There is not much I feel like saying about Saturday. I spent the day in Long Island visiting, along with my aunt and uncle, my cousin, her husband, and their two kids (aged two or three-ish). Kids are cool. Or at least kids of my relatives: they always seem so friendly and get comfortable with people very quickly. It's sad adults aren't so easy to quickly form a connection with.
During the day, we spent a while exploring (well, looking at boats and a ferry) in the quaint sea-side (well, strictly sound-side) town of Fort Jefferson. My cousins (well cousin and husband, and not referring to the kids of my cousin which I suppose technically are cousins too) seem personality-wise how I remember them. Just to be clear, I like them. So that is a good thing. They seem healthy and happy. And their kids seems well adjusted and smart. And my aunt and uncle seem quite happy to be grandparents and living so close to their grandkids.
During the trip we took a little drive to see where my parents went to college at SUNY-Stony Brook. It was a really big campus. So big that I wouldn't want to go there without a car. We drove through and it took a while. Quite green with trees. Looked old and dated, like all buildings were from the 60s or 70s. (Vaguely depressing.) I wanted to take a picture to mail my parents -remember this?- but nothing I saw looked distinctive enough to be recognizable. Anyways, I just found out my aunt told my parents we visited there so it wouldn't have been a surprise.
Saturday: Visiting Cousins (with Aunt and Uncle)
Friday: Good Dinner, and some wandering with camera
Friday I picked out a place for dinner before I left work: a chowhound-recommended Turkish restaurant in lower eastern manhattan. On the way there, explored the few sites that were around. That part of lower manhattan has lots and lots of tall buildings. Also has a higher density than the rest of the city, quite intimidating. Saw some more fancy well-hidden churches, a cute row of English townhouses, and the outside of a supposedly really nice place called the Pierpont Morgan Library. It's a museum like place that made the top-ten list of sites to see in New York in my guidebook. Sadly, it's closed for renovation until 2006.
Ali Baba was an excellent well-hidden restaurant, with a nice though nondescript decor. I ordered babaganush to go with the focaccia-like bread that came when I sat down (good bread, better by itself than focaccia) and manti. The manti was described as "a Light Dough Stuffed with Seasoned Ground Lamb and Onions, Steamed to Perfection, served with Garlic Yogurt." I figured I was doing so well with meat stuffed in stuff I should continue the pattern. When it arrived, I was surprised. It was doughy balls maybe an inch across, each stuffed with a little lamb and seasoning, all in a big ceramic pan filled with a yogurty broth. I'm amazed how they got the little pieces of lamb in each tiny ball. But boy was it tasty!
After dinner I tried to explore the Gramercy district. It got too dark for me to get very far. But I did take a number of pictures during this trip, especially of the empire state building (which looked really stunning at night). My empire state building pictures didn't come out very well (too much camera shake), not as nice as this picture I found on the web. I may post all my pictures later when I find a good web interface or (more likely) program my own web interface.
Until then, you're stuck with the few pictures I bothered to shrink and upload:
* a decent picture of the met life building
* a very interesting sign (at this museum)
* a statue that I walked two feet past before realizing that it wasn't a real person. (Hey, it was dark.)
* a sign at a church - maybe the phrasing could've been better considering the news in the last few years...
Update: I uploaded the rest of the pictures from this day's sights.
Thursday: Dreary, then Aunt & Uncle
I spent a large chunk of the morning worrying what place I should choose for dinner. See, an aunt and uncle I haven't seen in some years that live in New York was driving into Manhattan to see me and asked me to choose. The morning was spent reading reviews, thinking about where I'd be able to find parking in the vicinity, pondering places with nice atmosphere, reasonable prices, a wide selection of dishes, some of which should be without lactose. In the end I ended making a decision through indecision and choose the decent though not exceptional Trattoria Trecolori which I'd been to before and knew it met these characteristics.
