see also: the Pei Pei art project

We interrupt this tedious and stale chronology of summer trips for the important news that I am now an Award Winning Photographer. Last week, somebody on the photography mailing list at work declared his intention to start a series of minor contests. He picked a theme, "Sweet Things," gave people a week to submit something, then picked an overall winner (me) and some runners-up. There were 67 entries. My prize is to pick the theme for the next contest, and judge the next winner.

Cheesy though my picture may be, I will say in my defense that I was the first person submitting not to take the theme literally. Many entries were pictures of cookies or cupcakes or what have you. Who the little girl is, I don't know. She was at Steve's kid David's birthday party in April 2008, when he turned 2.

For the next contest, I picked "nothing gold can stay."

° ° °

Chapter 5 in the ongoing series would have been the week I spent at sailing school in Berkeley. I had a really good time at that, but don't feel like talking about it just now. I have given away my secret plans to too many people as it is, I think.

28 Sep 2009 22:00 PT - persistent link - trackback - 4 comments

chapter 2: phish

In my head there is always a version of the doomsday clock that represents how long until I go crazy, assuming no course changes. "Go crazy" most probably means "quit job and leave Northern California," but there are other possible outcomes. Shortly after I moved here, it got wound up for about 4 years. It advanced as far as 5 or 6 years at one point, then snapped back to a few months. Right now it's set for about 12-18 months, I think.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point was that during the very boring month that followed the trip to Boston, the Clock seemed to have mere weeks to go. So I set out to pack the calendar with activities meant to fill the rest of the year, or, failing that, help decide where to go next. This all started with the Phish concert on August 5.

The concert was ok. Better than they were playing in 2000 when they finally quit touring the last time, but the songs they picked could have been better. I was hoping for Stash or Bathtub Gin or something in the encore, but no, just a couple more songs I didn't know. And there really aren't that many of those; I even listened to some earlier concerts from this summer to see if that was going to happen. Oh well.

chapter 3: santa monica

The morning after the Phish concert, I went to Santa Monica to work for the next two days. I went to talk to some people about Picasa, thinking I might try this whole thing that some people do, working on something I'm actually interested in. That's no kind of magic bullet for a happy life, however. I really believe my relative lack of attachment to anything we work on has been an advantage more often than not. I can schedule myself for whatever of our projects nobody wants, and they will be happier and I won't care.

Not much to report about Santa Monica, though. I went to supper with Laura on Thursday night, but Alice was out of town, unfortunately.

chapter 4: los angeles

After work on that Friday (August 7), I went on a tour to Pasadena to see Yi, then Pomona to see Meg and Kevin. This was the first time I have seen Yi since her baby was born. Being back at work, with a two year old, it's probably not the easiest year ever. I bet her first couple years at Pomona (which were my last couple) seem like a vacation now too. As always I stayed later than I meant to at Meg and Kevin's house, but not too bad, I still got to Cheryl and Ed's house by about 10 or 11 or something.

Much of the reason I went, of course, was that it was Miriya's birthday. She's 10 now, so she won't be a little girl, and I won't be her favorite person, much longer. We went to Frank and Son's on Saturday morning, then she had a birthday party on Saturday afternoon. (There wasn't a whole lot for me to do there, being neither a 10 year old girl nor the parent of one.) But the next day we went to the Orange County Fair. I got a deep fried White Castle hamburger and Twinkie. The deep frying of both is pretty unnecessary, but you know that going in. Miriya climbed both the rock-climbing walls that they had, which were too easy. Actually the first guy called up the second one on the radio to tell him that he was sending Miriya over because his wall was too easy. (Why the climbing wall ride operators are linked by dedicated VHF channel, I do not know.) Then we went to the pig races, after which they gave us all coupons for free bacon. This is not a joke. Can't be beat.

Leaving again was hard, even more than usual. Miriya is old enough now to understand that I won't be back for a long time, and she gets sad. So do I.

