Meme: Cooking and music

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There have been nice bits of music lately.
First off there’s Little White Flag and the related kickstarter for a full album. It’s a good song. You should help fund their album if you like the song.
Second, Kelly apparently wrote a new anthem for the Dallas Cowboys called “Get Up”, which you can download for free here. It’s very happy and upbeat and dance-y. I am a fan (even if I’m not a fan of the Cowboys).
Third, Incorporated Elements did an awesome remix of “The Day We Fell Apart” from Kelly’s last album, which is also up for download here.
Fourth, I downloaded Bangarang back when the EP was on sale. Dubstep is awesome. Too bad good dubstep is so hard to come by.
Fifth, I also downloaded Amaryllis back when it was on sale. A few of the tracks (Unity, Miracle, Through The Ghost) are standouts and they’ve been on my standard playlist since then.
Also grabbed a few random tracks like God Gave Me You and Something To Do With My Hands using free MP3 credit. My musical tastes are rather eclectic.

Anyway, I’m making food for 5 tonight (kind of an impromptu dinner party), so it seems like an appropriate time to cover the last of Jess’ meme topics for me.

Cooking is a weird thing for me. I generally like food, and looking at food, and contemplating food. One of my favorite websites is airline meals, where people post photos of their plane food.

That said, I don’t really have a good appreciation for “fancy” food. Maybe my palate isn’t refined enough or something, but on the occasions I get to go to upscale places, I feel like I don’t appreciate the food as much as I should given how much it costs… really, I would rather go to cheaper places and get larger portions.

So, expectedly, my cooking is rather boring, standard stuff. There’s a bunch of stuff I make in the food category of this journal. It all tends to involve a meat and a veggie or starch. I do cook Thai food sometimes, but not as much as I should given the expensiveness of “exotic” ingredients ($4/lb for bok choy? really?) at local grocery stores and distance of cheaper ethnic stores. Also, Greg doesn’t like tofu or non-standard sea creatures, which also limits the kind of things I can easily do.

The process itself I usually find relaxing and rewarding, since it’s nice to be able to do something after a day of coding that doesn’t involve a keyboard or debugging. Cooking pretty much always works out the way you want it to, and you can experiment as much as you want and (usually) still get something tasty out the other end.
Still, when I’m feeling particularly stressed about work, I tend to find the extra “chore” of cooking to be too much and will default to heating frozen things or making sandwiches. Which is odd given how much I enjoy it normally. But meh.

So yay food.
Tonight’s menu is salad (a mix of bagged salads with some fresh tomato and mozzarella; yes I’m lazy), lemon-pepper baked tilapia, green beans, rice (made with mixed veggies and spices in my usual style), and watermelon (since we have two, since they were on sale this week at geagle). Om nom nom nom.

I’ve had a lot of other random introspective thoughts bouncing around my head the past few days, but I don’t know how to put them into words, so they will remain unwritten for now.

Wedding, Boston, and things

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Tim got married last weekend. It was an awesome time, and was definitely the best wedding I’ve ever been to.

More photos will be posted at some point when I am not in Boston.

Because, yeah, right now I’m in Boston (well, Cambridge, anyway). It has been a fun time. Yesterday we did an 11+ mile walk around Cambridge and Boston. Today’s plans include more hiking. I really like this area… I think if it weren’t for the prices of everything, it’s somewhere I would be happy to live in.

MIT has a building uglier than Gates! Yay!

Moving, games, and disappointment

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Haven’t done a general life post in a while. Life goes.

People seem to like my SimSimi pillows that I brought back from Thailand.

In any case, Greg’s sister Chris recently moved to Pittsburgh for a year-long internship thing at UPitt. We spent most of the weekend helping her move things from there to here.

Nothing like helping people move to realize how much stuff people can accumulate. It’s left me and Greg with a desire to get rid of more of our things so any future move we might do isn’t nearly as painful.

In any case, after moving was done, we went to Red Robin for dinner, as I had been wanting to do for a while. Maybe I have unreasonable expectations or something for a casual restaurant, but I felt rather disappointed. Our waitress didn’t refill my tea unless I asked (and would come by and grab other people’s empty glasses and refill them), and generally seemed like she was unhappy at me. Also, my “well-done” burger came out terrifyingly red in the middle. (Not even sure how a burger that thin could manage to be that undercooked.) By that point, I was feeling unhappy enough that I just wrapped it up and took it home instead of asking it to be fixed. And then reheated burger is never that good… managed to eat it tonight, somehow. But kind of a disappointment for something I’d been looking forward to.

In any case, today we had some more board games.


