Random Processes

Getting Nexus One's Bluetooth/WiFi to Coexist

2010-09-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

Something that's bugged me no end over the last couple of months is that activating my Nexus One's Bluetooth causes its WiFi connection to drop and reconnect every few seconds. Particularly annoying when streaming Pandora, since it doesn't handle the network bounce well, and gives up about 10 seconds into each song.

I've been lazy/busy enough that my quick solution was to simply stream the lower-quality audio over the phone's 3G connection, but today I finally got around to fixing it by simply changing the channel settings on my router (from 6 to 1). Apparently using a different slice of the 2.4GHz band seems to do the trick.

The Strobist goes to the LHC

2009-02-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

Here's the gist of a conversation that went down last October-ish:

DH: The Googleplex may have just moved to #2 on my best-ever lighting seminar destinations.
Me: (bristling at the insult) How so?
DH: Received an invite to do one at CERN. The LHC is currently down and can be toured. And lit. And shot.
Me: HAH!, but do they have strawberry mojitos? And, um, holy shit. Need an assistant?
DH: I am sure they would have no problem. Even if he never did seem to do any work.
Me: engfeh... {wobble}... {THUD}

So that's where we were last week. Touring and shooting all four major detectors at the LHC, and getting better treatment than even nibs like the King of Belgium did (who, I'm told, got to tour a mere one experiment --- pah!).

So here's a brief rundown of the fun at CERN:

Day 1: ATLAS and CMS

Started off the day getting retina scans for our biometric passes into the detector. Now since my right retina is currently being held in place with some chewing gum and gaffer tape, I was all prepared for hilarity to ensue: "Please center your eye in the rectangle". "No, your *eye*"... but I was pleasantly surprised when the system actually worked pretty well.

The ATLAS detector was our first stop. As an aside, ATLAS is an acronym for "A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS". Uh-huh. I'm thinking someone was fishing really hard, and should've just gone with the first choice: "A Thingy Like an Awesome Stargate".

Interesting fact: The ring is an average of about 100m below ground, but it's at a slight angle to the earth's surface so that it all remains within the same geological plate. The engineers that built it thought long-term, and knew that if it straddled different layers, then shifts in the earth's crust over a 50 year period would deform the ring. If only we could write software with that amount of forethought :)

From our vantage point, we could see the ends of the huge superconducting magnets that focus the beam and collision debris. They're the orange-striped bits you can see if you click through to the picture above. It's fascinating to hear about how fragile the superconducting state really is; the currents in these magnets are of the order of 7000A, so a tiny loss of superconductivity in the coil would immediately shove a resistor in the path of that current, which would generate an enormous amount of heat, and cascade the loss of superconductivity to its surroundings.

While I went giddy over the machinery, David was busy scoping out the area and setting up a couple of lights... resulting in these shots of Xavier and Doris.

CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) was the next stop. You know physicists have a sense of humor when they use the word "compact" in connection with anything resembling such a behemoth.

Michael Hoch was our physicist guide (and model). He pointed out another cool engineering trick: If you shoot the detector using an on-axis flash and nuke the ambient with a fast shutter speed, you'll see a cool pattern produced by little reflectors.

Photographing that pattern from many different vantage points allows them to precisely model thermal expansion/contraction of parts of the detector (which, y'know, you have to think about when cooling the blighter to a nippy -270C).

ATLAS and CMS are twins, in the sense that if the Higgs boson is found by either one, it will have to be verified by the other (The EU member states that fund CERN, and indeed the physics community in general, would turn a fairly jaundiced eye towards anyone making an ass of themselves by announcing a false positive).

Day 2: LHCb and ALICE

If matter and antimatter were created in equal measure at the time of the big bang, then how come most of the observable universe only contains "regular" matter? One of the goals of the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider - beauty --- since it's designed to study beauty-quarks/antiquarks) is to understand the asymmetries that caused matter to win out over antimatter within just a couple of seconds of the big bang.

Since most of the interesting traces for these particles happen in a thin cone around the beam direction, LHCb is constructed like a giant view camera, with planes of detectors perpendicular to the beam. Each of the vertical slices is separate detector, and can slide out on rails for maintenance.

The ultra-cool part? Niko took us to within spitting distance of the section of the beam-pipe that sees the actual collisions:

Most of the beam pipe that runs around the tunnel is made of stainless steel (which is pretty cheap to manufacture) and can handle the pressure differential of the near-vacuum that the beam must travel through. Steel however would cause too much scattering of the collision debris, so this bit (at the collision point) is actually made of beryllium. This is a bit more problematic to acquire since there are only a couple of places in the world that can machine beryllium (being quite fragile and a strong carcinogen in dust form). Right now, while the repairs are under way it's in its protective plexiglass casing, and is pressure-balanced by being filled with neon.

Here's our intrepid chaperon Niko, caught from my vantage point where I leeched off David's light setup. David's shots are here.

Our last stop was ALICE (A Large-Ion Collider Experiment). Besides being able to analyze proton-proton collisions, ALICE can also analyze collisions between much heavier lead-ions. Our crazy kart-racing, horse/jellyfish-eating friend Fons likened it to the difference between smashing a couple of tennis balls together versus a couple of Steinways. There's a lot more debris to analyze in the latter, and part of his work is building out the software infrastructure that can make sense of it all.

Some more pictures from ALICE:

The next day (Saturday), David did the Strobist seminar, and I got to hang out with a bunch of awesome people from all over the place. And on Sunday, Péter & András (the organizers of this entire trip) gave us a choice of driving up a stunningly beautiful mountain, or visiting CERN's compute-center and taking more cool pictures. So, of course we chose the compute-center (besides, it was snowing like crazy).

As of this writing, they have about 15PB of spinning disk storage that is used as a cache for 18PB of tape storage. It was cool watching the little robotic arms shuttle tapes around, so we had to stop and take a shot of that as well.

Huge, huge thank you to Péter, András, Fons, Doris, Niko, Michael, and all the folks at CERN who gave us the unprecedented access. Péter, thanks especially for all the early mornings you had to endure. You can now go back to your regular schedule waking up at the crack of noon :)

DH, I owe ya big time for letting a drooling geek tag along, although I know the really hard bit was parting with half your last 5-hour-energy shot ;)

Dust Puppy Goodness!!

2009-01-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

My copy of Ten Years of UserFriendly.org arrived in the mail today!! 1057 pages of every strip published from 1997-2007.

It arrived at the office today morning (where I have all deliveries sent --- ones that make it to the apartment tend to wind up flung into the patio and chewed by rabid squirrels that lurk about the complex with an evil look in their eye), and I was shocked (shocked!!) to find out that none of my three office-co-inhabitants had even heard of this jewel of a comic-strip.

If you, like them, have not yet discovered the joy of life in the little Canadian ISP that is Columbia Internet, then I envy you with every fiber of my being. For you, dear reader, have it all ahead of you to discover. Go now to the very beginning, and enjoy!

5 Friends

2008-10-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

So *I* can't really vote, but there's gotta be 5 of you out there that can, right? Right?

Yoshi's in September

2008-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

Awesome concerts coming up next month. I'm hitting them all! :)

At Yoshi's Oakland:

Friday, September 26 - Sunday, September 28
Dave Holland Sextet
(w. Eric Harland & Robin Eubanks)
Tuesday, September 30 - Sunday, October 5
Wayne Shorter Quartet
Featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci & Danilo Perez

At Yoshi's SF:

Tuesday, September 9 - Wednesday, September 10
The Bad Plus
Monday, September 22
Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band
Tuesday, September 23
Antonio Sanchez and Migration
featuring Miguel Zenon, David Sanchez and Scott Colley

Protocol Buffers Open-Sourced

2008-07-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

One of the very few drawbacks of working at Google is that I can't really talk about any of the frighteningly cool pieces of technology that make us hum.

Well, now I can mention one more :)

We use these everywhere.

Reinforcing my general dislike of the population at large...

2008-07-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

My camera backpack was just stolen. Right off the luggage trolley as I stood in line to check in. I must've had it out of my sight for just a couple of minutes as I was chatting with Jayita, and we suddenly noticed the conspicuous absence. It had (reading from top to bottom), my E-330 DSLR body, two Zuiko lenses (including the beautiful 50mm f/2.0 macro), a Nikon SB-800 flash, and an Acratech V2 ball-head.

Filed a report with the SFPD desk at the airport, and hopefully next week we might be able to get at the security tapes to see if anything useful pops up. Probably no chance at getting the equipment back, but if there's any hope of catching the blasted worm who did this, that's something.

So while I'm not gushing with warmth towards the human race at large, I take consolation in the fact that it could've been much, much worse. If they'd taken the laptop bag instead, that would've been goodbye to a bunch of visa documents that would be really difficult to replace, and would've effectively cancelled my trip to India.

The other silver lining? Now I have a good reason to upgrade to the E-3 :)

Light Painting

2008-06-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Someone on the Google photography mailing list sent out a link to lightmark.de, a simply phenomenal example of the technique of light painting.

Reverse-engineering some of these pictures is immense fun. For example, how would you accomplish this one without getting footprints in the snow?

First of all, figure out where the light sources are. Clearly there's some light coming in from camera-right and illuminating the foreground of the scene. There's also the ambient light that's giving some tonality to the background trees. And then there's the little painted squiggle. How would we create this? Let's say your exposure is 2 minutes, and we're doing this in near-darkness (with perhaps just starlight or faint moonlight). Open up the shutter. Fire the foreground flashes. These light up the foreground (with no footprints) and create the exposure. Wait until you've got about 15 seconds left on the exposure, and then walk over and create the squiggle. By then the background light has burnt in, and the just-created footprints won't have time to register before the shutter closes.

Gotta try this stuff :)

Like Hot Cakes

2008-06-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

They're sold out!

Just as I thought when he mentioned that he had only 1000 copies ready to push out, David Hobby's much anticipated Strobist Lighting Seminar DVD set is all gone. He's busily printing new copies, and backlogged orders get priority so you might as well reserve yours now.

I watched my copy over Memorial Day Weekend, and I'm already on my 3rd review of the location shoots :)

Joe McNally @ Google

2008-05-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

The awesome Joe McNally spoke at Google last week. Of course, I missed it since I was in NYC, but we do have the video up on YouTube:

B&H Store, NYC

2008-05-16T15:38:00.001-07:00

Those near and (even mildly) dear would have heard me wax eloquent about how Fry's Electronics is the ultimate geek's paradise, and how entering the place is like an instant lobotomy of all restraint.

