I’ve redone the Photography page here.  It now leads to four separate sub-pages of photo galleries organized by general subject.  There are now separate pages for Hong Kong, Musicians, Food & Travel and Models.  Please check back on a regular basis as I plan to be adding more photos on a regular basis.  (There are 27 new shots of Icebox live at Amazonia added just this morning.)  The pages load very fast, just thumbnails with the Lightbox plugin so that you can see larger versions of any/all photos without leaving the page.  I hope you enjoy!

Gonna crawl back into bed and see if I can get some sleep soon.

Just wanted to note that it seems like everyone’s back in town from their holidays.  Monday was my #1 day for both unique visits and page loads since moving to this domain in November.  Thanks!

Just a few notes/reminders:

Please click on the Google AdSense ads once in awhile to show your support for this otherwise-out-0f-work blogger.

Also note that some of the DVDs, CDs and other stuff I mention here are accompanied by links to Amazon and if it’s something you think you might want to buy from Amazon, then please do so by clicking on the link here.  It doesn’t cost you any extra but puts a few pennies in my pocket.  If you click on an Amazon link here and then don’t buy that product but do buy something else, I still get a referral fee.  There’s a couple of Amazon widgets on the right hand side – one’s a “deal of the day” and the other is some product suggestion based on the content of the blog – take a look.

Also a reminder that if you want to view the site on your mobile phone, I’ve got a special mobile theme installed.  It loads really fast.  You don’t need to do anything, just go to the web site via your phone’s browser and the mobile theme will load by default.

Also a reminder that if you link to me on your site, I’ll not only reciprocate with a link here but will also display a banner or badge along with that link – just email the graphic or link to me and I’ll post it here.

Last for now – yes, I’m not doing much in terms of updates to the Spike HK facebook page.  However, I am very active on Twitter and you can follow me here.  Aside from the usual Twitter nonsense, I do post some quick links to stuff I’ve found of interest, links that don’t always make it to these pages.

I think I finally fell asleep around 9 this morning, woke up around 2 PM.  Sitting around, doing a little bit of this and that, my mind is a little on the dull side today.  I was going to go to Mong Kok and back to Sim City for some stuff but just couldn’t be arsed to get dressed and drag myself out of the house.  Dinner home tonight, a movie or two, get some more work done.  Exciting stuff, eh?

I was talking with someone last night and he said that the contrast seems off in my studio shots and asked about my monitor calibration, suggesting I might want to try the hardware route instead of doing it by eye.  Here’s a web site that provides a very nice online calibration tool.  Here and here are two looks at hardware calibration tools.  So, yeah, maybe get out to Mong Kok and find out what’s available in Hong Kong and for how much.  I also told my friend that I had the picture control set to Vivid on the D300 and he said he thinks that works well for landscapes but not for skin tones.  Well, it’s a never ending process, isn’t it, learning this stuff and then internalizing it so it becomes second nature.

Anyway, here are two very different shots taken with my new 24-70mm lens.  Neither is anything special as a photograph, just testing out the lens.

This first, taken on a cloudy day, my neighbor’s yard and his dog.  The point of this?  By all means, click to view the full size photo and feel free to zoom in – the bricks, the steps, the flower bushes.  To my old and tired eyes, this lens appears really sharp.  (70mm, ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/100 sec – and I know it would probably be sharper still if I backed off a bit from 70mm and and went with f/8 or f/11, right?  But still I’m really happy with this.)  Actually, the full sized shot on my computer is 4288×2848 and looks amazing for what it is, but a “full sized JPG” file is 12 meg, so I’ve just uploaded this hence the reduced shot here at only 1024×688 – hopefully the detail comes across.

Something a little different, a place many of you know, same lens, handheld, 38mm, ISO 800, f/5.0, 1/160th of a second:

Probably could have reduced some of the noise a bit by shooting at ISO 400 – actually I did shoot a few at that speed, but not from this angle.  But again, zoom in on this, you can see the details on the metal struts holding the sign together.  Think I wanna go back with a tripod and shoot a longer exposure at 200 ISO and compare the results.

