Absurd Singularity

It's going to be fun using this lens.

Even though the focusing motor's a little loud without USM.

And gotta keep that exposed bulbous element away from curious hands.

it's what you do with it, right? Eh, in these cases it's just about the size. ;-) 5200mm FTW! You know it's serious when a lens has to have its own targeting scope.

Recently I picked up all the Rurouni Kenshin box sets and in one of them, a promo disc was included with the very first episode of Voltron - Defender of the Universe (Lion version). Blast from the past, right? I remember it being such a classic cartoon back in my youth along with GI Joe, ThunderCats, He-Man and the like. So I figured what the hell I'll take a look for old time's sake.

O...M...F...G... I can't believe my generation actually watched and loved this show. It's so horribly, horribly, incredibly horribly bad. I'm crying hot tears of shame inside. The stilted voice acting, the "is that French? No wait, is it Indian? What the hell is it?" accent, and the craptastic dialogue ("We're space explorers and we need space!") combine into a maelstrom of suckitude unparalleled in my adult life.

I'm never watching any of those old cartoons again. Ever. I'd rather leave my cherished childhood cartoon memories resting peacefully in the hazy depths of my mind.

In his currently short life, Devon likes the following: Mommy, wheels, balls, and cars. While at Toys 'R Us, he wasn't interested in the bikes and toy cars because he could get around faster, he just wanted to touch their wheels. Even while sitting in this car he was directing me to push him around to the other cars so he could touch their wheels. Bit of an odd one. ;-p

Would we have seen something like this if there was no WGA strike? Since they came back on the air, I think Conan hasn't suffered all that much. I like it when it's just him goofing around. He does a great job of it. The (or A, as it's been renamed during the strike) Daily Show did lose a lil' sumthin' sumthin' without the writers. And I haven't watched The Colbert Report in a long time so can't comment on any effects the strike may have had. But it's great to see the 3 cross-pollinatin'. Hope it's not the last time they do something like this.

As noted earlier, I picked up one of the new Etymotic hf2 earphones a few weeks back and have been using it exclusively during my work commute since then. My initial review on the sound quality between the hf2 and the V-Moda Vibe Duo remains unchanged. Both of these newer earphones pretty much follow their respective company's line: Etymotic places more emphasis on clear and accurate mid and highs while V-Moda places more emphasis on pounding bass. Between Etymotic models, the hf2 and the ER-4p has very similar specifications and real life comparison draws pretty much the same conclusion. Although at the same volume level, the ER-4p sounds louder than the hf2.

As for non-sound quality issues, the Vibe Duo buds are smaller and overall easier to put in and take out. It feels like the Vibe Duo buds don't seal as well due to their smaller size so noise isolation is less but it does not affect sound quality in general. The ER-4p and hf2 buds, when compared next to each other don't seem to be that much different size-wise but for some reason, the ER-4p's stick out of the ear a lot more than the hf2. I started using the foam eartips with the hf2 and they definitely are a bit more comfortable overall than the default triple-flange rubber ones.

I like the microphone piece on the hf2 a LOT more than the one on the Vibe Duo. The hf2 mic looks much larger than the Vibe Duo mic because it's wider and flatter and just a bit longer but it's very light so you don't feel any extra drag on that side of the earphones. Plus the mic button on the hf2 is soooo much easier to use. Even though the Vibe Duo button is larger overall, because it's more flush with the mic housing, I often have to fiddle around with the mic a bit before I can figure out where the button is. With the hf2, I instantly know where the button is at first grasp. The mic itself is located higher up on the hf2 which makes it at my lower jaw/chin level which is great. The Vibe Duo mic hangs a bit lower so sometimes I feel I have to bring it up a bit in order to be heard.

The cables of all three earphones are all different too. The ER-4p has a thicker plastic cable up until the Y split where it turns into this odd thin twisted pair cable. The hf2 uses the same thin rubbery plastic cable throughout while the Vibe Duo uses a thin cloth-like cable. I don't really have a preference between the three.

So it appears that once again I'll be keeping the Etymotic earphones over the V-Moda. Don't misunderstand, the Vibe Duo is a great pair of earphones (especially considering the price) but I personally favor clearer sound overall than deep, slightly-overpowering bass. To each his own obviously.

