Khalid from my Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford held a party at his apartment in San Francisco last night. His project centers around developing technological and business solutions that integrate ICT centers in rural Bangladesh. It was fun seeing the Fellows in an environment outside of Stanford. We should do more outside activities and have more parties like this! The food that Khalid and his wife prepared was really good. They had a huge lamb, tasty chicken, and great veggies for us to feast on!

Joe informed us that he’s going to Vegas to watch the Super Bowl with his father, who’s traveling through the City of Sin on business. As much as I hated the Patriots when they beat the Rams in the Super Bowl two years ago, I am somewhat rooting for them this year. It’s probably because Rodney Harrison, a former Charger, is now on the team. On the other side, Dan Henning, the former head coach of the Chargers, is the Panthers’ offensive coordinator, but I don’t care as much about him as Harrison. Still, I don’t really mind who wins the game, so as long as it’s exciting.

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Following Khalid’s party, Rae and I drove across the City to Frankie’s Bohemian Cafe on Divisadero to catch the tail end of Patrick’s belated birthday party. The dinner was just about ready to break up when we got there, but we at least had the chance to say hello and happy birthdy to Patrick. He recently returned from China and was showing everyone his photos from the trip.

Afterwards, the group dispersed to go to an 80’s party where DJ Bam was spinning records. Rae and I decided not to go and headed back down 280 to the South Bay.

Earlier in the day, Rae, Susan, Bryan, Petrice, and I went to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to check out the Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts gallery. I really enjoy art exhibits where you can interact with the pieces on display. Walking into the gallery, one’s first impression might be, “This looks like an arcade!” The gallery featured a playable demo of American’s Army, a first-person shooter that puts you in the place of an American soldier. What’s unique about the game is who developed and markets the game, the American Army! It’s said to be a good recruiting tool for the military. What I wonder is if it is causing certain populations of people to be objectified as “the enemy.”

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Ever since the Canon EOS-10D was released, I’ve been hearing about the wonderful high ISO performance. People have been raving on the forums that 10D images are clearer than many digital SLR’s on the market today, including the Canon EOS-1D. I never had the opportunity to test this theory until last night when Mike came over to return my 28-70 lens.

I’m most interested in evaluating a camera’s low-light, high ISO performance, since these are situations I face on a daily basis. By low-light, high ISO situations, I mean lighting conditions that necessitate setting a high ISO speed in order to maintain a reasonable hand-holdable shutter speed. Most high ISO tests on the Internet don’t replicate these types of real-world conditions; they usually involve photographing the same well-lit scene, varying only the ISO speed. For instance, they test using ISO100, f/8.0, 1/50s all the way to ISO3200, f/8.0, 1/3200s. Unless you’re shooting sports, you’re rarely finding yourself in a situation where you’re thinking, “Hmm… should I shoot ISO100 or ISO3200 if I can handhold the shot?” More often than not, you’ll find yourself thinking, “I must use ISO1600 in order to handhold this shot.”

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Canon announced the new EOS-1D Mark II today, the successor to the EOS-1D. This is the camera that I’ve been waiting for since the release of the original EOS-1D at the tail end of 2001. The new 1D features a 8.2 megapixel CMOS sensor that can rip off 40 consecutive frames at 8.5 frames per second. If you do the math, that’s an enormous amount of image data — 69 megapixels per second — that’s being processed by the camera. The previous 1D could only handle 21 images at 4 megapixels and 8 frames a second!

There’s much more to the camera that the increased resolution. Check out the links at the bottom of this entry for more detailed information on the new features. Suffice it to say, this is a killer camera. It’s fast enough for anybody and the resolution is high enough for some of the most demanding applications. The 11 megapixel 1Ds is still the camera to get if you need a full-frame sensor and the highest resolution. For me, however, the 1D Mark II will be more than adequate for my photography work.