Well, I now stand corrected.

I've been in NYC all this week. I'd mentioned the fact to David a few weeks ago, and he quite innocuously said "You should stop by the B&H store". I trusted the man. Thought he was a friend and all that sort of rot.

The place is in-effing-sane. Besides the (slightly surreal) fact that you couldn't swing a TTL-cord without hitting someone sporting a yarmulke and payess, clattering overhead was an assortment of rails on which large green crates were being flung about. This apparantly is their distribution system that gets the actual items from the bowels of the store to the pickup counter where you pay for them when you leave. This also means that you don't have to schlepp stuff around in shopping carts; you simply wander around the store and point at things, and the staff keep adding it to a list that's shoved into your hand. Walk out to the checkout counter, and with the magic of the clattering roller-coasters above, all will be waiting for your plastic.

Only the insistent buzzing of my phone (Google Calendar sends these helpful text-messages reminding me of meetings I'm supposed to attend) prompted me to finally leave. That, and the fact that they wouldn't accept my right ~~testi~~ arm as collateral when the plastic ran out.

Another side-effect: Given the way reinforcement learning works, I now slosh to the gills with the milk of human kindness for anyone wearing a yarmulke.

Dumb Luck

2008-02-14T11:31:00.000-08:00

It's a rummy thing.

Once in a while, I'll sit back and the realization will dawn that I have this Supreme Being who has chosen to take the plunge off life's dock holding my hand, and I wonder: "How the hell did I pull this off?"

Happy Valentine's day love <3

Doubtsourcing

2008-01-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Nacho for pointing this out; brand new comic strip awesomeness. And there are only a couple out so far, so you can go back and read all :)

Your Rights Offline

2008-01-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

With the number of violations of photographers' rights making the news these days, this little jewel is worth laminating and stowing away in the wallet.

There and Back Again

2007-12-28T19:48:00.000-08:00

I was back in Bombay for the holidays which, don't you know, is always a smashing time to visit. Firstly, it's the coolest weather one can expect (clocking in at a marrow-curdling 85F), and secondly, it's the one time of the year when the snappy "Jingle Bells" ditty belted out by the building elevator (to signal that you've neglected to close collapsible grate), is actually appropriate.

Primary purpose of the trip of course was to hang out with the old hive over Christmas-break, but as a side-benefit, I got to celebrate a dear old friend's (Michael's) decision to feed for life out of the same bucket with the lovely Fiona.

While the wedding itself was awesome, the part I enjoyed most was chewing the fat with all the old school friends that I hadn't seen in almost a decade (sometimes more!). What's interesting about a large part of that crowd is that they have practically no internet presence to speak of, and I've had no easy way of getting in touch with them.

Except, apparantly, for Facebook.

While I've heard rumors that Orkut is all the rage in India, everywhere I met up with old cronies, I was presented with the question: "Are you on Facebook?" So there, suddenly, was the "one good reason" I'd been holding out on signing up with Facebook for. And I have to admit, it's pretty scary how many denizens of the old haunts I've been able to find on there.

I still think the site is not all it's cracked up to be, and most of the "applications" are an utter waste of time (send me another stupid "gift" and by Apollo's bronze behind, I'll un-friend you, I swear). But the potential for connection discovery is awesome. Somewhat similar to LinkedIn, but for the non-professional side of your network.

But that brings up the question of social context. I'm part of something like a social network on Flickr/Blogger because the sites are particularly suited towards sharing of ideas within the social context of the photographic community. It'd be hard for Facebook to be the generic social platform for every social context: photography, basket-weaving and physics? That's why I think 2008 will be the year that the industry realizes this and sprouts an eczema of social aggregator companies that claim to unify the experience across properties. This will be an interesting circus to watch...

Playing Hookie

2007-12-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be on a solo trip to India next week, and consequently will be separated from Her Radiantness on our anniversary.

So as a substitute, we decided to take last Friday off to loaf about in San Francisco, and paint the town a frivolous shade of 0xff0000. After mangling a spot of dim-sum, and wandering about Chinatown during the afternoon, we caught some nice late light up at Coit Tower, on Telegraph Hill.

Dinner was at this little Senegalese restaurant that we've been dying to try out for the longest time. And since we'd planned to spend the night in SF, it provided the perfect opportunity to grab tickets on Saturday morning for SFJazz's 2008 Spring Season. Here's what's on the agenda:

March 8: Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, & Jack DeJohnette
March 14: "Tyner & Taps"; McCoy Tyner Trio with Savion Glover
March 15: SFJazz Collective
April 11: Wayne Shorter Quartet with Imani Winds
April 13: Ana Moura
April 17: Bobby McFerrin, Chick Corea, & Jack DeJohnette
May 31: Miles from India
June 8: Fiesta Venezuela

We've even got Coeman coming up for Tyner and the Collective, which means I've inadvertently contributed to The Grand Procrastination...

Wingsuit BASE Jumping

2007-12-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

Ok, that is just scary shit.

xkcd @ Google

2007-12-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Randall Munroe (only the creator of one of the best comic strips in the world) gave a talk at Google today. Among the highlights:

Guido van Rossum asking him "Do you expect me to fly?" (you'll need to have seen this.)
Randall only discovering that the guy who asked that question was Guido after the talk was done.
Donald Knuth (yes, that Donald Knuth) asking him "What's the name of my O(log log n) search algorithm?"
Randall sketching (on a sheet covering a projector) an impromptu Google logo created out of his xkcd stick-figures.

I work at a surreal company.

Zion: Evening Light

2007-11-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

For those of you in the know, I'm spending 3.5 days in Zion National Park as part of a workshop on landscape photography. Today's assignment was to capture the "golden light" of sunset, while playing with interesting compositions. Here therefore, are the results of scrambling up 600 feet over 40-degree inclines, getting stuck like a pincushion by some fine-thorned cactus, and grazing a much-loved elbow.

While technically correct, this one is actually not a very good picture since the composition is dead boring (Uh-huh. It's a mountain. We get it.) Still, it was pretty for a cliche, and a good example of the quality of the last rays of sunset causing the top of the mountain to glow. I also had a polarizer on which shifted the sky behind to a slightly deeper blue.

I'm happier with this image. It's a stretch for me to be composing landscape pictures with a narrow lens, so I was pushing myself into somewhat uncomfortable territory at this 300mm (35-mm film equiv.) setting. The idea here was to have the setting sun cast a glowing warm rimlight on the tree and the rock ledge, while the background rock face contrasts with a cooler in-shadow look. Personally, I also like the lines of the background rock striations and the foreground ledge that lead your eyes over to the tree.

Other lessons learned:

This takes time. It's not about cranking out 30 different compositions. It's about looking around and carefully picking a composition (or three). And then it's just a matter of waiting till the light looks right. Sometimes that means coming back another day to get that one shot that looks really evocative.
Timing is everything. The light changes quickly. You need to have your filters in place, and the camera in position on the ball-head so that you're ready to crank off those 3-4 pictures that you'll have time for in the few seconds that the light peaks. If you're fumbling around trying to screw on that polarizer at the last minute, you might as well come back tomorrow.
Don't pack up as soon as the light's gone. Sometimes your best picture is the one you see over your shoulder when you're putting your gear back in the car.

Silicon Valley 5k

2007-11-04T17:29:00.000-08:00

The wife and I did the Silicon Valley 5k this morning. Lots of fun, and absolutely perfect weather for running. This was my first 5k, so I was really kicked, and I'm all looking forward to the next one. My time was 32:47, and Jayita did 44:16. Woot!

3d Lenses & Focus Correction

2007-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

This post has been making rounds recently. It's in French, but if you scroll down you'll see a video by a guy from Adobe (speaking English) showing off a prototype compound (as in, insect compound versus human simple) lens which allows one to do some pretty amazing stuff:

Selectively change the focal plane
Move the camera viewpoint by a few degrees

All from a single image capture. It's probably several years before the big hardware manufacturers start to take notice, and he says that the compute time to render that image was of the order of a week.

If you could throw a couple of thousand machines at it though...

SearchLight

2007-10-02T16:45:00.000-07:00

I mucked around with Custom Search Engines today, and created SearchLight, a mini search-engine restricted to retrieving results from websites about off-camera photographic lighting.

Give it a whirl, and let me know if there are sites you'd like me to add.

Another reason...

2007-09-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

...to find an iPod alternative.

Warning: More of Yours Truly in the Offing

2007-09-04T20:49:00.001-07:00

One of the drawbacks of being an amateur photographer is that there never is enough opportunity to hone the old skillz. Now I freely admit that I'm married to a woman whose unbridled joy at being at the business end of a Zuiko 50mm f/2.0 is second only to the pleasure she takes in her 8-hours-of-the-dreamless each night. But even so, having to stand for hours on end while her photog. spouse makes ever-so-slight adjustments wears somewhat thin.

I've often considered practicing portrait lighting on myself of course, but the drill is awful: Press, run, get in position, <click!>, run, gawk at botched picture to figure out what to adjust, press, run... well, you get the idea.

First, the good news...

A fellow strobist reminded me of this little feature that I remember glossing over in the camera's user manual (yes I did RTFM --- just not that carefully): Video-out. Simply put, God's greatest gift to narcissistic photographers.

Most recent LCD monitors have a composite-video input jack, and my E-330's USB output doubles as a video-out line. They've even provided a handy cable for the purpose. Combine that with the its live-view feature (which Olympus was something of a pioneer at with DSLRs) and you've got heaven. Now I can simply connect up the monitor, point the camera at the finely chiseled, and I make composition adjustments right where I sit while viewing them on the 20-incher. This assumes that I've got the lighting parameters (shutter, aperture, flash-power) nailed down of course, but that's getting easier all the time.

All that's lacking now, is to get one of those little IR remotes that I can use to trigger the camera remotely.

Now the bad news... Given my new found freedom, you can probably expect more pictures of yours truly. I know I'm not as easy on the eyes as the beautiful ball-and-c., but hey, you can always volunteer as a guinea-pig, even if it is just to keep me from myself :)

Oh. That was easy...

2007-09-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

I remember trying a couple of years ago to get Flash working on my 64-bit desktop, with not much success. This weekend I thought to myself "Maybe I should give it another go, and throw a couple of hours at it again...". So quick search for [gentoo amd64 32 bit firefox] pulls up this page at the top result which (halfway down) provides the following incantations as advice:


> emerge netscape-flash
> emerge nspluginwrapper

So, I dutifully installed the indicated packages, restarted Firefox and voilà! Instant Flash. Note that the nspluginwrapper spits out this message at the end of the install:


* Auto installing 32bit plugins...
* Any 32bit plugins you currently have installed have now been
* configured to work in a 64bit browser. Any plugins you install in
* the future will first need to be setup with:
*   "nspluginwrapper -i path-to-32bit-plugin"
* before they will function in a 64bit browser
*

Good to know.