After grabbing a quick lunch of bagel with fish (belly lox in this case: quite salty but still good) (and cream cheese, tomato, and onion) I decided I might as well simply continue working from home rather than go to work and have to return in a few hours since my relatives were picking me up from my apartment. So that was a dreary afternoon -- basically I didn't move much until 7pm.
Seeing my aunt and uncle was nice. We discussed my somewhat crazy though mostly indecisive parents, caught up on other relatives, and traded stories about my (now deceased) grandpa and grandma. Dinner generally was what I expected. The menu is good; the food is decent but not great; everything else fit my criteria. Except for a fairly large table of somewhat drunk people that were being annoying loud. After dinner we strolled around times square (staying on side streets -- otherwise we wouldn't have been able to move) and chatted, mostly about the changes the city has undergone since they'd been younger and the sorts of things they do in the city nowadays (opera and photography).
It's nice to catch up. I've been feeling guilty the last few years about not paying enough attention to my non-immediate relatives. This makes me feel a bit better.
Digital Camera: Initial Playing
I spent a lot of time recently researching a digital camera to buy. This post is really just my notes / narrative of what I did for future reference for me (or others). Trust me, you don't want to bother reading this!
I took a bunch of pictures in various conditions to try out my camera. First (Tuesday night) some outdoorsy pictures from the balcony (19th floor) in the google office. Then some indoors pictures with flash in my apartment (Wednesday morning). Two quick shots on the way to work. And some night shots on the way home Wednesday night (while smoothie hunting, if you recall). Some of these were of the massive postal office half a mile north of my apartment, which I used Canon's slick software to stitch together into a panorama. Those turned out pretty well; the software impressed me.
I'm generally pretty happy with all these pictures. Some of them had some parts which were out of focus and grainy, but the colors and sharpness were good. And the focus was just me trying to figure out how to convince the auto-focus mechanism to get the right thing in focus. Some night shots are little soft, which is to be expected from minor hand shaking during the longer exposures. The clouds in some outdoors pictures bothered me in some shots, but these were the same shots that other distant things were out of focus so I'm attributing that to the clouds being "out of focus" too.
All this and I haven't filled up the initial 32 meg card. Maybe I shouldn't have bought a larger card? But it could be handy. And everyone tells me to and they must know something. Like if I want to go on a longerish trip and not have to worry about downloading pictures or restricting my frequency of shot taking.
The only thing that bothers me a little about the camera is that you can't really use the viewfinder to frame the shot. It's not quite the same as what the LCD displays ( = the picture the camera actually takes). On longer distances they're pretty similar but on shorter ones it's not that close and the LCD is hard to see in direct sunlight.
Notes from later:
* Actually the battery usage also bothers me a little. With my current habits (which usually involve turning the camera on and off pretty often) the camera drains (cheap) alkalines in about seventy shots. Not too bad though and considering I have a tremendous pile of rechargables that I'll pick up when I go back to California, it shouldn't be a problem.
* Longer trips I can take a good number of pictures (seventy on most of a day of exploring) and I don't want to be forced to download them all immediately that night before exploring more, so I'm certainly happy I bought the larger card.
On the Title of this Blog
Since I'm two days behind on this blog and not about to immediately catch up, I figured I'd provide a post to tide you over:
Most of you know I'm a fan of double-entendres and in generally anything with multiple meanings. The title of this blog is no different; it has three appropriate intended meanings. If you can figure them all out I'd be impressed.
Spiderman 2 and Smoothie-Hunting
Wednesday got better when I finally made it to work, got some food in my stomach (even though it was the bad chinese food google had ordered that day), did a drop of work, and headed out to the google sponsored outing of watching Spiderman 2. My summary: "Like Spiderman, a typical summer action flick. Tries to have emotional feel but the whole movie (including romance) is generally too over-the-top for it to succeed. Occasionally seems to make fun of itself (which works) but sadly frequently doesn't." During the outing met an intern here who is currently a Stanford coterm student. That's pretty neat.
