Monthly Archives: March 2010

Quickie Tech Notes

For any who may be interested.

I’ve now switched from Firefox to Chrome. I got sick of Firefox crashing on me at least twice per day and also the extremely long start-up time (very noticeable especially when re-starting after a crash). I’d tried Chrome when it was first released but wasn’t terribly impressed. Now it seems to do the job just fine and the plug-ins I need most (Xmarks, RTM, Evernote) all work with it just fine. No surprise, Google Translation works better in Chrome than Firefox (it doesn’t translate better but at least there are more options).

And yes, I placed my order for an iPad a couple of days ago. Had I gotten off my butt and done it sooner, it would have been delivered to my friend in the US this Saturday. Instead, it now ships on April 12th. So I should receive it the week of April 19th. I went for the 64 gig WiFi-only edition. Along with that, I ordered a case, the keyboard dock and the camera connection kit.

If I can’t wait three weeks for it to arrive, perhaps I’ll make a Shenzhen run and look to pick up one of these. Selling for about US$150, it looks just like an iPad but it runs Android – maybe it’s better than the real iPad?

Why Don’t You Like Jazz?

I came across an interesting post by Dyske Suematsu titled Why Americans Don’t Like Jazz. Suematsu is, as you might have guessed from his name, Japanese while his wife is American and he compares his way of listening to music to hers. He says he tends to ignore the lyrics while his wife just ignores music.

If you don’t speak English, any songs written in English are instrumental music. Singers turn into just another musical instrument. These days, no matter where you live, you cannot get away from the dominance of the American music. This means that most non-English speakers grow up listening to a lot of instrumental music. In Japan, I would say, it constitutes about half of what people listen to. When they are listening to Madonna, Michael Jackson, or Britney Spears, they have very little understanding of what their songs are about. In this sense, their ears are trained to listen to and enjoy instrumental music, which explains why Jazz is still so popular in Japan.

That’s an interesting take on things but relatively minor. He hits his stride further down in the piece.

The bigger problem is the dominance of our thought. Most Americans do not know what to do with abstraction in general. To be able to fully appreciate abstraction, you must be able to turn off your thought, or at least be able to put your thought into the background. This is not as easy as it might seem. In modern art museums, most people’s minds are dominated by thoughts like: “Even I could do this.” Or, “Why is this in a museum?” Or, “This looks like my bed sheet.” Etc.. They are unable to let the abstraction affect their emotions directly; their experience must be filtered through interpretations.

Agree or disagree, his conclusion is an important one:

This problem extends far beyond the American disinterest for Jazz; it is a problem for music in general. The dominance of words and visuals in the American culture has lead people to believe that listening to Rap or watching music videos is the full extent of what music has to offer. If this goes on, they’ll be missing a huge chunk of what life has to offer.

He doesn’t go back into the history of jazz and it’s probably important to note that almost from its inception and up through WWII, jazz was the dominant American popular music. But probably in a fashion similar to the history of paintings – the development of the camera made painting realistic images and portraits redundant and more abstract versions of painting developed – jazz moved on after WWII as other forms of pop music ascended. Jazz became, by and large, a more abstract, more cerebral art form.

If jazz remains popular in Japan and western Europe but has become a relatively small market in the US (where it was created!), it barely registers as a blip on the Hong Kong cultural map. We have a small handful of excellent musicians (my favorite being guitarist Eugene Pao) but since the demise of the Jazz Club a decade or so ago, there hasn’t been a regular venue for live jazz and the few jazz musicians who come through here (generally brought by the annual Arts Festival) have trouble filling a hall. I don’t know if jazz was ever “big” in Hong Kong or not, if it ever had the same hold over pop culture that it did in the US in the 30s.

As to why I like jazz, it’s not really something I’ve ever stopped to think about. I just do. My parents never listened to it; it’s something I discovered on my own as a teenager. I bought Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew when it first came out, attracted by the cover art, the ads and the reviews.

I loved it on first listen and so I moved on my own to expand my horizons and today my collection encompasses recordings from the 1920s up through the current year. I’m not big on the free jazz of Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane’s later recordings (at least I’ve heard them and for a period in the 70s and 80s I was a fan of Anthony Braxton’s experimental compositions but haven’t listened to that in a very long time) but otherwise I’m as much of a musical omnivore with jazz as I am with other genres. Miles remains my favorite.