As a brief aside, my coworker recently purchased a pair of Shure SE530's and I got to play around with them for a little while. I confirmed that I'm not a big fan of the "over the ears" type of wear and I thought that the bass wasn't significantly heavier, nor the highs and mids significantly (if at all) clearer. So I'm not entirely sure the Shure is worth the $200 price premium over the ER-4p.

As an age-old and avid computer user, I've pretty much encountered and used the 4 more commonly known cursor control devices available in the market today: the mouse, the trackpad, the trackball, and the trackpoint. While I have no beef with any of the 4, I personally prefer the trackball because I'm an inherently lazy person. Why move your hand/wrist/arm when your fingers will do? I'm writing this post today to lament the fact that after 6+ years, there has yet to be a nice Bluetooth trackball available in the market by known brands such as Kensington or Logitech. It's a damn shame. But apparently the existing market for up-to-date wireless trackballs consists of me and probably a dozen other people scattered across the globe so neither of the two companies feel its worth it to come out with such a too-small-to-even-be-called-a-niche product. Fools.

Oh there has been attempts. More specifically, one attempt that ever made it to the masses. Simply named, The Ball, it was available for a brief time in late 2005-2006. Probably not a hit because it was basically an over-sized mouse with a trackball stuck on top. Didn't help that the company who came out with it had a bit of a shady reputation amongst Mac users as well. Probably still available if I looked hard enough but it doesn't look like something that would serve my needs since it only has 2 buttons.

Most recently, Kensington has released their SlimBlade Trackball Mouse which looks like they took Apple's Wireless Mighty Mouse, flattened it a bit and made it gray, and then stuck an extra button on it that let you switch the functionality of the tiny rollerball on top to function as a regular trackball. Intriguing and slim, but again, only 2 buttons.

What I would ultimately love to have happen is for Kensington to just release an updated Bluetooth version of their venerable Turbo Mouse Pro Wireless which I've been using for what feels like forever. I love this bad boy. I just don't love the big-ass receiver you need to plug into the computer to use it. As for the trackball itself, it's big, but comfy (especially with the wrist-rest that it comes with). It's got 4 big buttons surrounding the ball, a scroll wheel right above the ball, and then 6 programmable soft buttons (which I admittedly never use) at the very top. The entire thing is just very ergonomical and laid out wonderfully. Probably the oldest computer accessory I have that hasn't found its way to a landfill yet. Not only does it function as a trackball for me, I also routinely pick the ball out of its socket and just fiddle with it (like a hard stress ball) while pondering the mysteries of the universe or reading a particularly long blog entry. Throwing at unsuspecting significant others not recommended.

Every once in awhile I'll scour the Interweb to see if anyone's finally decided to test the waters with a Bluetooth trackball but so far, to no avail. I was going to email Kensington to see if they would finally do it but apparently I have to sign a submission agreement and mail it in. WTF, are we still in the 80's???

*sigh* So my search (and waiting) continues. Curses.

Recently Apple upgraded Aperture to version 2 which is supposed to pack a significant performance increase as version 1 was, to put it nicely, dog slow when working with a large library. However, the one factor that kept me an iPhoto user was the lack of "film rolls" (relabeled "Events" in the newest iPhoto) as an organizing structure in Aperture. I absolutely love this feature in iPhoto. It basically keeps all my events in order based on time automatically upon import. Newest photos/events were always at the very top. Aperture, with its folders and projects and albums seemed more complicated than it was worth.

However, I decided to finally just bite the bullet and migrate over to Aperture. It makes more sense workflow-wise since I'm mainly a RAW shooter and with the built-in RAW tools, I can probably do most of my post-processing in Aperture unless I really had to use some of Photoshop's plugins. What got me over the organization hump was this informative blog post and handy screenshot of how he was organizing his photos by date. So I'm basically using the same structure but I'm also adding the day to the names of my projects so that even they are sorted somewhat in date order.

When I first played with Aperture many moons ago and was trying to figure out the film roll issue, I had a feeling that it would have to come down to this. There's a lot more manual work involved with this style of organization in Aperture but I guess I can live with it. I'm also trying to actually add keywords and ratings to my photos from now on but it's just such a time consuming process. I'm sure it'll pay off in the long run but damn I wish there was a faster way.

