… a work in progress

Moving into my new building this weekend, formerly an art gallery and studio. It has been rezoned recently and is now considered multi-use. Some before pics below, I’ll be sure to take lots of photos of the progress. Maybe I will do a time lapse when I paint the rooms.

When you enter the front door, this is what you see.

Reverse View

This is the 2nd gallery room, includes the huge 34′x28′ room, also a hallway to the bathroom, and kitchen.

Reverse View

View of the ceiling from the middle room

The Bedroom. Needs a lot of work, 2nd bathroom on the left and closet on the right

The rest of the building, the warehouse. Stadium style HID overhead lighting, 22′ barrel roof, sound recording room in the far right. Vehicle ramp on the left.

Finally ordered that Mac I’ve been drooling over since it came out, the 24″ iMac 2.8. Yay! Now I just need to figure out how to use Mac OS since the last Apple I owned was in 1988. It was a Mac Plus with a grayscale 9″ screen and 3.5″ floppy. I think I had a SCSI CMS 40 Meg hard drive and a SCSI laser printer. I loved HyperCard back then and I think I used Z Terminal for dialing out. Prior to the Mac Plus I had an Apple II+ with 64Kb, sound card and dual 5.25″ drives. After the II+ I had an Apple IIC. I can still run the Bard’s Tale series , Ultima IV & V, and Wizardry series on the IIC. Man those were some really good games. My favorite had no graphics, but it was the most fun, Telengard. It looks like there is a Telengard version ported for a PC, gonna have to check it out. Good times

UPDATE: Damn! I can’t figure out how to get in full screen DOS mode in Windows Vista to run Telengard. All the better I suppose, I’d probably have wasted several hours killing orcs and finding treasure if it did run.

I’ve been without broadband at home for a while now, about a year and a half. For a little bit of time I was allowed to jump onto the buildings T-1 line, but that was shared between two buildings and was really slow actually. It was as bad as dial-up at times, sometimes I couldn’t renew my IP address. Then the building owners cut me off, so I went shopping around for internet service. Cable modem is not available here because there is no cable service on this block, it’s the warehouse district outside of downtown. Across the street at my work we had been using a point-to-point wireless high power network that sent a signal about a mile or more to a wireless tower. At work when it was foggy, rain or snow we would not have any internet access. Then our next door neighbors had cable put in, the first customer on the block to have cable installed. 2 years ago the cable company wanted thousands to run cable to our block and the phone company only offered a T1 line. So we dumped our wireless service and got cable, so far so good. Fast and reliable service for our business. Now moving on to my loft… across the street. This side of the street has no cable and up until recently had no DSL service. For the past few months I’ve been using 3G or HSDPA service from AT&T wireless. AT&T recently launched 3G service and Denver and it has been fairly fast considering. So this now brings us to today, I have broadband internet service via QWEST DSL and it’s very fast for DSL service. I’m just happy to have something faster than GPRS/EDGE/3G.

Just did a network speed test, getting about 5.4mbps down and 640k up.

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of movies. Some recent one’s I’ve seen both at home and in the theater.

Paprika - Trying to get through this one, hard to work and watch at the same time since it’s in Japanese and in English subtitles. From what I’ve seen, it looks interesting but the sound seems amazing. It’s a movie from Sony, so of course it’s on Blu-Ray. I’m going to have to save it another day.

2 Days In Paris - I watched this last night and thought it was very funny. Written, Directed by Julie Delpy who also stared in the movie and even composed the musical score, this is a twisted romantic comedy of a couples trip to Paris.

Training Day - Saw this on Blu-Ray, seen it before a few times. Fun to watch once in a while, it’s so intense

The Lives Of Others - Absolutely loved this movie, go out and rent it or add it to your Netflix. It’s even on Blu-Ray! It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, so go see it.

There Will Be Blood - Crazy movie, left the theater unsure of what I had just seen. I’d have to say I liked it?! A few things I do have to say is that the music was great, the first few minutes were strangely intense and Daniel Day Lewis is a phenomenal actor. The pastor dude in the movie you may remember from Little Miss Sunshine.

I just found out that Canon has released the Rebel XSi aka EOS 450D. It seems like a big improvement over the Rebel XTi and a really big improvement over my Rebel XT. Drool… I want one. Here are some of the new highlights:

• 12.2 megapixel APS-C CMOS (1.6x focal conversion)
  • I don’t think I really need12.2MP but from the previews from DPReview.com it sounds like many improvements were made to the sensor.
• 3-inch live view LCD (up from the XTi’s non-live-view 2.5-inch)
  • Sounds interesting, kinda like a point a shoot. Perfect for when I have to ask someone else take a picture. And a 3″ LCD is so luxurious compared to the 1.8″ screen on my XT.
• DIGIC III image processor
• 9-point AF, 3.5fps shot rate (up to 45 images in JPEG, 6 in RAW)
• SD / SDHC media
  • hmmm this is got to be a new change. I guess I’ll have to get rid of my CF cards.
• ISO setting displays in viewfinder and ISO button
  • Perfect improvement for the on-the-fly ISO changes.

