Hongkie Town

Meant to comment on this bit in the SCMP yesterday, "Expat Voting Rights 'Worry Beijing'". The lead:

The right of non-Chinese nationals to vote and stand for election in Hong Kong is part of the "international influence" that is "troubling" to Beijing, a former mainland researcher for the Basic Law Committee argues.

Take out the word "nationals."

It will make implementing universal suffrage in the city more complicated, Cheng Jie, associate professor of law at Tsinghua University, believes.

Any port in a storm, any excuse in the book.

"Not only civil servants but also judges can be foreigners. This unique arrangement may have been a great mistake of the Basic Law ....

If you're not ethnic Chinese, doesn't matter if you were born here or if you've been here for more than a decade, you're a foreigner.

"Consequently, universal suffrage in Hong Kong would be more complicated than for nation states where only its own citizens are eligible for elections."

If you're not ethnic Chinese, becoming a citizen of Hong Kong is next to impossible - unless you're Allan Zeman.

In November 2003, the then chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, Tsang Yok-sing, sparked controversy among expatriates when he told a forum that the right of non-Chinese nationals to vote in Hong Kong was "rather dubious". He is currently president of the Legislative Council.

Take out the word "nationals."

"Foreign influences were noticed during the July 1 demonstration and in later elections," she wrote. The 500,000-strong march targeted both the Hong Kong and central governments, she noted.

"Foreign influences" most likely a euphemism for non-Chinese residents of Hong Kong.

"The surprisingly broad-based resentments illustrated by the protest brought an end to the central government's former laissez-faire policy, and called for new thoughts," Dr Cheng wrote.

Farewell one country, two systems.

==================

Want a Hong Kong passport? From the Government's web site:

You are eligible to apply for a HKSAR Passport if you are:

• a Chinese citizen;

You are regarded as a person of Chinese nationality if you are a Hong Kong resident:

(a) of Chinese descent who was born in Hong Kong or other parts of China; or

(b) who fulfils the criteria of Chinese nationality in the Nationality Law of the People's Republic of China.

Article 7 Foreign nationals or stateless persons who are willing to abide by China's Constitution and laws and who meet one of the following conditions may be naturalized upon approval of their applications:

(1) they are near relatives of Chinese nationals;

(2) they have settled in China; or

(3) they have other legitimate reasons.

Good luck if you're not Allan Zeman. At least that's what I've been told. If I'm wrong, please tell me.

Just a weird day all around. Nothing huge, lots of small stuff leading up to a general feeling of ... I don't know what.

Last night not a lot of sleep, no particular reason, but I think I didn't fall asleep until after 4 and I was up around 9 this morning. After work, what will be my final visit to the chiropractor (insurance coverage for this has run out) - but I'm feeling 99% normal now (not that I'm claiming that I am 99% normal) so probably no need anyway.

Bought tix for the new Harry Potter film. Hong Kong only has 1 IMAX theatre (until some time in the future when a second one opens up at the ICC, I think). Even though it hasn't opened yet, the Harry Potter film is all but sold out on the IMAX screen for the next two weeks but managed to get some not horrendous seats two weeks in the future.

What really cheeses me off is UA Cinemas garbage web site (not gonna bother a link). Because I was trying to book last night at 1:30 AM. You go to the web site, choose the movie, choose the seats, enter your credit card information and ONLY THEN are you told that you can't book tickets online between 1 AM and 6:30 AM. What? They need to bring their system down for maintenance for 5 and a half hours every freaking night? Is their site not run by computers, it's run by a team of gerbils that are allowed to get off those wheels for a few hours late at night to catch their little gerbil breath? And they can't tell you about that sooner? Like as soon as you click on "Buy"? I think they must be partying in the office late every night, getting drunk, watching the screen, "Oho! Here comes another one! Wait .... wait .... wait .... gotcha!"

Anyway, some late afternoon trekking around to find the Mophie Juice Pack Air. If I wasn't sure that I wanted it before, the fact that I can't find it makes me crazy to have one. (Yes, I know, this is not rational.) It would appear that stock arrived on Friday or Saturday, only to sell out instantly. I went to Windsor House, Times Square and the Wanchai Computer Centre, all with no luck.

