I’ve spent a part of the past few days setting up the “free” netbook that I got from PCCW, a Lenovo S10-2.  I decided to keep it rather than try to sell it off because it’s so much smaller and lighter than my MacBook that I thought it might be easier for me to carry around on a regular basis.  Though one problem I’m finding is that the keyboard is so freaking small, it doesn’t really lend itself to touch typing, which is proving to be a major distraction.  (I never thought I’d adapt to the chiclet style keys on the MacBook but now I quite like them.)

The Lenovo came with a 160 gig hard disk.  But the initial set-up was weird.  The disk was partitioned into two drives and the 30 gig D: drive (labeled “Lenovo”) contained a folder called “Drivers” with less than 1 gig of files on it.  Not sure how this makes sense.  I used EASEUS partition manager to cut that back to 2 gig, restoring 28 gig to the C: drive.

Copied over all the music I have loaded into iTunes on my desktop computer.  And then tried to ruthlessly pare it down to what I figured would be nice to have if I’m sitting in some bar or coffee shop and trying to get work done.  Maybe not so ruthless, because after going through the entire thing 3 times, I’m down to 15,907 songs, 96 gigabytes of MP3s.  Of course I need every Velvet Underground album on there but do I really need 12 Van Der Graaf Generator albums?

And actually, do I really need any of that music on there if every time I leave the house I have my iPhone with me?  (Though I’ve only got a measly 24 gigs of music there.)  The iPhone does email and has TweetDeck (and Tweetie), Facebook, etc. on it, so do I even need to carry around the netbook?  Useful for working on the blog, I suppose, or perhaps any assignments that come my way, if any.

So now, when I leave the house, I’m not just taking my keys.  I’m taking a bag that includes:

• iPhone
• PCCW Pocket WiFi
• Lenovo Netbook
• Kindle
• Nikon D300 camera (with either a 35mm or 18-200mm lens)
• Shure earbuds
• Moleskine notebook
• reading glasses
• sun glasses
• smokes
• the usual assortment of mints, eye drops, spare batteries, business cards, pens

How do I go out with less?  Only thing I can think of would be to swap out the DSLR for a lighter pocket camera, but having given my Canon G10 to my gf, I don’t wanna spend the money to buy another camera right now (Canon S10 looking really sweet). (Well, odds are I won’t be carrying the Kindle or the netbook if I’m going out at night.)

Anyway, if you spot me on the street and it looks like I’m carrying an entire house on my back, now you know why:   I’m completely insane.

I read a lot of blogs, for a lot of different reasons.   I’ve got about 300 different feeds coming into Google Reader at the moment and most days, when I wake up, I’m faced with over 1,000 new articles to read.  That may be why I don’t leave comments on other blogs as often as I should – I’m often so busy trying to get that counter down to zero that I read the content but don’t stop to think about if there’s something I might leave in a comment.

Some blogs that I definitely won’t comment on are some local Hong Kong blogs that seem to be in a battle over which one gets the most page loads.  But I also won’t names names or give links.  These web sites are commercial endeavours, one of which offers what they believe are humorous takes on the day’s news, several of which are positioning themselves as guides to what is hip in Hong Kong.  (Yes, I know my participation in BC Magazine may make my commentary on those sorts of sites suspect – so sue me.)  I don’t consider any of them to be very good.  They’re good at marketing themselves and probably attract more eyeballs than my modest little corner o’ the web.  But every time I come across a post along the lines of “such and such dot com claims they get 20,000 visits per month but we get 30,000!”, all I can do is roll my eyes and wonder if anyone really cares.

Also, again without naming names, with only one or two exceptions (Siu Yeh and Cha Xiu Bao), all of the English language HK blogs that focus on food seriously suck donkey balls.  I realize that many of them are written by people for whom English is a second language, but even if one wades through poor grammar, most don’t provide even basic information about the restaurants and dishes they purport to cover.  I still remember one of these sites reviewing a restaurant and saying, roughly, that you know the prawns are fresh by the freshness of them.  I mean, come on, that’s not even trying.  They’re so busy trying to turn themselves into commercial endeavors, so busy with Twitter and Facebook fan pages that they don’t seem to have time to come up with decent content.

By far the biggest sin is the quality of the photos.  Some of these sites – and I’m talking about sites that run advertising – have photos that look as if they were taken by 5 year old mobile phone cameras in paper bags.   Rather than single any of them out, here are some examples of what I consider to be great food photography.  (I’d love to include Cosmopolitan’s blog photos here but he seems to be inactive web-wise lately.)

Eating Asia.  Photos by an actual working photographer with decent equipment.

SkyBlueSky.  David Hagerman, who does the photos for Eating Asia, has this separate blog to further promote his excellent photography.

Asia Flavors.  I don’t know anything about the author/photographer or what he/she does for a living, but look at the quality of the pictures.

Austin Bush.  A photo-journalist based in Thailand. (Though the photo below comes from a recent Hong Kong trip.)

