Lunatic bought a lightly used Newton the other day. Its backlight was really bright compared to our well-traveled Newtons. I wonder how many Newtons were manufactured? 40,000? 80,000? If you haven’t picked one up yet, now’s a good time. They are selling cheap on eBay!

Kevin finally figured out why he couldn’t get his Newton to communicate wirelessly with his Airport network. His Lucent WaveLAN card was busted! My Farallon Skyline card work in both of our Newtons, but the WaveLAN clunked out on both. There’s two bids on Skyline cards on eBay. Kevin and Roland, go get them!

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Despite their schedules being a click away, Eric and Vienna are hard people to keep track of. Eric recently returned from a trip to Fiji, where he continued to demonstrate his growing mastery of underwater photography. Vienna was getting ready for another mini-tour to Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and San Diego, before returning to San Jose for a show a Montgomery Theater on June 1.

Mission Street. I finally walked into the apartment where the song of the same name on Warm Strangers was written. Vienna made the comment that her apartment doesn’t feel like home anymore. The motels and hotels she stays in during her tour are home now. “Is she lonely, driving all those miles on the open road?” “No,” she replied, “At times. I felt more lonely sitting in front of my computer in my cube at work.” So true. I sometimes wonder if the life of the cube is waiting for me after the Fellowship is over, or if I’m better suited to continuing to do my own thing for a little while longer. We’ll find out soon enough; the program is ending next week!

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The dry cleaning lady said to me this afternoon, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I could only nod and laugh half-heartedly. Yes, it was a lovely day, if not for some !%^$#@ bike thief who stole my rear wheel and seat this morning!

I parked my bike at the Art Building at 10:00 am. Though I always lock my bike to something, I don’t always lock both the front and rear wheels together. If I was riding my road bike, this would be different. With my campus bike, however, I figured that what I did would be enough protection. Following my art class at 11:45 am, I walked out, turned the corner, and saw my bike, minus the rear wheel and seat. “WTF!?!” I stood there looking at the bike for what seemed like several minutes. I was dumbfounded… how could this happen to me, to my bike?

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My colleague in the Digital Vision Fellowship, Brij Kothari, kicked off his Planet Read project with a Bollywood-inspired party in Piedmont. Planet Read’s goal is to improve literacy in India by combining same-language subtitling (think Karaoke) technology with movies, books, and songs.

How Bollywood Can You Be? was the theme of the party. A few days ago, Brij told me of a movie called Chachi 420, which is basically a Bollywood version of Mrs. Doubtfire. Assured by Brij that dressing up as Jayaprakash Paswan would go well with the crowd, I got a sari from Rae’s sister and carefully planned for Elsa’s arrival on Saturday night. Thanks to Burny’s friend (whose name escapes me at the moment), Rae and I were transformed into Janki and Jayaprakesh!

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Chances are you haven’t heard of Rick Smolan, but you’ve probably seen his work in the bookstores or on your coffee tables. Rick is the creator of the popular Day in the Life photography series, America 24/7, From Alice To Ocean, and 24 Hours in Cyberspace. I’ve been a big fan of his work, and it was great to meet him in person. He’s good friends with Doug Menuez, who created one of my favorite books, Defying Gravity (or Defying Graviity for those in the know); after the meeting, he called up Doug, who just recently donated his photographic collection from the 80’s and 90’s to Stanford, and let me speak to him. Now, I know just how he was able to get such great access to the Newton group in the early days (it’s all about connections).

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The May 2004 COBA meeting was held last night at the usual place and the usual time. The main focus of the meeting was taking a look at prints from various digital cameras. We wanted to see how much difference there was between 3, 4, 6, 8, and 11 megapixel cameras. Last Sunday, a number of COBA members met at Stanford University armed with a veritable arsenal of photography equipment. We tested a Canon PowerShot S30, EOS-D30, EOS-10D, EOS-1D, EOS-1Ds, EOS-1D Mark II, Nikon D100, Sigma SD9, and a Sigma SD10. Over the next couple of days, I made some prints of the images have a fairly consistent post-processing procedure.

The results were very interesting and in some ways, surprising. As expected, at 4×6, there was little difference between all of the cameras. At 8×12, the PowerShot S30 was clearly lacking compared to the DSLR’s, but its image was still acceptable to most people in the room. At 20×30, the differences between the various DSLR’s were noticeable, but as much as many people initially suspected. The biggest difference between the cameras was in color rendition. I tried my best in post-processing, but it was very difficult to get the colors to match, even in a simple daytime photo such as this one!

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The wedding train continues to pick up new passengers! Last week, Rae and I attended the wedding of Eric and Flora at the Chardonnay Golf Club in Napa, California. The Rotten Tomatoes and Cal Wushu crew were all there for the festivities, including Anne Hsu, a fellow Stanford alum whom I haven’t seen in several years. The ceremony was held on a lawn overlooking the vineyards and golf course. The contrast was sharp — old white guys playing golf and dressed-up Asian people for a wedding!

Wind sure is a pain during the wedding; Flora’s veil kept whipping around Eric and her throughout the ceremony. The ring bearer did his job to straighten and smooth things out on her dress whenever he could.

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Last night, Rae, Susan, and I went to somArts Cultural Center to see Genny Lim and Melody Takata perform their respective pieces, Child At War and Quest. These pieces and many others are part of the larger 7th Annual United States of Asian America Festival happening this month. In a couple of weeks, Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble will be performing a piece with Robert Moses Kin. I did some photography earlier in the year for them, and I’m eager to see the performance!

With the Mark II, RAW images are now 9MB in size, with the JPEGs coming in at 3MB. That’s a major size increase from the original 1D, which saw RAW images at 3.5MB and JPEGs between 1-2MB. With a 1GB MicroDrive, you get less than 100 photos! When I switched to a RAW+JPEG workflow, I remarked at how few photos I got with my 512MB and 1GB cards. Now, it’s even smaller! I can’t seem to find that Muvo2 in stock (with the 4GB Hitachi MicroDrive for cheap) anywhere on the Net. Anyone have any leads?

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After several years of living in sunny California, Trevor and his family are returning to Ottawa, Canada. I first met Trevor when I joined Palm back in 2000. We were all in the same Palm.Net group (a.k.a Content and Access). Four years later, there’s only a handful of people left in the group. Everyone has gone off in different directions (or to eBay!).

We went to the Chevy’s next to Santana Row in San Jose for lunch. As one would expect, the food was mediocre, but the conversation was great! We’re going to miss you, Julie, and Curtis, Trevor! Get a webcam so I can be Uncle Adam for Curtis in Ottawa! He’s going to grow up resistant to the cold, thanks to the frigid Canadian Winters!

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This past weekend, I installed two 2U servers from King Star Computer (ask for John, he’s a great salesperson at King Star!) at my new co-location facility at United Layer. Matt and Sean were very helpful getting everyting configured and installed properly. I know a bit about Linux and server management, but my skills pale in comparison to Matt’s.

Over the next two weeks, I’m going to complete the migration from my various web hosting providers. There’s been a lot to transfer, and the quicker I get this done, the happier, I’ll be. Following a successful migration, I’ll begin work on redesigning tow.com for a more modern look. I’m looking forward to offering more functionality and features on the site. Stay tuned!

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