Besides Ingenious, which seems to be getting popular on game nights and is one of Greg’s favorite games, and My Happy Farm, which I think has become my favorite “quick” game choice, we also played Puerto Rico for the first time in a while. There was also a lot of 7 Wonders (with Max and Yubin’s set that we’re holding on to until they return from getting married), which is quickly becoming one of my more favorite games… perhaps it will be time to buy a copy in the near future.

This upcoming week will be interesting. On call for work while I’m spending Friday being driven to a wedding in Connecticut, then on call all weekend while I’m there and on a train to Boston. With luck, nothing will happen. Without luck… well, at least I’ll always be at most 30 minutes away from an internet connection.

Meme: ITG and comprehensive camera stats

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It seems that 8 will be moving to the bay area at some point in the near future. This makes me sadder than it should. Meh.

As for meme topics, we have ITG. Which I’m actually not quite sure what to say about.

The first time I played DDR was in a Gameworks in Arizona Mills, probably in middle school or so. I didn’t know what I was doing and stepped on the arrows pretty much as they came on screen. Then I added another player after the first song (which that machine apparently let you do), wasting some money because player 2 only got two songs instead of three.

I think I started being interested in it in high school, when we went to a Fry’s Electronics and they had the PS version of DDR set up with pads. This was intriguing, and my parents bought me a PSOne, DDR, and two mats with the promise that I would play it for exercise fairly often. (Of course, this didn’t really happen. I was such a horrible kid. :P)

My first real experience with the arcade machine (and hard pads) then was in college when I came to CMU and discovered the DDR machine in Scotland Yard my freshman year. From photos, it seems the ITG machine appeared around December 2005. I remember the brief period of time when the machines existed side-by-side, and I remember being annoyed at the “elite” ITG players who wouldn’t alternate with DDR players (like myself) since you couldn’t play both machines at once (the music got mixed up and way too confusing and threw everyone off).

I think I really got into ITG the summer I had the PLSC internship in Pittsburgh (2006). I played with 8 at least once a week every week that summer, and managed to progress up to 10s. (I think the desire to avoid my room and my horrible roommate at the time had a lot to do with this.) I’ve pretty much been playing since then, although my general interest in it seems to have lowered somewhat.

At this point, I’ve stopped trying to improve on song difficulty, and have mostly resigned myself to playing casually in the 9-11 range. I also really, really like marathons and mods, so I’ll do that a lot. But the ITG machine at CMU has been having issues lately, and the stupid company in charge of it keeps screwing it up, so I don’t know if it’s really something I’ll continue doing regularly.

Also, wow… I’m making a lot of posts this month. This is weird.

I now have 296,595 tagged photos in Photoshop organizer. I think we’ll break 300k by the end of August. Or maybe not, because I’ve been taking fewer photos lately. We shall see.

I went through and tried to find the first and last photos taken by each camera. Photoshop organizer doesn’t let you sort by filename, and I have way too many files to do EXIF data searches, so some of this may be off by a few. (In particular, finding the “last” photo my Intel camera took is a pain because it still works, and I was using it for its portability even though high school even when I had gotten the Kodak camera. And it didn’t even record any EXIF data, and you can’t do a “negative” search in organizer. So blah.)

And it turns out the photos aren’t all that interesting anyway. So here’s just the dates of each camera’s first and last photo.

Intel Pocket PC camera October 6, 2000 September 18, 2003 1077 days; 2.95 years
Olympus C3000 Zoom September 28, 2001 December 5, 2003 798 days; 2.186 years
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 December 8, 2003 March 17, 2006 830 days; 2.274 years
Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years
Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 Current (last July 20, 2012) 1089 days; 2.98 years so far
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 Current (last July 25, 2012) 880 days; 2.411 years so far

Getting numbers for how many photos each camera shot would also be interesting, but not easy to do.

Edit: Searching by filename and using the power of maths should give reasonable estimates of total photos. Therefore:

Intel Pocket PC camera 15,829 photos $200 14.7 photos per day 1.26¢ per photo
Olympus C3000 Zoom 10,647 photos $450 13.3 photos per day 4.23¢ per photo
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 49,413 photos $500 59.5 photos per day 1.01¢ per photo
Nikon D50 105,067 photos $570 (+$250 repair cost) 78.8 photos per day 0.54¢ per photo (0.78¢ per photo including repair cost)
Samsung SL30 18,571 photos $70 17 photos per day 0.38¢ per photo (so far)
Nikon D90 97,068 photos $780 110.3 photos per day 0.80¢ per photo (so far)

Cost estimates don’t include charges for accessories (extra batteries and lenses in the Nikon case), electricity, or memory cards.

