Ari's Planet

Nikon came out with the D700 camera a few months ago. Bhphotovideo is selling this for around usd$3000. It is one nice camera. I briefly used one at the nikon showroom in singapore in december. It's about the same size and weight as the D300 and D200 and has a similar control layout with a few improvements to speed access to such commonly-used functions as image zoom during playback. What really makes this camera great, though, is the full 35-mm frame sensor, what nikon calls "fx" format. The sensor is cmos based and has very low noise. I took a few quick test shots and even at iso 6400 it has lower noise than my D200 at iso 1600. The D700 can even go up to around iso 24000. Basically, you won't need a tripod or flash for most uses. You'll still need flash for special circumstances, like fill light or stop-action. A tripod remains useful for special uses, such as panoramic, hdr, timelapse, or very low-light situations. The viewfinder is round and much brighter, though it still has only ~95% coverage.

windows vista has a curious ability to stop you from using your own files. i think this is part of vista's "enhanced" security. getting around the guard dog requires some fancy footwork and several hours of wasted time. this reminds me of banks that won't let you get at your own money (e.g., "suspicious" activity, like, oh my god, leaving the usa) or visa's "verified by visa" feature which more aptly should be named "denied by visa" since i can never remember the password it makes me enter to use my own credit card.

somehow the permissions and ownership data on some of my files got out of whack. this meant that i could no longer open, move, delete, etc. etc. certain files, which were randomly distributed throughout my directories. part of this is due to trying to use cygwin's cp command. though i'm using a current version of cp, it seems to completely mess up file ownership and/or permission settings under vista. cp is a useful programbecause for some operations it is useful to have a command-line copy that is actually useful (unliked window's brain-damaged sibling to cp).

in the mossy cloud forest monkeys dissolve. their hoots filter among elemental sounds. branches shake, monkeys leaping, monkeys walking, tan hides, fur that was leaves, moving between sky and land. birds, or frogs, or lizards of sound call to those that understand their words. in the cloud forest, trees dissolve. if you should reach out, for as the call of keas, the ground yielding, there is no sure footing, if you should reach out and try to touch that which is substantial, you will touch only the illusions you came to destroy, they will run through your hands like tears, like broken waters. branches are not branches, they are light moss that drapes itself from branches. wood is not wood, it is watery matter through which swim bacteria, or some insect unknown to science that someday will fall from on high to escape its naming. the trees will make the rain, as they have for 100 million years--there is no ordinary counting of the times the sun lifted mist from their bodies, or for the cries of monkey-mothers whose young fell, monkeys who are as infants to the forest. we would know which trees have survived, if only there was an imprint of their endless sorrow in the granite rocks. masks of native wood carved by native hands, filled with sadness and strangeness, stare down from shelves and walls. within their curves moves the wind, down valleys of carved wood, my mind's hands run within river channels--perhaps there is an imprint here, a translation for young who cannot read, or there is only an illusion one sought to destroy, to understand.

there are stories of apportionment--when god was handing out this or that, such and such got it, or the bird which is red because it stole a feather. tea is one of those: when color was being handed out, tea leaves took the darkest, deepest, truest shade of green. but this green is only there to be seen when the tea is viewed through polarizing glass and is stunted and warped, from the tree that it would be into a tiny shrub, hacked at every 20 days by drug-addicted apes yielding shears and machines.

where do we eat? but in town we couldn't tell if it was chicken or meat? the lament of the unintiated. eat anywhere, the first place that strikes your fancy, the cheapest. so ask the guests, so i answer. today will be an easy day. a civilized day. of tea and deep green leaves growing in mist. such are the best plans laid. waylaid. on the way to breakfast the weekly vegetable market, so naturally i must buy oranges and dark green cucumbers and limes to put in my drink. a quick breakfast at one of the two indian shops open on sunday morning, a bottle of water, nasi lemak for lunch. at the bus station a tall aussie asks about my camera, shows me his bag--a daypack for a month, and 50% of that is taken up with his camera bag! i'm so envious of his light pack. another aussie joins in.

but the jungle is shaking, the mist-lady caresses it, the rain pounds it till the trees break and shatter into flowers deep in their violet beacons. monkeys hoot, hoot here and there in the lady's caress, hoot amidst the ciccadas' long trill that drums into the ear, where the feet of the many-legged centipedes crash. the birds laugh, laugh at the foolish ape, scatter with their fearful shrieks. the women are free to roam, they are locked into their demanding jobs, which they have not started yet, discourse in sterile rooms. the man is trapped, captive from the fear of loss. the women are here, their heads covered in cloths, they sit and eat, they buy the red love of strawberries that grow under artificial suns. the chicken pays the price, its thigh painted red, drizzled in lime, it is eaten. and the rain, the rain puts the mountains in its washing power, and the mountains cling to the trees' roots, shaking in the lady's embrace.