I think it comes down to a matter of musical education. Modern jazz is not immediate in its appeal. You have to know how to listen to it, you have to learn how to appreciate it. Some people simply don’t see it as being worth the time or the effort and I believe that arts education in HK schools takes a distant backseat to more “practical” subjects. I think that’s wrong. Learning music is the same as learning a language and knowing music helps you think more creatively in business as well as in life.

I’m guessing that at least some of my readers are jazz fans. What about you? Do you like jazz? Who do you like? If you like it or you don’t like it, is there any specific reason, any conscious choice? What do you think of what Suematsu has to say on this topic?

Phottix Geo One GPS final thoughts

At the beginning of the month, I posted my initial review of the Phottix Geo One GPS image positioning module for cameras. As I mentioned at the time, I have no experience with other similar products, such as Nikon’s, so I can’t compare it to others. I did find another review – one where the reviewer has the Nikon GP-1 and could do a comparison and said that the two units function almost exactly alike, the biggest difference that he noted being the difference in price – Nikon’s unit costing almost double the price of the Phottix. He also notes that the Phottix comes with a better selection of accessories than the Nikon.

(above images from Phottix’s web site)

I’ve wanted to keep on using this throughout the month but as you may have noticed, we had not only a lot of bad weather but also that nightmarish air pollution. GPS devices need to get signals from at least 3 satellites (4 is better) to function properly and the clouds, rain and smog all served to mostly keep me away from shooting outdoors and the Geo One was mostly unable to get a signal on the few days that I tried. Narrow streets lined with tall buildings also didn’t help much.

I brought it along with me to the Rugby 7s and used it for about half the day and was really pleased with the results. I kept it on the camera while I shot more than 600 photos and the first thing to know is that there was still plenty of juice left in the battery at the end of those 600 shots. For the most part, the Geo One had no problem quickly acquiring satellite signals in that huge open space.

The end result was actually quite useful. My media pass allowed me to walk anywhere I wanted along three sides of the pitch (I wasn’t allowed to walk along the west side, where the officials and hoi polloi were all seated). As I looked through my shots of the fans, which ones did I shoot of people in the South Stands? As I looked at the game shots I took, which ones were shot from midfield and which were shot from the far end? I walked around a lot, back and forth multiple times so I couldn’t remember and it wasn’t always obvious from looking at the photos. But it wasn’t a problem getting definitive answers with the Geo One.

Loading my photos into Picasa (like most sports photographers, I was shooting JPEG-only that day) and clicking on the “Places” button to bring up the view of Google Maps in a side bar, the readings from the Geo One were so exact that I could literally trace my steps as I walked around the pitch. I know exactly where I was standing for each photo.

While this sort of information is not going to be useful to everyone, some people will see the value in this – I certainly did.

My final conclusion is that I’m very happy with the Phottix Geo One’s performance and considering the huge price difference with Nikon’s GP-1, I can say that once I return this unit (loaned to me by the company for review purposes), I’m definitely planning to go out and buy one. Unlike lenses, where I believe there are certain benefits to sticking with the Nikon brand rather than going with third party choices, I’ve got no hesitation now about choosing Phottix over Nikon for GPS.

Re-Think

I was about to cut and paste something here and stopped for a moment. There’s a piece in the SCMP today that I love and want to share with my readers. Most of the SCMP’s content sits behind a pay wall. And most people don’t pay their annual subscription fee. So in order to share it, I was going to cut and paste the entire piece here.

But then I thought about it in light of my previous post about Facebook. If I cut and paste the entire piece here, even if I credit it back to the source, am I then as guilty as Facebook? From my perspective, all I am doing is sharing something that I liked and think should be more widely seen. But would the SCMP share the same perspective? Would they see me as being guilty of stealing their content, of providing something for free that they created and own and have every right to control the distribution of? And even if I happen to believe (as do many others) that their content shouldn’t be behind a pay wall, that it should be freely viewable on the net (as most newspapers are around the world), is it my place to “liberate” that content?

So that brings me to the middle ground, the varying definitions of fair use. Summarize or excerpt but don’t use the entire thing. So here is an excerpt from Michael Chugani’s Public Eye column today. Here is the link, for SCMP subscribers.