Took a look on Amazon, US$80. and it says "usually ships in 1 to 2 months." HK shops, when they had it (in white and purple but not black, the one I want, of course) were selling it for around US$85. It's on Ebay, where some guy has a "buy it now" price of US$100 - plus $35 for shipping to Hong Kong, so I ain't going that route. And the guy who's selling it for $90 won't ship internationally. It's also on the US Apple store - $80, ships in 3-5 days, but this is starting to be too much trouble.

Actually I've yet to run down the battery on the iPhone 3GS. I love the readout that shows percentage left on the battery (no idea how accurate it is or not). Everything, and I do mean everything, loads and runs noticeably faster than on the 3G. I'm very happy with it.

At least I accomplished something at Times Square, because there's a store-wide sale at Page One - 10% off any purchase, 20% over $300, 30% off purchases over $600. So I grabbed two books by Michael Freeman, one on HDR.

Hooked up with my gf, got some snacks that turned into an early dinner, and by the time we got home at 8, it was all I could do to make it upstairs and go to sleep. I woke up at 10:30, which knowing me means I'll be up for the rest of the night. (And no, it's not an especially clear night and this is one of those rare nights where there are no fishing boats anchored in the stretch of water in front of my house, so nothing to take pictures of.) My gf, meanwhile, seems to be out for the rest of the night. We were gonna watch Duplicity but I guess I'll have to be satisfied with the season premiere of Entourage.

Just took a look on Monster, where I uploaded a new CV last week. In one week, 350 views, not a single email or phone call. Sigh. (Yeah, I know, you're gonna say must be something wrong with my resume, but I've worked and reworked it dozens of times and I think it's pretty strong.)

All Things Digital's Quote of the Day led me to this bit on Huffington Post. Seems that Albert Hoffmann, the inventor of LSD, wrote a little letter to Steve Jobs in 2007 asking for help.

Dear Mr. Steve Jobs,

Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.

I'm writing now, shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser's proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness. This will become the first LSD-assisted psychotherapy study in over 35 years.

I hope you will help in the transformation of my problem child into a wonder child.

Sincerely,

A. Hofmann

HuffPo reports that after Jobs received the letter, he and Hofmann had a 30 minute conversation but that Jobs never donated any money to the cause.

Not that Jobs having tripped on acid is a huge surprise, but it does explain a lot though, doesn't it?

The SCMP, happy for an excuse to run the above photo (as am I!), reports that 30,000 people have signed an online petition asking that models be banned from the HK book fair.

The five young ladies shown above are featured in a book published by Sony called, ahem, Summer Blooming.

K.L. Chan, occupation not given but apparently an expert on literature, is quoted as saying:

... the albums were not proper books and the models sent the wrong message to young people. "These are not books. The models are likely to set bad examples to children, telling them that they can earn a lot even if they don't read enough."

So some paper bound together and featuring text and photos isn't a book? And, yes, around the world, good looking people can earn a lot even if they don't read enough. Sarah Palin, Britney Spears, Donald Tsang ....

But bikinis or not, some patrons want them barred. Isaac Cheung Chun-hoi, 18, who is organising the concern group, said sexing up the fair was indicative of a wider malaise.

"This is not just about the pseudo models. The book fair's quality is deteriorating and, in fact, many people are not happy with cultural matters," he said, pointing to concerns over the West Kowloon Cultural District. "We want to get more people involved to pay attention to this issue."

Mr Cheung said his group had 20 members and would meet for the first time tonight.

Twenty whole members? The Trade Development Council must be collectively trembling in their Crocs.

(And clearly the above is not a reference to Victor Isaac Cheung, famous HK blogger who is slightly older than 18 and if he organized a group, it would have far more than 20 people in it and most of those in the group would be wearing bikinis.)

Elsewhere, two lunatics university professors in Guangzhou have decided that Hong Kong is faced with a severe land shortage and the answer is:

.... reclaiming the waters between Lamma, Cheung Chau, Peng Chau and two smaller islands.

The reclamation would create 25 sq km of extra land - roughly the amount of built up land on Hong Kong Island, they say. The ambitious plan would cost HK$11.2 billion.

May I be the first to say to these lunatics professors, "Sod off!"