leaving kuala lumpur is a momentous event, a joyous day. somehow i extended my stay in kl beyond what was strictly necessary.

on monday i went to the indian visa agency to drop off my passport. though i had been told by the office in jb that the fee was myr$152, as is also stated on the website, the visa office in kl said i had to pay myr$236 as an american--the 152 fee is only for british. amazingly, i had exactly myr$237.70 on me, leaving me with $1.70--not even enough for the train rides back to the hostel. instead i walked back, which turned out to be rather fun. spending $1 on water got me the rest of the way. none of the money changers in the area by the visa office would take travelers checks, which was a moot point as i did not have my passport. so i changed a bit of cash back at bukit bintang and went to hide in the hostel. tuesday evening i picked up the passport with a shiny new visa stamp. walking back, a blind begging man was singing across from a mosque.

internet here in kuala lumpur has become terribly slow the last few days. we even completely lose connection several times during the day. when i say slow, i mean it can take hours to download a few megabytes and some sites, including my webmail, might never manage to load in the browser. at the moment it's running slightly better, but still very slow. this is probably due to the loss of several undersea cables between egypt and italy affecting south asia, including cables that carry traffic from india. strange that a cable outage to europe affects websites in the us, but i guess that just has to do with how traffic was routed or how it has been rerouted.

An article my Matt Apuzzo of the AP, "Where'd the bailout money go? Shhhh, it's a secret", raises serious concerns on oversight of the use of bailout money by banks. According to the article, many banks receiving bailout funds are not disclosing how they are using those funds. In October, you wrote an open letter to constituents, in which you stated that you included several curbs on the use of the bailout money and the establishment of an Oversight Board and a Congressional Oversight Panel, though your letter implies that the board and panel would exercise oversight over Treasury, not over recipients of the funds.

Puzzo writes, 'Pressured by the Bush administration to approve the money quickly, Congress attached nearly no strings on the $700 billion bailout in October. ... "We're not sharing any other details. We're just not at this time," said Wendy Walker, a spokeswoman for Dallas-based Comerica Inc., which received $2.25 billion from the government.'

headlines on google news today are an odd mix. the economy is tanking, obama is shaping into an environmentally-minded president, and class warfare is alive and well in the us.

Study: As Banks Failed, Top Executives Earned $1.6B, Fox News reports on an AP study. Incredible the amount of money these guys take. Some are reduced to their "base" salaries of only $600,000, since apparently the company still needs their "expertise". Exactly what expertise was that? Should they be sacked and replaced with people who make money instead of drive their banks into insolvency? Just a crazy thought there. these guys are siblings to those who put us in wars of choice. because, as far as i can figure out, the only effective benefit derived from such courses of action is from war profiteering, given that the soldiers sent to die generally derive little benefit and general civilian populations are placed at disadvantage (death, destruction, debt).

in the morning i am lazy and i don't run out at sun-up to take pictures. i have an omelet and chat with a schoolteacher from san francisco making a visa run from southern thailand. to anyone wondering, the only impact of the mess in bangkok that she noticed was that there were fewer tourists in the south. no one has been able to figure out what was going through thailand's government when they reduced the on-arrival visa for people arriving by land from 30 to 15 days, certainly not a good move when your tourist industry is already suffering. actually, we all know what was going through thailand's government, it's the same thing you'll encounter at home on any given day. i walk down to the portuegese settlement, about a lazy half-hour walk involving careful dodging of traffic and random asian-style steps. i even pass local fish spa and scenic prison. i stop for lunch and try some strange sweet drink but decline further attempts to quaff the remaining syrup. the portuegese settlment is nothing special in the day. men are working on a walkway. the streets are lined with one-story homes of no particular persuasion. it's hot.

melaka was recently awarded unesco world heritage status. i stopped by the ethnographic museum, which is housed in an historic building constructed by the dutch and which served as their administrative center. founded around 1400 by a palembang prince, melaka has had an amazing history in which control has passed from one set of rulers to another. first, it was ruled as a sultanate. zheng he stopped here with his huge chinese fleet. portugal took over in the early 1500s, followed by the dutch, the british, the japanese, the british again, and then malay independence. melaka was an important port for arab, indian, and chinese traders who relied on the seasonal trade winds. basically, it's one huge historic mishmash. today the historic area is a big tourist playground filled with cars.

