Got in my possession one of the first iPod Touch to be released in Singapore. It was supposed to be out yesterday but not all shops received the stock. There’s this shop in Funan that had a few and I bought it right away. Got just the 8gb version for S$498 which is list price here minus about S$25 in GST refund when I leave tomorrow.
Other than the iPod, bought a couple of accessories for my photo stuff, and a mid sized backpack for my future chinese adventures. Cathay photo was selling the Epson R2400 printer for just S$1599 but its too big for me to smuggle back to Shanghai. Anyways, the Chinese customs are kings at imposing duties on new and used printers and scanners.
Used it this morning at Shanghai Pudong airport. Internet check in is not for nothing anymore. After printing out your boarding pass on your home printer, at least Singapore airlines has a separate 2 check in counters for internet check-in and they serve first internet check-in customers first and then normal customers. The beauty of this is that almost no one was using internet check-in this morning. The normal queue was 50 persons long, while i just strut to the front of the internet line to deposit my bag!
Don’t remember this trick being of too much help in europe where its common to do kiosk check-in anyway.
Been busy going through about 1000 photos, at least 80% of them from the Ricoh GR Digital, which I brought to Taipei, Hong Kong and Beijing and the rest from my Nikon D2H used only in Beijing. Sorting is quite simple, I go through them and if they dont hit me the first time I see it or if the shot looks too touristy (flat and no emotion) it goes away. After that process, kept about 600 photos, and out of that, I’d say half is relatively flat but I’ll keep for nostalgic reasons.
Then its time to tag the photos so that it can be searchable in Adobe Lightroom. But since I put each shoot in a separate folder which I label according to date I upload and location, actually it doesn’t really require tagging, but why not? So the sorting took me 2-3 days to go thru. And I’m glad to say that now I can start uploading the photos up to the site. Hong Kong comes first. Taipei later since there are more pictures. I didn’t write any article for Beijing, but I guess I’ll just put photos plus a little commentary later on.
Made a business trip over to Beijing this week and managed to get part of Sunday off to roam a few of the famous places around town. Saw some of the Olympics mega buildings, including the yet to be completed CCBS building. This time at least I did not bother blogging on my Nokia E61 so I’m just going to post the photos here and put some comments on where its taken. Here goes:
View of the Forbidden City from Jingshan Park
(Nikon D2H with 40mm f2 Ultron: 1/2000s, f2.8)
Main Entrance: Forbidden City
(Nikon D2H with 105mm f2.5 AIS: 1/800s, f5.6)
Continue reading 'Travels: Beijing Walkabout'»
Awaiting my 0815 Shanghai airlines flight to Beijing this morning at the Hongqiao airport. Which reminds me, I’ve not been here since the move to Pudong around 2001ish. Even then, never had the chance to fly domestic in China (Hong Kong is not really included for me). As expected, its decidedly chinese, people do talk louder here, and there are hot water stations everywhere to fill up the quintessential tea flask. Surprisingly its a no smoking zone. At the front entrance theres a heavy air filled with cigarrette smoke as everyone takes a last pull before going into the torture chamber. Time to get from home to airport? The usual 20mins and another 20mins later I’m inside the waiting lounge. If all airport was this painless. I’m also guessing that the fact that its not even 7am now and its a domestic terminal has to do with the apparent efficiency. Anyhow, got to plan for my half day assault on the forbidden city, weather permitting.
1233hrs: Same day Hong Kong Airport Express return ticket to Kowloon station cost 90HKD. Not too bad value. Finally, found an ATM that takes Chinese Unionpay cards. Now I can charge this adventure to my chinese bank. Train takes about 25 mins to get to Kowloon. Planning my trip with copied and pasted addresses and GPS coords on my palm TH55. I have approximately 4 hours to roam and iPod fully charged.
1253hrs: Just arrived at Kowloon station. Looks like free shuttle bus K3 will bring me close to Tsimtsatsui MTR station. Got my octopus card ready to be topped up at the closest metro station… The picture up above is one of my favourite place in Hong Kong: ChungKing Mansion on Nathan Road. I like it because its like a city inside a building. Been to a not-so-bad indian curry house inside, but if you ask me to go look for it again I dont think I can find it! Its a maze inside and it looks terrible outside, but I like it!!
Continue reading 'Travels: Hong Kong in 6 hours…'»
One day after dropping my nokia into the sink wet, and spending a whole day drying it by leaving the battery out, spending 15mins under the hair dryer, this phone is alive again! It was wet enough to have water spraying out once shaken. Nice. Water was seeping in through the keypads and all and it survived. At least for now…
I’m currently at Taipei’s Taoyuan Airport on the way back to Shanghai today with 6 hours in Hong Kong. Been some time since my last time in HK and nice to be back there again. The itinerary today will be 2hrs in Tsimtsatsui and Mongkok to grab some 5.11 gears before going back to the airport for the 7pm flight. Will hope to grab a bowl of wontan noodles on the way. Goody goody.
…while washing my hands in the wash basin. Just happened sometime ago. First thing to do: turn it off (which was difficult as it was locked and takes a couple of key presses), remove battery, use dry towel. Looks like I wont have a use for my Nokia E61 for a couple of days while waiting for it to dry. There’s no hand dryer anywhere in this office in Taipei, and so I will need to wait till I get back to the hotel tonight to do that.
In the meantime no one will be able to get me on the phone!
