Absurd Singularity

Office move late last week/early this week back to our previous temporary space from a year ago. Same building, different offices. Now we have a spectacular view straight down 9th Ave and I can gaze upon B&H (see crappy iPhone photo above) every day. This should be our last move until we end up in a permanent office space later this year/early next.

Have a couple of things I want to put up hopefully in the next few days. Been on the backburner for awhile. Like a new sling bag review, a brief review on "Asian Fit" sunglasses, and a review on the Pentax K20D. And possibly a few other minor tidbits here and there. Not enough hours in the evening unfortunately.

"Severe punishment," huh. I guess as long as it's not capital punishment.

Will this mean no more "War on Drugs?"

Devon received this Wheely Bug as a Christmas gift but at the time he had no clue what to do with it and pretty much ignored it. A month or so ago he got around to flipping it over and playing with the wheels underneath. Starting a week or so ago he's made a few attempts at trying to crawl onto its back with no luck. Today I helped him into position and he thought it was a rocking horse. And then he tipped it head over heels and face-planted into the carpet which was hyyyysterically funny but which made him cry. But at least he went right back to it after being consoled by grandma. Eventually he'll figure out how to play with it. ;-p

Regular readers will notice that computer upgrades have pretty much never worked out as planned where I'm concerned. This past weekend proved no exception. With the recent MacBook Pro Penryn upgrade, I was hankerin' for a laptop boost and even had a custom built 2.6Ghz version on order. But after further thought I decided that this latest upgrade wasn't worth the premium price and settled for a refurbed 2.4Ghz model of the previous generation for about a grand less. After selling my current model to help offset the cost, I'll have spent a comparatively minimal amount for the privilege of having a .07Ghz speed bump, maxed out 4GB of RAM (for optimal Parallels functionality) and a LED-backlit display. I can live with that.

Has anime in the US officially jumped the shark?

So Pentax has an interesting shooting mode in their new Pentax K20D called "Burst Shooting" which takes 21 frames/second for about 5 seconds. I think it maxes out at around 115 shots before it has to stop. Each shot is a 1.6 megapixel JPEG at 1536x1024 resolution. When in action, you have to keep the shutter button pressed down, it's completely silent, and LiveView kicks in so you can see the shots occurring in the LCD as they're being taken. This is about as close as you'll get to taking movies on a dSLR at this point in time. The Quicktime slideshow movie I made above while playing around with this mode is only running at 15 frames/second. If you really want to take a look at the full sized version, you can get it here (105MB download).

WARNING: Clicking on the photos in this entry will load up the rather large (~2-3MB) full-sized versions. All photos except for the very first one originally shot in RAW format and converted to JPEG using Adobe Photoshop CS3 with no noise reduction. But the ISO 1600 shots clean up pretty nicely with Noise Ninja.

ISO 1600, f/2.8, 1/60, 50mm

Had the chance to play around with the new 14.6MP Pentax K20D paired with a Pentax 16-50mm f/2.8 (24-75mm equivalent) for the past month and thought I'd write up my impressions on it. This will be in no way shape or form comprehensive as I didn't test every single functionality on the camera. I just used it as I normally would a DSLR and that was that.

In another installment of odd Japanese things, I ran across this music video of an idol girl group called AKB48 which has, incredibly, 48 members. Yeah, you read that right. Now I had heard of Morning Musume in the past and was pretty incredulous about them too but even they never went into double digit membership at any one time I don't think.

Now I'm sooo glad that for the most part, boy/girl bands aren't really "in" in the US music scene anymore but they're still going strong over in Asia and frankly I never understood the appeal. I mean having 4 or 5 guys/gals prancing around is already border-line annoying but why, why in the name of all that's good and holy would you create a group with 48 members? Even if they're broken down into 3 groups of 16 that's still 3 times as many members as there should be.

I originally read about this strippers hired to dance at a funeral story this past Sunday and while it was interesting in that the deceased was Taiwanese, 103 years old, apparently "famous for his interest in strip clubs," and had probably hit every single well-known club on the island, I was bemused for a couple of seconds and then moved on. Two days later, the story made its way to the 8Asians site which revealed a new detail that the first site had not touched upon. Namely that the poor fellow had passed after walking 3.1 miles. TO VOTE. Now that's dedication. Apparently he was equally passionate about watching gyrating naked women and exercising his right to vote. Hopefully he didn't die before he could actually vote.

So, to recap, an 103-year old Taiwanese man, well-known around town for being a connoisseur of strip clubs, died after walking 3.1 miles to vote in the 2008 presidential election and had a funeral with strippers. Ahh... politics and sex, forever intertwined. ;-p