Both shots from RAW, tweaked slightly in Lightroom (hey, I like saturated colors).

Hongkietown.com has been live for just over a month, but I didn’t get Google Analytics going until December 1st.  Reviewing my month end report, the results are surprising and gratifying.

Special note to other Hong Kong bloggers:  please read down to the end of this post for a special message.

Special note to potential advertisers:  please read down to the end of this post for a special message.

Last year I wrote a total of 681 blog posts.  This is not a group blog, there are no “substitute Spikes,” this is all the work of one person (who, admittedly, has a lot of time on his hands these days.)

In December, 2009:

Just under 35,000 page views

Over 10,000 unique visits by 2,400 visitors from 55 countries.

• 51.3% from Hong Kong
• 21.2% from the USA
• 6% from the UK
• 1.5% from China

An average of 3.36 page views per visit.

54.75% coming here directly, 39% coming here from links on other sites, the rest coming from search engines.  (84.64% of those coming via a search engine came from Google.)

39% using IE, 34% using Firefox.

This was the most popular individual post in the past month.  The Links page remains extremely popular – which is why I’m working on expanding my links listings.

Note to other bloggers:  I know that you’re a huge reason for the good numbers above.  I sincerely appreciate everyone who links to me and especially those who updated their links to my new domain.  You may have noticed that on my HK Links page, I have separated those links into three different groups, the first being those who have linked to me.

I’d like to further highlight your site.  So if you do link to me and you have a small logo or banner for your blog, I’ll display it along with your listing on this page.  Just send it to me at hongkietown at gmail dot com.

If you link to me and I don’t have you including in my links, first of all I’m sorry!  Second, please send me an email or leave a comment here and I’ll take care of it ASAP.

Note to potential advertisers:  As the saying goes, if you’re here, the chances are good that your customers are here as well.  If you’d like to show support for this blog by placing an ad, please send me an email at hongkietown at gmail dot com and let’s discuss it!

And to everyone else, thank you for your support, your comments, your constructive criticisms and brickbats.  It’s really important to me.

Sitting around, crappy weather, not in the mood for much.  Added Google AdSense to the blog on the right, as you can see.  Finally got the formatting sorted out.  Also added a couple of Amazon widgets, bottom right.  And text ads only to the RSS feed.

No, I don’t think I’m going to be able to earn a living from the blog.   But if you do enjoy it here, I hope you recognize that keeping this going requires a lot of my time and I hope you’ll accept the blatant commercialization.  The ads don’t take up much bandwidth and if you don’t like ‘em, don’t click on ‘em.  But if you do want to show some measure of support, please do click on this stuff from time to time.  (I’ve earned US$1.18 from people clicking on Amazon Associates links embedded within posts in the past month.  It may seem small but it’s a chocolate bar or an ice cream cone.  Thanks for the treat!)

Guess I’m just an old hippie at heart, apologizing for doing the same thing everyone else does?

Argh.  Added Google AdSense, as you can see.  And now the “About Me” widget isn’t allowing me to edit it to change the size of the Spike logo picture.   I can remove the About Me Widget, put in a new one, and then it allows me to edit the widget itself but not to insert any text.  Feeling quite frustrated and going to take a break from this.  Bear with me, please.

I actually never click on links on my own links page – that is until yesterday, when I discovered that blogrolling sticks an annoying banner across the top of all resulting links.  So I’m slowly going to start getting rid of that and go back to maintaining links manually.

First up is a new page for Hong Kong links.  It’s a work in progress, the eventual goal being to have a relatively comprehensive set of links to English language blogs in Hong Kong – divided into two groups, those who link to me and those who don’t. It’s already a large list and don’t expect that I’ll be checking existing entries to see if they’re still active or are taking a virtual dirt nap.  Click at your own peril!

Eventually I’ll get around to adding a third group, a variety of non-blog online HK resources.

Checking through the blogrolls on other HK blogs, it’s depressing to note that 17 of them still link to my old blogger page rather than here.  Some of them I assume just linked me once and no longer bother to read me.  And some are just like me, too busy or too lazy to regularly update their links.   But it would be nice.