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Reid Hoffman, the Founder and CEO of LinkedIn, came to speak at our DVF seminar this afternoon. Reid was one of the first Symbolic Systems graduates at Stanford, meaning he had the pleasure of taking Philosophy 160A (and Phil 160B!). I bet he’d be shocked to know that the classroom of students taking 160A today fills up nearly all of Building 370’s classroom!

Reid was formerly at PayPal, where he led all of external relations for the company. It was interesting to trace his background from academia (he received his Masters of Philosophy from Oxford) to technology (eWorld, Fujitsu, Confinity/PayPal, Friendster, and now LinkedIn). The idea of social networking has been around for several years now (beginning with SixDegrees) and it’s starting to make news with the rapid growth of services like Friendster and Orkut. Unlike those two, LinkedIn is primarily focused on business networking. We debated in the seminar and afterwards whether or not these systems will truly be successful. They require that most of the members find some positive benefit from the system. In the case of Friendster (and possibly Orkut), it’s all about dating. For LinkedIn, it’s about networking, the ability to find potential employees and/or potential employees. The marketplace is only big enough for a few companies in this space (Reid believes the magic number is 5), and it will be interesting to see which ones make it through. Friendster is dog slow these days, while Orkut is fast (though it did have a few security holes that were patched up last week).

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“The vision or the idea sometimes is more important than the technology.”

Doug Hickey, a Partner at Hummer Winblad Ventures Partners, a San Francisco-based VC firm, came to speak to the Digital Vision Fellows this afternoon at Stanford. Doug has a phenomenal resume to his credit, running or holding senior-level positions at companies like Critical Path, MFS, Metricom, and Global Center. He retold some stories of building his companies from the ground up to passing on his nuggets of wisdom to those who would undertake the startup path.

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The Stanford Newton User Group held its 10th Anniversary meeting tonight at Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto. It’s amazing that we’ve been convening here for 10 years now! The cafe has outlived the bookstore next door as well as the cafe across the street (La Dolce Vita is becoming a Harmony Bakery)!

I tried to webcast the event this evening using my PowerBook, iSight, and EvoCam. Using the wireless hot spot at Printer’s Inc., I set up EvoCam to take a screenshot every 2-5 seconds and upload it to tow.com. There’s no sound, but I think readers were able to get an impression of what the meeting was like.

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Rae, Susan, and I were up in Berkeley/Oakland last night to celebrate Petrice’s birthday, which happened to coincide with Chinese New Year! Gung Hay Fat Choy! The Year of the Monkey began with a trip to the Old Spaghetti Factory in Jack London Square. There were three people celebrating their birthday at the restaurant, a 7-year old girl named Alice and an “18-year old” named Darrell.

The food there wasn’t that bad, but the portions were so small! It’s probably for the best, since I don’t want to gorge too much, lest (yes, here comes Adam’s obligatory elephant seal quote) I bloat up like an elephant seal. After a few months of inactivity, I’ve begun the long road back to fitness. I started cycling the other day, and I’ve been doing pull-ups for the past several weeks. I can now do 11 pull-ups in a row! I hear Amabelle’s SO won this pull-up contest by doing 31 pull-ups. Geez! I wonder how many I could do after losing 10 pounds… hmm…

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Ann and Randy prepared a scrumptious Chinese New Year dinner on January 21st at Ann’s apartment in Sunnyvale. The week before, I went to A&J’s in Cupertino Village with Rae and her family for a pre-Chinese New Year dinner. It’s good that I’ve started exercising again, as I would be as bloated as an elephant seal after eating so much good food!

Along with Randy, Joon-Mo, Ann, and Rae, Suejy Hobson, a former co-worker of Joon-Mo and Randy’s at Homestead, was at Ann’s place. There’s only one mention of her on Google at the moment. We spoke about this web site being a magnet for Google. Let’s see how long it takes for Suejy to be indexed by the king of all search engines!

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Thanks to the heads-up by reader, James Matthews, I learned that Vienna Teng’s Waking Hour is now available on the iTunes Music Store! This is very cool!

Her new album, Warm Strangers, is due out at the end of February. Check out the pre-order page from Amazon.

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