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I could not help but kill him

"If I did not kill him, I would still have been a victim of false accusations by the dirty writer, and would have suffered social ostracism, " Sakura said. "I could not help but kill him."

--The Japan Times, April 28, 2004

Terror Dog Update

Sunday afternoon is always dog training time. Today was fun because I got to see my wife conduct a group class (where group = a husky puppy, a very shaved little dog, a jack russell wearing a band-aid, and a poorly behaved schnauzer named Rufus). It was also a chance for me to play with the still-unnamed beagle puppy I'm getting in the next few weeks. Oh man, it is really full of 'zest' -- howls, barks, runs, leaps. It was tormenting Mona, trying to bite her tail. Mona just kept squirming away -- she seemed far more afraid of the 12oz puppy than the twin Rhodesian Ridgebacks outside waiting to be photographed with "Santa Claus."

The only disappointment of the day was that it was yet another Sunday monsoon rain, which meant I couldn't take Mona on the agility course and I couldn't try out our friend's brand new toy, the first Segway in Singapore.

A Pile of Crap

I photographed each window from one storey of a skyscraper in Tokyo. Then I assembled it into a wide poster 160cm (62") x 30cm (11.8") 270MB file. Next I spent one hour installing updated drivers for my Epson Stylus 2100 printer that would handle the semigloss paper used on my roll sheet-feeder printer accessory. The idea was to print out a nice panoramic photograph.

Photoshop 7 was acting shaky in print preview mode, which I eventually gave up on. Just set things in page setup, and hit, directly, print. Allow the Epson preview program to show you the display.

It didn't work anyway. The output just showed an end-part of the image printed on the top of the paper, leaving the rest blank. I carefully checked the settings to figure out why it might have broken, but I couldn't find anything. Eventually I found online discussions that printing large panoramics using the roll feeder and Epson 2100 inside Photoshop 7 does not work. Then someone mentioned that Paint Shop Pro didn't have the same problem when printing, so I'd try that. But hopes were challenged again when another long thread suggests the Epson 2100 driver simply doesn't allow panoramic banner printing more than 44". WTF?

Anyway, it was moot, because Paint Shop Pro couldn't even load the 272MB .psd file. It keeps saying: "Not enough memory to complete this operation; close one or more documents or applications and try again. If this does no correct the problem you may need to adjust your memory settings or work on a smaller document."

Well hell, I closed everything else, I have a GB of memory in the pc and I increased the paging files to 3048MB. Shouldn't that much memory be sufficient to open this stupid file? Or is the problem Paint Shop Pro turns a 270MB .psd into a 5GB .tiff or someting moronic ?

So now in Photoshop I converted the .psd to a tiff. Paint Shit Pro could open that ok. But then when I tried to print it, I again got the same insufficient memory failure.

Any other tricks or suggestions to force this pig to work?

So it seems there is a 44" length limit to panoramas printed out using the Epson Stylus Photo 2100 2200 printers. The stupid thing is that the driver doesn't fail with that message, it just fails. In Paint Shop Pro 9 is just blows up from "insufficient memory". In Photoshop 7 it simply doesn't work. Even less than 44" I couldn't get Photoshop to work. Ultimately my work flow is: 1) create image in Photoshop 2) Save a copy as a tiff 3) Open tiff in Paint Shop Pro (if you try to open the .psd instead, it will be too big apparently) 4) Print using Paint Shop Pro (which will really labor and take a long time.

Fucking assholes. When I buy top-of-the-line equipment, it would be nice if the fucking drivers were also top of the line, instead of brittle pieces of shit.

Robert Downey in the Round

Nothing left to read... International Herald Tribune from Wednesday laying on the floor... There must be something in it I haven't read yet... God, there is, "Robert Downey gets a back beat." Great, Robert Downey, spoiled, self-indulgent man-child back on the road to recovery.... Read some more..

"This week, Sony Classical releases his first album, "The Futurist," consisting of eight of his own pop ballads as well as two cover songs, "Smile," a Charlie Chaplin composition and "Your Move" by Yes."

I starred in Double Penetration Tentacle Porn today

Early this morning I popped my Double Penetration (DP) Tentacle Porn cherry.