Meme: Photography and Pokemon

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Before I forget, I should wish Greg a very happy birthday. Yay birthday.

I’ll never forget my first trading card game and my first trade. Back in May 1999, I went with a friend (Jim) to a GameStop. He picked up some boosters and I bought a starter deck plus two booster packs of the Pokemon card game. Opening the packs yielded a holographic Raichu and a Clefairy Doll for the rares. (Of course, I had no idea about rarities at the time, since I had never touched or seen a trading card game before.) This was also at the same time as a Pokemon card game promotional thing or something, because I also had my picture taken with a giant Pikachu card (for me to take home on a floppy disc!).

Jim and I sat down at one of the provided tables to play a game, and I lamented about how I couldn’t play the Raichu because I didn’t have a Pikachu card to evolve it from. One of the younger kids playing nearby apparently overheard and offered to trade me one. He looked through my small stack of cards and asked for the Clefairy Doll. Upon Jim’s advice, I made the trade of my rare for a common. (“That thing only had 10 HP, and the Pikachu has 40 HP. You got a great deal.”)

Fortunately, several years later when we had both learned what rarities (and rarity symbols) were, he traded me a Clefairy Doll for a Pikachu, and all was well. Yay noobness.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about here. Continuing with meme topics from Jess (after quite a hiatus), we have photography.

Photography is one of those things I enjoy doing, and have periods off and on of wanting to do professionally (or, at least, with more dedication that I do now). My first digital camera was a Intel Pocket PC Camera (retailing for $199 at the time) when I was in middle school (late 2000).
My parents were redoing the front yard at the time (removing the palm trees and grass and replacing them with rocks and gravel), and promised me a digital camera if I helped. Of course, being the horrible child I was, I managed to get the camera first, and then proceeded to do nothing to help (except take photos of my parents working on the front yard, which are some of the first digital photos I ever took).

The camera took photos at an amazing 640×480 resolution, more than enough for anyone, and came with an option to switch to 320×240 resolution in case you needed to take more photos (since there weren’t memory card options).

This camera satisfied me only about a year. I got my next camera, a Olympus C3000, my first year of high school (2001). It took amazing (for the time) resolution photos, and had a flash, and was the best thing ever. I actually still have the camera, and it still works, even though the drivers no longer work in Windows XP (or 7) and there is no card reader that can read the SmartMedia cards it takes.

That camera lasted only a couple years (2003), when it started to have issues with exposure metering. (Photos were coming out completely black every so often.) It was quickly replaced with a Kodak Easyshare DX6490 with its amazing 10x optical zoom and even better resolution. Naive me referred to the three steps as a “casual” camera, a “semi-professional” camera, and a “professional” camera. Upon reflection now, it seems horribly stupid of me to think that a point-and-shoot that didn’t even have full manual control could be considered “professional” by any means.

In any case, the Kodak lasted until my Sophomore year of college (2006), when it proceeded to die in a series of unrecoverable errors (the last photos it took were at the fondue party at Wes’ house). It was replaced a week later with a Nikon D50 (with its kit 28-80mm lens) that I shot for the following 3 years (including a series of repairs by a horrible company that didn’t fix it right the first time).

The D50, in turn, was replaced by my current Nikon D90 (in February 2010) after it died in November 1999, which still seems to be in great condition. Overlapping the two is my Samsung SL30, which is a crappy $80 point-and-shoot I picked up just to have an “easy to carry” camera.

So I seem to be in the habit of going through cameras every 2-3 years. This, I suppose, is somewhat expected given how much I abuse and use them (my D50 had over 100,000 shutter releases when it died completely, via the mirror refusing to flip).
There’s a summary of my cameras, which is accurate minus the D90, here.

As for photography in general, I find it to be a good hobby, a good way to remember my life, and a good way to remove some level of awkwardness at large gatherings (using my camera as a shield, which I have previously written about). I don’t think I’m particularly good at it… I just take thousands of photos, which means I’m bound to get one or two good ones out. Most of my shooting is casual snapshots… I used to do more studio shooting when I had access, but in retrospect find the setting too boring and limiting.

I suppose the good thing about taking so many photos all the time is that I often manage to get candid shots of people that you wouldn’t otherwise get. People are so used to me having a camera all the time (and taking their picture all the time) that they’ve stopped noticing. As a photographer, that’s one of the best places to be.

Anyway, photo meme = moar photo. Here’s Chris with the awesome pillows I got from Thailand.

I don’t know what else to write about photography. If you have anything specific you’re curious about, feel free to ask.