Now what do I do with the remaining 118 minutes?

My Prodigal Ogg Player

2007-08-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I begrudgingly had to send back my shiny new ogg-player for a replacement (you can read more about that story here). To add to the agony, I was out sick yesterday, so when the replacement arrived at the office, I had to sit and pine feverishly (I did have a fever) for it for an extra 24 hours before I could get my grubby hands on the device.

Arriving home with it today however, rather than immediately commence with the music upload, I thought I'd experiment with trying to take one of those fancy product-type shots you see in magazines and such. No time like the present, I convinced myself, before fingerprint-smudges mar the visage. Here's the result:

I knew I wanted a cool blue background, and in lieu of a second flash to slap a blue gel onto, I simply used a blue sheet of card-paper as the base and backdrop. After posing the device appropriately, these are the bits I had to consider regarding how to light it:

The bottom half of the face needs a specular highlight to emphasize the surface indentations where the buttons are.
This should transition to no specular highlight in the top half so that the graphics on the display can shine through.
I need some light as a fill on the right and to emphasize the metallic buttons on the side.
All this, with just one flash.

Here's the ghetto-setup shot, metered for the flash:

And here it is again, metered for ambient (I opened up the windows to get more light in -- hence the splotchy sunlight).

The guts of it is essentially hooking on that piece of cardboard to the top of the flash as a gobo to produce that light-to-dark transition on the paper which is then reflected in the face of the device. That, and making sure that there's enough shiny stuff at the top and at the right to reflect what little available light makes it through back onto the device for a fill.

Another detail: I was working at a fairly tight aperture, so in order to get the display and button lights to register, I had to use a tripod and keep the shutter open for about a half-second.

Stuff I could've done better?

Move the specular highlight producing paper further away so the grain of the paper doesn't show up in the reflection. This would've made the fill reflection on the left dimmer though, so it's tough without that second flash.

My Fancy New Ogg Player

2007-08-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

I've ranted and raved for a while about how the iPod is simply the aesthetically pleasing spawn of the devil, whose sole aim is to rob us of our hard-earned dough for substandard features, and incompatible media formats.

Unfortunately, my trusty iRiver iFP-890 died on me about 2 months ago, and I have not been able to find a replacement. Worse, the pointy-haired fools running that company have gone and sold their souls, and now don't support Ogg files, and only provide a proprietary (Windows Media Player) means of getting music on and off their devices.

So after wandering hither and yon and reading countless technical specifications in Korean, my replacement is here at last! The Cowon iAudio 7. Features that matter to me the most:

Plays Ogg Vorbis. Even at the insanely high bit-rate (256kbps) that I encode my CDs to.
Mounts as a standard VFAT filesystem under Linux. And because of this, it hooks nicely into Amarok from which I can drag/drop music, podcasts, etc.
8GB of flash memory storage. No spinning hard drives, so I get (supposedly --- I haven't tested) 60 hours of continuous playback time.
Integrated FM radio.
Records from integrated mic, line-in, and FM.

The only glitch? I had to return mine for a replacement because (and you're not going to believe this), there was a hair trapped under the screen. Yup. I kid you not. I didn't notice it at first, but when trying out the image-viewing features, I noticed it in stark contrast against one of the brighter pictures. Luckily Amazon has a pretty good policy on replacements, although I'm pretty sure they've never heard a reason like mine before. So Jayita has another week or so before she loses another part of my soul to yet another shiny flashy gadget.

Scoop of the Day

2007-08-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

So David Hobby over at Strobist had an assignment last week, where he asked people to elevate an ordinary piece of kitchen equipment to the level of art.

Imagine my surprise, when my humble submission below got called out in his blog post as one of the "standout" pictures!

It feels like back in grad-school, getting that first publication accepted ;)

Collective Mediocrity

2007-07-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

The Live 2007 double-CD of the SFJazz Collective turned up yesterday. Consistent with the previous 3 offerings, this is another really polished performance from one of the tightest live acts I've seen.

But sadly, this year that's about the only compliment I can pay it.

One of the reasons this group was put together was to force a severely modern rethinking of jazz that we have become too comfortable with. However, with the exception of Miguel Zenón's two arrangements of Monk's Epistrophy and San Francisco Holiday/Worry Later, I was a trifle disappointed with the rest of the band's all-too-delicate handling of Monk's work. They sorely could've used Miles Davis' advice:

When you play music, don't play the idea that's there, play the next idea. Wait. Wait another beat, or maybe two, and then maybe you'll have something that's more fresh. Don't just play from the top of your head, but listen and try to play a little deeper.

Newcomer Dave Douglas saved my flagging attention on the second CD of original compositions with his three-movement San Francisco Suite which, along with Eric Harland's Union seemed to be the only pieces that really provided a platform for interesting musical discussion. Admittedly I've only listened to the album a couple of times since yesterday, and while it does take a couple of listens for me to grok a tune, with the rest of the pieces I had the feeling that I was simply embedded in a stream of somewhat incoherent background conversation. Nothing on the album had the sweeping vision of Collective Overture (on the Live 2006 album), or the joy of Development (on Live 2005).

Hopefully the injection of new blood this year with Joe Lovano replacing Joshua Redman, and Stefon Harris replacing Bobby Hutcherson will revitalize this group in the coming season.

Second Light

2007-07-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've always been a fan of those cool wine/martini glass shots, like this one over at Liquid Air Photography. Now that's all fine and dandy, but I just have one flash, and the setup clearly requires two broad sources of light (one on each side of the glass).

Now although I plan to get a second flash sometime in the near future, I'm putting it off for a couple of reasons: Firstly, I need to actually do other stuff with all that money like um, pay rent. And secondly, having just one light source forces me to think a little more creatively than I otherwise would.

Now before I tell you how it all came together, goggle at the result for a second or two:

See what I mean about the two light panels? So the problem for me, is to figure out how to illuminate two panels on either side of the glass with my lonesome FL-50. It's something of a tricky problem since I can't allow any extra light to contaminate the scene, but I still need to get those two panels lit up bright enough.

So here's a top-view schematic of how we could possibly achieve this:

The key realization here is that unlike the Liquid Air setup, we don't need both panels illuminated via reflection, but instead one of the panels can be constructed out of material that transmits light via diffusion. This allows us to use a single flash on one side of the setup, lighting one panel via diffusion, and the other panel via bare reflection. With a little bit of placement trickery, we can make sure that bare light from the flash doesn't contaminate the subject itself.

The nice thing about this setup is that we can control the relative illumination of the panels by adjusting the flash distance, as well as the horizontal placement of the glass. The final ghetto setup cobbled together with all the garbage that was within reach on the table, is shown below:

One point that's not obvious from the top-views of the setup, is that the flash is kept just a smidge below the table level. This prevents the light from contaminating the surface that the glass sits on.

A couple of things that make me really happy about the result: As a proof-of-concept, I'm thrilled that it works, and I've learned a lot just by restricting myself to using just one flash. I could certainly improve on it too --- the DOF could've been increased (the base of the glass is a little out of focus), and now that I know this works, I need to build a little DIY studio to replace that ghetto setup.

Depth of Illumination

2007-07-02T17:01:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy month, but more about all of that in another post.

It's refreshing to be exposed to a piece of information that radically changes my way of thinking about something. Especially when that something is as mundane as the distance of a source of light from a subject.

We're familiar with the notion of depth-of-field when it comes to focus, but now think about exactly this concept, but applied to illumination instead. We know that light falls off in intensity as we get further from the source. In fact, elementary physics tells us that the amount of light falling on the subject will be inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the light source. Fine. That's easy-peasy. So if we want to double the intensity (1-stop up), we need to reduce the distance to the light source by a factor of 0.7071 (1/sqrt(2)). Conversely, if we want to halve the intensity (1-stop down), we need to increase the distance by a factor of 1.4142 (sqrt(2)). That's trivial. Now here's where it gets interesting:

We're normally illuminating more than just one plane. Typically the scene consists of a bunch of objects scattered about at varying distances from the light source, so if we expose correctly for the middle-distance objects, the ones closest to (furthest from) the light source will be over(under)exposed. But by how much? If we define +-1-stop of light as an acceptable exposure deviation, then from our calculations above we know that objects within the 0.707x to 1.414x (where x is the distance of the correctly exposed object from the light source) box are "acceptably" exposed.

The cool thing is that this gives us a useful creative knob to tweak. The diagram above shows that by moving the light source further away (and cranking up the light power to compensate), we can increase this box of "acceptable" exposure. Similarly, if we want the zone of acceptable exposure to fall off quickly, we just have to move the flash in really close (and decrease its power). The object in the middle-zone gets exactly the same illumination each time, but the gradient of illumination can be as smooth or as sharp as you like.

A practical application of this is when doing portrait shots against a background. By controlling the depth of illumination, we can easily control the relative illumination of the subject versus the background simply by changing the distance of the light source from the scene.

In a nutshell, the following 2 rules should help:

Given a correctly metered subject, you'll know that 30% inside and 40% outside its distance from the light source, all objects are within a 1-stop illumination deviation.
Conversely, if you've got a scene of depth x, then to illuminate it all within a 1-stop deviation of the central part, the light source has to be at distance at least x from the near edge of the scene.

Making Lemonade

2007-06-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

Face it: At some point in life you're going to be asked to take a picture of a singularly boring object, so learning how a bit of creative lighting can make an image pop can be helpful.

Subject: Blue vase, white flowers. Couldn't be duller.

Arranging the main light was easy. I hooked up my FL-36 at camera left, and fired it into a silvered umbrella about 3 feet away from the vase. To add a bit of light on the right, I added a sheet of aluminum foil to the right (you'll see the ghetto setup in a minute).

The first question was the choice of backdrop. Since I was using the flash, I could turn up the power such that it overwhelmed any ambient light, and I'd be left with an effectively black background. Nice, but still boring. The windows with the vertical blinds in the background provided a nice regularity against the chaos of the flowers themselves, so I decided to keep that in the picture.

To get a good balance between main and ambient, I switched the flash off, and adjusted the shutter speed till I got the ambient light to be about 2 stops underexposed. Now that that's done, all I need to do is crank up the flash to light the flowers up to the brightness I want.

