If you’ve been following the Lance Armstrong EPO/L’Equipe story, you might be interested in reading the transcript to Armstrong’s interview on Larry King Live last night. It’s always more informative to read the actual transcripts than the filtered media reports.

My favorite quote from this whole story comes from Laurent Fignon, former two-time winner of the Tour de France:

Cette histoire est trop vieille. 1999 ? J’en ai rien à foutre. Ca va servir à quoi ? Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est la prévention vis à vis des jeunes

Which for English speakers translates roughly into:

This story is too old. 1999? I don’t give a fuck about it. What does it serve to help? What interests me is preventing this with the young riders.

Classic unfiltered Fignon!

When I first arrived at Printer’s Inc. Cafe in Palo Alto for the August 2005 SNUG meeting, no one was there. I knew that Flash was in Canada and wouldn’t be able to make it, but what about the others? Is this the end of the Newton User Group? I myself wasn’t able to attend last month, and I heard that there weren’t that many people who showed up.

Fortunately, the old standbys arrived within 20 minutes of my arrival, including Woo Lee from Southern California. Woo has such enthusiasm for the Newton; he helps me recharge my own Newton batteries with all of the cool accessories he brings to the meetings. Tonight, he demonstrated three products from Italian Newton developer Adriano Angelillis: NewtEye, NewtLight, and NewtAC. NewtEye is a LED light that plugs into and is powered by the SER-001 serial port addition. NewtLight lets you power USB devices using your Newton as a battery source (500mA at 5V devices or less). Finally, the coolest product from Adriano has got to be NewtAC, which lets you power your Newton via a USB cable! Woo also brought along a replacement backlight for the Newton. I never knew that they were so flexible! He even took apart his Newton to show us his accelerator board.

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Melanie and Oliver got married this past weekend! I met Oliver as we were completing high school, when the two of us were awarded scholarships from the San Diego Chinese American Scientists and Engineers Association. That was back in the beginning of 1993, 12 years! Reading my old journal, I see that I got my wisdom teeth pulled a few days before the scholarship banquet. I don’t think I would have been very talkative that night!

I first met Melanie at Justin’s 26th birthday party. Looking at the photos from 2001, I see a lot of familiar faces from the wedding, including John Liu, Eric Lin, Mel’s sister Monique, and Ann Ku. My cousin, Justin, was there too, providing a connection between my family and friends.

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Amy and Jeremy are leaving the Bay Area for a cross-country road trip in their Eurovan! They held a going away party at Heritage Oaks Park in Los Altos with their friends and colleagues. This “pack up your bags and travel” bug is getting contagious, Felix just left for his own cross-country road trip a month ago!

The past three years, Amy has been doing a great job as the Program Coordinator at the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford. I’m going to miss her when next year’s fellows start, but I have no doubt that Vi will continue the terrific work! It’s hard to believe that the next batch of fellows will be arriving in just three weeks!

Jeremy and Amy’s friends are all very good ultimate players. As much as I love playing the game, I really suck at throwing the disc. Although I can run fast, lay out for catches, and defend decently, I crack under pressure when holding the disc. Short passes, dump-offs, and the occasional hammer are my forté! I need more practice!

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Let’s hope I never get hired to shoot this kind of wedding.

Five years ago, Canon released the camera that got me hooked for good on digital photography, the EOS-D30. Today, they announced their new offerings for 2006, the EOS 5D, a 12.8MP, full-frame, digital SLR in a camera body similar to my original 3MP D30. Many people have been waiting for a smaller version of the 1D-series, and this camera could be it. No, it doesn’t have weather sealing, doesn’t shoot 8fps, and has user controls that are based on the D30, D60, 10D, and 20D cameras, but hey, it’s got a full-frame sensor, 13 megapixels, and is much smaller and lighter than the 1D!

At a price of $3299, the 5D is almost the same price as the D30 ($3000) when it was released. Canon is going to sell thousands of these in the coming years.