Elsewhere, the SCMP takes the bold step of trodding on the toes of Hong Kong's elite with two articles in the "Life" section. The first says that tap water may be healthier and safer than bottled water - the two major purveyors of bottled water in HK being Swire (Bonaqua) and Li Ka-Shing (Watsons). The second is an article that I cannot find online that finds that real estate advertisements and brochures might be misleading!

Oh brave new SCMP, nibbling at the hand that feeds you.

Okay, Sunday night, waiting for my computer to finish doing some stuff so I can reboot and go to sleep ... time for another rant!

Let me start off by saying that while I may be an aspiring foodie, I don't have a foodie's budget. Diary of a Growing Boy seems to eat gourmet tasting dinners with multiple wines every night but I can't.

And when we're going out at night, if we're not sticking around Sai Kung, more often than not we end up in Wanchai. A few simple reasons, starting with the fact that I can park for free here and that we both like the two bands at Amazonia. And in the past 18 months, I got into the habit of having a lot of meals at bars not because I liked the food but because you could sit there and smoke. It's more gourmand than gourmet (especially because it seems that everything on the menus at the Brit-style pubs is guaranteed to help you gain weight, clog your arteries and stop your heart) but the price is pretty cheap and some of these places actually seem to care about the food they're giving to you as well as the drinks.

You all read here about the mess at Trafalgar last week (didn't you?). The flip side of that, the only other place I'm going to name, is Doghouse. And I'm naming them because right now I can't have any alcohol and I've gotten used to waitresses and bartenders looking at me cross-eyed when I order a bottle of water in a bar. But in Doghouse, I was talking with one of the owners one night, and I apologized that I wasn't getting more than just a coke and he responded by saying, "that's all right, I'm happy just to see you back here again!" Now that's the kind of attitude all these places should have, right? Actually most of the places know me by sight if not by name. They know I'm a fairly regular customer. I don't expect preferential service but I also don't expect them to think they can slack off and treat me worse than an average customer either.

Earlier this week, in another Wanchai bar for dinner, I ordered a steak sandwich. Now when you get a steak sandwich, you may not expected imported Kobe beef but you would at least expect that you'd be able to pick this up and bite into it, right? But this piece of steak had so much gristle in it that I had to resort to opening up the bread, cutting around the gristle and putting what's left back onto the bread - and not an easy thing to do when you're given a knife that wouldn't cut through warm butter. Yes .... I should have complained there and then. But I didn't. Sometimes I'm that way. As we paid the bill, the manager asked how the food was and I told him that the steak had too much gristle to enjoy. Now if I was the manager of that place, I would have said, "sorry, your iced tea's on me!" And I would have left feeling a little bit better about it. Instead he peered at the plate with a quizzical expression as we left.

Saturday night, we couldn't work out what to eat. We ruled out Sabah because my gf had already had a curry for lunch. That also ruled out Thai Farmer. We weren't in a mood for Agave or Amici or the cheap 'n cheerful Beijing dumpling joint. My gf decided she wanted fish & chips, so we hit one of the, you guessed it, Wanchai bars.

We sat down, about half the tables were occupied, maybe more. We ordered our food at the same time. After awhile, they brought my plate out. I sat there picking at it while my gf kept saying, "Go ahead, don't wait for me." After five minutes, a waitress walked by and I asked her if she could see what happened to my gf's dinner. Nothing. Five more minutes and I asked another waitress where my gf's food was. All she had to do was say, "Sorry, let me check," and that would have at least made us feel better. Instead, she practically yelled at me. "The kitchen's very busy, everybody ordered at the same time." And walked away. Apparently it was my fault that I'd ordered two dishes at the same time and expected them to be prepared and served at the same time.

Finally, my gf's food arrived but she's more sensitive than I am and she'd lost her appetite. She picked at her food until I finished. When the waitress came by to clear the plates, she asked if we wanted another round of drinks. In truth, I would have been happy to order some more and hang out there for another hour or so. But looking over at my gf, I just asked for the bill. As soon as we got out the door she said to me, "Don't ever ask me to go there again. If you want to go there another time, I'll wait for you someplace else."