Now keep in mind that the ambient light filtering through those blinds would be pretty close to neutral white, so at 2 stops underexposed those blinds look something of a crypt-like sickly grey. Time for a mood adjustment.

I strapped on a CTO gel to the front of the flash. What this does is make the main light that illuminates the flowers orange (or warmer).

Now, I adjust the camera's white balance to compensate, which gets the main (flash) light on the flowers back to white, but also has the side-effect of shifting the ambient background light from the blinds to blue. Voila, we have mood.

Could I have done better? Absolutely. For one, I would've closed the blinds a smidge, so I wouldn't get the distracting view through the glass. And secondly, I would've used a longer piece of foil on the right, so that fill would extend down to the bottom right flowers too. But that's why I'm an amateur.

Babies Abound

2007-06-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

Ok. It's something of an epidemic. Everyone's having them. Some aren't even learning their lessons, the poor devils. Regardless, congratulations to the following recently sleep-deprived:

Sushil, Lalitha & Sunayna
Sean, Amy & tot
Stefan, Ladan & Ella
Katie, Brandon & offspring
Ram, Mrs. Ram & Harish
Priya, Hashim & Tarun
Michael, Lauren & Ava

Non-Industrial Light & Magic

2007-05-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

I splurged a little this week.

Since about the beginning of the year, I've been running into a wall when it comes to getting more creative with the photographs I take. The two most common problems being:

I need more light. Either that, or I'm stuck with using really wide apertures and leaving only a thin sliver of the image in focus.
I need to control available light. Either there's too much spill from the available light source which clutters up the image, or it's simply coming in from the wrong direction.

So many hours of online research and several trips to Keeble and Shuchat later, I'm now the proud owner of:

1 Olympus FL-36 flash
2 PocketWizard Plus IIs transceivers (to remotely trigger said FL-36)
1 Westcott 43" silver umbrella
1 Manfrotto light stand (over 6', but collapses to 19")

Add to this an assortment of DIY snoots and gridspots (created out of the boxes that all of the above loot arrived in) and one trigger-happy amateur photographer, and you've got the makings of a joyous long weekend.

First experiment: Creating soft light for a headshot. The difference between soft and hard light is all in the shadow. Actually, it's all in the transition from light to shadow. And that's all about "apparant light-source size", which is just a fancy name for the size of the light source relative to the size of the object being illuminated. Take a gander at the following diagram, where the white bars on the left represent light sources that are illuminating the circular object on the right:

In each case, imagine you're an ant moving along the surface of the object (see arrow), you first hit a point at which the far edge of the light source starts to go out of view. From now on the amount of light hitting the surface gets progressively less until the near edge also goes out of view leaving the object completely dark. What the top and bottom diagrams show is the difference in the distance between the first and second point when the size of the light source is changed relative to the object. The smoother the transition, the softer the light. Here are a couple of examples which demonstrate the quality of soft light.

The first two are using the flash shot into the umbrella from about 3 feet away, while the third uses the flash bounced off the ceiling to create an even bigger apparent source.

Second experiment: Controlling light spread. This is where the snoot comes in handy. Using it to restrict the spread of the beam of light, you can get it to illuminate exactly what you want without scattering photons willy-nilly and contaminating the scene. I've always wanted to create those funky smoke photographs you see once in a while, and having a nice tight beam of light coming in from the side allowed me to capture these beauties:

Happiness :)

Methinks...

2007-05-07T22:06:00.000-07:00

...we should rechristen it SueTube. Don't you?

Cheap Shot

2007-05-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I like Flickr over Picasaweb is that it has succeeded in getting the "community" aspect of the site to work. As an amateur with a lot to learn, being able to discuss photography and techniques with others helps enormously.

For example, I've long been a fan of the Strobist group which talks about using relatively inexpensive household garbage to achieve professional quality lighting. Today I decided to try out one of the cheap tricks mentioned for achieving nice omnidirectional soft light for macro shooting, when all you're stuck with is hard sunlight. Jayita had picked up a gorgeous basket of strawberries at the farmers' market this morning, so that was my subject du jour. Before I show you what the setup was, here's the result:

Now here's the setup in all its glory:

2 sheets of paper and 3 pieces of tape. Total cost about 1.7 cents, so I can save up for all those lenses on my list.

Monk 'n' Trane --- Straight, No Chaser

2007-05-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

In early 2005, a recording engineer named Larry Appelbaum discovered a set of 8 acetate-tape reels while mucking about at the Library of Congress, which were labeled "Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957" with a handwritten note hinting "T. Monk" along with some song titles. As it turns out, this was a hitherto unpublished recording by Voice of America of the Monk/Coltrane date at Carnegie Hall.

You see, Monk and Coltrane worked together for a very brief period --- just over a year (April 1957 to September 1958) --- and while they performed together extensively during that time, there is a devastating paucity of recorded evidence of their work, which made Appelbaum's excavations all the more stunning.

Monk would've turned 90 this year, and as part of what they're calling the Monk Project, SFJazz's Spring Season yesterday featured a reimagining of that historic Carnegie Hall concert with Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Brian Blade taking on the mantles of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Shadow Wilson respectively.

When signing up for the tickets earlier this year, I was initially a little skeptical of attending one of those reenactment concerts which usually feature too much replication and very little imagination. I'm glad I ignored those initial anxieties. While they stuck closely to the original set list with a lot of Monk's standards like "Crepuscule with Nellie" and "Monk's Mood", this was truly a "reimagination". Blade and Redman were particularly inspired, while Mehldau anchored the quartet in Monk's trademark harmonic eccentricities. I was a tad disappointed in McBride's showing --- he tended to play in a detached sort of way, which was unlike the previous times I've seen him as a bandleader.

For cute irony, they rounded off the night with an encore performance of Straight, No Chaser. Awesome! :)

You know, anybody can play a composition and use far-out chords and make it sound wrong. It's making it sound right that's not easy.

--Thelonious Sphere Monk

Avishai Cohen @ Yoshi's

2007-05-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Peter and I caught Avishai Cohen's trio at Yoshi's last night. Normally, when it comes to attending live shows, I'm somewhat risk-averse, and tend to go with musicians of whose music I've already heard (and liked) a significant chunk. In that sense, this show departed from that ethic, since I've only ever heard his playing on one album --- the Chick Corea New Trio's Past, Present and Futures.

My leap of faith wasn't misplaced. While his band isn't as tight as some of the other acts that I've gotten used to seeing (like the SFJazz Collective), the energy that pours out of these young guys is astounding, and made for quite an exhilarating evening. Both Peter and I are convinced we should attend more of these when we can.

Btw, the setlist was primarily from his As Is... Live At The Blue Note album. Sidemen on this date: Shai Maestro (piano), Mark Guilliana (drums).

More Wildflowers

2007-04-22T00:06:00.000-07:00

We have a friend visiting from London, so as part of the normal touristy garbage that we inflict on her, we also took her for a short walk around Shoreline Lake. More wildflowers are coming up, and overcast skies provided the perfect lighting for some more photographs:

If anybody can identify the last two, leave a comment! :)

Ladies Six-String

2007-04-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago, Jayita and I caught Patty Larkin at The Attic. As expected, a fantastic performance, but the best thing I got out of the evening was a CD I picked up that she produced a few years ago called La Guitara. It contains some amazing pieces by some of the best and most influential female guitarists around including Kaki King, Vicki Genfan, and Badi Assad.

A brief search on YouTube brought up the following snippet (among others) of Kaki King's astounding percussive technique:

And while her sound is really cool and funky, Vicki Genfan has the ability to take that to the next level and get some seriously rich, sustained bell-like sounds out of her tapping. I find her style to produce a much more mature, disciplined sound.

My music shopping list just got a lot longer.

It Was Meant To Be

2007-04-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've taken a lot of pictures since I started dabbling in photography about a year ago (the groaning hard-drive is testimony to all those accumulating pixels). Nevertheless, this has got to be one of the pictures that I'm most proud of:

Until two days ago however, I didn't know what flower it actually was. I had happened to see it on the side of the road and had just grabbed the photo-op. It was only when I saw the comments of a fellow Flickr member that I happened to browse over to one of Kishimi-san's photos and realized that its botanical name is hypericum calycinum.

Even better, one of its common names is (and I just can't make stuff like this up): Aaron's beard.

Bassically...

2007-04-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

It's turned out to be the season of The Bass.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Stanley Clarke kicked some serious (b)ass over at Yoshi's last month. It turns out that San Francisco is practically seething with bass-masters this Spring. On Saturday, Peter and I caught the legendary bassist Ron Carter's quartet. This was probably the most polished act since The Modern Jazz Quartet --- they even wore matching ties! Attire aside, I haven't seen a musically tighter group in a long time.

In two weeks we'll have Avishai Cohen in town. The first time I heard this guy was on Chick Corea's Fingerprints (off the Past, Present and Futures album) where his bass lines simply astounded. Other than samples off his website, I've heard very little of his own music, but the fact that he blends some Middle Eastern motifs into his work intrigues.

On a smoother-jazz note, Richard Bona will also be at Yoshi's next month. I quite enjoy his music for light listening, and Jayita's a fan too since he plays the kind of jazz that doesn't make her "tense". I've caught him in concert once back at USC, back in the days when the Fall jazz festival organized by Spectrum actually had some really awesome artists perform, and he could pluck a pretty pleasant string. As a side-benefit, he has an ethereal voice.

Here's to the low notes...

Muse

2007-04-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

New ER-6i Isolator Earphones

2007-04-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

Here's the nub. I love listening to jazz while working. So picture me at my desk at Google, happily hacking away, and listening to Ornette Coleman (for example). Now picture a pair of spectacles surrounded by anguished features goggling at me from across my office. Multiply spectacles and anguished map by three, and you'll have an idea of what would come to pass were I inconsiderate enough to do this without personalizing the aural experience.

Hence, I've been on the lookout for a good pair of headphones for a while now. I considered the Bose noise-canceling variety that are hawked at every airport these days, but I couldn't stand the size. And my earlobes feel sore if I have stuff pressed against them for too long. True, I could use the button-headphones that come with most mp3 players, but you need superglue to keep them in place while running at the gym.

I finally found everything I was looking for in these. Awesome frequency response for the size, and the in-ear design meant that they would be locked in place and provide about 35dB of noise reduction pretty much across the spectrum.

The near (officemates) and dear (ball and c.) now can rest easy in the comforting thought that I won't be inflicting any jazz goodness on them. Poor blighters.

