Some random updates (and a very incoherent blog post in general, sorry): Yesterday I signed up for a new gym, got a great deal, something like $800 for 3 years and $24 annually afterwards. It’s great to workout in a real gym again, the one at the condo just didn’t quite cut it. When I was there yesterday afternoon, back to my program I put together 3 years ago, it felt great. Kindda brought back memories of my college days, workout has always been a way to handle stress and help me focus. I should also get back into running again, running is a little different though, I actually need to be able to focus to run long distance.

The iPhone contest at OnMyList created some strange traffic pattern that pretty much brought the server down, I’m looking into caching more things with memcached right now. I also got the first cut of our Facebook app to work, now we’ll just work on the styling to make it look nice and then we’ll release it.

My father wrote a great blog entry (in Chinese) about roughly the last 5 years of my life. Shamefully, he is absolutely correct about everything. I didn’t know exactly what I was going through, but I knew I needed a change, so I took a new job and a change of scenery. I’m blessed to have parents who are really close to me and understand me, more than I do myself, when going through confusion in life it is important to let the people who truly understand and care about you to help you figure things out.

I wasn’t pleased with any of the photos I took outside during lunch, so snapped this one at home… It’s already been a year since I bought the Co-Axial GMT in today’s photo, it was a birthday present for myself, it did make me happy for quite a while and now it’s just another watch. I guess work and photography are what keep me going these days…

“things that used to matter”

Had serious troubles falling asleep last night, not sure if it was the new apt or the noise or something else, well probably all of the above. Got up pretty early again, walked over to Chinatown to get some stuff to make coffee, snapped this on my way there. Now I got everything I need to get myself fully caffeinated, ready for a serious work day!

Completed my move from Santa Clara to San Francisco, went very smoothly. Also found a tenant for the condo in south bay so I won’t have to pay double rent… (update: the dude freakin backed out, so now I’m still looking for a new tenant) I am able to pick up an open wifi AP, it’s on Comcast and is super fast. So maybe I won’t have to get broadband or catv myself…

snapped this at Washington Square across the street, it’s no masterpiece but I’m tired and it’s getting dark (thus the noise)… This photo, unlike the previous ones, doesn’t have much to do with my current mood or state of mind either…

“though we often break the law”

pianissimo -> mezzo-forte -> fortissimo…

Technorati Tags: crescendo

Again woke up early, signed the lease for my new apartment in SF yesterday, so I put my place in Santa Clara up for rent on Craigslist. My eyes wide open starring at the ceiling and the surroundings, saw the controller and bear on Tay’s coffee table and snapped today’s photo. With Jan’s help I captioned it “The Tao of Toys” (「道」之玩偶 ). It has something to do with the concept of Wu Wei (無為) in Taoism and the desire for some level of control of your destiny at the same time.

Technorati Tags: wu wei, taoism

Jan on Superfuture suggested that I do a daily photo blog post… It will get me back to shooting and blogging regularly. I’ll try to take a new photo daily, but I might take a batch one day and post one per day… The photographs might or might not reflect current mood, I can’t really control the weather in SF… To kick this off I’m including a couple of photos taken just an hour ago:

got up early, took a walk and shot a few frames on my way to a cafe…

I’ve said this many times, when asked what digicams I would recommend, I always say Fuji’s. There is really not much point to have a camera that looks sexy but it turns shitty pics. Of course if you’re not ever gonna shoot indoor or at places with very limited available light (like bars/clubs/lounges), then yeah, pretty much any modern digicams would work.

Now, Amazon is not gonna be happy that they’re kindda recommending something like the inexpensive F20 over $500 models from Canon or Sony or Nikon with some fancy image stabilization technologies… 🙂

Compact Camera High ISO Modes

Many decent compacts can produce almost SLR-like quality at their lowest ISO, but whatever the marketing departments of the camera manufacturers may like you to think, there is no way you can get acceptable results from a small sensor compact at high ISO settings – some struggle even at ISO 400. The only exceptions are the Fujifilm FinePix F30 and F31fd, which use a combination of large pixels (lower megapixel count), clever sensor design and clever noise reduction to produce decent results at ISO 800 and usable results at ISO 1600 (the ISO 3200 mode is, however, a step too far).

For ‘serious’ photographic purposes your options for high ISO photography with a compact camera are very limited. You’ll get perfectly acceptable results using the lowest ISO and a tripod, but if you want to produce decent enlargements (in some cases anything from 6×4 inches up) you’ll find the high ISO modes are of very limited use.

Of course the manufacturers would argue that compact cameras are not ‘serious’ photographic tools, and for the ‘average’ consumer – the typical ‘point and shoot’ user – the loss of resolution and detail is not as important as getting the shot, recording the moment. This is true, but as our studio tests show in some cases the output isn’t even as good as a decent camera phone, and would, we suspect, be disappointing to even the least discerning snap shooter.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I didn’t forget, and actually carried my camera the entire day yesterday for the 24 hours of Flickr event/project. You can see all of them here. Some selected few:

I haven’t decided which one to submit to the group pool yet. Best way to see the submitted images at FlickrLeech.

Technorati Tags: 24 hours of Flickr, flickr, photography, san francisco