Look, I know this ain't 5 star hotel cuisine and service. I know you get what you pay for. But is it too much to ask people to at least be professional and courteous to the customers who are paying their salaries? Or is it a case where since there's relatively little tipping in HK, since waitresses don't have to work to get 20% out of you, they just don't give a damn?

The thing is, I don't completely blame the waitresses. Of course they're gonna do the minimum required and they know if they get kicked out of one place, there's 27 others that will hire them the next day. It starts with the owners, who set the standard. And continues on through the managers. You train your staff, they treat the customers well, the customers come back. Not rocket science, is it?

All right, I know, it's all a tempest in a teacup, isn't it? But I feel so much better for having written all that!

By the way, you know the corner of Lockhart and Luard, right? There's that Chinese place right on the corner, Hay Hay, open 24 hours, decent enough roast meats, noodles, eggs, other cha chan teng things, cheap & cheerful for decades. And in front, there's a newsstand. The guy who works the newsstand at night, round glasses, ponytail down to his waist, always remembers what magazines I buy and what cigarettes I smoke and always has a smile even when I walk by and I'm not buying something from him at that minute.

Thursday night, the newsstand was closed. And Saturday night, Hay Hay was closed as well. Closed for renovations? Forced out by 300% rent increases? No idea right now. Are we gonna end up with another 7-11 or Mannings or Starbucks in its place? Who's looking out for us? Apparently no one.

These are unretouched JPGs, not from the RAW file, just shrunk down the file size to make for quicker uploads/page loads. Please click on image to view full size

18mm, f/5.6, 1 second, ISO 400.


Same as above but 1.3 second exposure.


Same as above but 0.769 second exposure.



Same as above but 0.625 second exposure.

And so on and so on ...

So my question is - look at the lights on the boats. They're not single points of light, they're blurred and hazy, because they're so much brighter than everything else in the picture.

I'm not sure HDR is the answer here, because even in this shot below, stopped down to F18, if you look at it full sized - yes, it's better - but still not quite where I'd want them.


I guess stopped down all the way and an exposure time of around 1/60? But is there something else? Something easier? Tried using a polarizing filter because that's the only other thing I could think to do tonight but obviously that's not the answer. Some other kind of filter perhaps?

And yes, standing outside for 10 minutes to grab 35 variations on this shot at different settings, I think I got at least 35 mosquito bites!

Levon Helm, former drummer and singer with the legendary The Band, is 69 years old. After recovering from throat cancer, in 2007 he released his first solo album in 25 years, Dirt Farmer, and it was nice, and it won a Grammy.

Now he's back again with Electric Dirt, and I don't think it's an understatement to say that this stands shoulder to shoulder with his best work.


And if you don't believe me (or even if you do), watch this fabulous performance of "Tennessee Jed" on Letterman a couple of nights ago.

From here.

Taken with iPhone 3GS, not retouched/photoshopped/picasa'd/lightroomed

Far be it from me to bite the hand that feeds me (like that's ever stopped me in the past).

I bought the Blu-Ray edition of Watchmen today. I liked the movie enough and want to see the extended directors cut version. Three disc set - one disc movie, one disc bonus features, one disc "digital copy" (AKA waste of plastic). Didn't need the special edition from Amazon that comes in a huge plastic mock-up of Night Owl's flying thingie.

Only had a chance to watch some of it tonight, the first half, didn't really spot anything that seemed new - maybe a few shots here and there more graphically violent but no new scenes.

Thing is, you flip through the bits of paper in the box and you find .... "coming in December 2009, Watchmen Ultimate Collectors Edition." Five disc set, with an even more extended version of the film (they've edited in the Tales of the Black Freighter thing into the film itself) and even more bonus features. Oh and there's a discount coupon there in case you decide you wanna buy this.

So, you go out, you spend $30 or $40 bucks on this, bring it home, open it up .... and find out you should have waited another five months? Coupon or not, doesn't anyone realize how negatively this will be perceived? Had I known about this in advance, I would have happily waited to download a pirate 1080p copy off the internet and then maybe by December would have forgotten all about the movie.

=========================

(Oddly enough, all the spare space on my new iPhone makes me think ---- spend hours converting AVI files and DVDs to MP4 format? Or pony up some money for videos at the iTunes store? Ah, probably the former. I gots lots o' spare time these days.)