Early Wildflowers

2007-04-02T22:42:00.000-07:00

Jayita and I decided to check out the first of the wildflowers peeking out at Russian Ridge this last weekend. So clutching our trusty guide-to-California-wildflowers book (Jayita, that is) and macro lens firmly screwed in place (that's me with the camera), we hove off early on Saturday morning.

Weather was bright and beautiful, and although there was quite a bit of haze visible across the Bay, we caught some nice views:

As expected, there was just a sprinkling of the early-bird wildflowers, but that made the thrill of spotting a novel one all the more keen. Here's a sampling of our current portfolio:

From left to right, top to bottom: Golden violet, popcorn flowers, red-stemmed filarees, saxifrage, blue-eyed grass, charlock, scarlet pimpernel, fiddleneck and baby blue eyes.

It's only the beginning of Spring, so we're definitely planning on making at least two more trips. Watch this space.

Sydney

2007-03-24T16:54:00.000-07:00

Since Adam got the chance to go earlier this month, it's only fair that I save him the pain and effort of another trip down under. So reluctantly, I decided to fling myself over the equator, and spent the last week in Sydney.

When speaking at conferences, I favor the get-it-over-with-ASAP theme. Search Engine Room was ideally constructed in this respect. Quick one-hour talk over breakfast on the first day of the event, and I was done. Free to mingle and enjoy the rest of the conference (and Sydney) without a care.

Google has an awesome Sydney office which sits smack on the edge of Darling Harbour, with some fantastic views thereof. It's also within spitting distance of the standard touristy attractions which one just has to take pictures of. First, let's get the obligatory shot of the Opera House with the bridge in the background out of the way:

Now that that's settled, here are some other snippets:

Jazz and the Other Woman

2007-03-12T23:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since we gave Eric some guilt; both about not graduating, and about his wild-and-wondrous life. And missing us as much as we missed him, up to the Bay Area he came for another weekend of sake and song.

On Saturday we caught Stanley Clarke at Yoshi's. Stunning performance from the reigning master of the electric bass. As a bonus, towards the end of the evening he even did a couple of numbers on the upright bass, finishing off with a mindbending encore performance of the piece Touch from his latest album 1, 2, To The Bass.

Sunday was reserved for the SFJazz Collective's study of the legendary Thelonious Monk. I was initially a little anxious about the replacement of Nicholas Payton with Dave Douglas, but this diminutive New Jersey horn player showed some seriously larger-than-life chops. And although the name of the piece escapes me, Miguel Zenón's arrangement of one of Monk's tunes was one of the best of the night. Watch this guy's career with considerable interest. He has consistently produced some of the most stimulating music in jazz in the last 2 years.

Moodbar

2007-02-25T18:45:00.000-08:00

This was a weekend of tinkering. One of the things I discovered was Moodbar --- a cute blend of signal-processing and UI design. The motivation for this toy was that intra-song navigation is still largely guesswork since one has to know in minutes/seconds where one would like to jump to in a song. Now why would you want to jump around a song? Well, if you're like me, you might want to jump to an interesting few bars of a musician's solo, for example. So rather than dealing with this antiquated interface:

this is what I can work with instead:

I'll point you to their paper for all the interesting details, but the gist of it is that for each few-millisecond slice of the song, the intensity of the power spectrum in the low, mid and high ranges is translated into R, G and B values respectively. What this means for those of you (yes you Jayita) who've forgotten signal-processing basics, bright shades mean loud bits, red parts denote bass-dominated parts of the song, while green and blue indicate more stuff in the soprano and higher regions. Here's what a few of my favorites look like:

"2 and 2" has 3 distinct regions corresponding to solos by Miguel Zenon (soprano sax), Joshua Redman (alto sax), and Eric Harland (drums). The horn solos are green, indicating a strong mid-range response, while Eric's solo is a mixture of bass (red) and high-frequency (blue) cymbal-work. It's also interesting to see the pattern of tension buildup and release in each solo; the colors start out dark, and build up to a bright glow towards the end of each solo (a common idiom in jazz).

Dream Theater's "Caught In A Web" has nice green highlights where James LaBrie's voice dominates the midrange. Now I know how to jump around those bits since I think he's typically the weakest element of the band's music (sorry Arjun!).

Surprisingly, jazz tends to display more structure in the moodbars --- probably because of the long solo sections featuring instruments in different tonal ranges. Bill Evan's "All of You" shows nice demarcations with Scott LaFaro's bass solo taking up the dark-red section in the middle followed by a short solo by Paul Motian on drums. Joe Henderson's blistering saxophone solo also shows up in bright green on McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance".

Pop and rock moodbars are less organized, but song structure such as choruses (such as the bright loud cyan regions where "We Will Rock You" is yelled by the crowd) are easily identifiable too.

I should mention that the moodbar is available as a plugin to Amarok.

Let's Face It...

2007-02-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

We've all had our bad days at math:

New Blog Home

2007-02-19T15:51:00.000-08:00

Assuming DNS has updated, you should now notice that this humble blog is at http://blog.randomprocesses.net/. Still hosted on Google servers (so I don't pay extra for bandwidth cost), but by mucking about with DNS and adding a CNAME alias from the hostname "blog" to ghs.google.com, I get it all working quite seamlessly.

Happy Birthday Ava

2007-02-10T22:27:00.000-08:00

Coe's an uncle again. Congrats Sean and Amy :)

"Show" Off

2007-02-10T21:01:00.000-08:00

That's what I'm going to do.

In the last 3 weeks I've attended five (yessiree!) shows (I love the Bay Area). First was Bobby McFerrin. Now saying that this man has an amazing voice is akin to saying that Beethoven's Fifth is a pleasant little ditty. He performed with Voicestra, an 11-member a capella group which had an interesting improvisational style for a choir: Separating them into the traditional platoons of bass, tenor, alto and soprano, Bobby would start a purely improvisational groove and get one section to follow, while leading off and improvising a melodically distinct groove with another section which wove seamlessly into the previous ones.

Knowing that I'd missed watching Ladysmith Black Mambazo perform in each of the previous two years that we've lived in the Bay Area, Jayita had made sure we didn't do the same for their appearance at Stanford this year. As expected, these jewels of South Africa were stunning. The tightness of their vocal harmonies are unmatched, even if the melodies got somewhat wearisome over the course of the evening.

A few days later, I was driving back up to Berkeley to catch Paco de Lucia and his group of flamenco musicians and singers. A true luminary of the flamenco guitar, he impressed us most with how easy he made it look. For me, an eye-opener was the performance given by the two female flamenco singers. I'd never heard a singing style like that ever. I'm definitely going to try to acquire some of that music.

Three days later, we were back in Berkeley for Kodo; a Japanese taiko drumming troup. The sheer visual spectacle of this art form can't be missed. The incredible physical endurance displayed by some of the performers, as well as the virtuosity in improvised rhythms made it an evening to remember. They performed on several different types of drums from the smaller rope-tightened ones, to the large o-daiko, measuring four feet across and carved from a single tree trunk. The piece composed for this beast was supposedly inspired by the sound of a mother's heartbeat as heard by a baby in the womb.

Final trip to Berkeley for the month: Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!, one of our favorite NPR shows was being recorded live at Zellerbach, so yesterday we toodled back across the bay. What's truly amazing is how much of the show doesn't make it to air. Between Paula Poundstone making repeated references to the phrase "crap a pineapple", just to see how the sign-language interpreters would translate, and Linda Ronstadt (the special guest) discussing the absolute uselessness of the brassiere, we rolled in the aisles.

Good times.

Camera Rainwear

2007-01-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

As I found out first-hand, the weather during New Zealand's summer is notoriously unpredictable. See for yourself:

This of course doesn't bode well for my habit of carrying around a somewhat non-cheap camera to capture memories of all that troublesome weather. Luckily for me, Jayita had done her homework and warned me of the possibility. So, the day before our flight, I hove off to Keeble & Shuchat --- the local camera experts in Palo Alto --- for some advice, and the brilliant man there introduced me to the Kata E-690:

Ok, I'll admit it isn't pretty, and even on a good day, looks like bondage-wear for the camera. But at around $40 it's been dashed worth it for all the shots I've been able to get without worrying about rainwater/seaspray/bird-droppings mucking up the works. It also means I'll be prepared for rain during the next California wildflower season. The only drawback is that you can't use the camera strap when it's in this, so that means you're holding on to the body of the camera the entire time. I counter this by holstering the entire contraption in my case (hanging at my hip) when I need a break.

New Zealand

2007-01-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

So that was the best vacation yet. If you'd been paying attention to my bragging over the last 3 months, you'd know that the missus and I toodled off to New Zealand over the holidays. Some of the highlights:

Auckland city:

Sailing on Lake Taupo:

Kayaking/hiking in Abel Tasman National Park:

Spending the night on a boat in Fiordland:

Getting to see some rare critters first-hand:

I am of course leaving out large swaths of description of the what-happened-where nature; partially because I'm lazy, but more importantly because the dear lady has graciously cataloged the entire saga in her trademark detail. See more pictures here, and read about it all here.

I should also mention that the wife was responsible for all the planning, while I chipped in with all the driving. This worked nicely since if it had been the other way around, we would've done nothing more interesting than drive around very slowly for 3 whole weeks.

Methinks...

2006-12-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

The secret to having a great marriage is to have lots of extramarital affairs with one's own wife.

Collective Anticipation

2006-11-05T22:38:00.000-08:00

It's just about that time again. The SFJazz festival is on, and the latest CD of the SFJazz Collective has just been released, which chronicles their work over the Spring season, when they interpreted works by Herbie Hancock, and chipped in with their own original compositions.

Now I haven't received the disk mind you. I did pre-order it earlier this year, but they've only mailed out the copies this week, so you can understand my drooling jitteryness. In preparation (one must prepare, of course), I've been listening to their live 2005 CD, and for the last 4 days I simply haven't been able to keep my ears off it.

Most engaging are the original contributions by Joshua Redman ("Half Full"), Matt Penman ("Sega Games"), and Eric Harland ("Development"), but I was particularly impressed by Miguel Zenón's "2 and 2". The man is truly a master of his meter. Hats off to the rest of the band for being able to play along. After playing it about 30 times so far, I think I've figured out that the initial segment is something of a 21-beat cycle, but beyond that I'm left stymied*. In the interests of preserving my marriage, I'm going to desist and simply concede defeat.

In the meantime, while I wait for the imminent arrival of their next installment, I present to you, gentle reader, my interpretation of one of jazz's most revered standards:

*Update (2006-11-19): Joshua Redman's solo in the middle of the song is done to a 11-11-11-10 meter.

