Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Open Outcry

Fresh tuna auction at Tsukiji

I tried using Fuji 400 NPH print film pushed to 800ASA.

It's not really suited for low-level flourescent light photography. "A high-speed ISO 400 daylight-type color negative film for outstanding wedding and portrait photography. Ideal for a wide range of shooting conditions." But I used it anyway.

How'd it turn out?

It shot fast enough, although the grain was quite high. The photos were fairly washed out, but then maybe my bad metering was the fault.

What didn't work well?

The only place that pushes print film in Singapore is RGB Photo, one of the pro labs here.

Now last August, when we returned from the Outback, I dropped a lot of film there. When I was scanning in the developed prints and slides I was ill when I discovered hairline scratches running along the length of the film about 0.25" below the top.

I first pointed fingers at my scanner, but when I disassembled some mounted slides I could see the continuation of the scratches behind the mounting -- it wasn't coming from my scanner.

Then I pointed fingers at dirty film or a dirty camera. I took a heap of photos in Laos, but developed them at Ruby Photo, near City Hall. No scratches.

Well, when I (was forced to) developed these pushed films at RGB, once again I notice the scratches.

Hey, it's great that Photoshop has the 'healing brush', but if they think I need the ten minute healing side-project for each scan I do, RGB and their pro-lab-size charges are very mistaken.

RGB Photo scratches film regularly. Sorry; wish it wasn't true.

Ooops, sorry for the heavy compression on the photo, but Karavshin is running critical of disk space... Visit me and you can see the 40mb version on A3 format.

The Finishing School

Authors have a fundamental problem writing non-fiction about spies, commandos, and secret operations: all the interesting stuff is secret. If they can talk about it, it's either antique or it's mind-numbing. Either way it makes for a bad story.

When he wrote his first book about the BUD/S training school for Navy Seals, "The Warrior Elite", Dick Crouch carried it off well. He did lots of 'showing' and not much 'telling.' Maybe this shouldn't be a suprise, after all, doing 1000 pushups in an hour and not sleeping for a week may be demented but it's not a national security secret.

The sequel follows the class post-BUD/s and onto their advanced training, preparing them for active duty on 'the teams.' 'The Finishing School: Earning the Navy Seal Trident' starts out with a cool title, but goes no further. The fundamental problem is that there is almost no 'showing,' just 'telling.'

Theoretically the book should have been interesting, with students attending all sorts of radical schools (sniper, intelligence, emergency medicine, etc). However he never digs into any of them except perhaps the Winter Weather course in Kodiak Alaska, which is little more than a week-long, freezing-cold BUD/S redo. The whole book has a grim pallor of "operational security" over it, as if he isn't free to say anything very interesting. Even the characters he interviews are dull, anonymized individuals that say nothing memorable.

Consequently, to fill pages, he falls into the same trap of other special forces books -- tons of tedious administrative and organizational detail that no one enjoys except maybe Seal groupies. To the average guy looking for some riveting stories and impressive characters, you really don't give a shit about the variations of officer assignments and platoon compositions from Vietnam through the present. "Most of the time, the AOIC will move into the OIC position, but not always. Occasionally, the LPO will make chief petty officer and move into the key role as his platoon's chief petty officer."*yawn*

I've read far worse books, but I'd only recommend buying this volume if you crave completeness.

Another astronomical phenomenon when I'm in Australia

During our outback Australia trip in August 2003, Mars came as close to Earth as it ever will for hundreds of years. I just found out that during our trip to the Finke Desert Race next month a similarly rare phenomenon will occur -- Venus will transit the Sun.

I momentarily thought, "ewwww, I was also in Australia last June. I wonder if there were any spooky events I wasn't aware of back then?" Well, not really, unless you consider things like "Z-Cyg is its maximum brightness" or "15:13 Moon passes 04?24.7' north of Jupiter" as interesting.

I'm not sure if we'll be able to witness the transit though. This site says only half the event will be visible in Alice Springs, occuring between 5:08 and 5:27 GMT. Alice Springs Local = GMT + 9.5 hours. That means the prime time is approximately 2pm. That won't work -- we'll be flying in from Perth at that time.

They said they wanted to know how I was using movable type?

My main blog is Black Coffee. I'm very interested in travel blogging technology, so I have been trying out several models using blogs as the background. An intranet/travel blog of our planning and execution of a two week trip through the Outback. A trip to India. A trip to China/Tibet by my wife and I. A trip to Norway by my wife. And an experimental travel blog that is automatically-built by some perl scripts. I also have a 'secret' blog that is esesentially a private intranet for some friends and I to discuss interesting technical things.

So yeah, there are probably five authors set up -- but most of them are very irregular, and I'll probably add more authors, and more blogs as I find new travel partners and new trips. I could have 20 authors on my site and still scarcely produce more publishing than I currently do. Number of authors or number of blogs is a bad way to discriminate between professional/big users and individual/small users.

This license totally ground to a halt my work on developing travel blogging technology for Movable Type -- I won't support it with these sorts of licenses. It's developed in an open source sense, while I don't feel like MovableType is moving in a Open Source direction.

Why am I mentioning this? Because they asked for it.

Net Nanny Just Say 'No'

This grotesque picture of Bob Kerry in drag reminds me of the old line from Alan Colme's Radio Graffiti back in 1994 (the golden era of AM Talk Radio)

Don't make fun of Chelsea; nature has been cruel enough

#860 Wayne Onions

Wayne Onions (Boyne Island, Queensland) blasts through the Prologue of the 2003 Finke Desert Race. He pushed his KTM 525 EXC to first place in the Class 8 bikes (Veterans) and placed 86th quickest bike overall with a time of 5:50:59

Back Problem Advice?! This sucks.

