Less than perfect but I think not too bad.

Driving home tonight, I realized that thanks to the factory closures in China for Chinese New Year, it was a pretty clear night, so I decided to seize the opportunity and grab some photos.  These are all hand-held, as I didn’t have my tripod in the car.  I’d like to go back to the same spots with my tripod to do slightly longer exposures at lower ISO settings.  These are shot at 3200 and if I wasn’t so cold, I would have stayed longer and tried more combinations of settings.  But now I know what I’ll do differently the next time I can get to these spots to shoot.

Bonus pic:  there are what I’ve been told are feral cows in Sai Kung and I often see them during the day but very rarely at night.  Driving up the hill to my village, I spotted this one just plunked down, happily chewing its cud and grabbed this shot.

The Learning Cantonese blog went for a long time without any new content (there were no posts between May 15th and October 22nd last year) and it’s possible that people stopped checking the site.  In my RSS, I never deleted it, I simply moved it into a different folder.  And I’m glad I did.

You might think that from the title of the blog, the content is simply language lessons.  Actually, it’s a very political blog.  “DM,” whomever that may be, counts Long Hair among her friends and often provides front row coverage of events in Hong Kong far better than any of our two English language dailies.

The latest entry, The Siege of Legco, is one of the few English language blog entries covering the recent protest in any real depth.  It’s a long post, punctuated with photos and YouTube videos.  At the end, there’s this pungent bit of analysis:

A more PR savvy government might have called a moratorium to reconsider the project cost, or directly spoken to the protesters. But Chief Executive Donald Tsang stayed behind the walls of his mansion, and sent out his government flunky, transport secretary Eva Cheng, to handle the job instead.

Cheng answered some questions, but stonewalled most, and that undoubtedly accounts for some of the slip in public support. But it was her attitude that really sealed it. With her stiff expression, her thin lips curling in irritation, she personified the arrogance of the Hong Kong’s elite civil servant class. Even watching her on TV I could practically hear her sniffing in disdain. “Who do you think you are?! Just give us the money. We aren’t going to let a bunch of riffraff tell us what to do, and who cares if they were democratically elected..WE know what’s best for the people of Hong Kong!”

But they don’t. And the Hong Kong people want some accountability. And accountability means only one thing: un-game the stacked political system, and give all Hong Kong people an equal vote.  As the dust settles, it’s looks like the pan-Democrats won’t have to struggle to make the argument for real political reform in Hong Kong when they resign in the five district referendum scheme later this month. The Siege of Legco–and the inspired, tactically savvy troops of the baat sap hauh–have done the heavy lifting for them.

Check it out.

As you’ve probably seen elsewhere, the Finance Committee has approved the HK$67 billion dollar high speed rail link.   Is there anyone who is surprised by this?  Is there anyone who didn’t see this as a foregone conclusion?   Hey, I love the high speed rail trains that I’ve taken in Japan and Taiwan.  I think they are a good thing there and I’m sure it can be good for Hong Kong.  But did it have to be this route and at this cost, both in terms of actual dollars as well as misery to the lives that will be uprooted?  Demonstrations outside Legco unfortunately did not remain calm and it remains to be seen what fallout, if any, may come from that.

In other news, Yahoo has now said that they have also been targets of the sophisticated cyber attacks reported by Google.  They’ve said that they’re “aligned” with Google.  Yahoo’s mainland partner, alibaba.com, has said that Yahoo “was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence.”   You may have also seen reports that Microsoft has announced that they will not make any changes to their China web strategies regardless of what Google is doing.  Which leads me to wonder if Steve Ballmer is just Allan Zeman on a much larger scale?

There is a letter in today’s SCMP letters column that refutes some of the bullshit in that previous letter from the anti-gay group, Caring Friends.  But there is an even more curious letter – a resident of Ontario, Canada, writes in to express “disappointment” that Portugal will be allowing gay marriage and commending New Jersey for voting gay marriage down.  The rest of the letter is a bunch of ill-considered bigotry and religious claptrap.  The question remains, why did someone think that a letter by a Canadian about legislation in New Jersey and Portugal should take valuable column inches in a Hong Kong newspaper?  Whose agenda is being pushed here?

Ebert divides his list into mainstream and independent; each list is in alphabetical order.

Mainstream:

• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
• Crazy Heart
• An Education
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Knowing
• Precious
• A Serious Man
• Up in the Air
• The White Ribbon

Independent:

• Departures
• Disgrace
• Everlasting Moments
• Goodbye, Solo
• Julia
• Silent Light
• Sin Nombre
• Skin
• Trucker
• You, The Living

Is Eating Asia my favorite food blog?  Not sure, but I feel happy every time I see they’ve got a new post up and today’s post is yet another cause for blog-reading joy.  The writing is always good but the images are even better.  Here are just 3 of the 19 images in the latest post and after you look here, by all means click over and see the rest!  (And no, I don’t know these people, don’t have any hidden interest in their blog, just think it’s one of the ones that should be in your RSS.)