The column starts off with the recent sale of flats for Cheung Kong’s new Festival City development near Sha Tin and moves into a discussion of the general housing policy.

A political party survey showed 80 per cent of the people want the government to restart the Home Ownership Scheme for families who can’t afford the crazy prices our developers charge. But our government – which is anything but for the people and by the people – says no. It’s even furious with one of its own – executive councillor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung – for wanting to resume HOS flats. Cheung, a member of the Housing Authority, wants to discuss the matter at a forthcoming meeting. But the government doesn’t even want him to do that. Why? Our unelected leaders always say they respect public opinion. So why aren’t they doing that with HOS flats?

Chugani eventually segues into the recent “rebranding” of Hong Kong, a new logo for the city that cost HK$1.4 million, which is actually not an unreasonable or unusual amount for this sort of work. But it does lead to an interesting point:

Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah was unfazed when asked why democracy wasn’t included as a core value in re-branding Hong Kong. He replied: “Democracy is in our hearts.” Is he saying the other core values are not? Are we spending millions to brand Hong Kong with core values that are not heart-felt?

Well, we know the reason that democracy isn’t included as a core value. Because we are never going to have it. Beijing will keep dangling it in front of us like a carrot on a stick to mollify the masses but we’re going to starve long before the arm that holds that stick gets tired.

Facebook Encourages Theft

I suppose this is my own fault for not noticing it sooner.

Every time you view a photo album uploaded by someone to Facebook, there is an option there to “Post Album to Profile.” What this does is allow someone to take your photo album and post it to their Facebook profile. And rather than properly credit it, the album appears on that person’s profile credited to that person. I’m really unhappy that someone posts MY album to THEIR profile and then gets comments praising the photos.

Of course this goes with the territory. There are zillions of web sites that allow people to post their digital photos online and relatively few of them protect those uploads in any way. I suppose given the original concept of Facebook, it would be natural for someone to post pictures of their Auntie Grizelda or some kegger or their dog humping a turtle and then their family or friends might want to include those on their profile as well.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be so cheesed off about this. Maybe I should take it as a compliment that someone likes my photos enough to want to steal them and claim them as her own? Hell no!

But I think I will be posting far fewer photos to Facebook in the future.

Hong Kong Rugby Sevens 2010 Sports Photos

This was my first time shooting a sports event – and it was rugby, a game that I can’t say I have much of an understanding of. But I enjoyed the challenge of trying to shoot something different.

Almost all of these shots were taken using my Nikon 70-300mm lens (which I purchased used via DCFever). I found the lens to be sharp enough, but I was really suffering with the maximum aperture of f/5.6 at the 300mm end. The day was quite overcast and I had to push the ISO to 1600 in order to be able to shoot wide open at 1/750th of a second. I would have preferred 1/1000th but didn’t want to go to 3200 ISO.

With my media pass, I was able to sit on those little green benches right along side the pitch. I confess that I spent a lot of time looking at the other photographers and their equipment – two or three camera bodies strung around their neck, mega-long and mega-fast telephoto lenses that I know cost HK$75,000 and up. I think that those are permanently out of my price range!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I shot approximately 2,500 photos in one day – about 6-700 of those the fans in the stands, the rest the players on the field. What’s truly mind-boggling at the moment though is that in the past, I’ve been averaging a couple hundred views of my photos per day on Flickr – the number spikes up to around 700 when I post a new set, drops down into the dozens if I haven’t posted in awhile. But my photos of fans in the stands received a total of almost 9,000 views in two days! Clearly people love looking at this kind of stuff – and it makes me wish I could have gone for all three days instead of just one.

Anyway, after combing through all the shots multiple times, here are my favorites. Enjoy!

[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157623607856025"]

Spike Bourdain

Well maybe not so much.

The video crew arrived at my house around 10 AM. They were 30 minutes late and normally I wouldn’t care except that CLP had sent out a notice that they were doing electrical work in the village and all power would be cut by 2 PM. Actually the three crew members arrived and the show’s hostess and while they got to work setting up the equipment, she settled into a chair and pulled out the latest fashion and gossip magazines. I was hoping she would go over the show with me but it turns out that’s not her job – she’s a young (and of course pretty) university student who does this in her spare time. Of course my dogs weren’t about to let her just sit there and read; they charmed her and pretty soon she’d given them most of the salad and sausage bun she’d brought along for breakfast.