Yes, I did get my 32 gig black iPhone 3GS today. Here's what I figured - wrong or right. 3's upgrade price is actually cheaper than AT&T's in the US. I could have bought it outright from the Apple store online without extending my contract but I'm gonna need a contract with someone, right? And I'm happy enough with 3. So yes, I extended the contract by another 12 months and I'll just tell myself that I got a 1/3rd discount off the retail price.

My plan is to give my iPhone 3G to my gf and take back the iPhone 2G that I previously gave her and sell it off. But ... she's resisting. She says I should sell off the 3G one because I can get more money for that and, unlike me, she's happy enough with the older phone. We'll see.

I spent a lot of time - too much time - tonight going through my iTunes to see which music I want to carry around, now that I have all this extra space. I went through iTunes twice (170 gig on my PC) and so far have just come up with 14.5 gig of "essential." Which leaves me room for a couple dozen new albums and a bunch of videos. I love having the extra storage space.

But I haven't had enough time to really run the phone through its paces. I forgot how much time it takes to set up favorite numbers, ringtones, wallpaper, WiFi passwords, organizing all the app icons in some logical sense. Haven't even tried the camera yet! But with another typhoon approaching this weekend, I guess I'll have lots of time to work it out.

The bigger problem was that I got so involved with all this that I forgot I had a deadline today. Around midnight my editor dropped me a line to ask how it was coming. Oh shit!!!! But fortunately I've got two columns half-written, so just another hour or two to finish one of them off and fortunately my editor claims to have forgiven me.

Ah, two final "jokes" for the evening. A week has passed and my manager (not in the mood to call him "my boss") has not sent out the announcement of someone else taking over my job responsibilities in another 3 weeks. Were they having second thoughts? Could it be that on the last conference call when he couldn't understand a single word that guy said and I needed to step in and clarify/translate, he started to get a glimpse of his future and decided he didn't like what he saw? Or did he send it out and neglect to include me on the distribution list? That one would have been less of a surprise. However, the answer is far simpler - he forgot to send it and thanked me for reminding him.

Oh, how I almost wish I worked in Japan. And here's why. I have one team member in Japan who gives new meaning to the word "incompetent." I've wanted to fire him for several years, but the country manager and the HR department wouldn't let me. So now we're doing the global lay-offs and I find out this person's last day will be September 11th. I sit back and wonder if there is any special significance to that. I ask if there's been any fuss or noise. And I find out, no, he's not being fired or laid off or let go or whatever euphemism you care to use. After 9-11, he will no longer be a part of the MIS team. But the company has to find a new position for him in a different department. Because in Japan apparently you have to agree to be fired and bought off and if you don't agree, they can't do it, and this person knows he cannot find another job.

So if you wonder why Japan's economy has been in the toilet for decades, that's gotta be a clue.

The National Enquirer reports that 72 year old actor Morgan Freeman is marrying his 27 year old step-granddaughter. I think this makes Woody Allen look like a saint by comparison.

Something else I wanna mention and should develop more thoroughly but here's just a quick thing on it ..... Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno" opens in the US today. It looks outrageous and funny and of course I want to see it. I'm a huge fan. Cohen has now made feature films with all three of his best known TV characters - Ali G, Borat and now Bruno.

Ali G of course was a completely fictional film set in the UK. But with both Borat and Bruno, Cohen (and director Larry Charles) are out to use a faux documentary format to throw a spotlight onto prejudices that by all rights should no longer exist.

But the thing is, Cohen is British and the characters were originally developed for UK TV. So why are these two films set in America? Is it merely a commercial consideration - by setting the film in the UK it would not do as much box office in the US? Or is there something else, something more? Does he see something in the "character" of Americans that he doesn't see in Britons?

Just curious.

iPhone just delivered. Gotta go play.

A letter in the SCMP this morning from James Griffiths of Kennedy Town commences with the line, "I write to express my frustration at the smoking ban that is now in force in all bars in Hong Kong. " As a smoker myself, I can understand his frustration. For almost 2 weeks now, I have been forced to spend almost 30 seconds walking from my bar stool to the exit, to stand on the street by myself watching pretty girls walk past or striking up conversations with other smokers for several minutes while feeding my incessant nicotine addiction. The horror!

