Monthly Archives: June 2005

Callooh! Callay!

Going to be away from the Internets for a frabjous holiday.

Had a fantastic birthday party, and did not wake up in a pool of my own vomit, which was good. I guess you do get wiser.

I remembered a good bit of it, which is also good.

Sorry to disappoint you all.

Cameras

One day, Sam asked me a question during lunch.

“How many cameras do you have?”

Good question. One that is not easily answered. The short answer is, “many.” I have had a lot of cameras. Most are not being used, tossed aside after their heyday. I am unable or unwilling to part with them in anyway. Most are still functional. Perhaps not the aiptek pencam that had the battery acid incident, but I did say, “most.”

I have a particular fondness for the Game Boy Camera I own, although now it would be difficult to get pictures out of it. There’s a graininess in the low resolution pictures that give it a certain charm.

I shoot everyday with a Sony DSC-U30 camera. It’s a point and shoot with no zoom. It just makes me get closer to the subject. Overall, I appreciate the small size, fast startup time, flash, integrated lens cover, and AAA batteries that I can replace on the fly.

Since the battery failure of my everyday watch, I’m wearing my Casio Wrist Camera, and posting the results to Flickr. What I love about it is that it looks like a clunky watch. No color screen to give it away.

Troubleshooting

Performing any work (software or hardware) on a personal computer is an amorphous event. You don’t know how long it’s going to take. You do know what you have to do. You don’t know if any other problems are going to arise in a system composed of dozens of parts from dozens of different manufacturers. You don’t know what’s going to go wrong in the dozens of programs composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

It’s a miracle the thing boots up at all.

Trying to gauge how long it’s going to take is like trying to solve the n-body problem. You really can’t solve it analytically. Poincaré, in trying to solve it, merely laid the foundations for chaos theory when he talked about deterministic chaos. And that’s really what it is.

Solving any sort of computer issue is improvisation. You know when you’re at the beginning, you know when you’re in the middle, and you know when you’re at the end. You know some moves, you know some steps, but until you start dancing with the problem—you just don’t know what’s going to happen.

Interesting Google Ads

I guess that googleYahoo! is picking up on the words “chocolate,” and “fountain” on my flickr account, because the only ads I see for that page in flickr are for Chocolate Fondue Fountains.

Which, I think, look very cool, although I wouldn’t want to clean one after an event.

I didn’t realize that there were no less than three manufacturers of chocolate fountains in the United States.

Behind the Video

Basically, it was an idea that Yuriko and I bantered about over IM for about 15 minutes. Then we borrowed a camera and some equipment from Dan. We shot principal footage in Chinatown over the course of an hour and a half, with one reshoot for audio. Editing and titling took longer since we all have day jobs, but it probably could have been done in a day.

Julie did the translations for the signs, because, well, she’s Chinese.

I think we have a better handle on it now, so the next one won’t take as long to get out.