Today I got a letter in the mail from the US Government.
It said: “Expect to receive, in about 10 days, a letter from the US Government.”
note 1: I did get a letter from the US Government.
note 2: A week later, I got another letter from the US Government that said “did you receive your letter?”
The web server upon which I host this website just forced me to change my password; “We are improving our security and now require stronger passwords,” they say.
It won’t let me use G2lEnrYMqzJqiMMJQecMXvHNwmsONLDcTqigHgSzFdP1qPdZ† as a password, because “that password is too weak – it does not contain a punctuation character.”
However, it’s perfectly happy to let me use abAB12!@
† I basically live out of 1Password, which lets me generate random passwords like this for websites and auto-fills the login fields when I enter my 26-character long master password. It even synchronizes my passwords to both my home computer and my laptop. Highly recommended.
Because I’m such a tinkerer and perfectionist. 1800 photos don’t magically go through photoshop automatically ;)
Edited with Picassa |
Edited with Photoshop |
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Problems: Photo too blue. Bag on girl on left blown out. Background crooked. Lighting flat. Colours drab. Composition makes it look like I’m nailed to a cross. |
Remove colour cast. Warm up overall colour. Push colours. Burn bag. Increase contrast in quartertones. Straighten and re-compose to balance white purse against brown plaque. Burn background to focus down and to middle. |
One question everyone is asking me since I got back from Japan is “How well did you do with your two semesters of Japanese? Were you able to get by?”
The answer is yes and no… I have the vocabulary of your average three-year-old child, and grammatical structures to match. In English, I would be able to say “I would like to buy a ticket on the Shinkansen to Toyko,” in Japanese I could get the point across with “ときょに しんかんせんで いきます おねがいします”, which literally means “To Toyko using Shinkansen Go Please.”
In fact, “___ please” turned out to be quite a useful little phrase. Ordering in restaurants became a matter of looking around, seeing someone eating something that looked good, and saying “that please.” Of course, it didn’t always work out – Theoretically, if nobody was eating anything that I wanted to eat, I would have to leave, hang around outside for 10 minutes, then go back in and try again.
Another thing I wasn’t prepared for was all the kanji. You see, Japanese is written in a combination of two alphabets and thousands of Chinese characters called kanji. And my courses don’t teach any kanji.
Because of this, you find yourself left in situations such as arriving at the train station and wondering when the next train to your destination is leaving…
Then you have to find the station on a map and figure out how much the ticket will cost…
And, of course, once you figure it out and buy a ticket, you have to try and discover (a) which track the train is departing from, (b) which car you should be in (because sometimes the trains end up splitting and going in two directions), and (c) which seat you have to sit in.
By the way, awesome bokeh in the background on that picture!
Sometimes it didn’t matter that I couldn’t read kanji, because the meaning was completely obvious:
And other times, my lack of kanji-ability didn’t matter, because I doubt it would have helped me figure out what some things were:
The English on the box says “Flash Over: Here is the thing I have been longing for. Transformation of extra quality is now completed. Experience yourself with this satisfaction.” Given that this was on a shelf near the boob cream, my theory is that it’s either a herbal anti-depressant or a vibrator.
I had brought my Japanese textbook with me, and I decided to go back to the beginning and start looking up all the Kanji for words that I didn’t know. Of course, studying isn’t exactly barrels of fun while you’re on vacation, so I decided to force myself to learn – I decided I would only order things in restaurants if I could read the name of it (with the help of a dictionary, of course) off the menu. Of course, I was buying most of my meals at convenience or grocery stores – this was to save money, not an unintended consequence of not ordering food I couldn’t read. (yeah right, says the peanut gallery.)
I had some success and some failures. For example, I decided to have coffee and cake in Shibuya, and managed to figure out how to say the name of the one at the bottom right of this picture:
Of course, when the waitress came and asked for my order, I opened the menu and immediately mental-blocked on whether the ショート at the end was pronounced “shouto” or “tsuuto”, so I just said the first part. Which, of course, is the name of the dessert at the top of the menu. Incidently, it’s “shouto” for “shortcake.”
I also discovered that riding the train or bus became a free game of kanji-flash-cards, as they both would display on a screen the same of the next stop in both kanji and english. Sometimes I had no clue – Sometimes I had almost one part. And this was my great triumph; three weeks in, I successfully read the name of this bus stop.
Obviously, I’m easy to please – “His great transformation occurred when he read the name of the bus stop.” If my life was a novel and that was the back-cover copy, I don’t think I’d buy it.
Incidently, I know the photos from my trip that I’m putting up right now look like crap – they’re the low-resolution JPEG versions of the RAW files that my camera generates, and I’m “editing” them in Picnik instead of photoshop.