So bright this morning, freshly `purged`, I was wheeled into the Gastroenterology clinic. I'm lying there on the gurney staring at the two meter-long, centimeter-thick cables they're about to cram down my throat and up ass (colonoscopy). I think the single most gross detail about them was the hash mark every ten centimeters, like it was some sort of anal fathom line.

But actually, no big deal, they knock me out, scope me out, and then i'm through.

Or so I thought.

As I am laying there, the nurse says, "open your mouth so i can spray some novocaine to numb your throat."

"what?"

I'm thinking to myself, "why the hell are they numbing my throat if I am going to be unconcious?"

Then I shit myself, or would have shit myself, when i realize, "am I going to be awake for this goddamned procedure?" Is there a phobia term for "fear of being awake with a tube as thick as your throat down your throat? I think I have that fear.

I can hear the machine behind me, beeping with my heart beat, tangibly increase in speed. She sprays the horrible, gagging spray in and almost immediately my throat and tongue are totally dead, and my eyes are bugging out of my head. Making it worse, she sticks a plastic donut ring into my mouth to provide an opening for the tentacle. Now I'm trying to breath through my nose (I have a cold) and keep from suffocating on my own terror.

Then I realize the other nurse is fussing something with my other arm. I have never wished more fervently to be stuck with a needle than I was then. The last thing I remember was thinking, "hurry up and jab me!"

Then I was awake hours later and everything was fine. Doctor said they found nothing, basically. So alas it appears I probably don't have anything more than a souvenier jungle parasite from my last mountain biking trip. But this time he got a tissue sample of it, so maybe we can learn exactly what species of critter it was. Wheee!

Although I was awake three hours later, and went into the office, I was not especially functional. It was sort of like being a combination of slightly drunk and moderately hungover simultaneously. If I'd stare hard at the screen I'd feel dizzy. So basically I sat there with dull eyes until I went home at seven.

Attention Family: No jokes about 'Thanksgiving Stuffing' and all that.

Little (Mis)adventures In Tokyo

Last time I was in Tokyo we had a book with a pile of suggestions for interesting stuff to do in Tokyo (online version!). One of the ideas was to visit a Go club. I never got around to it mostly because Ling had zero interest in it. Since this time I was alone, I figured it was a perfect time to try it out.

The directions to the club were reasonably clear. I haven't played Go in so long I can't remember, so before I left, I went through a refresher course (a really weird movie and an annoying two-column pdf).

I had a cold while I was there, so everything was fifteen percent more effort and ten percent less fun. Regardless, I took the Hibiya Line to Ebisu and then jumped on the JR Line to Takanobaba train station.

Now the online version of the book gives a phone number and says "located on the seventh floor of the F.I. Building, just across the street from Big Box and Takadanobaba station." The book only said it was "around the corner from the Big Box" and near a "Biblos" bookstore. The map neglected to show the FI building at all....

Consequently I wandered around for quite some time before finding the FI building. As far as I can tell Biblos is extinct. The Big Box is on the eastern side of the North/South running JR line. The FI building is on the opposite side of the street running north/east along the big box, just perhaps one building closer to Waseada-dori (the big street that cuts perpindicular under the JR Line) It barely even has a label on the building, I just noticed a very small sign on the side.

Anyway, it's all moot, because when I got to the 7th floor I found: 1) closed, gutted room 2) a Yamaha music school 3) an electronics store. I tried to figure out where I might be missing the trick, but eventually I asked a manager at the electronics store. He laughed and said the Takanobaba Igo club closed five years ago.

Well great..

So three hours later I hit a dry hole, and all I had to show for it were two not-sweet-enough Mister Donut donuts, a hamburger from Lotteria (a Korean(?) hamburger chain in Tokyo), $100 of stationery from Chikhudo (a bit further away from FI than Lotteria), and a bowl of egg and soba. So I bailed and headed back to the hotel.

Next time I go back, I'm not going to be looking for Go clubs anyway -- I found this incredible tour of underground Tokyo water handling systems.

Okonomiyaki

I was in Tokyo for a couple days (ostensibly to "enjoy" this year's Nouveau Beaujolais. Yuk. It dried my tongue into a bitter knot. What piss.) The best meal I had was also the most casual. Two of my Japanese colleagues asked where I wanted to go. I said I wanted to eat somewhere that they'd go themselves to spend their own money unrelated to work...