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.9.  Reportedly more than 500 bug fixes and enhancements.

And now, a vaguely marvelous compendium of the stuff that’s caught my eye so far this morning, in random order.  Warning, down towards the bottom of this post there’s a photo that some might consider somewhat NSFW.

First up, the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis on her favorite (and a few least favorite) films of 2009.   She mentions that Star Trek and Avatar “remain exceptions to the flashier, noisier, dumber rule of much of today’s mega-budget entertainment.”  Her favorites include Gomorrah, Tulpan, Summer Hours, Hurt Locker, Beaches of Agnes, Public Enemies, Beeswax, Ponyo, The Informant, Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Sun and, of course, Avatar.

She pulls even fewer punches in this interview.

On why so many romantic comedies are so terrible: One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they’re morons, three they’re insulting panderers who think they’re making movies for the great unwashed and that’s what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don’t know what’s happening. I think it’s depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they’re about men.

Is Mila Kunis the thinking man’s Megan Fox?  Maybe “thinking man” isn’t the proper phrase here.  (Photo swiped from here.)

Click here if you wanna see a Lady Gaga video redone Sims-style. Someone’s got more free time on their hands than even me?

And from a Sim to the real thing, some new shots of Lady Gaga by David LaChapelle, swiped from here.

That’s one of the least-NSFW shots over there.  (And yes, she has reportedly had “them” done recently.)

My admiration for LaChapelle knows few bounds.  I love his saturated colors and the concepts he comes up with.  This Google image search reveals lots of his stuff.  How he conceives of this stuff much less how he executes what he sees in his head remains a mystery to me.

Yeah, I finally got around to activating Akismet earlier in the week.  Definitely should have known about this and got it going sooner!  For those of you unfamiliar with it, it looks at comments that come in and automatically tags some as spam based on a variety of criteria.  Seems to be working quite well, though of course it won’t be 100% in either direction.

I won’t remember to look in the spam folder frequently … so if you’ve written a comment here and haven’t seen it go live and you think it should have, then drop me an email.  I value all non-spam comments and appreciate that you’re taking the time to comment on something here, positive or negative.

Well, lots of other stuff I wanna get to  but it’s 3:23 AM!  Think it can wait till tomorrow.

After activating Akismet here comments have dropped down to zero.  If you have tried to post a comment today and couldn’t for whatever reason, please drop a line to h0ngkiet0wn at gmail d0t c0m (just replace the zero’s with the letter O) to let me know.

Received an invite via email today.  AJ’s Sri Lankan Cuisine in Sai Kung is doing a special for Xmas Eve, Xmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day.  Sri Lankan buffet, all you can eat $200 per person.  Or all you can eat and all you can drink for $300 per person.  I figured – neighborhood place, food we enjoy, friendly owner – why not?  Yes, I’ve already booked it.

A little bit of a bar crawl tonight, almost literally a crawl since my back is still bothering me.  We stopped into Escape, the bar that’s replaced Fenwick.  The owner told me that they’re still just in their soft opening phase and to expect some unusual theme evenings after they’ve opened for real.  I’ll say this – the newly renovated space looks really nice.  I’m told they make great mojitos but I was driving so that will have to wait for another night.

I’m on the David Byrne mailing list and just now got an email with details of an upcoming release:

I have, after many years, finished the Here Lies Love CD project – at least this iteration of it. It will come out in late February on Nonesuch. It’s a collaboration with Fatboy Slim , an upbeat series of songs sung each one by a different singer. The songs are about Imelda Marcos and Estrella Cumpas, the woman who raised her. The package includes 2 CDs (22 songs), a DVD with videos of 6 of those songs, and a 100-page book that explains it all. Singers include Florence Welch (of Florence + The Machine), Sia, Santigold, Nellie McKay, Sharon Jones, St. Vincent, Róisín Murphy and many more (even me on 1 and 1/2)… I am pretty excited about this, but who knows, it might just make people crazy.