Mr. Griffith says, "I am a smoker and I know the risks involved. However, we live in a democracy (or a kind of democracy), where we can choose what to do as long as it does not affect or impact others around us." I wonder if he was drunk when writing that section?

"Why not give an option to bars to be smoking establishments. Perhaps a few of these bars could be designated in different parts of the city and they could pay a fee. " Think this through, James. Let's say there are 1,000 bars on HK island. Let's say the government decides to issue 50 licenses for smoking establishments. The 950 bars that don't get a license will surely not mind. They'll just quietly accept this and go about their business, won't they? And most of these bars serve food as well, but the surrounding 5,000 restaurants won't complain about any inequity either, right?

I have no doubt that any bar or restaurant that could legally allow smoking would be extremely popular. But I don't think the owners of these places want the government to be able to choose which ones of them are allowed to sanction smoking and which ones don't. And I wouldn't want that either. It's all or nothing at all as far as I'm concerned. It has to be a situation where there is either no choice or the choice is left up to the owner of the establishment. That is what you get in a "kind of democracy."

Mr. Griffiths says he will now stay home to drink and smoke, rather than going out. And then this bit: "This is a shame, because when I go out I spend at least HK$1,000 in a bar, maybe another HK$500 on food and HK$50 on taxis. " He spends $1,000 in a bar in a single evening just on drink? Assuming for the moment that money isn't being spent on commission drinks for women in Wanchai bars, he thinks his biggest problem is that he can't smoke in a bar? I think his liver must be happy for the vacation it's now getting.

In all seriousness, as a heavy smoker who has tried to quit unsuccessfully many times, the first thing I know is not to force my smoke on others. Secondhand smoke or not, I know that most non-smokers find it objectionable.

The second thing I know is that this ban will eventually be all but global and is not likely to be rolled back in Hong Kong or anywhere else. I don't think that arguing that the ban is inconvenient is likely to change anyone's mind. And I suspect that if Mr. Griffiths does indeed spend so much in a single night in a bar, he's not permanently going to switch to doing all his drinking at home. Give him a couple of weeks and he'll be right back out there again.

Let's just be thankful that we don't live in places like certain counties in California where even smoking at home - if you live in an apartment building - is illegal!

Okay, iPhone 3GS is online at Apple HK store now - $5,388 for 16 gig, $6,288 for 32 gig, unlocked, no contract required. What to do, what to do?

Yeah, I know the upgrade prices from 3 for the iPhone 3GS are every bit as insane as they are for AT&T in the US - and even a little bit more so, because 3 is charging different prices to users depending on which monthly service plan they're on. And yet, crazy me, I believe that one is being delivered to my office Friday afternoon.


The following photos taken from the roof deck of the car park at the Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre or whatever it's called. Pretty much your standard ranch stash and these are taken from the JPGs as I don't have the energy to play with Lightroom tonight.






The reason I was there? A good friend whose taste in food I trust 1,000% is now at the Marco Polo Hongkong Hotel and insisted that I should try their Italian restaurant, Cucina.

Here's a thing of beauty - their veal chop. This may well be the best veal chop I've ever eaten. In the background you can see truffle mashed potatoes - I'm told that last week a New York-based food critic said these were the best mashed potatoes he's had in his entire life, and I think I could say the same.



All of the desserts are deconstructed oddities with so many ingredients that I can't recall any of them. This one is called "bubble tea."



And "mango," the one I had. (That's not a banana in the center, it's some kind of pudding or custard.)


I am gonna have to go back there soon, not just because I enjoyed this meal so damned much but because of something else I spotted on the menu. Unless memory completely fails me, it was pork belly basted in apple cider and slow roasted for 72 hours. It's only available on Fridays and I am certain my gf will go gonzo for it.

So, anyway, Cucina is immediately adjacent to the car park deck, which means an amazing view from the restaurant and then just step outside for even more. Lots of people go up there and line up with cameras on tripods to shoot the 8 PM light show and just the view in general. Naturally I wasn't carrying my tripod but couldn't resist taking some shots. In order to be able to shoot handheld, 1/30th of a second, ISO got boosted up to 1600. So just one of many, taken from the JPG, not the RAW file, but you get the idea. I think I'll be back there again, with tripod, next time there's a clear night AND I feel up to dealing with TST traffic.



