't have gone to court, and the PGA wouldn't look so inhumane. I play golf. Letting a guy with a handicap like Martin use a cart is not a big deal. If a pro golfer can't walk the course when he doesn't even have to carry his own bag and still compete with Martin, who can barely practice b/c of his handicap, under those types of conditions, shame on him.

I've been thinking...