DPReview.com has a brief “hands on” with the new Rebel XSi/EOS 450D Here

Canon Rebel XSi Press Release

Canon Rebel XSi Product Page

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail on my Flickr account from Schmap.com that two of my photos had been “shortlisted” for the 2008 London City Guide. This was such an unexpected e-mail, I didn’t think anyone was paying attention to my photos. I completed the photo release for them to use the photos in the guide and to properly credit me. After this process I went into my Flickr account and optimized some of the tags and keywords. Since the optimizations I’ve noticed a larger number of photo views. Well after a few weeks of waiting my photos seems to have been approved for the 2008 London Guide. How exciting for me, I never expected to have my photos shown anywhere outside of my own photo album. It’s not the cover of National Geographic Travel but I’m happy.

In the summer of 2007 I met up with my sister and her husband in Europe for a vacation. They had already been traveling for a few weeks on a tour and I met them at the end of their tour in Amsterdam. We wandered together for the next few weeks in the Netherlands, France, UK and Ireland. The first photo was taken near Borough Market at the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum. I remember taking the photo because it was so colorful and the picture on the tin was interesting. The second photo is of a restaurant that the hotel had recommended and turn out to be the best Indian food experience to date. The place was called Memories of India and we went to the South Kensington location on Gloucester Road. Here are the two photos that were chosen for Schmap’s 2008 London City Guide and the corresponding links.

Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum: Colorful Lipton Tea Tin

Memories of India: Indian Restaurant

Bramah Tea & Coffee Museum
http://www.schmap.com/london/sights_southbank/p=2298/i=2298_4.jpg

Memories of India
http://www.schmap.com/london/restaurants_indian/p=331117/i=331117.jpg

I made Jasmine Rice for the first time ever. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I have always loved and cooked short grain Japanese style rice.  Anyhow, it was good with the chicken I marinated the other night. Finally uploaded all of my recent photos from Thanksgiving, my two weeks in Southern California which included New Years and Christmas.

My ATT Wireless internet connection seems to be happy, I have a fairly fast connection. This weekend though I plan to hook up a Hi Gain directional antenna and access point from work across the street and point it to my loft. I hope that I get a good signal and I can cancel the ATT wireless service. I’ll update on the installation.

Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s 2008, seems just like another day and week to me. I’ve been on a vacation of sorts for 2 weeks now and really haven’t had any spare time. I have finally uploaded a bunch of photos to my Flickr, most of which were taken on this vacation. Originally I was scheduled to be in California Dec 21st thru Dec 30th, however at the last minute I extended my trip till the 3rd of January. Here are a few of my favorite pics so far:

So I’ve been in California away from the cold Colorado weather to visit with family. My cousin is visiting from overseas and it is his first visit to America. It’s been an interesting trip for him, would have made a great movie or short film about his experience in the USA. So this trip is really all about showing my cousin from Japan a great time.

He had many ideas about America, most of which were not true or exaggerated. Or it’s possibly Californians are different from the rest of the US. But one funny stereotype he has about Americans were that we all have ice cream in our freezer. Well everyone we asked and every freezer we checked had some ice cream.

Wandered around La Jolla the first day which was Friday. Got to see some things I have not seen since I lived in San Diego, like the tide pools and sea lions. The next morning my cousin and I drove up to Claremont to pick up my Erika and Michael. My cousin Masamichi had his first experience with real Mexican food (I think it was called Brendan’s). People had brought their own pots to pick up Menudo and were lined up for the Huevos Rancheros. I suppose this is not real Mexican food, but closer than the stuff served in Japan. After breakfast we drove up to Las Vegas for one night. We stayed in the Paris hotel but spent a lot of time downtown at the Golden Nugget, Plaza and California. I guess there are a lot of Hawaiians that go to the California hotel. We gambled a little, I played some craps and video poker while everyone else hit the slots. After a few plays at craps I dropped some money on “YO Eleven!” A 15 to 1 payout and won. Nothing really funny that I recall happened in Vegas but on the drive up the traffic was horrible. It was so bad and so slow a guy jumped out of the car he was riding in, ran to a construction porta-potty in the freeway median and afterwards ran to catch up with the car.

Back in Claremont with my sister on Monday we wandered around LA, hitting up Pink’s hotdogs, K-Town, UCLA, Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, and stopped in Sawtelle. Driving consumes most of the time in LA so we head home for a Christmas eve dinner of steak at the only place where we could get a reservatio, Cask and Cleaver in Rancho Cucamonga. Christmas in Chino Hills was great, always great to see family. Pics will be updated below and on Flickr.

Post Christmas was a typical American event, shopping at the mall, looking for good deals and eating a “Hot Dog On A Stick”. My cousin has never seen a Pretzel or Mongolian BBQ, which seemed really strange to me. Afterwards we drove back down to San Diego we stopped by Tofu House for some Korean Soon Du Boo Chigae, which also my cousin has never seen.

Today was an easy day, Balboa Park and Old Town. It was Masamichi’s first time to have a Margarita, and it was a good one from Coyote Cafe. We are off to deep sea fishing tomorrow with H&M landing near Point Loma.

Update: I’ve changed my schedule and airline ticket and have decided to spend New Years (the biggest Japanese holiday) with family.  I’ve added an additional 4 days which is fine, it’s snowing and cold in Denver anyhow.