Almost forgot ... given the time of year, lots of high school students (or their parents?) rented out some of the private function rooms at the hotel for graduation parties. The women were all done up, make-up and hair as if for wedding photos, formal-ish dresses that mostly were short, not long. And I guess they're legal age and many of them looked so damned hot but they also looked so young. No, I didn't stand around in the hallway trying to take pictures of them. I just smiled watching them having so much fun on their big night.

So the iPhone 3GS goes on sale in Hong Kong tomorrow at 3's shops. Here is the pricing plan for new customers, taken from 3's web site.


The two lines in green are for existing customers who want to upgrade. Extend your contract by 12 months, no further details on pricing. So I called the hotline and they couldn't tell me yet - they said they would call me back.

The HK online Apple store is one of the few, maybe only, places in the world to buy an unlocked iPhone (at full price) from Apple with no contract required. They have not updated their 3GS page yet. Perhaps 3 gets a small window of exclusivity before Apple puts it on general sale.

When I got my iPhone 3G a year ago, I did it at work via 3's corporate sales and got a small discount. Trying to find out from that guy if the same will apply if I want to upgrade now. And again got a response of "will let you know."

I'm really hoping to have one of these monsters in my hands tomorrow. The faster speed and the increased storage size are enough to make the upgrade worthwhile for me. My gf will get my iPhone 3 and I'll sell off the iPhone 2 that I previously gave her.

Well, I'm still learning my way through Adobe Lightroom. So many, too many options there. And it seems as if each time I return to a photo, I "develop" it slightly differently. I suppose that as I get more experienced with it, I'll develop something resembling a style.

Anyway, I was going kind of nuts last night because it was a full moon over the sea, and I wanted to capture a shot of the moon in the upper right corner, the lit up villages along the coast in the lower left corner.

Those of you with far more experience than I know what I ran into. A full moon is much brighter than you realize. So despite trying all sorts of combinations of F stops, shutter speeds, ISOs, I ended up with shots where the moon was relatively well exposed and you couldn't see the villages, or you could see the villages and the moon was a giant white blob. I suppose the answer is to do this in stages - two separate pics photoshopped together - yet I think there must be some way to capture this in one photo. Which means I'm either up against my limitations as a photographer or up against the limitations of my camera.

I finally settled on this shot of the villages along the coast.



11:42 PM, 46mm, 2 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 1600. And that last bit means some noise, duh. Because I had the ISO set to auto, duh. Next clear night like this I'll drop the ISO down to 400, 600, 800, and go for longer exposures. But this shot has nice detail, check out the full sized version.

And in the morning, a gorgeous sunrise.

5:35 AM, 12mm, ISO 200, 1/40 second at f/3.8. Played around a bit in Lightroom to restore the pinkish red on the clouds. Click on the photo for the full sized version, it looks nicer than the thumbnail above.

Well, if the best way to improve as a photographer is to just keep on taking picture after picture, that's what I'm doing.

Tips and comments always welcomed. (Luke, thanks for the reminder to clean my sensor. I really need to clean my monitor and get it more properly calibrated.)

We've all got our guilty pleasures in music, right? Abba, Michael Jackson, Monkees ... Leonard Bernstein was a fan of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble fer crissakes.

So I loves me some Lady Gaga. I suspect that most of my readers either hate her or just don't know who she is. And with just one hit album so far, of course it's too soon to know if we'll even remember her in five years. But I think she's the Madonna of the 00's. My pulse quickens a little bit every time I hear "Just Dance" - even though I've heard it dozens, if not hundreds of times by now. It's consummate pop music.

And whether you think she's a beauty or a buttaface, her public fashion sense makes a statement. Half the time she just completely cracks me up with some of the stuff she steps out in. Like this pic, grabbed from Celebitchy:



And I quite like the gallery over at Bastardly, from which I grabbed these two shots:



And if you wanna see her full-on topless, check this out over at Inquisitr.

I hope she sticks around.

Or maybe I'm just not getting enough sleep these days.

Gmail is finally out of beta!!!!!!