15 Sep 2009 10:33 PT - persistent link - trackback - 2 comments

When I was in Los Angeles last week, I was reminded how few people I have bothered to inform of a recent development, which was that Megan broke up with me on May 31. I got little warning; she came back from yet another baby shower one Sunday afternoon and announced that because she and I were not "leading to anything," we were not going to see each other anymore. I was not asked for an opinion as regards "leading to anything," so I formed none. The whole conversation lasted about five minutes. So it goes.

First off, I got to re-plan my exciting Boston vacation, which had been set for dates suiting her schedule and filled with activities suiting her tastes. But Kyle, it turned out, did not cancel the wedding, so I did not have the option to just stay home.

There, let it never be said that I don't learn anything from past relationships.

chapter 1: reorganization

So what now? As Don Draper said in the episode of Mad Men that I just watched, I have a life, and it goes in one direction. Forward. The first thing that happens is that everything is on the table. After two excruciating weekends, there literally wasn't anything left to clean. Every room of the house was done, the basement, the shed, and I stripped and re-waxed the car. Next I got rid of a generation of video games, old rock band and dance dance stuff (I kept the newer versions, so far), various old electronics, two cameras. A trunk full of clothes went to the donation bin.

A hypothetical long-suffering reader would remember that I do this regularly, and this episode arrives right on schedule, 14 months after the last one. For every object I own, I consider whether it is worth buying a box, putting it in the box, carrying it out to a truck, carrying it in again somewhere else, taking it out, and throwing away the box. It's safe to assume I will be doing this by myself, in suboptimal conditions. I have carried this stuff on a quarter-mile round trip from the street to the back of the Long Beach apartment complex in 100° of June sun, and driven it 4000 miles in blizzard conditions on two consecutive round trips from LA to Denver, and I'm tired of it. So if the answer is no, this thing isn't coming when I move, then I might as well get rid of it. Possessions are a burden. My living room now contains one shelf of books, Rock Band, and two pieces of furniture.

After the actual housekeeping was done, I did the metaphorical kind. Such as closing my 10-year-old Speakeasy account to replace it with the cable modem, which at 10x the speed, I am finally forced to admit is better. I closed the Smith Barney account that I inherited with the company stock plan and moved it to Charles Schwab. Which led me to close my airline credit card and replace it with the one from Schwab (which you should do too, if you are a customer...it pays 2% cash on everything, with no annual fee). Which leads me to liquidate ten years of AA miles and American Express points. The American Express points translate to a couple thousand dollars of credit at Banana Republic or whatever, which fits with the Extreme Makeover plan just as soon as I find someone that is willing to consult on wardrobe.

I sold my old computer and bought a new imac. I bought two new lenses. I rearranged some investments. I sold the tickets to the Phish concert at Red Rocks. Now the easy stuff was done, and it was time to face the bigger changes that need to happen.

My situation being what it is, something like moving or a job change would take a while, and I would not be able to talk about it until it was done. But I have a number of options. And along those lines, I did take a week to go to Santa Monica and Los Angeles, and a week in Berkeley taking the first sailing certification class (all done). Then I'm going back to Dublin at the end of next week, then Wales.

To be continued...

19 Aug 2009 00:47 PT - persistent link - trackback - 5 comments

see also: G7 vs D-Lux 3

Preparing for my first sailing class last week, I took another trip into point-and-shoot land. The idea was to get something waterproof, since I assumed it would get splashed on the boat, which certainly happens when you go rafting.

Based on earlier reviews, I wanted the Pentax W60. Unfortunately, it was already discontinued, and nobody knew when the W80 was going to show up. So I borrowed Ian's Canon D10. Then the W80 turned up in stock at Amazon three days before I left, so I got one just in time. The point being that I took both of them to Berkeley with me. Here's how it turned out.