So starting from 2008 I'll be organizing my photos with Aperture. Slowly feeling around in the program to figure out its full capabilities. Prior years I'll leave with iPhoto. I'll still need to use iPhoto occasionally as Aperture doesn't recognize movie clips (as taken with our Powershot TX1) though.

For those that may be mulling over the Canon 40D or Nikon D300 issue, here's a recent article on the matter that I fully agree with. The D300 has more features (which it should since it's $600 more) but the 40D gives you more bang for the buck. Having used both cameras within the past few months, I can authoritatively say that they're both great bodies and any bad photos you get from either camera will most likely be from user error rather than something wrong with the cameras themselves. I just ordered the 40D again to more fully test AF performance when compared to the 5D as I'm finding the 5D's AF system rather lacking when attempting to keep up with a high-performance toddler.

And finally, wow, I never thought I'd ever see this lens actually available on Amazon. Someone's going to trigger a big terrorism scare when this hits the field. =p

He didn't mind when I put him in, but getting out was a different matter...

For those who haven't seen the cluttered study in our lovely NJ home, my home computing setup consists of my 15" MacBook Pro and this lil' PC, sharing a Dell 24" LCD along with a wireless Logitech keyboard and Kensington trackball via a 2-port KVM switch. Now this all worked pretty well for the past year or so but lately I wanted to change things up a bit by switching out the RF keyboard and mouse I've been using to newer ones using Bluetooth. I've already chronicled my disappointment in not being able to find a Bluetooth trackball but I figured I'd forge ahead and test out a Bluetooth keyboard, namely the Apple Wireless Keyboard. So I dutifully picked up one of these tiny Kensington Bluetooth adapters to use with my PC.

Now, the way the RF wireless peripherals worked in my setup was I had the USB RF receiver plugged in to a USB port on my KVM switch. When I switched to the Mac or PC, the machine would detect the keyboard and mouse and things would just work. So I figured, well, Bluetooth is supposed to replace the RF crap so it should work similarly no? Apparently not. There are two problems with Bluetooth that I ran into. One, Bluetooth peripherals need to be "paired" to its host. There's some security involved in this procedure which requires you to enter a random passkey during the pairing process. Problem is, the BT peripheral (the keyboard in this case) apparently only remembers one pairing at a time. So when I pair with my Mac and type in a the passkey, then pair with my PC and type in a different passkey, then switch back to my Mac, the keyboard no longer works with the Mac because the passkey is different. I'm not sure if that's a limitation of the keyboard or of all BT peripherals but man does it suck.

Secondly, on my lil' PC, the keyboard isn't recognized as a keyboard until Window loads up because that's when the Bluetooth drivers kick in. This normally won't be a problem if you're on a single-boot machine but on a dual-booter like my WinXP/Vista machine, you can't switch OS's. And in case anything ever goes wrong or if you need to fiddle with your BIOS, you can't do that either. I'm not sure at this point why my RF wireless keyboard works fine in this regard but the BT doesn't. A bit more investigation will be needed.

So I'm pretty disappointed with Bluetooth at the moment. For a technology that is supposed to be more advanced and easier to use than those that came before it and that it wants to replace, it hasn't been too impressive in my experience yet. Got a cool name though but that doesn't help me with my computing. ;-p But I'm not sure what I want to do right now. I really like Apple's Wireless Keyboard so I'd hate to return it. It's just tiny, tiny and looks pretty fantastic. Makes my already small Logitech diNovo look obese in comparison. One other problem I discovered while using it with a PC though is that I can't page up or down with it. Like the keyboards on the MacBooks and MBPs, there are no dedicated Page Up/Down, Home or End buttons. Instead, those are simulated by holding down the Function key and a corresponding arrow key. Works fine on Apple machines but a no-go with Windows. Maybe I'll lose my PC desktop entirely and replace it with a Mac Pro and do Windows completely via Parallels. Helluva more expensive option though. =p Worse comes to worse I guess it's back to RF I go. *sigh*

Yay, another Hollywood remake of an Asian movie/anime. Can you feel my enthusiasm?

I guess I should reserve judgment until more info is available. As for the original anime, I suppose the animation was ground-breaking at the time and the red bike was way cool but story-wise, eh, didn't do anything for me.