Another digression from travel. My install disks for adobe photoshop cs3 and lightroom 1.0 have gone awol. current versions are cs4 and lightroom 2. now, you might think, this being the age of the internet, that adobe would keep old versions of their software available for download, and we're only talking last-year's versions here. i tried their contact support page and it took a week for them to get back to me. before the week was up i called adobe and was told that cs3 and lightroom 1 are not available for download. the alternative is to order replacement media, which adobe charges usd$20 for the privilege. absurd, a disk costs pennies. i can understand a bit of cost in handling the request, say around $5 would be ok with me, but paying another $40 for software i already own is stupid. also, since i'm on the other side of the world, having the disks posted to me would cost another bundle--and let's not even get into singapore customs charging 7%. all adobe would have to do, like every enlightened software company, is provide a link for customers to download their legally-purchased software. that's all i ask. bah, damn adobe, wasting my money and my time.

we would like now to return you to our regularly scheduled programming. we apologize for the interruption in service caused by technical difficulties and hope you enjoyed looking at pretty pictures while we sorted out our new equipment.

Coming to a new country is one of the most exciting parts of travel. Granted, going from Singapore to Malaysia is not an earth-shattering experience, yet it still manages to take me out of the usual zone of familiarity. I was in Singapore for 10 days. Singapore does not hold much attraction for me. It is a big city. Clean. Shiny. With many shops. What do you do in Singapore? Shop. Shop till you drop. It's equatorial and humid, so you also get to sweat, but to me it felt cool after the heat of the Northern Teritories in the build-up to the Wet. Walking around the Raffles Shopping Center, a large modern shopping complex, I wondered what it would be like to grow up in Singapore. The experience would include a lot of shopping. There are a few other things to do in Singapore, and perhaps I might even avail myself of them when I return.

vista just seems to be getting slower and slower. my system isn't old enough to be slowing down. i just don't understand it. boot up takes over 2 minutes, shutdown nearly 2 minutes. performance logs show boot up processes only going about 15 seconds over. according to a site, 95% of systems boot in less than 3 minutes and 80% in less than 1 or 2 (can't remember right now). but it's not just boot up. just clicking on a folder takes seconds. launching takes too long. it's annoying. to top it all off, media player can't play music with popping every 3 seconds. the only suggestion the docs have is to check the sound card drivers, which i did and they are up to date. ok, so guess what?

Motorola put a standard usb socket on their phones. this would, to a naive observer, make you think that you can just plug the phone into any old usb socket to charge it. wrong. the usb spec expects devices to negotiate with the host. at first they can draw 100 ma, but after negotiation they can draw more power. i own a motorola v190 handset, but the following information pertains to many other motorola phones that have a mini-usb connector for charging, though i don't know exactly which models.

to charge from a pc using a standard usb data cable you need to install motorola's drivers. i installed the main driver, but that didn't enable charging through a standard usb cable. there are two "charging" drivers with cryptic model numbers, all starting with "w". it is unclear which driver is needed for my v190. i downloaded both drivers. after a while i discovered that the main driver install just installs a program that in turn does the install, so i ran (or reran, not sure) this program and now the phone is recognized and charges.

i purchased an hp tx2510us convertible laptop computer recently and have had a few days to play around with it. here are my impressions. the tx2510us is a preconfigured tx2500z setup for same-day shipping and retail outlet sales in the us.

choice

using the shift key when typing, often by pressing the shift key with the same hand that's still moving over the keys, exerts additional strain on the fingers. it also slows typing down. that's why i never capitalize my emails, but i usually capitalize blog posts--just not this one. the same is true for other combination keys, especially the control key. capitalization can easily be restored in a word processor, except for the odd acronym or name the program doesn't recognize, but these can be added to a custom dictionary if the software supports it. increased strain also applies to laptop trackpads, where you need to hold down an awkward button and simultaneously drag. there is a click-lock function in windows but it would be nice to have a dedicated button for that. at least the hp trackpad has a scroll bar.

Sorry folks, but this travel blog is being interrupted for a series of boring articles about Vista and Tablet PC related adventures. Our regular programming will resume when our computer does what we want it to do, or at least comes closer to achieving this ideal. Perhaps my website needs a "don't show these tags" filter so you can concentrate on the interesting stuff. You can also click on any of the Travel links to see all travel-related articles.

My war with Vista is at a standstill. Fighting from the trenches, we have taken to exchanging textual gifts. My troops claim they have successfully reduced Vista's armies from 1.5 MB to a mere 800 MB--a staggering feat. Vista's propaganda continues to point to its successful use of 800 MB to do no more than XP was able to do in 150 MB, Mac OS in 8 MB, and Xerox Star in 384 KB. We needn't go into the heroic deeds of even older, and greater, ancestors, or their younger offspring who continue to go forth in small vessels of great success. Below, you may see the terrible lies and slurs Vista hurls at us. My troops, brave and a tad foolish, as the young are wont to be, attempted to storm the dark realm of Vista Journal--a place of fame, or of infamy, where heroic deeds of great battles, past and future, are recorded.

Windows Vista declares victory in the Skirmish of Windows Journal.