First look

All right, so the point of this camera is to get some kind of pictures where otherwise I would have had none at all. I realize the results are not going to be great, and it's going to have the kind of gimmicky feature set meant for the most clueless user. In this respect, the W80 immediately meets–nay, exceeds–expectations. It's loaded with useless crap like in-camera aspect ratio selection (which just throws away some of the captured pixels), and I really don't need two different "modes" for Kids and Pets. "Smile Detection" has been chosen as the function of the one and only dedicated button. Fine. But even given all this, I'm still surprised to find that there is no Tv or Av mode. At all. Exposure compensation is possible via clunky menus, but that's all as you get. Ouch.

How does the D10 stack up? I find it just a little more usable, mostly because exposure compensation is only one beep away, and the case has one more button. So it hurts a little bit less when Canon dedicates one of them to that useless direct-print thing that nobody ever uses, as is their custom. The D10 also restrains itself to a mere fourteen goofy scene modes, slightly less redundant than the W80's twenty-four.

Now for some pictures

So, figuring when-in-Rome, I kept both cameras on either auto-everything or "beach" mode all week. Getting back to the hotel with the W80 on the first night, I have many pictures like this:

Here is a nice 40-foot ketch (how about that sailor talk? YARRR!), but what is going on with this picture? First of all, it has a strong blue cast, which makes no sense. The only source of light is the sun, at sea level, hardly difficult conditions. Here's what the scene actually looks like, after forcing the sails to a neutral white in Photoshop:

Every camera blows the white balance sometimes, but this blue-purple cast is pretty consistent, including after I took it out of "beach mode," which seems to be trying to exaggerate the blue of the sky and water. The D10 seems to be free of this problem:

Taking a closer look, things only get worse for Pentax:

Canon D10	Pentax W80

The Canon doesn't blow me away, but it's in the mid-tier point and shoot ballpark. The Pentax would be in that ballpark too...if this were ISO 400. But this is ISO 64. 64! Aren't we getting about a trillion photons per pixel at this speed? Yet there's painful noise in both chroma (fake magenta and green tints) and luminance (overall grainy look). And at f/5.5, 1/400s, ISO 64, bright sun, on a subject that is barely moving, this should be showing us the camera at its best.

And the problems don't stop there:

Canon D10	Pentax W80

If you need to illustrate chromatic aberration, both cameras will do, but at least the Canon has to be pushed into blown-highlight territory. Again, not too bad, considering how the optics must be compromised to be able to zoom in a sealed package with no exposed moving parts. But the W80 happily bleeds purple fringes anywhere there's a light-dark transition. Fortunately those hardly ever happen in pictures.

Movie mode

If the image quality problems of the W80 were too subtle for you so far, try the movie mode. Watch in amazement as skin tones, brown rails, blue life jackets, and shadows all fade to purple. This isn't even the worst video by far; it's just one that Chrisi already uploaded to youtube so I don't have to.

Too bad, because the W80 claims 720p video at 30fps. There are a whole lot of pixels, they just all suck.

Here's me doing the same drill, as seen by the Canon D10. Fewer pixels, and the contrast isn't great (and I don't do as well at slowing the boat down), but the color looks more or less like it was shot under the Earth sun:

Verdict

I've never said this before, but Pentax has made the W80 so bad that I don't want it. Assuming they'll take it, it's going back to Amazon. Some updated reviews are coming out now, and they confirm that somewhere in the process of smashing those so-very-important two more megapixels onto the sensor, they made the actual image quality dramatically worse than the W60.

If I really needed a waterproof camera, I'd have to get a D10. It did a perfectly serviceable job, and my only complaint is that it's so big and bulbous, and doesn't fit in a pocket. But the real moral of the story is that I don't need either of them, at least not for sailing. If you're going out for a class to do drills, it's hardly worth bringing any camera, because you're going to be busy all day. If you're going out to sail like a normal person, just use a normal camera. The wettest I got either of these was rinsing them under the faucet at the end of the day just in case they got splashed with salt water at some point.