I don't know really where we were, since it was late and dark. It must have been in some sort of semi-industrial area because most of the buildings looked like wholesale storefronts shuttered up for the night. My host said something about a lot of the sweet (we call it Bull Dog) yakiniku sauce being manufactured in the area. Maybe that's a clue. Anyway, we stopped outside a dilapidated building and climbed a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor. It was a tiny, cluttered, and grimy shop. We were the only guests. One lady worked behind the counter and that was about all. We sat on the tatami mats on the floor by the window at a low bbq table. The whole room couldn't have been more than 20x12 feet.

First half of the meal was spent eating random yakitori and drinking Asahi beer. The second half of the meal, the whole point in fact, was Okonomiyaki. I've had it in Singapore and it was ok. But this one was shockingly, amazingly good. Unfortunately I'm going to take the easy way out and say Greg does a much better job of describing okonomiyaki cuisine than I can... All I can say was it tasted really good, the environment was really interesting, and I had an excellent night of drinking, eating, and conversation.
My hosts were a bit dissappointed because the chef prepared it for us. They had hoped to have us grill it at our table, taking fun in the assured mayhem of me trying to build one of these things. I didn't mind though, because the chef served picture-perfect ones. At least next time I'll know what it should look like.

Our next dog...

Our friend is giving us our choice from his new litter of Beagle pups. I've chosen the wildest, most aggressive and naughty of the beagles for us. He's smaller than all the other pups because he spends his energy running around antagonizing the others, while they feed and rest.

Currently he is named 'Jordan', but seeing that he is not a gay underwear model, I'll be changing the name. So far Ling has vetoed 'Fury' and 'Vengeance' as being unsuitable. I am only giving in to her unreasonable-ness because she is pregnant.

I want to eat your spam

watson.aby@gmail.com

It's daring you to screw with it

I replaced the camelback's water bladder with camera gear, wrapped a ten pound tripod in a suffocating chokehold around me, and biked back to the mysterious orange mushrooms I tried to capture yesterday.

Glad to see they hadn't been trampled since yesterday (in fact, I couldn't even see any signs of anyone having passed since I'd been through), I got to work.

Tripod Failings
I insisted on the tripod so that I could get sharp photos. These tiny mushrooms are no more than 4cm tall and the cap is perhaps 1.5cm diameter. When I flattened my tripod out as low as it could go, I discovered it could only get the mount maybe a foot off the ground (there is a center post to the tripod mount that hits the ground. Therefore I was getting photos, although close, at a weird 45-degree angle to the cap. They weren't very nice. There is a way to hang the camera upside down from that center post, but it seemed awkward and would have physical limitations as well. Looking at the Manfrotto tripod $ite, it $eem$ there i$ better technology for low-level tripod$ now.

So even though I knew the answer, I tried hand-holding. The photos were just as blurry as I expected. It's laughable to think I can hold steady a one second exposure.

Plan B: The Flash
So if the tripod isn't feasible for the views I want, and I can't hold steady in ambient light, I guess I can try the flash. I try to avoid this because I basically don't know how to use the flash for much more than fill, and definitely not controlling it as a tame component.

But, guess what, I made it work! The answer? You set the camera to Manual - I specify both the aperture and shutter speed. So I set something sanely hand-holdable... say 1/50 or 1/100 and set an aperture that gives me a reasonable depth of field f/9. Now shoot that, you get a photo that's practically pitch black because there is nowhere near enough light. That's where the flash comes in. Hit the FEL button on the camera, it sends out a burst of light, and figures out how much flash it needs to expend in order to make my f/9 1/50 photo expose satisfactorily. It works!

The flash work could be nicer (off-camera flash, diffused, etc) but at least it works now and I can get the photo I want.

I took quite a few of these photos, but have only included a single untouched one. I'm spending my efforts making some prints that you can only enjoy if you visit me.

So then, the obvious question: What the hell is this thing?
Beats me. I couldn't find any field guides to identifying mushrooms in Singapore or Malaysia. I tried the very cool mushroom identity expert system on http://www.agarics.org/Index.jsp but it seems to be European or North American-centric, so it didn't help. Hopefully someone will come along with an idea of what it is. I just know one thing, organisms don't live in the dark green Singapore jungle wearing a festive traffic-cone orange unless they are very confident of being able to take care of themselves.