Escape to Moss Landing

2006-10-29T22:22:00.000-08:00

The missus' birthday dropped in this weekend. Now, I've learned something over the last 8 years of marital bliss: no matter what you think of the beastly things, birthdays are a big deal to a woman.

So instead of sitting around and working diligently on the publication of my second chin, I surprised the aging w. with a trip to Moss Landing; a semi-comatose little town about halfway between Santa Cruz and Monterey. We lodged at the Captain's Inn, a delightful place run by Melanie & Yohn Gideon, with views (from our windows) that looked like this:

Impressive no? If you're shameless enough not to be content with that (like we were), there's also the ocean about a 10 minute walk away, and Phil's Fish Market & Eatery, which has seafood to simply die for.

Yohn also runs the Elkhorn Slough Safari, and for a modest fee, he'll strap you onto a pontoon boat, and take you for a spin about 4 miles up the slough (pronounced "sloo", not "sluff", "sloff" or "slau"). It's an impressive amount of wildlife that's infested this tiny area. In the span of about an hour, we encountered rafts of sea otters, seals, egrets, pelicans, even a blue heron or two, and several brightly colored species of kayakers.

To top it all off, I've scored enough brownie points with the old ball and chain to last the rest of the year. :)

Next Week

2006-10-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

It's an SFJazz week with:

Thursday: Joe Zawinul Syndicate
Friday: Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussein, Eric Harland (Sangam)
Saturday: Alice Coltrane, Ravi Coltrane, Charlie Haden, Roy Hanes

Mercy, mercy, mercy!

Erik Mongrain

2006-10-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

Arjun pointed me at a YouTube link a few days ago that I couldn't view since I didn't have sound enabled on the machine I was at. I saw it today, and was just floored. Here's another one by the same guy:

Opening Night

2006-10-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

It's a measure of the excellence of the San Francisco Jazz festival, that they have the audacity to open with the saxophone colossus himself: Sonny Rollins.

Orrin Keepnews introduced him, it being almost exactly 50 years since they met during a recording date for Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners album. Orrin said that since there was very little creative control that anyone could ever exert over Monk, he just accepted Monk's choice of this new tenor saxophonist without question. One of his better decisions.

Sonny is one of the few living jazz masters in the world who can command a 3-minute standing ovation before playing a single note. And last night showed us exactly why he deserves such reverence. Through the 110-minute performance, this 76-year old infused his audience with a joi de vivre that most improvisers a third of his age don't have. He was just so happy!

5 years ago, when I saw him perform for the first time, I was too untrained to realize what a brilliant mind was behind those improvisations. His charm lies in the fact that he can take even the most banal motif through 12 choruses (an average number for all his solos last night), and find a distinctly engaging way of presenting it in each cycle.

And the man has chops. He may not have the intensity or angst of Miguel Zenón but I'd be willing to bet that in just sheer inventiveness, he'd leave him in the dust.

He didn't do an encore, but at the end of the night he got a 10-minute ovation anyway. We would've happily made it 110.

Foot in blog syndrome

2006-10-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

I think it's funny as hell that the post on how much we value security, is followed by the one explaining that our blog was hacked into.

I love my company :)

Flashback

2006-10-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

Apologies are due. Knowing that the wild fanbase of this humble blog (yes, all three of them) hangs on my every word, I am indeed remiss for not having updated it in such a long while.

We've started going for swimming lessons. Yes, every Saturday afternoon, the wife and I toss ourselves into the wild blue yonder (well... more like "tame blue hither" really, being all of 4 feet deep) at the nearest YMCA, and try not to make asses out of ourselves. Personally, I think we're doing quite marvellously. Jayita is down from 3 floatation devices to just one, and of the three essentials of kick, stroke, and breathe, I'm up to doing any 2 out of 3 (which I'm told is not bad) at the same time.

In other news, we've also started Spanish lessons! You see, Jayita and I have realized that we're somewhat lacking in the linguistic breadth necessary to obfuscate rude comments we would like to make about people while in their presence. Between the two of us we know about 3.5 languages (ok fine, 2.5 --- C++ doesn't really count), and English and Hindi are out since most of our friends and family (about whom we would like to make those rude comments) know those already. Initially we thought of Japanese, but then settled on Spanish since travelling to South America seems cheaper than a trip across the pond.

So there. That's the update for the moment. Salud, amor y pesetas!

Upgrade

2006-10-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

I switched to the new "Blogger Beta" this weekend. The downside was that I lost some of the customization that I'd done to the old template, but I like the new interface much more than I did the old one. And we finally have labels! Oh joy! I had tried the roundabout del.icio.us route before, but that was simply too cumbersome to last more than about 2 posts.

Mmm... even has that new blog smell...

Review: "Half Life 2: Episode One"

2006-09-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I finally caved and bought "Half-Life 2: Episode One". First of all, kudos to Valve. Their Steam content delivery platform is awesome. Credit card, click, and about 20 minutes later (depending on the speed of your pipe), I'm killing Combine.

For those kindred souls who felt betrayed when the credits scrolled at the end of Half-Life 2 ("but I only just started playing 73 hours ago!!"), this is going to be akin to the feeling one gets when opening a bleary refridgerator and finding that the pizza isn't over after all.

Pros:

You get to play (almost) the entire game alongside Alyx. She's kinda hot. And kicks ass with a shotgun.
Fighting in the dark (whenever your flashlight battery runs out). This is scary and pretty cool. Kinda Doom-esque.
Nice progression of the City 17 storyline. As always, they've done an incredible job meshing story-arc and gameplay.

Cons:

No real novelties with respect to the gameplay, weapons or enemies. But for those of us who just wanted more, it's enough.

New Home

2006-08-31T23:02:00.000-07:00

The old lab server went titsup about 3 weeks ago, and I've been without a web home while the hard drive gets some recovery work done. So I finally bit the bullet and picked up a domain I've been eyeing for a while.

Welcome to my new home. I even did the decor myself. It's somewhat sparse on content, but that'll get fleshed out whenever I get another 3.8 minutes to spare.

Deeelishious

2006-08-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, Jayita was rummaging through one of the many corners of the web and uncovered Deeelish. According to the website, this was an establishment in which one could saunter in, slap together a dozen gourmet meals, vacuum seal them and shove off with the whole lot, all in the duration of about an hour.

"How so?" you ask, do you? Well, the idea is that they allegedly do the shopping, chopping and cleaning, while you do the "assembling". The result is a bunch of meals (with cooking instructions that anyone with more than two braincells could understand) that are ready to be served with at most 15 to 45 minutes of preparation time, and a smug sense of accomplishment plastered on one's mug. At first I tended to look at this entire scheme with something of a jaundiced eye; assuming --- true to my cynical nature --- that it was just another scam designed to afflict the unsuspecting Bay Area inhabitant, leading inevitably to heightened yuppiness and moral degradation.

But I didn't have the heart to dissuade the dear girl. After all, that shine in her eyes could only come from one who suffered from the full forty-three hunger pangs that she daily endured. So she did try it, after conning another friend (Vandana) into accompanying her and splitting the fare. Here's a sampling of the results:

Mustard encrusted pork loin
Maple-soy glazed salmon
Artichoke-tequila chicken

Well, jaundiced eye be damned.

After a hasty bit of math, we realized that this scheme worked out to an average of about $5 per meal, per person, which is way less expensive than eating out (something we end up doing too often if we're lazy). And after listening to her drool on about the atmosphere of the place, and the cleanliness, and the fresh organic ingredients, I'm almost tempted to accompany her on the next round.

For now at least, we've justified it to ourselves by interspersing the Deeelish meals with our regular cooking, and only consuming them when we feel the need to have something more exotic. So maybe I've turned more yuppie, but I think it's great. I'm one of the few men in the world whose wife is happy to arrive home bellowing "Hi honey! I'm home!" with 24 servings in tow.

Some assembly required, of course.

Methinks...

2006-07-23T20:25:00.000-07:00

Religion is the funniest and most tragic practical joke that humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.

Hot Saturday Afternoon

2006-07-22T23:43:00.000-07:00

Mother Nature must be going through "the change". If today wasn't the very definition of a hot flash, then I've grossly misunderstood the term. Nevertheless, the rising mercury does have it's benefits: The last time I saw summer skirts so short, I believe they were called cummerbunds.

Still, despite the heat, we mustn't let standards drop. Stiff (if sweaty) upper lip, etc. We had a plan for frittering away a Saturday afternoon, and we stuck to it. Well, sort of. We postponed it to frittering away the evening --- when it was cooler --- instead. Stanford theatre was showing Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo". Awesome movie. Followed by awesome gelato (from a shop which was doing a day of the briskest business in years). Yum.

'Tis the Season

2006-07-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

It's upon us again! No, not the next round of "Pirates of the Caribbean" with the swashbuckling Jack Sparrow. Johnny Depp can buckle all the swash in the world if he dares, and I really wouldn't bat the uninterested eyelid.

No, I speak of that other annual wonder: The San Francisco Jazz Festival. Jayita and I wandered into the city this morning (at 8:30am on a Saturday, mind you) to pick up tickets. Here's what we're attending:

Listening party with Zakir Hussein
Planet Drum: Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussein, Sikira Adepoju, Giovanni Hidalgo
Sonny Rollins
Joe Zawinul
Sangam: Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussein, Eric Harland
Alice Coltrane, Ravi Coltraine, Charlie Haden, Roy Haynes

Good, no? I thought so too.

Now that in itself would be good enough to pour a spot of sunshine into spirits of the poor sod who woke up one morning to find he had no e-mail access with his morning caffeine. But we don't stop there. Jayita and I wandered into the Ferry building across the street from the Embarcadero, and spent the next couple of hours wandering the aisles of the farmers' market, people-watching, picture-taking, sample-nibbling, and generally doing nothing in particular. One of the most productive mornings of my week, if you ask me.

The All-Too-Short Weekend

2006-07-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

Providence is indeed cruel to juxtapose such a long month with such a short weekend. Still, after much travel, enduring dishevelled meals and interminable schmoozing, arriving back home to my superhero wife (whose super-power is sweet delusion) is almost enough of a treat to make the separation worthwhile. If I were allowed to drink, I'd tip the happy glass to a weekend of hiking, running, playing with a new macro lens, and catching up with Pelham :)

Weekend in Point Reyes

2006-06-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

We have a pair of dear friends who have a 6-month old baby. Outside of that minor deviation, they really are quite a perfectly intelligent couple. In fact, we hold their mental faculties in such high regard, that this weekend we decided to take their recommendation to heart, and visit a charming little place called Point Reyes; about an hour's drive North of San Francisco.