At the end of the workday -eating dinner at work-, I really wanted to replenish the vitamins and proteins I lost in my bout of food sickness. Either that, or I was in the mood for a smoothie. And not the pre-made Odwalla ones in the fridge upstairs. Something real. Something fresh. I looked online for smoothie places (a.k.a. juice bars) still open, the only thing I could find was Jamba Juice and that would violate my vow. Sad.
I decided to look as I wandered home (10pm-ish). Lots of delis and a few pizza places open that might've made me something. But I wanted something good. I was basically home, having not found anything, before I realized the solution. Catching a quick train northbound I returned to Gray's Papaya, got a simple hot dog (call it dessert or something) and, more importantly, a banana daiquiri. (Non-alcoholic.) They have that in addition to papaya and it tempted me last time. It fulfilled my smoothie craving.
Digital Camera: Purchase
I spent a lot of time recently researching a digital camera to buy. This post is really just my notes / narrative of what I did for future reference for me (or others). Trust me, you don't want to bother reading this!
I did a bunch of research on the web and called around to find the best deal on the Canon Powershot a75 I wanted. Eventually I realized that the most I could save over buying at my local camera superstore, B&H, was around $30. And saving anything required buying online. Paying $30 extra dollars to buy locally from a reputable merchant (rather than an sketchy internet discounter) and deal locally with issues and have a satisfaction guaranteed return policy seemed like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
So I bought it, and a 256 megabyte flash card ($44). (Online wouldn't save me any money on this and a smaller 128 megabyte flash card was only $9 dollars cheaper.)
B&H is a really cool place. It's run by a lot of orthodox jews. Trust me, the yamakas, the beards, the noses, the clothes all give it away. All they sell is photographic/video/lighting/seeing (e.g., telescopes, binoculars) products. And they sell anything you'd ever want in these areas. They have so many helpers in the store -easily over 50 not counting the cashiers and doormen- each of which is an expert in a particular product line for a particular manufacturer. When buying, I talked to someone who was an expert in Canon digital cameras. I overheard a discussion that lead me to believe the experts are actually approved and/or trained by the manufacturer they are responsible for, in addition to being trained by B&H.
But that's not the only cool thing about B&H. You don't buy products directly in the store. You pick what you want and then they deliver it from elsewhere (the basement? upstairs?). The delivery mechanism is a set of rollers near the ceiling that push boxes around, also with some under the floor and a few tiny elevator like things. And they also have similar lines running around the store with hooks upon which items are transported. When leaving the store, you go to one line and pay, and another to pick up the items you selected which magically appear together in your shopping bag near the exit.
I'd go in and take some pictures of all this but they're really paranoid about people stealing stuff and going in with a digital camera would be difficult.
Digital Camera: Research
I spent a lot of time recently researching a digital camera to buy. This post is really just my notes / narrative of what I did for future reference for me (or others). Trust me, you don't want to bother reading this!
First I read some digital camera buying guides and determined what features I wanted, didn't want, and what would be nice. Some guides came from a list of sites (listed below) that had camera reviews. Other guides I read included a pcmag article, another pcmag article, a pcworld article (and its companion feature comparison piece), a cnet article, and an article from an amazon.com affiliate.
At this point I know I want 3 megapixlels, 3x zoom, something that uses memory cards of some form (not disks or cds), and with an lcd (for examining and deleting pictures before downloading) and a viewfinder (so I don't have to take a picture by aiming with the lcd). It'd like the camera to have some manual controls, a flash, a "low light focusing aid," image stabilization, a relatively high ISO rating (for taking pictures indoors without a flash), reasonable maximum aperture, passable battery life, and a good response time from pressing the shutter to actually taking the picture. I don't really care about video recording, being able to change lenses, audio recording, mp3 playing, ... Image quality is probably my highest consideration. Price doesn't matter than much, which is easy because I know I don't want one of those large fancy professional cameras, so the price naturally will be somewhat reasonable.
Then, I wanted to narrow it down to a brand or set of brands. So I went to a popular digital camera site, www.dpreview.com, and looked at all the cameras released in the last two years with a "Highly Recommended" rating (their highest rating). Only four brands had at least one camera with this rating: Canon, Nikon, Minolta, and Sony.