As for a replacement to the 1D, Canon announced a slight revision to the 8MP EOS-1D Mark II. The 1D Mark II N has a larger LCD screen (2.5″ versus 2.0″), Picture Styles, and more customization of file/folder generation. Despite the small list of upgrades, I can see its usefulness for professional photographers. It’s enough to make me jealous of people who have it, but not enough to make me upgrade. I think I’ll wait until the true successor to the 1D and 1Ds line appears in a years time. That camera will marry the performance of the current 1D with the image resolution of the 1Ds. On the other hand, I could pick up a 5D to replace my original 1D. Anyone takers?

A 24-105mm f/4.0 IS L lense was announced, alongside the 430EX Speedlite. Wedding photographers are going to buy this lens in droves. One problem with the 1D-series and f/2.8 lenses is the weight. After a long day of shooting, these cameras and lenses get very heavy and are tiring to hold!

In other news, Canon also released the successor to the venerable PowerShot A95. The A95 is the camera that I have been recommending to people over and over when they ask me, “What camera should I buy?” Now, I’ll have to start telling them to get either the PowerShot A610 or the A620. The biggest difference between the previous camera and these is the use of SD memory cards. SD has quickly become the new standard for memory cards for cameras, handheld computers, laptops, and even mobile phones.

The FSA Compact Crank that I purchased requires the use of a Park Tool BBT-9 Lockring Wrench. I had to call six different bike stores in the South Bay before I found one that had it in stock. Chain Reaction in Los Altos, Bicycle Outfitter, Performance Bike in Redwood City, Supergo in Mountain View, and Palo Alto Bicycles all didn’t have the BBT-9 in stock. Mike’s Bikes in Palo Alto seemed to be hoarding all of these bottom bracket crank tools, as they had 5 in stock!

I ended up buying a SRAM PC-58 chain for my bike as well. I’ll be heading over to Dave’s house tomorrow morning to get my new cranks and chain installed. New bike components, exciting!

It was a fun and informative night at COBA last night. I spoke about white balance and my wedding invitations. I demonstrated the use of various white balance products, including the EXPOdisc, WhiBal, gray cards, WB presets, and RAW. I’ll see if I can clean up the presentation and post it online. Suffice it to say, all of the products seem to do a reasonable job of ensuring better white balance than AWB. My biggest recommendation from the evening is to shoot RAW and deal with the WB later.

Not to be left out is the fact that sometimes we don’t want color accuracy in our photos. Achieving proper white balance shouldn’t always be the goal, unless you’re a commercial photographer shooting the next new widget!

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I went out for a 7.4 mile run today from my house to the intersection of Mt. Eden and Stevens Canyon Road in Saratoga. Assuming the mileage is correct — I’ll confirm once my bike is operational again — I did the run at an 8:30 pace over 63 minutes. Not bad!

As a ninth grader in San Diego, I participated in my first, and to this date only, half-marathon. Out of 1030 entrants, I came in 500th place with a time of 1:43:14, a 7:51 pace. Sadly, I burned out of running after that race, becoming a sad shell of my former self in cross-country competitions my remaining years in high school.

One of these days, I’ll have to time myself over 13.1 miles and see where I am fitness-wise to my ninth grade form. It turns out running isn’t that bad once you have logged a few miles in your tires. It also helps to have either (1) someone running with you or (2) some music playing in your ears.

There’s a great interview with Eric Cheng on the Nature, Wildlife, and Pet Photography Forum. Check it out to find out how underwater photography found Eric!

Eric was one of my inspirations for taking up photography. I always enjoyed browsing through his photos of his time in college. Although I wrote in a journal nearly everyday, I didn’t have much in the way of photo documentation. That changed in 1998 when I bought my first digital camera, and the rest as you know is history! Back when I first picked up a camera, I didn’t know my shutter speed from my aperture, but now they are second nature. Thanks, Eric, for all the help you’ve given me over the years!