Butterflies

This afternoon I went into the jungle for some mapping and photography work. I'm still learning how to use my 1dmkii and 100mm macro lens, so most of the photos I took were very unsatisfactory. Ultimately the blame lies on me for being lazy and not bringing a tripod. It's just impossible to take good macro shots without a tripod. No matter what else you do, if the camera isn't locked into a tripod, the photo is going to suck.

It's a bummer because I discovered three tiny brilliant orange mushrooms. The orange was nearly neon -- they just screamed DEADLY DEADLY DEADLY. Unfortunately the photos were blurry, had terrible depth of field, and were over-blasted by my fill flash. I'm hoping to run out there tomorrow morning and get a proper photograph before they're accidentally crushed by hikers and bikers.

There are a number of interesting butterflies along this wet trail. I caught a decent photo of a male Vindula dejone erotella (The Cruiser).

The next butterfly I shot doesn't look exceptional until it takes flight. When it flies, its inside wings look as just like UV Black Lights. An absolutely glowing dark purple. I chased this butterfly around for ten minutes trying to capture a shot of its majestic purple flight, but I never succeeded.

It seems to be a butterly of mystery in general, as I couldn't even figure out exactly what species it was. Externally it looks similar to some of the Ypthima, but it only has two rings, and none of the descriptions said anything about the brilliant purple color.

Thanks for your email. Glad that you had an encounter with the relatively rare Dark Blue Jungle Glory. You were looking at the wrong family/genus for this one! The Ypthima are small greyish brown butterflies. What you saw is at least 20 times the size!

Celebrity Sightings: Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah Al-Mustain Billah ibni Almarhum Sultan Sir Abu Bakar Riayatuddin Al-Muadzam Shah

Ling and I spent the last several days hanging out in Kuala Lumpur at the great Mandarin Oriental hotel. Today when we were checking out, we saw a huge entourage waiting alongside a red carpet rolled out to the door of Mercedes S320. I decided to stick around and see who came out.

A few minutes later out came the Sultan of Pahang. This guy, of course, is opulently wealthy. I had to laugh though, he was wearing a two-piece short-sleeved safari suit the same grayish-green color mechanics' uniforms use to hide grease marks. Ok, fair enough, at least it looked comfortable and stylish in a retro kind of way, but I cackled when I saw he was wearing a wrinkled, faded meshback trucker's hat! It even had 'scrambled eggs' on the brim. I couldn't make out what the logo/embroidery said, but it was scarcely different than Cridland's Trucking! I swear the thing was so faded and abused that it looked like it had spent a long summer sitting on the bottom of some redneck's bass boat out on Lake Denton.

There must have been at least six cops, another half-dozen flunkies, and two dudes who were clearly the Sultan's "hired muscle," sweltering in their black Bell motorcycle jackets as they waited to run escort in their 750 Honda Nighhawk. I had to laugh again, because when the Sultan reached the big Mercedes sedan, he didn't get into the back seat, instead he popped open the front door and rode shotgun, leaving his sycophants and fixers to pile into the back.

What is 'concession'

Last Tuesday John Kerry 'conceded' the election to George Bush. Is this actually any sort of legal status? The election is not John Kerry's or George Bush's to give away I presume. At the end of everything, the government still has to tally up the final count of votes, right? It must just be a de facto admission that "I'm not going to win this," but only the final vote count is the de jure act that determines the winner in each state.

That is, theoretically John Kerry could prematurely concede, and only later on, when all the votes have been counted and certified, in fact find out he's the winner.

Of course, this is not ever going to happen. When the candidates are spending more than a quarter-billion dollars each in their campaigns, they'll cling to even the slimmest chance of winning.

Good riddance to a wicked, righteous man

Wicked, evil, awful John Ashcroft, a huge pox and embarassment, resigns.

Fingers and Toes

The new doctor has a the state-of-the-art GE 3-d scanner machine. Today's photo session showed in suprising detail fingers, feet, and the baby grouchily rolling around.

I also saw a little pointy bit, but I was disappointed when he said that box boys and girls have that pointy bit at this stage.

Mona II

Our dog Mona, is a stray orphan from the pound. Luke's Aunt Shannon decided to find the parents of Mona...