… a work in progress

Grrr.. If I’d only knew this was in the works before I got my XSi.  The 1080p video and full frame has me sold. My photo skills are not yet worthy of this gadget, but maybe soon.

http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canoneos5dmarkII/

Cock brand fish sauce

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.