Beware that there are huge gaps in my non-scientific test, such as: I never actually took either one underwater. So you'll want to read other opinions. But I'm pretty sure you won't find I've got it completely wrong, unless there is some kind of manufacturing problem with these early samples.

16 Aug 2009 23:09 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments

YES! AWESOME! POOL PARTY!

24 Jul 2009 19:51 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments

This thing called Google Voice has been around a while. The original idea goes as follows: You sign up and receive a new phone number which is managed by Google. You program it with the numbers of your existing phones, and then whenever anybody calls your new number, it rings your existing phones. The point being that people can call just one number, and you can answer on your work phone, cell phone, or whatever else you have. That was called "Grand Central" and it was its own company until Google bought them.

Since then, Google has added a lot of features, but it was still a mess to use, because they couldn't do anything about the fact that any calls or messages you send from a cell phone still look like they are coming from your original (non-google-voice) phone number. That might be fixed today, with a new thing you can download for Blackberry or Android.

The point of all this is, I finally signed up to try it, and the first thing you have to do is pick your new phone number. So what I did, being extremely motivated to do work today, was filter all the 7 letter words out of the dictionary and look up all of the ones that seemed interesting to see if they were available. (Since you are going to ask, there are about 20,000 of them, and it took about 90 minutes.) So I now present, as a public service, a list of interesting google voice phone numbers that can be yours if you act now:

(The area code and state don't matter, you can pick anything you want.) The one I picked for myself is not in this list. But 848-MATHNET was a strong runner up. 561-AIRHEAD, 507-RAGTIME, 409-BEDEVIL, and 510-VIBRANT are pretty good too. 530-BELOVED is good for somebody that's not me.

Leave a comment if you take one of these...or just tell me, if, like me, you don't want your new phone number on the interwebs.

16 Jul 2009 02:01 PT - persistent link - trackback - 4 comments

Having played Rock Band for a year, there are few songs that are still hard on the expert drums. This required the Ion Drum Rocker, first of all, because you will never make it through faster songs that use a lot of hihat or ride with the original drums. But I got that a while ago. We can't possibly leave well enough alone, so what else could be improved?

Minimize the latency

The latency through my stereo was about 60ms. Meaning that 60ms passed between the time you played a note and the time it came out the speakers. This mostly didn't matter to the game, as long as you had calibrated it, but it really sucked for the drum fills and vocals.

Last weekend, it suddenly occurred to me that the delay was probably caused by using my 12 year old receiver to decode the SPDIF audio, via an optical cable from the Playstation. Sure enough, when I switched it to use the plain old 2 channel analog connection, the latency went down to 18ms.

This makes a big difference to a fast song, although I don't know why; the calibration is supposed to take care of it. The worst were sections with a big long roll of sixteenth notes, so maybe the mismatch between sound and action was just causing me to screw up.

It's annoying to have to change it back to play movies with surround sound, but you know what, that really doesn't matter much either.

This is hardly an original idea, but I finally went to Guitar Center and got a microphone stand, which makes it possible to play an instrument and sing at the same time. (Into the microphone, anyway.) It's surprisingly hard to sing and play both on Expert at the same time. The best I have managed is 98/91, as you see here. I wouldn't have realized it, but it takes a lot of attention to make it happy with your singing on Expert. Monitor headphones would probably help, if they helped you hear the correct pitch over the drums. So maybe that is the next addition...

Note that you might think, like me, that it would be possible to just attach a boom to a light stand that you already have (for photography). You would be wrong. Music stands all use a threaded connector that's about 1/2 inch thick, and does not work at all with any lighting equipment, which depends on studs and 1/4 or 3/8 inch tripod sockets. You could use a clamp or something hacky, but a microphone stand and boom is only $20-30 anyway, so I didn't bother.