The director showed up around 11 and asked me what I was cooking. Apparently the person in their office whom I’d been communicating with hadn’t told them much. When I explained that my main dish was going to be a simple steak, the director told me that they’d had someone cook a steak the week before and could I do something else? Well, I’d given them the list of ingredients I needed and that’s what they had brought along so we looked at it for a few minutes and the director asked if I could make some sort of pepper steak. Fortunately, that’s something I used to cook years ago and remembered how to do it so I agreed. Along with that, I have my own take on roast potatoes that I made and also a basic salad, the twist being that I make my own dressing from scratch.

We spent about 2 hours taping the 11 minute cooking segment. The hostess wanted to take part in the preparation and she had zero knife skills – I tried to show her a better way but she wasn’t really picking up on it. Anyway, the three dishes all came out edible (and actually, of all the times I’ve made my own salad dressing, this time was the best result I’d ever had).

(For those who are curious … took two small steaks, brushed some oil on them, coated with coarse salt and fresh ground black pepper, sliced into small strips. Smashed a couple of cloves of garlic; sliced an onion and a red and a yellow pepper. Stir fried in a wok (a bit more salt and pepper added to the veggies at that point) and had I thought about it more, I might have added some Tabasco or chili to spice things up. For the potatoes, I cut them into medium size pieces, coated them with a mixture of salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary, drizzled just a tiny bit of oil on them and then let them roast in the oven for 45 minutes – they come out tasting like french fries but with a fraction of the oil and much more flavor. The salad dressing was a basic mix of oil, balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard, salt, pepper, sugar, oregano, basil and garlic.)

The hostess turned out to be a terrific actress – she said she actually enjoyed all three dishes and started doing that high pitched squealy thing that I’ve seen on all the other Cantonese cooking shows when they’re trying to show how much they like the food. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “this is just like on TV. Oh, wait, it IS TV!”

When it came time for the sit down interview segment, they set up a table out on my patio, with the great view of the Sai Kung sea behind us. The hostess hadn’t told me what questions she would ask in advance and many of them led me into areas that were probably more political than they should be for a show like this. What changes would I like to see in Hong Kong? Democracy. What changes have I seen in the past 12 years? Worse air pollution, more power in the hands of the major real estate developers, greater gap between the rich and poor. I guess they’ll fix that in post-production.

Then we shot some cut-aways and reaction shots and my dogs got to be in those shots. For some, they were just filming the hostess re-asking the questions. “You’re not going to use my answers, right? You just need her audio?” Right. So this time – What don’t you like about Hong Kong? “The porn in Japan is much better.” Could you compare the IT scene in the US to Hong Kong? “Sure. A priest, a rabbi and a monk walk into a bar. The bartender says, what is this, some kind of joke?” Stuff like that. She said I was torturing her!

They were about 90% finished when the power got cut. Fortunately, we were filming outside at this point, so even though the lights were no longer working they were able to position a couple of reflectors around to deal with the shadows and we got everything done.

I forgot to ask when this will actually air! I don’t have any HD channels so I can’t watch it, but they promised to burn a DVD for me.

Overall, I had fun. It’s not a big deal really; I’m just making it into one because I don’t get to do stuff like this every day. I have to give thanks to my buddy @HyperCasey who introduced me to the producers – check out his blog Fist of Fun; he’s also a contributor to and editor for the NeonPunch blog.

Alice in Wackoland

Via BoingBoing, Drew Friedman’s cover art for this week’s issue of The Nation.

A little bit too restrained maybe?

Apple iPad sort of sold out

I’m expecting to have a reason to celebrate this week and was going to use that as the excuse (as if I really needed one) to place my order for the Apple iPad. Then this morning I noticed that the initial shipment is sold out – to the extent that the Apple store in the US no longer states “Delivery on April 3rd,” it now says “Ships by April 12th.” Think I’m gonna go ahead and order it anyway. I’ve 93% decided on the 64gig non-3G version.

Hong Kong Rugby Sevens – Photos of the Fans

Here is a selection of my photos of the fans at the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens on March 27, 2010.

[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157623718304800"]

The above is just a small sampling; I created this sub-set strictly for the blog. To see lots more photos, check out the entire gallery here. Maybe you’ll see yourself there?