Then I went to each manufacturers website and found out what cameras they were still making (and supporting) and which cameras were later version of which earlier cameras. During this I noticed Minolta recently merged with Konica. Since I'm paranoid about mergers and technology combining taking a while to sort itself out, I crossed Minolta off the list (at least partially because Konica wasn't on the list in the first place). I narrowed down my list of cameras to those currently in production with the features I wanted.
I looked up reviews all the cameras I was considering at the following sites -I'm only listing the useful ones- : www.dpreview.com, www.steves-digicams.com, www.dcresource.com, www.imaging-resource.com, www.megapixel.net (magazine), and www.photoxels.com.
From reading reviews, I eliminated a few cameras. Not at many as I had hoped, probably because almost all cameras made by these manufacturers are good. At this point, I decided to eliminate all my sony cameras from consideration because the reviews, while generally highly positive, didn't sound quite as positive as the Canon or Nikon reviews.
My current list of things to consider at:
* Nikon Coolpix 3-5 thousands: 3700, 4100, 4200, 4300, 5200, 5700. (Higher numbers were too fancy for me; lower were too low-end.) This is pretty much the list of what Nikon currently manufactures in that range except for 3200 (which had a not that positive review on dcresource) and 5400 (which had a not that positive review on dpreview).
* Canon a70/a75/80. a75 is the improvement of a70, as is a80 (but with more megapixels).
* Canon s60. Newly released so not many reviews on it. Improved s50.
* Canon s500/s410. Improvements over s400. Smaller than the other cameras, but fewer manual controls.
* Cannon s1 is. Has a very tempting 10x zoom lens (which would be fun) but I've heard it sometimes has noisy images indoors because it has no minor light to help the auto-focus focus.
(For reference, I eliminated the g5 and the s50 because there was some concern about chromatic aberration in the dpreview.)
I've also decided that Canon has too many models.
For reference, the fstop range is similar for almost all these cameras, with the maximum aperture being 2.8.
I stopped by B&H to get a feel for the sizes of the camera. I'd prefer something "pocketable" so it be easier to transport around.
I built a spreadsheet comparing the features (fstop, size, iso, zoom, megapixels, missing features mentioned in reviews) and price of these cameras.
I thought and eliminated the s1is from my consideration. Image quality was supposedly good but not great and although the 10x zoom was tempting, I didn't think I'd use it much.
The decision from this spreadsheet was pretty clear. I didn't really want an ultra-compact camera because it felt too small and these tended to have few manual controls (which would be nice to have). This eliminated the canon s400/s410/s500 and nikon 3200/3700. Those latter two were actually eliminated also because their iso-equivalent was relatively low. The s60 was eliminated because the s50 didn't have great reviews and neither got much attention in general. I didn't think it was likely the s60 fixed some so the s50's problems.
The Nikon 5000-series were a normal camera size, a bit larger than I wanted. The Nikon 4000s (esp the 4300) were tempting, but the remaining Canons a70/a75/a80 simply won in the end. More manual controls if wanted than any of these, a good size, and lower prices than all (but the 4300) of these. And the Canons are generally supposed to have better interfaces.
Of the a70/a75/a80 series, it's pretty clear what I want. The a70 is the basic, old camera. a75 is a slightly improved version, slightly more and better controls. a80 is pretty much the same except 4 megapixels. I'd avoid the a80 since it is just an a70/a75 with a larger CCD and I've read lots of reviews of cameras whose image quality went down with that "improvement" because the lens and algorithms don't match the CCD as well as they used to. Some reviews of the a80 I read hinted at this issue.
The a75 is currently (June 2004) going for 200-250 dollars and actually is pretty much one of the cheapest digital cameras with the features I want, happens to have more of the desired features I want, and happens to be of the size I want. Some direct review links for reference: photoxels (friendly), dcresource, and imaging-resource.
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