Many people have observed that the Rock Band microphone (unlike the Singstar microphones) is just a generic USB dsp device. You can plug it in to your computer and record through it without doing anything special. So I figured I would try the reverse, and see whether the Playstation will accept any random thing that looks like a sound input. I tried this Alesis 8 track USB mixer with a condenser microphone that I had from a previous project. It works fine. So now you can use any microphone you want, turn on the built in effects, or run more than one at the same time. I'm not sure what the point of any of these things would be, but when has that ever stopped anyone?

09 Jul 2009 23:08 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments

File under "things I wish I had known three years ago":¹

See all those black plastic trim pieces? The ones that go all the way around my car, and are annoying as hell if you try to wax it, because they are in the way on every panel and tape doesn't stick to them and they're black so they show every tiny bit of wax you get on them by accident? Yeah, those all pop off if you pull on them.

¹A list which contains some whoppers, by the way.

14 Jun 2009 11:08 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments

redlance ~ $ diff -u june_2006 june_2009

- address: Mountain View
+ address: Sunnyvale

- camera: Pentax *ist DS
+ camera: Canon 1D mark II

- car: Nissan Sentra
+ car: BMW M3

- debt: $18,000
+ debt: $0

- glasses

- hair

- job_code: O3 / System Administrator II
+ job_code: O5 / Sr. SA/SRE (Eng Manager I)

redlance ~ $

07 Jun 2009 21:39 PT - persistent link - trackback - 1 comment

Last Friday, somebody posted two Indigo Girls tickets to the forsale list at work, for Wednesday night, in Berkeley. This is perfect, because I can get to the BART on the (work provided) shuttle, stay at Megan's house, and get back to work the same way the next morning. So of course I jumped to get the tickets before somebody else did.

Only problem was, Megan didn't want to go. This made me mad, which forces me to admit that concerts like this are not really optional with me. Just like going to plays and the occasional opera is not really optional with her. I don't want to make her go, I want her to want to go. A certain recent prospective girlfriend was dead in the water after passing up a similar last-minute opportunity to go to the Ditty Bops.

But Megan was (mostly) spared from fighting about this one because it occurred to me that her friend Heidi would almost certainly want to go. Which she did, and Megan stayed home to make food for this other friend that recently had a baby. When I got to the show, I found out that in fact all of Megan's Berkeley friends were there. Including the one she though she had to make food for. Wah waah.

So this is how it comes to seem like a good idea, being home alone and chained to the computer again, to do this little project.

