2007-10-30 CNET’s Ad Freaks Halloween

I was really burned out from partying. But Patrick IM’d me saying that he was in the city for one night only and extrovert that he is, I knew I had to find a party at the last minute, sans costume.

Patrick
The Holy Cow
SoMa, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/50sec @ f/2.8, iso 640, 16mm (24mm)

Andrew Mager was kind enough to invite me to the party sponsored by CNET business.

Mager, broadcasting for Justin.TV
The Holy Cow
SoMa, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/60sec @ f/2.8, iso 500, 16mm (24mm)

It was a lot of fun even though I only knew ten people in the entire place, a couple people actually tried to use my name to get past the bouncer at the door—and it worked!. Can you believe that? 😀

Rock this party!
The Holy Cow
SoMa, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/50sec @ f/2.8, iso 640, 16mm (24mm)

Also, since this photo got insane viewage as it was uploading, I thought posting it before the jump can’t hurt. I’m putting it really small so you click on it though… 😀

Our favorite bunny
The Holy Cow
SoMa, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, SB-800, ultimate light box
1/60sec @ f/2.8, iso 320, 16mm (24mm)

[the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on November 1, 2007 by tychay 4

Collapsing the female wave-function

The solution to the greatest paradoxes of the twentieth century physics is the realization that the observer cannot be separated from the experimental design.

General Relativity? The observer can’t tell the difference between gravity and an accelerating reference frame.
Maxwell’s Demon? Even the observer’s computation cannot be separated from the physical system that implements it.
Quantum Mechanics? Observation collapses probabilistic wave-functions.

There is a simple irony in the above.

A 21st century paradox, shared among my friends and with constant teasing, is how someone like me could both emphatically claim and successfully test as a heavy introvert.

The solution to this slightly less prestigious paradox is: I carry a camera.

Like quantum mechanics, my data collection device changes the experimental design.

[How a camera collapses the social wave function after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on October 23, 2007 by tychay 17

Making it rain (a story with three "Mark"ed bills)

Tagged has a Cherry Coke promotion which pretty much works with any website out there. In honor of this, I pimped out my profile with some raining cherries—I mean once you get over all the pr0n on my profile, that I’m too lazy(?) to delete. 🙂

Mark #1

Apparently there was a reward for getting Mark hired and I was the lucky recipient of it. In a move back to our gangsta roots, Greg gave me most of it in the form of a brick of 125 $20 bills. Time to really make it rain!

Making it rain
Tagged, Financial District, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina AT-X PRO 16-50mm f/2.8 DX
1/200sec @ f/2.8, iso320, 16mm (24mm)

(Best viewed large on black)

[More raining and Tagged is hiring after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on June 26, 2007 by tychay 9

2007-06-14 My ten seconds at WWDC

A friend of a friend hooked me up with a WWDC pass. Shhh… The real reason I went there was to meet a friend, but he had to miss out that day because of bugs and a release. (I won’t name names, but you suck!)

Unfortunately, I was too tired from driving back from Lunch 2.0 and errands to make it there for much of it. Actually, I caught exactly 5 seconds of the last talk’s Q&A on Dojo Toolkit. It’s probably for the best since Alex doesn’t need to hear me rant about Dojo for the hundredth time. My host scored me a free pass to the Apple Bash after the event just before they went off to dinner and I had to head the other direction to sflickr.

As I was passing Yerba Buena Gardens, an Apple Person In Black saw my bash band and said, “Right this to the Bash, sir.”

“Thank you. But no thank you, I’m skipping the party.”

My ten seconds at WWDC
SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina AT-X PRO 16-50mm f/2.8 DX
1/160sec @ f/4.5, iso100, 17mm (25mm)

[OSCON, Microsoft, and Apple after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on June 19, 2007 by tychay 2

Ethan’s Baptism and Party

Mother and son
St. Joseph Parish, Mountain View, California

Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-.56G VR
1/60sec @ f/5.3, iso 3200, 120mm (180mm)
.