As some proof will testify, if you're looking to drop all your worldly cares and spend some time without a single 802.11 radio wave to bugger up the mood, this place is the real tabasco. Some of the complimentary charms include:

An 11-mile stretch of beach whose only dedicated inhabitant appears to be a socially challenged starfish.
A quaint old lighthouse which is actually quite a marvel of engineering.
A newer version of said lighthouse, which is undeniable proof that with a little bit of effort, technology can take the charm out of just about anything.
A protected population of about 300-odd tule elk.
Enough wildflowers to drive the female of our species quite bonkers with delight.

Other oddities include a plant called the stinging nettle which took some offence at me consuming it for lunch, and proceeded to inflict its revenge upon my calves that evening on a nature trail. Vindictive flora aside, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. A repeat visit is not unlikely.

'Tis a Good Evening

2006-06-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

Looking over some of the archives, I realized that I devote a significant bit of real-estate on this blog to ranting. But really now, you can't blame me can you? I'm naturally cynical, on top of which, I have a job dedicated to eliminating webspam, and indexing that holy grail: "good content" on the internet (ha!). Oh, and having sarcasm personified as a dear friend doesn't help either. Besides, in case you didn't know, I'm not drinking until November (some drivel about me going jaundiced).

Ok, I'm ranting again. But today was a good day! Jayita and I decided to head out to a local South Indian restaurant. After carefully wrapping ourselves around several idlis, we drove back facing one of the most magnificent sunsets I've seen in a while. Well, I was facing it anyway. Which made Jayita not a little jittery since I was supposed to be driving. But back to the sunset. It was one of those performances that make you want to stop the car, stick your head out of the window and yell "Bravo!", or "Wah ustad! Wah!", or something like it. Dashed decent of it to put up such a show, even if it was its 1.2 trillionth rerun.

So there. Now back to our regularly scheduled ranting...

Recap

2006-05-31T23:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I gave the blog some love. That's because... oh yeah, I've been swamped. It hasn't all been work though. Here's a recap:

5/2-5/5: The workplace sent us off to the Seascape resort in Santa Cruz for 2.5 days for a workshop.
5/6: Danilo Perez opens for Kenny Barron. I preferred Danilo Perez (and got my CD signed!).
5/13-5/14: Arjun (a roommate from USC,) visits the Bay Area with his folks.
5/20: We hang out with Rick and Kathy in Japantown. Izumiya has awesome sushi.
5/27: Hike at Russian Ridge with a couple of docents to show us the last of the wildflowers.
Right now, I'm in London speaking at SES, and hanging out with childhood friends.
Oh yeah, and I've lost 7 pounds and I'm now running 3.1mi in 30 minutes. Body fat is down from 18.5% to 15.5%. Finally being sub-150lb again is goooood!

"Manual" is the new "algorithmic"

2006-04-30T00:56:00.000-07:00

A recent conversation with a friend about the whole Web 2.0 madness got him to flatter me into pimping my opinion on the subject to the blog. The title of the post was (of course) inspired by a conversation with the other wife.

In the beginning, there were directories (think Yahoo! and the ODP). These were manually populated by some trusted community of people, who made sure that the links pointed to relevant content. Eventually the amount of content on the web grew way beyond the capability of manual discovery, and fairly complicated algorithms crawled and sifted through the mounds of crud to find the data relevant to most queries (think Google).

Once it became obvious that search was an incredibly powerful driving force for web commerce, it wasn't long before an entire community of black-hat search engine optimizers (SEOs) popped up to manipulate the rankings to their advantage. After all, "There was GOLD in them thar SERPs! (Search Engine Result Pages)". Most search engines of course have groups of people dedicated to making sure the ranking algorithms are wise to their tricks.

Fast-forward to 2003(ish), and the pendulum swings back to manual labor. Del.icio.us and Flickr introduce this novel concept: Let users "tag" content (URLs and images respectively) with words representative of the content (like "family", "poodle", "jazz"). This works great. Free labelled data! Naively, one could use this as a direct relevance statement. An object tagged with the term "jazz" must obviously be a valid search result for the query "jazz", right? Quite so, but the real power of this turns up if you can generalize the labelling to unlabeled content on the web. That's exactly what machine learning algorithms do. If Yahoo!'s smart, their boffins are using their acquisitions of del.ico.us and Flickr to do exactly that.

From a naive point of view, it would appear that we're done. We've solved the relevance problem if the users themselves tell us what's relevant. Right?

Not quite.

Keep in mind that the only reason index spam wasn't a problem with algorithmic search from 1998 to about 2002 was because it didn't (yet) drive commerce. Once Yahoo! really does start using that label data, and the black-hats catch on that tagging is being used to influence search results, what's going to stop an SEO from tagging affiliate pages for online casinos with "cooking"? Pretty much nothing. At that point the value of the labelled data is zilch. We'll have to resort to natural language techniques for summarization to automatically generate tags. Guess what? That's back to algorithmic information retrieval again.

So that's my $0.02. We're in a temporarily happy phase where "manual is the new algorithmic" (smile Coe). In a couple of years' time we'll be back to where we started. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Tags: google

"i" is the new "e"

2006-04-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

iPod, iMac, iRobot, iGoogle, iCan't really understand what the fascination with this letter is. It's like back in the days of the dot-com boom when people would prepend an "e" all willy-nilly to any idea and instantly receive venture capital.

Now Nintendo's gone and named its next generation console "Wii" (pronounced like "We") since it's a "console for everyone". Ooh-ooh, I have a couple more:

iPii: Especially after all those cups of coffii
F#$k yii: Suitable invective if yii bii annoyed by superfluous "i"s

Misplaced in Translation

2006-04-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

A recent trip to the motherland (pun unintended until I noticed it) made me realize that growing up in India placed a few words in my vocabulary which --- while rarely used now in the Republic --- bring a nostalgic sniffle:

gum-boots: Hideous rubber boots that we wore to school during the monsoon at the age of about 6. Wonderfully watertight, but that only meant that the water dripping into them from the raincoat sticking to your knees had nowhere to go.
lift: Elevator. But not the fancy-schmancy stuff with the automatic doors. These are the ones with the collapsible metal grating which you have to drag open and shut. Oh, and if you don't shut it completely, you'll be haunted by the midi-style "Jingle Bells" all your life.
"yoo-dee-clone": This mysterious fragrant stuff that my grandmother believed would cure everything from colds to fractures. When I got around to reading, I found out it was eau de cologne.
flat: Apartment. Not rented but owned; in a building where everyone knows everyone else and their birthday.
chai: Not the strawberry-raspberry-mango flavored foo-foo crap that Starbucks foists. This is the real stuff. Sold at most street corners (milk and sugar included) and strong enough to make you sit up and bark. Perfect during the monsoons while those gum-boots are drying off. If you're in a hurry, you can ask for a "cutting" (half) serving. By the way, do any of my non-desi readers realize that chai means "tea"? So when you ask for "chai tea" (with or without the passion-fruit infusion) you just sound kinda silly?

Anyone else have a list they want to throw in?

Allana

2006-04-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that my friends are starting to fall into a couple of categories. Those that we are grateful have absolutely no hope of offspawn, and some others who have simply the most adorable kids ever. I mean, listen to the man. Doesn't he sound positively ga-ga over the little object?

And in case you're wondering (as I know my dearest aging relatives are); no, Jayita and I love our friends' kids because they all have this eminently endearing property: a return policy.

Tags: friends

SFJazz Collective

2006-04-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

Jayita and I just returned from attending the members-only concert of the SFJazz Collective. Outstanding performances all around, especially from Nicholas Payton (trumpet) and Eric Harland (drums). One of Payton's compositions -- "Sudoku" -- captured the spirit of the game perfectly. The arrangement had a pecking staccato melody, broken up into intervals of two or three notes performed by each instrument, with each leading into and weaving around the other. One immediately felt the hunt-and-peck nature of the game's solution, while the sections which had flurries of simultaneous chords alluded to the cascade of solved cells that usually results from a breakthrough.

The most awesome part of the evening? Getting to meet the band members after the concert. Oh yeah, those are the autographs I got on my CD :)) Jealous yet??

Google Calendar

2006-04-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

I had to keep my trap shut about this for far too long, but now that it's been released, Google Calendar rocks! :))

Tags: google

New Toy

2006-04-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

Picked up this little beast yesterday at Fry's. I'm happy. Very happy. They even gave me a discount to match an online deal that was $100 cheaper. Did I mention I was happy?

Overdue

2006-04-05T05:39:00.000-07:00

Meant to post this on the 21st of March, but I (naturally) forgot to carry the USB cable for my camera. Now that I have the picture... Happy 95th birthday, Grandma.

Why Google won't give you driving directions in Mumbai

2006-03-26T06:43:00.000-08:00

Because nobody knows what the street names are. Or which direction (E-W/N-S) they run. Everybody goes by these really absurd landmark-based instructions like "Turn left at the second signal after the big lotus shaped petrol^* station". Sometimes the directions require prior knowledge: "Do you know where Lilavati Hospital is? Right. There's a church adjacent to it, across from which is a lane, with a bank on the left. Across the street from the bank is the building you want".

We're doomed. No matter how much research you put into it, I just don't think directions like "Make a u-turn after you pass the wall with the paan^* stain that looks like the Virgin Mary" is something an algorithm can spit out.

^*For my American readers^H: petrol=gasoline; paan=chewing tobacco;

Tags: rant, google, maps

Visiting India: Day 10

2006-03-23T20:42:00.000-08:00

Oh this is just the most wonderful time in the world to be alcohol-deprived. I could drink of course, but with the medication I'm taking, it might mean sacrificing my eyesight.

Don't think I'm chicken though --- oh no!! I'm only complaining because it's the wrong sense; if I (at least temporarily) lost hearing instead of eyesight, I'd be inhaling the stuff.

Tags: rant, alcohol, whatsupdoc

Air travel -- Indian style!

2006-03-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

The bit that really amused Jayita and me as we were flying up to Delhi on Tuesday, was that the meal actually had this little dairy-creamer-sized container --- with achaar! (pickle). Even better, the after-meal "mint" was a little sachet of saunf. Compared to the "budget" airline services back at the republic, getting great service at the budget price was a pleasant change.