I’ve written here previously about PCCW’s attempt to rip me off for $2,000 for phony roaming charges on my Pocket WiFi.  It took me hours of my time and multiple emails as well as hundreds of attempts to navigate their miserable voice menu system which seems designed to prevent you from actually doing what you set out to do, until they finally admitted I was right and credited back those charges to me last month.

Guess what?  Now I have the new bill from them.  And it seems as if they have reinstated those charges again!

There is a line item on the bill “Roaming Charges” with no further detail or explanation given, and the charge is $1,871.20. This bill covers the period November 10th through December 9th.  I was still in the US on November 10th and 11th but had stopped using the Pocket WiFi after they cut the service on November 9th due to this billing dispute.  From November 12th through today I have only been in Hong Kong, no travel, not even to Macau or Shenzhen.

So is this their latest trick?  Agree that they were wrong, drop the charge, and then simply reinstate the charge the following month and hope you don’t notice?

Hmm, trying to think of the appropriate name to call them.  Scumbags? Douchebags?  Donkey-raping uncle-fucking shit-eaters?  Your suggestions gratefully appreciated.

I’m about as far away from being expert in Adobe Lightroom as can be.  But I’m working at it, you know?

I have a legit installation of Lightroom on my MacBook but a, um, un-legit version on my PC.  Which is not the best set-up because I prefer to edit photos on my PC – no special or logical reason.

So Lightroom 2.4 doesn’t load Panasonic RW2 files.  And I don’t feel like spending time learning the software that comes packaged with the Panasonic camera – which will only output in JPG, not do simple conversions.  Which means I could use Adobe’s DNG converter.  Fortunately, the public beta of Lightroom 3 does load RW2.

I thought the colors in the JPG looked kind of flat.  I finally got around to loading the Lightroom 3 beta and loading the RW2 files into it.  Anyway, here’s the very first shot that I took with the Panasonic GF-1, about a week ago, RAW, straight outta the camera.  Nothing special about the photo, just using it as an example.

Here it is again, after playing around with it in Lightroom for 10 minutes.

The biggest problem I have with Lightroom is knowing when to stop.  And having time to really work on the hundreds of photos I take each week.  But I save everything – as I said to a friend, “Who knows, maybe two years from now blurry poorly-lit photos might come into fashion!”

Aside from Springsteen, another artist whom I have endless admiration for is Miles Davis. I’m one of those people who enjoys every era of Miles – birth of the cool, the 50s quintet with Coltrane, the orchestral work with Gil Evans, the great quintet work in the mid 60s, the embracing of electronics and studio wizardry of In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew (the first jazz album I ever bought), the heavy metal of the 70s, the pop covers of the 80s.   Since I started listening to him back around 1969 or 1970, there remains more than a few albums that I simply can’t listen to enough.

And even though I already own all of the Columbia boxed sets that collect everything he recorded for Columbia, including outtakes and alternates, in chronological order, this new set, “The Complete Columbia Album Collection” is something that I can’t resist.  70 CDs – 52 albums – every album he released on Columbia in a 30 year period, in mini-LP sleeves.  Plus a DVD of a 1967 concert with his second classic quintet (Shorter, Hancock, Carter, Williams) in Europe.  Plus a CD of his 1970 concert at the Isle of Wight.  Plus a 250 page book.

Amazon in the US has it as an exclusive and lists the price at US$400 and I was able to resist it at that price.

Thumbing through the latest issue of Uncut magazine tonight, I noted that the box set is getting a more general release in Europe and at a lower price than the US Amazon price.  In the UK, the list price is 150 pounds.  So I did a bit of searching around and found a German shop that’s got it in stock at 140 euros.  But their international shipping policies were confusing in this instance – 3 euros for the first disc, 2 euros for each additional disc.  If I was reading that correctly, then the shipping charges would work out to 143 euros.  Yikes.  I wrote to them and they wrote back to tell me that a boxed set counts as just one item and that shipping would cost only 3 euros for the entire box.  So I’ve placed my order.

But did I jump the gun too soon?  Because just now, taking a look at the Amazon US page again, it says, “We have been notified that there is a manufacturer defect with this product. We are working with the manufacturer to get this corrected and have the product available again.”

Fortunately, you only place the order through their web site.  Then they send you an invoice via email with a PayPal link.  So I’ve written to them to ask about possible defects and haven’t clicked on that PayPal link yet.

Seems to be a problem with glue from the sleeves getting onto the discs.

I’ve added a new gallery to the Photography page, a selection of my photos from Friday night’s “A Dice of Lesbian Touch” party/photo-shoot at PASM Workshop.  Hope you’ll take a look!

Celebitchy notes that Clint Eastwood has been chosen as one of GQ’s Men of the Year.

(That’s a pretty freaking amazing photo, innit? Took a look at the GQ website but couldn’t find a photo credit.)

They’ve got some excerpts from his interview in the magazine, including this:

We’re “becoming more juvenile as a nation,” he said. “The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.”

So is he just being as grumpy in real life as his character from Gran Torino or does he have a point?

Well, a few moments later, I ran into this over at FailBlog:

Maybe ole Clint has a point.