Dave invited me to his son’s baptism. I put on a shirt and tie and drove down to South Bay.

I showed up early, had to drop off some stuff at Goodwill, and ended up loitering outside the church messing with Google WiFi. By the time I figured out that all the other people there were doing this weird makeshift flea market thing and everyone else was already inside, mass had already started!

Afterward, it turned out Mark was moving to San Francisco, so I went to the party for a short while and booked it back to SOMA to help him move.

That meant a couple more people got to see me working the shirt and tie…Ahh, East Coast strikes again.

(Mark and Rose bought me dinner at Koh Samui and The Monkey in SOMA.)

Posted on June 14, 2007 by tychay 2

Vote for Andrei

This is a shameless plug for my friend Andrei.

Andrei is writing something that forms the very essence of my future employment: PHP 6, and more specifically, unicode support in PHP 6. ICU in PHP is three meaningless letters about three other meaningless letters to most of you. I get that. Even though this meaninglessness stuff has 60% market share and powers sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia, WordPress, Facebook… (The “Vote for Andrei” generator above was written in PHP. It powers the websites for JPG Magazine and Flickr below.)

So when I say that it’s really important to keep this guy happy, please believe me. Think about the last time that you visited to the above websites. You wouldn’t want them to suck do you? If your native language is not English, then you would want them to work in your country right?

Luckily, photography is infinitely more accessible than the stuff that pays the bills. So please, take some time off from your day of ignoring my blog posts to do the world a favor and vote for this photo on JPG magazine (and tell your friends to too):

“Time eats itself” by andreiz

It’s a great photo and utterly appropriate with the theme of the month. My only complaint with it is he should have gotten with the bandwagon on photos like this and LOMO’d the sucker beyond recognition. I can almost recognize what it is.

[Andrei and photography after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on March 4, 2007 by tychay 4

Using a photo

I got an e-mail today in which someone asked to use a photo of mine for a Christmas prayer.

This use is well within my creative commons license, but it’s always a nice touch when I’m shown how my photos are used. Besides, I always had a soft spot for Episcopalians. 🙂

I noticed they’re using Joomla as their CMS. That’s interesting. Their template seems to be missing deep links, though.

[More of photo usage after the jump]
Continue reading →

Posted on December 23, 2006 by tychay 1

Postprocessing in outdoor photography

In an internal mailing list, a friend sent around these photos. Here is one:

The interesting thing was back in February, Mark Jen sent those same shots to me and the graphics design department. I composed a reply, but never posted it. I guess I better do something about that.

Very striking images! How did they take such amazing “postcard” shots? Are they real?

I guess it depends on your definition of real. It’s actually pretty easy to get that postcard look. Here’s an example from a photo I took:

Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls
Yosemite National Park, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G DX
UV
1/500sec @ f/9, iso 800, 35mm (52mm)

[A discussion of capture and editing of landscape photos after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on December 6, 2006 by tychay 6

A body is meant to be seen…

Seen while getting some brandy for my apples…

A body is meant to be seen…
Safeway, Sunnyvale, California

Lumix DMC-LX1
unprocessed raw
1/13 sec @ f/2.8, iso 200, 6.3mm (28mm)

“Like the starlet, a bottle of good Merlot is generally soft, sensuous, and uncomplicated—offering the ripe, jammy fullness of a fine Cabernet Sauvingnon without its complexity or tannic backbite. It is the wine equivalent of Monroe’s sultry, dulcet voice signing “Happy birthday, Mr. President.”—not intellectually engaging but a delight nonetheless.”
—Mark Oldman, “Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine”

Hmm, sounds a lot like my conference talks. Which, coincidentally, are about the only time I get to drink merlot.

[more random thoughts after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on November 16, 2006 by tychay 2

Beanbags at Plaxo

Mark sent this to me, with the title: “Ahh… $700 well spent :)”

Photo by Mark Jen

Posted on September 21, 2006 by tychay 1

The Woodwork

You tell that other boy, not to touch the woodwork