Unfortunately, Indian passengers seem to be the most boorish bunch of twits in the world. For some reason, the wheels touching down are an immediate call to unbuckle seatbelts. Before the plane has even come to a stop, our daisys (as a dear friend likes to call us) are already rummaging around in the overhead bins for their loot. And while actually leaving the plane, the idiots can't wait for you to remove your own bag before trying to squeeze past. I thought we were supposed to be a "patient people"? Jayita commented that it was sad that Indians now have the money for en masse air travel, but not the commensurate courtesy.

Tags: travel, rant

(Not Just) Jazz by the Bay

2006-03-19T18:13:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, Keith (my cousin) calls up and says "Hey, do you want to come to a concert at JbtB this evening? We're performing." (I should mention he's a bassist). Of course, I jump at the chance since:

It gets me out of the house.
I get to listen to some good music.
I'm going to be in one of the nicer clubs in Bombay surrounded by really hot women.

A most excellent evening. I got to hang out and chat with Gary Lawyer who was performing. I've never liked his original stuff, but he did some nice renditions of a couple of Frank Sinatra and Al Jarreau standards. And he seems to be quite a likeable guy. The evening eventually wound down at about 2am, by which time I was thoroughly exhausted.

Btw, Indian women do sizzle.

Tags: music, family, travel

Homesick for Hitler

2006-03-15T16:43:00.000-08:00

The trouble with visiting a real democratic, secular nation is that the inmates actually expect one to be... well, democratic and secular. Dashed inconsiderate of them, I say. These problems are non-existent back in the good old republic. There one simply "exports democracy" because any fool can see that the less of the stuff one has in one's own country, the better.

Tags: family, travel, rant, politics

Visiting India: Day 1 (encore)

2006-03-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
<deep breath>
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Tags: family, travel, rant

The Poet: Bill Evans

2006-03-14T04:53:00.000-08:00

I've always regarded Bill Evans as my dream jazz pianist. The following quote from an article by Gene Lees sums up how I feel about his music:

Oscar Peterson raised the level of playing the piano in jazz to the proficiency long the norm in classical music. One musician made his apt observation: "It was said in their own time that Liszt conquered the piano, Chopin seduced it. Oscar is our Liszt and Bill is our Chopin." The poetry of Bill's playing compels the comparison to Chopin, whose music, incidentally, Bill played exquisitely.

...from the 1988 collection Meet Me at Jim and Andy's.

Visiting India: Day 1

2006-03-14T02:23:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah. Now I remember why I chose to live on the other side of the planet.

Tags: family, travel, rant

Visiting India

2006-03-10T21:23:00.000-08:00

Sunday afternoon I fly off to India to visit the aging flesh-and-b. Jayita joins me there in a week. Watch this space for updates :)

Tags: travel, family

NicNac, jazz, and a Coezy weekend

2006-03-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

The Coeman was in town for the weekend. Spent Friday evening at Nacho's celebrating his engagement to the lovely Nicole. One can't have Coe in town and not go to a jazz concert, so we caught Roy Hargrove at Yoshi's. I thought the pianist's solos were awesome with several shout-outs to Monk. Another point of mention: the sake at Yoshi's was exceptionally good. Too bad I can't drink for another 8 months.

Next week Ron Carter comes into town, but with the amount of work I have to get done this week, I see little hope of catching him.

SES @ NYC

2006-03-04T13:22:00.000-08:00

All of last week, I was at the Big Apple for the Search Engine Strategies conference.

Black-hats' tongues get a little looser after they've slathered some alcohol over it. Doubly so if they have to impress a female colleague.
Talk about a small world. As soon as I landed, I called Dhiren (friend from high-school, now in NY/NJ) and told him I'd be there for SES. His answer: "Really?! We have a booth there!". Sweet. Managed to hook up with him, catch up with his dad and brother, and meet the lovely Esther. Btw, his brother was one of the guys heading up Morgan Stanley's handling of Google's IPO.
Vanessa and I went to this Egyptian restaurant on Wednesday. She laughed at me slipping money into the moving targets which were the belly-dancer's hips, and I had my turn when she was picked to dance with her.
Central Park is pretty in the morning. Especially when it snows.

Unfortunately, I was too busy to catch any jazz. Next time.

Tags: travel, google, friends

The Real McCoy

2006-02-03T09:52:00.000-08:00

Last night I attended a concert which has to take the top spot. It was all-time best concert I've attended.

The great McCoy Tyner does a 2-week residency at Yoshi's every year; each week playing with a different lineup. This year:

Week 1: Lewis Nash (drums), Joe Lovano (tenor), Dave Holland (bass)
Week 2: Eric Harland(drums), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Ravi Coltrane (soprano), Charnett Moffet (bass)

Week 1 was an outstanding performance. This was the first time I'd seen Dave Holland, and the guy's got some amazing skills. He complemented Joe Lovano's screaming tenor really well. McCoy was a little subdued; letting the rest of the band do their thing. While I left that concert pretty impressed, nothing could've prepared me for what was to come the following week.

Eric Harland has to be one of the most intuitive drummers in jazz today. I've never seen any drummer gel with the other performers as well as he did. And his solos lit up the stage. Rick mentioned that apparantly when this guy was a kid, he weighed in at 300lb. Now he's a bloody rail. Being so large he didn't have much of a social life as a kid, so he just stayed home and practiced.

Also the first time I'd seen Charnett Moffet. Talk about a virtuoso. This guy's all the way up there with Stanley Clarke and Charles Mingus. He started playing bass (his 3rd instrument) at the age of around 8, and by now, his technique is unstoppable.

Old man McCoy's looking older each year, but this evening the man could've been 20. He was just so energized. It was awesome to see the effect of having great people to play with.

Rick and I almost attempted to get tickets for the next set, or for the next day, but we should've guessed; they were sold out. I'm really looking forward to catching the SFJazz Collective this season; if only to see Eric Harland and Bobby Hutcherson perform together again.

Wobbly Windows in Luminocity

2006-01-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

This is some of the slickest stuff I've seen in a long, long time. You have to check out the videos.

Tags: linux, eyecandy

F@#$ Windows!!

2006-01-24T08:09:00.000-08:00

Destroyed my partition table. I'm wondering if I should just keep it on a separate drive. Of course, the problem is they don't make 5GB drives anymore.

I wish I wasn't such a game-addict. Ah well, backups are a good thing :)

Tags: windows

SFJazz Pre-Season Listening Party

2006-01-11T22:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Jayita and I attended the SFJazz pre-season listening party at the Herbst Theatre. It was supposed to feature Joshua Redman (the artistic director and front-man for the SFJazz Collective) talk about some of the music we'd be hearing in the coming season. Instead we were pleasantly surpised when the master vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson took his place after he came down with the flu.

As we listened to some of the Collective's music, Bobby chimed in with one story after another about the music, and the people making it. A couple of cool bits:

Bobby's sister Peggy (on whose passing he composed the song "Psalm for Peggy") was one of the Raylettes. She also happened to date the pilot of the plane that flew them between cities for their gigs. Once night during the flight she decided to go up to the cockpit to meet her beau, and found Ray Charles at the plane's controls (uh huh... yeah... the blind guy). And he (very matter-of-factly) told her that he did that every night after everybody had gone to sleep so it wouldn't alarm them. Oh yeah!!
Besides being an awesome drummer whose style Bobby likened to that of a "fencer", Brian Blade apparantly plays guitar really well.
Danilo Perez once said "Bobby and Brian... beans and rice!"

It was a wonderful evening just for the stories. This year, the Collective will be featuring the music of Herbie Hancock, and it even includes a song from the Fat Albert series. It's going to be a good season :)

Tags: jazz

Holiday Calls

2006-01-01T23:29:00.000-08:00

Over the last week, Jayita and I have been calling the folks back home several times (the holiday season, plus a slew of anniversarys and birthdays). The first few seconds of the conversation are normal until one (or both) parties realize that it's a call from the US. That's when they feel the sudden inadequacy of the telephone system to bridge all those miles, and need to raise their voices several tens of decibels, just so that it can be heard on the other side of the world.

Of course, the telephone system wasn't really built for mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps (sorry Wodehouse), and distorts each yell beyond recognition, resulting in even further escalation of the vocal arms race.

Them: Hello?
(one of) Us: Hi there!
Them: HI<NAME>!!HAPPYNEWYEAR!HOWAREYOUDOING?
WHENAMIGETTINGGRANDCHILDREN?HOWWASYOURTRIP?
Us (minus eardrum): ebbeh...

Note the secondary effect of compressing an entire conversation's worth of questions into a single sentence -- just in case that connection drops.

It's "the most wonderful time of the year"... it really is...

Vacation Retrospective

2005-12-31T15:47:00.000-08:00

A couple of things I've discovered in the last 10 days or so:

I like to run. Ever since I saw the reduced gut on the other woman, I've been all inspired and stuff. Even better, I'm starting to lose all the weight I gained from the damned eye-medications.
Used-book stores rock. A few days ago I found a nice little hardcover copy of Reading Jazz.
I can't ever really stop working. Even when I'm taking a break. I seem to be most productive on my days off.
The little Venezuelan coffee shop in Palo Alto has awesome spiced hot chocolate.
No other game (FPS) comes close to being as playable as Half Life 2.

Mike Stern@Yoshi's

2005-12-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

Peter and I caught these guys at Yoshi's yesterday. Here's my take on the performance:

Mike Stern's music is really quite uninteresting.
Dennis Chambers can bang a drum alright, but doesn't know the meaning of subtlety. He should take a lesson or two from Brian Blade.
Victor Wooten is probably the most accomplished electric bassist I've ever seen. His solo was the highlight of the evening.

Overall, both Peter and I came away with the impression that the performance wasn't as interesting musically as it was technically. Still, after good sushi, and much hot sake, one can have fun listening to just about anything.

Save the carols!!

2005-12-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago, Jayita and I were in some department store like Macy's or J.C. Penny or something (they all look/sound the same to me), and they'd already started doing the Christmas carol thing, and I heard one of these "experimental" renditions of "Silent Night" clatter out of the speakers.

Now, friends and enemies who know me well enough will testify without a flicker of hesitance that I'm a jazz fan. Hell, I've even tortured a few friends into attending an Ornette Coleman concert. But where I draw the line, is when you turn a mood-piece like Silent Night, into some allegro-1930's-it's-prohibition-so-all-I-can-do-is-swing number. I mean "Siiilent Niiiiight, ba boo be dee DAP pa DOO!" is just not kosher.

But maybe that's just me.

Tags: holidays, jazz, rant