An Abridged, and Self-Servingly Edited, History of Concert Tickets

	The band that played at Pomona during my freshman year was Third Eye Blind. This was about the height of their popularity, but, nonetheless, they sucked. The opening band was Eve 6, also surfing the wonder of their one hit, and they were better. I went with my sponsor group, a bunch of friends that lasted about as long as those two bands.
	Something possessed me to go to the orchestra. (Ok, something's name was Mary.) I remember only one thing, which is that some snotty Pomona guy took pains to correct me when I referred to Also sprach Zarathustra as the song "from" 2001. Yes, jerk, I am aware that it wasn't written specifically for the movie. I was speaking colloquially.
	The World Sacred Music Festival was an odd thing that featured the Dalai Lama and Crystal Method. I think I went with Anna, because I think I remember her driving to the Hollywood Bowl. I also remember being mad at Julia who not only bailed out of going at the last minute, but never paid for her ticket, which went to waste. Which is why it hasn't been torn off, as you see here...
	Another Big Bridges concert was this Lisa Loeb and Duncan Sheik. I have no memory of Duncan Sheik at all, but Lisa Loeb was pretty enjoyable. I probably went to this with Christina.
	This is the first time I went to the Indigo Girls. They rocked more in those days, and had a whole band and lights and stuff. I went with a girl named Jill who lived upstairs and hung around a good bit and was despised by the likes of Caitlin and Desiree. Once we were there, we ran into Desiree and her roommate Laura.
	So far this is the only Phish concert I have actually been to, but that should be remedied this summer. Went with Janel (yes, from high school) and Laura/Alexa. Which I can be sure of because this was the first concert to take place after I got a digital camera.
	And this was the first of at least four Barenaked Ladies concerts. Desiree was there, and the new album that annoyed me by containing a lot of songs I didn't know was Maroon.
	Cake was also awesome, also with Desiree. This would seem to have been a good year for concerts. In point of fact we saw Cake on Sunset Strip with the gold marquees and stupid band names. The Cake dude, whose name I have just had to look up and is John McCrea, wears a baseball hat and looks like a truck driver. This means he looks like I think Dave Matthews sounds. The reverse is also true.
	Eagle Eye Cherry wasn't all that. But living in LA, there were like six clubs that were playing some smaller-name band like this (but that you have heard of) every night of the week for like $10.
	It seems unlikely that this was the first Dave Matthews concert, but it's the first one whose ticket stub survived. For several years I went to every one of these with Alice, which was three or four at least.
	Bet you didn't see this one coming. Alice had to cover this concert for the magazine she worked for at the time, and her other friends didn't want to go to Britney Spears for some reason. True fact, nearly everybody at a Britney Spears concert is either: a gay man a girl between the age of 12 and 16 a woman over 35. Some of these are the mothers of #2, but by no means all of them.
	Dave Matthews with Alice again, of course.
	The only non-concert exception on this list, also the only time I have gone to a big auditorium to see a comedian, which was kind of weird. I think there was a warm-up comic who was just as forgettable as the usual opening band. Went with Bi Ji, who was a big fan.
	I had to think about this one for a long time before I could remember it at all. Now I remember that they sang Christmas songs along with some kind of local grade-school chorus as their opening act. Bi Ji and Alice were there. Can't remember much because it was just a month before I moved here, which puts it solidly in an Eternal Sunshine blackout period. Honestly I have no idea if Old Whats-Her-Name was there or not.
	Here I was, barely six weeks after moving to the Google and I responded to a random post from somebody who had one extra ticket for Belle and Sebastian, first class sad bastard music. I went with some people that I had never met and never saw again. I would never ever do that now, of course, but more interesting is the fact that nobody would do that now. The Google was a lot different then, with "only" 5000 employees and another 100 moving in to Mountain View every week.
	Probably the last Dave Matthews concert; Alice came here to Mountain View for it. We kind of agreed that it was enough Dave Matthews for a while. Nothing else has come along to replace it yet.
	Don't know MC Lars? You must not be keeping up with the latest in "nerdcore rap," which is perhaps a little bit of a niche market. It was weird and obviously backwards to give MC Lars top billing over MC Frontalot, who was also there, and much better. (Opening act, Optimus Rhyme. You have to admit that rappers named MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme are probably awesome.) But MC Lars's one song was popular on the radio at the time. Crutcher, Theresa, and Jenny were there. Jenny thought the rapper was named McLars, which she will never, ever hear the last of. Just like I was relentlessly mocked in the sixth grade for having once read C+C Music Factory as "C plus C."
	At last, the Indigo Girls concert that started this whole entry. As previously mentioned, I wanted to go and Megan did not, which probably makes us the only male-female couple so oriented in the history of Indigo Girls concerts. (Hint: Few of the couples at Indigo Girls concerts contain any male representation at all.)

Wow, that took forever to finish. I was on call for the last two weeks and still didn't get around to it. Actually the truth is that I got to the first Barenaked Ladies entry and got stuck for a long time. By some accident of timing, all Barenaked Ladies concerts have come just before some kind of traumatic upheaval for me, which leaves me unwilling to write about what I remember, and unwilling to delete all of them completely. (And it makes me sad to read now that Steve Page has quit the band, which means this tradition won't be broken.) In the end I dealt with it as I usually do on here, by writing in code. When I read it a long time from now, I will know what I meant. Yes I know, it's a lot of work being me all the time.

27 May 2009 00:06 PT - persistent link - trackback - 6 comments