MRI OF THE LUMBAR SPINE

History
Recurrent back pain

Technique
Sagittal T1W, T2W; axial T1W, T2W scans of the lumbar spine.
Axial scans were taken from L3 to S1 levels.
The last unfused vertebral body is taken as L5.

Findings
Conus ends at L1/2 level and is normal in appearance. Bony alignment, lordosis and marrow signal are maintained. Lower lumbar intervertebral discs are mildly dehydrated. L5/S1 disc space is slightly narrowed.

Posterior facet joints show mild degenerative change.
Ligamentum flavuvm not significantly thickened.

At L3/L4 level, no significant disc bulge, or protrusion. No stenosis.

At L4/5 and L5/S1 levels, disc bulge moderately stenose the exit foramina bilaterally, impinging upon the nerve roots. Central canal and lateral recesses remain adequate with no significant stenosis.

Conclusion
Moderate foraminal stenosis at L4/5 and L5/S1 levels with nerve root impingement. This is due to mild disc bulge. Posterior facet joints show mild degenerative change. Central canal and lateral recesses are not significantly stenosed.

'Free' as in 'Shit'

Movable Type just fucked themselves.

They held us twisting in the wind for more than six months, waiting for the "pro" version of MovableType to come out.

What do we get? A registration system we don't need, no photogallery (which we do need), and a new licensing fee that's too expensive for trivial users like me. ($70 might be ok, but they want to limit the number of authors and weblogs?!)

Screw that. The Globe-Trotters have used up all their capital with me. If I ever build enough activation energy to upgrade platforms, it's going to be to another system entirely, perhaps back to Blogger. It's run by Google now, and presumably all the old reliability wrinkles have been smoothed out.

I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Who in their right mind would ever write a public domain module for this system after seeing their new license and how shabbily the used MT-Blacklist.

The rarest catch

More Dakar Footage and a Two-Wheel Drive Motorcycle

Some combination of upgrading to the 0.42g version of eMule and telling it my bandwidth capacities were higher and putting a lot of stuff in my download queue has resulted in torrent of non-copyrighted, public domain bits on my pc lately.

One of the goodies was the Speed Channel 2004 Dakar summary. I'd only give it a 'C' rating, but considering the dearth of footage available, I cannot complain too much. Basically it is a large collection of airbrone clips of the racers with a very brief bit of map graphics between each stage. There is basically no explanation, analysis, or deeper understanding, and they're only really covering the top four or five drivers/riders. The monster Kamaz's are largely ignored. Dakar 2004 Highlights.avi eMule Network Link

A few times during the show they mentioned a two-wheel drive motorycle. Like I said, they don't explain or give much details about anything, so I searched around, and sure enough Yamaha makes a 450cc 2-wheel drive enduro motorcycle.

How does it work? It sounds like a horribly kludgy, heavy thing. However, it's actually elegant and clever -- the front wheel hub is a hydraulic motor powered by high pressure lines coming off the motor. The result is better handling and traction in sand and mud, as well as at high speed.

I have an idea for a really shitty restaurant!

We'll run a regular neighborhood Chinese restaurant that can comfortably serve twenty tables. But then on weekends and holidays (even better yet, weekend holidays!) we'll put out perhaps sixty tables. We'll cram them in along the sides of the building, even spill out back. Those not sitting on the sidewalk will be sitting under the kitchen exhaust fan and where the table cleaner brings his gallons of wet seafood table scraps.

But you say it's a problem that we have sixty tables when we only have the staff and kitchen to provide reasonable service for twenty?

That's where you're fucked up! We don't have to provide reasonable service. Everyone can simply wait thirty minutes for their food, and its delivery will be strung out across another ninety minutes. It's sort of a buddhist thing -- the customers will be able to contemplate the monotonicity of eating a single dish at a time, with a comfortable fifteen minute rest period between dishes. Plus they'll order more drinks, because there is nothing else to do. As well, make sure we're out of stock on most vegetables so that there is nothing much to order besides their overpriced fish.

Customer doesn't like it? Who cares -- all the staff will be harried and rude, barely throwing the plate down on the table before they run off -- no time to tarry and sympathize with the stricken diners. If we don't hear you're unhappy, we don't know (for sure) you're unhappy!

Oh but wait, this isn't really my idea. This is the regular practice of the Ban Leong Wah Hoe Seafood Restaurant in Singapore:

122 Casuarina Road
SEMBAWANG HILLS ESTATE
Singapore 579510
6452-2824

This restaurant is a bullshit place that sucks. As we were paying the bill, I took a peek into the kitchen. It looked like a scene from The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible.

Anus Vampires

Roger pointed out that the creature/statue I saw along the Kappabashi kitchen district was known as a Kappa. There must be an X-Files episode involving Kappas.

About the size of a child aged 6 to 10, the Kappa is nonetheless incredibly strong. It attacks horses, cattle, and humans, and feeds on their blood. Stories tell of Kappa pulling little children into the water and drowning them. As drowning victims were sometimes found with a distended anus (swollen rectal), the Kappa became identified as the shirokodama (anus) vampire and is said to suck blood through its anus. In other traditions, the Kappa doesn't suck blood, but rather drains people of their life force. Other activities associated with the Kappa are theft, raping women, and eating human livers.

I couldn't find any more references to this statue online, and unfortunately I took a really hasty digital photo of it, so I cannot zoom in for better detail. As well, I thought I saw a plaque elsewhere along the street explaining the history the name Kappabashi, and it involved something about a bridge, not anus-raping cucumber-loving frog-men. Kappas aren't especially benevolent creatures, so they're also not obvious patrons of these merchants.

Anyone know any more about this statue?