What do those images have in common?  Sharp focus, good lighting, colors that burst off the screen, photos that make you want to run out and eat those dishes NOW.  I love these web sites not simply because they offer great photos but they offer challenge and inspiration to me.  I know I’m not as good as these guys are.  And I know that’s where I want to get.  And I think, examining my photos from a year ago against things taken more recently, I’m showing marked improvement, not merely standing still.

Compare the photos above to a recent photo I grabbed from a HK food blog.

This is not something from OpenRice.  This is something from a blog 100% devoted to food. Jeez dude (0r dudette, as the case may be), if this is important to you, spend a few bucks on a halfway decent camera.  Doesn’t have to be a DSLR, there are plenty of offerings from Canon or Panasonic that would give you better results with your eyes closed.

Am I just in one of my typical grumpy morning moods?  Maybe.  But my hope is that some of the people who blog about food see the above and take it as a personal challenge to do better.  That’s why I’m not naming names or linking links.  I simply want people to challenge themselves, to do more, to do better, to wake up.

Okay, one thing I have not figured out yet, how to insert just a thumbnail of an image into a post, allowing someone to click on it to see the full sized image.  So for now, large images embedded in posts!   Also, for those who have complained about the white-on-black text, while I like it myself, I’ve been looking at new themes (in part because I want 3 columns instead of the current two) so patience puh-lease!

Now …. round-up of great t-shirts for photographers here.

T-shirts for photogs

And over here, a BoingBoing thing about Michael Wolf’s series of photos of residents of HK’s oldest public housing estate.  Wolf’s page isn’t loading, possibly overloaded due to traffic thanks to the BoingBoing link, give it time.

Michael Wolf's photos of HK public housing residents

Last but not least for now, 12 Offbeat Resources for Landing a Tech Job.  This may prove useful for me if my current plans don’t work out.

Anyway, yesterday we watched Funny People.   I can’t recall a single funny movie about stand-up comics.  As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a single good movie about stand-up comics.  (Yeah, some of you might bring up Lenny and I can see your point though personally I always had a problem with it because I saw the original Broadway (or was it off-Broadway?) production and never liked the changes Fosse made for the screen version).   Mostly, films have portrayed the people who are in the business of making us laugh as deeply unhappy and neurotic people, and Funny People is no exception.

The film is written and directed by Judd Apatow, who graduated from stand-up to TV writing to directing films like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and also writing or producing dozens of films in just the past few years.  (Year One, Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Anchorman, the list goes on and on.)  His films have rarely been “art” but they also succeed at entertaining more often than not.  Funny People is clearly his bid to be taken more seriously, but it fails.

It stars Adam Sandler, and this is not Sandler’s first attempt to stretch beyond the comedy roles that have made him one of the richest men in Hollywood, even though he is still just borderline-passable as a serious actor.  It co-stars Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Bana, Aziz Ansari.  And appearing as some approximation of themselves – Eminem, Ray Romano, James Taylor, Andy Dick, Charles Fleischer, Bud Friedman, Carol Leifer, Paul Reiser, George Wallace, Norm MacDonald, Dave Attell, Sarah Silverman and so on.

You’d think from the cast that the film would be about the life of stand-up comics, both struggling and successful.  And that’s what the first half of the film is about.  Sandler is a mega-successful comic-turned film star, appearing in high concept crap like a film about a man’s head on a baby.   A man with infinite wealth but no friends, after finding out he may be dying from a rare disease, he hires the first struggling comic he meets (Rogen) to write jokes for him, be his personal assistant and be his best friend.

So fine, we get some insight into those two lifestyles.  There isn’t much we haven’t seen before, but there is a touching Thanksgiving dinner scene. (Actually, the scene with Eminem cursing at Ray Romano is kind of funny, too. “I thought everybody loved him!”)

Then, about half way through, the film essentially abandons everything it built up, to focus on Sandler’s attempt to win back his old girlfriend, “the only woman he ever really loved,” who is now married with children.   From this point forward, almost everything that happens will make you cringe and the film never regains its footing.

Why does the film abandon its premise to go this route?  I don’t know.  And what does it say when the unattainable woman is played by Apatow’s wife and her kids are Apatow’s kids?  It’s just bizarre. I suppose Apatow realized he had nowhere to go with the story he’d built up.  Successful movie star finds happiness.  Struggling comic finds success, or not.  So he had to come up with a new plot arc, rather than going back and reworking what he’d already written.  8-1/2 this ain’t.

Apatow does show some restraint in this film.  One of his trademarks seems to be always managing to get at least one penis shot into each of his films; here the characters all talk about their dicks but never show them.  But stretching this story out to 146 minutes (153 in the unrated DVD version) shows an almost total lack of restraint.  The film meanders, it wanders all over the place.  Trimmed back to 120 minutes, this might have been better.  (The listing on Rotten Tomatoes says that the film runs 4 hours, 59 minutes and sometimes it feels that way.)

I still think Apatow’s a talent to be reckoned with.  And maybe someday he’ll find some way to strike a balance between his comedic and serious sides.   But he needs to find new themes because almost all of his films are about boys in mens’ bodies who find a way to grow up and these multiple variations on a single theme are growing tiresome.