While on business trip in Taipei, had the weekend of 8-9 Sept 2007 to roam the city. Saturday was with Jerry, an old colleague and friend. Sunday was me roaming Taipei without a map or a real plan, but eventually visiting Kwanghwa Market and Taipei 101.
Po-Ai Street
First thing to do in the morning while waiting for Jerry to pick me up for a Saturday Taipei tour… What is a visit to any city without a visit to where locals buy photographic stuff? Po-Ai Street is the place to go in Taipei, it seems. Quite close to the main train station. Coordinates are: 25.04692N, 121.51124E for the start of the road closer to the train station. How do I like that place? I don’t think it has the feel of a place I’d like to shop in. Most shops look like the type that sell mainstream stuff from the major brands. Ok, they need to make some buck, but I didn’t find anything very interesting in the shops. All more or less the same. Schmidt Marketing (regional distributor of Leica cameras) has a showroom over there that looks a little more like a museum with a guy with suit and a tie on. Very big contrast compared to the other shops in that area. Ok, result is I didn’t find what I was looking for and since I was going to Hong Kong the next week, I was not in a hurry to get anything.
Continue reading 'Travels: Taipei'»
Woke up a while this morning with a little trembling. Felt the pictures on the wall move a bit, and 10 seconds later it was back to normal. Didn’t think too much of it. Did a search on the quake this morning and this is what I got!
Magnitude 6.5
* Thursday, September 06, 2007 at 17:51:27 UTC
* Friday, September 07, 2007 at 01:51:27 AM at epicenter
Location 24.334°N, 122.324°E
Depth 62.9 km (39.1 miles)
Region TAIWAN REGION
Distances 55 km (35 miles) ESE of Su-ao, Taiwan
85 km (55 miles) ENE of Hua-lien, Taiwan
115 km (70 miles) SE of T’AI-PEI, Taiwan
145 km (90 miles) ESE of Hsin-chu, Taiwan
As in, 6.5 on the richter scale! Local time is 1:51am Friday, since this is probably american time since it came from USGS site. Location seems to be in the ocean to the east of Taiwan as in the map below:
Quake Epicenter
Anyway, it was not as big as the last one I felt some time back. This one lasted really quickly.
Am currently zipping 100kmph along the airport highway in Taoyuan county after having touched down in Taipei at 4pm after leaving home in Shanghai at 7am. Flight to Hong Kong was delayed, and had to take a later connecting flight. Which is not really that bad as I got to refill my stomach with a bowl of wonton noodles and the mind with Wired and Outside magazines, which is almost impossible to find in Shanghai. The noodles at the airport does not taste as good as the last time I had it 1-2 years ago. Looks like on the return leg I have to go look for another one in Hong Kong Island. Still, better than nothing.
There’s this thing about taking photo of activity around zebra crossings. Day or night, messy or simple, it almost always looks good in black and white. I’ve done a keyword search on my b&w collection just for Shanghai alone and came up with more than 30 of them. Here’s a collage of 6 that got clicked in random by the mighty mouse.
Did some small research today on CF cards and the various specs you see on the packaging. I still don’t trust speed specs on packages, and I bet many list max speed rather that average throughput so comparison in shops by looking at packaging info is almost impossible. But I think we can all agree that at least you buy what you need today and not for the future as prices drop really fast.
What I found today is this thing called PIO modes that camera and cards somehow comply to. Depending on your camera, if you support an older PIO mode you may not be able to use the full speed of your CF card. Lets not talk about point and shoot cameras, 99% of them would probably do fine with the normal cards without the user knowing the difference.
Latest card like the Sandisk Extreme IV supports PIO mode 6, also known as UDMA in marketing-speak. Only the latest cameras support this card, like the D3 and D300 from Nikon. So, I take this to mean that you will not see close to 40mbps specced on Extreme IVs unless you use compatible cameras. The D200, D2X series and D2Hs supports PIO mode 6, so probably Extreme III will give close to IV performance. Got to check Rob Galbraith’s database to be sure. Which my oldish D2H will find an Extreme III an overkill! However, still think Extreme IIIs are a good buy if I can find a fast card reader to offload the data. 4mpix pictures are small, only 3mb per picture, so 40mbps write is overkill.
Will be out looking for UDMA card reader. About time I spend less time waiting for photos to be downloaded.
Starting very early this morning. Left the apartment at 0530 in order to catch the first metro to the South Shanghai station and to catch the first bus to Ningbo at 0630. Ticket cost 100RMB one way, and i have no idea how long it takes to get there yet. Some blogs mention 3-4 hours, but we’ll see. Gears today? Garmin GPS for sure, iPod (boredom buster), googleearth printout for God-view perspective and a page of scribblings full of coordinates in case i cannot find a certain location. Gearwise, Ricoh GRD is with me along with the 21mm adapter, Nikon D2H with 40mm, 70-180micro and 20mm lenses. This trip is special as I will be bringing SB800 and SU800 to experiment.
0931hrs: On board the bus. Garmin puts my position at close to 40km west of Ningbo, as the express bus weaves and dodges around the two laned highway, as though its making up lost time, even though there a couple of road diversions. To be fair theres an awful lot of slow traffic. Trucks carrying pigs, steel sheets and loads of whatevers. Still, looks like we’re good for a 3.5hr bus trip today! On the GPS map, it shows that we had to swing close to Hangzhou before turning left towards east, which explains the journey duration.
Continue reading 'Travels: Ningbo Raid…'»
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