The holidays are always a great time for pictures. Me, armed with the iPhone’s 3MP teeny camera and a 12MP Sony TSC point-and-shoot, was ready to commemorate the occasion and maybe even get a few decent prints out. Hell, maybe I’ll actually learn to shoot bokeh or HDR or whatever.
Photography’s one of those hobbies guys flock to – along with cars and video games – after a certain stage in life; in this case, it’s usually right around having a kid and wanting to cherish the early years. It’s also one that’s been widely practiced since the advent of digital cameras and onboard image processing, rendering most shots into passable email material. Like most people, I approached the subject of picture-takin’ from a purely utilitarian perspective: I wanted to etch memories into physical being. My artistic side (admittedly, limited) hated how 90% of my shots weren’t even clear enough for a normal print, and those that were in focus looked aggressively ordinary. I knew there were lessons in composition, exposure, white balance, and depth of focus I had to learn, but every time I read an article and tried to replicate the results, I was met with disappointing quality.
I decided I wanted another laptop. When Sui’s elbow jabbed me in the stomach for the umpteenth time while she shrank in the home office chair as I reached around to type in a chat IM window aside her email screen, I figured having two machines around would be helpful, and it’d quiet down my constantly-whirring, energy-sucking beast of a PC periodically.
And after spending some time with Macbooks in the office, well – why not. Macs worked well for development (say, when I’m working from home), I’m growing used to the OSX programs and interface, and the Macbook Pro really has exceptional build quality.
And all I needed was:
And I get this crappy iPhone camera pic:
Now all I need is one of my wealthier friends to donate a productivity-busting 30″ screen.
Thanks to Mabel for the recipe. More pics are found on the pictures page.
Emboldened by my previous efforts at cookery, I went for a more sophisicated kitchen test, this time employing my oven and the full range of the still unused cookware Sui bought a few months back.
It was to be your simple mac & cheese, but with a lot of cheese, plus other random bits of food thrown in for added flavor and crunch. And it’d be baked.
For the record, I spent an hour at Safeway getting the following set of ingredients:
Just one more picture set, this time of Jeremy’s and Pris’s housewarming party last weekend, complete with pot luck, Trivial Pursuit, Rock Band, drunk Eric, and spotty smile detection.
I think the entire smile auto-shot thing is more useful as an excuse to get people to smile, moreso than a tool for great shots (as the photographic evidence can attest). Also, my round face confuses the hell out of the sensor.
Yay, another new toy to play with. My job was kind enough to give us all very nice – belated – presents yesterday. So now I have a new camera to play with, the touch-screen, fingerprint-happy Sony DSC-T700.
And here I was thinking that my 2-year-old Canon SD630 was advanced; this one has 10 megapixels to work with, scene-sensing auto-config, super-macro mode, facial and smile recognition, anti-motion blur, and something about taking a second picture if it sees an eye blink.
So basically, it strives to live up to its point-and-shoot moniker. Judge for yourself.
My kitchen has been awfully lonely and unused the past few months. My culinary skills – lack thereof – have kept it nice and clean, random tea bags and snacks aside.
So it was time to properly christen the stove, countertops, and the new pots-and-pans set Sui got me for Christmas.
With what would be my signature dish, had I the prowess to make more than one dish; the masterful fingerpainting of a preschooler, if you will.
That would be salmon steak, Chinese bok choy, rice, and Taiwanese milk tea. Dishes and table courtesy of my condo’s interior designer. =) A few more pictures here.