Once I get home, I’ll start photoshopping pictures and replace them with half decent ones.
How much sushi can you make at home for $6?
Answers:
Homemade tuna sushi
So where have I travelled?
Create your own visited map of The World
I like to think I’ve travelled a lot, but this really shows me how little of the world I’ve seen…
On the way back from Yosemite, I took a detour to the Castle Air Museum, in Atwater, California. I rate this place as “very cool for airplane geeks who have read too many Dale Brown novels.” :)
I found out about the museum late one night, when I was playing “1980′s Soviet Spy,” which is a game I invented where you use Google Maps satellite photos to try and find U.S. warplanes on military bases. I wondered if there were still any SR-71′s operational anywhere I could look for, and some googling told me no, but there was one on display at this museum about 4 hours from my apartment.
They also had a B-52 there (hence the Dale Brown reference.) I knew from books that it was big, but I didn’t know it was thaaat big! The little white blob under the nose is some random tourist posing.
However, the aircraft I found myself most in awe of was one I’d never even heard of before: The Convair B-36 Peacemaker. It’s the largest piston-engine aircraft ever made, and its six propellers face backwards.
There are plenty of other pictures up on my Flickr Page.
I went on vacation to Yosemite for a few days last week.
On my first day there, I walked around a lake and saw a bird standing on some rocks, fishing. I thought “Wow, this is cool” and I went back to my car and got my camera, telephoto lens, and tripod.
When I got back, the bird was still there. So I set up and waited to try and get some good pictures.
After 20 minutes it flapped its wings…
After 55 minutes, it caught a fish, but my hand was away from the camera and I missed it. It was at this point that I thought “I think I’ll just put the camera away and enjoy my vacation.”
I didn’t pull the camera back out until I drove out of the park a few days later and visited Mono Lake. I’d heard it was an interesting place to take photos.
It seems that back in the olden days, before Los Angeles started draining every body of water within a ten-zillion mile radius, there were underwater springs in Mono Lake. As they percolated water up, the calcium in the spring water formed underwater rock structures. And, as LA sucked all the water out of the lake, these tufta became visible.
Good for photographers, bad for the environment. Oh well.
There’s a few more photos on my flickr page, but not too many. It was too dang hot every day for me to want to haul around a camera and tripod.
Still to come: Photos from my side-trip to Castle Air Museum; there’s lots of those ;)
So I see in the news that SUV sales are down 55%.
Given that people were buying SUV’s as a status symbol, wouldn’t they be an even greater status symbol now, as they say “I’m affluent enough that high gas prices don’t bother me?”
My car is one year and ten days old today, and I just rolled over to 10,000 km. That’s 6000 miles for the metric-impaired.
I think I’ll buy her a drink. She looks thirsty.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any photos, mostly because (a) I really wanted to re-do the photo software behind my web site, but (b) I’m too lazy to do that.
Ergo, I’ve decided to just start using Flickr.
Post: Photos from Saturday’s Rhythm Lounge at the Imperial Ballroom in Redwood City.
All you hear about in the news is “the housing crisis” and “the housing crisis is going to cause a recession.”
Can we please have a little of that here in Silicon Valley? Average house prices are only $150,000 more than they were a year ago. Crisis! Crisis!
Quick Summary: If you’re ever designing a web-based tool and you decide to use anything other than an email address as your customers’ login ID, then you deserve to be hunted down and ground up into something that will fertilize plants.
I made the switch – I bought myself a Mac. Does this mean I have to grow a goatee now?
Gosh, I hope not – Once per lifetime is enough for that mistake.
One of the perks of Corporate housing is the weekly maid service. A maid is one of those things that either you’re rich and you have, or you’re not rich and you wish you could justify.
Having a maid means two things:
When you move into a new apartment, you make decisions like “dishes should go in this cabinet” and “I’ll keep my battery rechargers all here so they’re easy to find.” Generally, you’ll never change these decisions (Hey, have you honestly ever removed everything from two cupboards to swap their contents? I didn’t think so.)
Unfortunately, the maid wasn’t around for those decisions, and I think deep down they get a bit of revenge upon those who use their services – They put stuff away.
Somewhere…
In a different place every week…
For example, last week, my box of rechargers moved from the living room table to inside the TV stand. My roll of holiday wrapping paper moved from the kitchen table to behind the sofa. My sanity moved from my head to Sweden.
No wait, I lost my sanity years ago. Not their fault. :)
I went to Fry’s Electronics yesterday to pick up some blank DVDs and some snacks for my flight to Victoria today.
While waiting in the fast-moving line, I counted how many checkout tills they had open…
They had 33 tills open.
They have 84 tills.
It makes me wonder – If three days before christmas is not a busy enough day to open more than half the checkouts, when is?