Tonight, I had my first pad thai in Thailand at Thip sa mai / Pad Thai Pra Tu Phe. It was quite an experience: chefs work furiously at large woks near the sidewalk while patrons sit inside at modest tables. Once the pad thai is cooked, a single portion is thrown onto a special wok and wrapped in a thin layer of egg — a feat which takes only 4-5 seconds. I switched to slow-motion mode to better capture the crazy cooking. I’m sure I’ll assemble something for the web eventually; until then, here’s a little preview.
UPDATE, JULY 13: I’ve replaced the video file with a longer edit.
I’ve been cursing AVCHD ever since it started showing up in camcorders and still cameras that shoot video. I don’t really understand why it exists. Although its file and folder specification claims to be compatible with Blu-ray, it doesn’t seem likely that the majority of casual video shooters will choose to archive video content from cameras directly onto Blu-ray discs, and AVCHD’s awkward multiple-folder storage structure makes it extremely difficult to work with in video editing workflows.
Some cameras save video directly to MP4 files or have the option to do so (everyone video person I know loves this). But on many cameras (e.g. Sony Cybershot TX7) the highest-quality video format is AVCHD-only. Frustrating! (read more »)
Actually, she was really friendly, but was clearly a nightmare traveler. She put all of her belongings in the seat between us and constantly fidgeted with her bags and travel accessories (e.g. a blanket, 3 pillows behind her, 1 pillow on her lap, and some sort of powder mixed in a water bottle).
Twitter activity from 12 hours ago:
The neurotic woman next to me on SFO-NRT just went on a rampage, closing 6 overhead vents near her (in 2 rows). I turned mine back on.
SFO-NRT seat-mate: “I watched you book your seat online. My seat is very important to me.” Okaaaay…
A short from the St. Lawrence String Quartet’s 2010 Summer Chamber Music Seminar at Stanford University. I only shot a little video during the 10-day seminar because I was focused on shooting stills, but I had enough to mash it together into this little piece.
St. Lawrence String Quartet Seminar 2010 group photo (zoom in for more fun)
I posted a bunch of photos from the SLSQ Chamber Music Seminar 2010 over on Facebook (public link). If you’re not on Facebook, you can see all of the photos here in this journal entry (apologies: it’s bandwidth-intensive!). You can also download hi-res versions of the group photos (click on the image you want and then select “O” for original image).
Special thanks to the other members of my group, Alex Li and Heidi Hau, and to all of the coaches and folks who made the seminar possible. See you next year! (read more »)
I’ve been intrigued by iSCSI for some time now. I currently have a ReadyNAS Pro with 6.5TB of usable, redundant storage space. Today, I created a 20GB iSCSI volume on the ReadyNAS Pro and used globalSAN to initiate a connection from my Mac Pro (partitioned and formatted using HFS+ Journaled). I copied 10GB of Canon 5D Mark II RAW files to the volume and imported the images into a Lightroom library (stored on my local file system).
After using the library for a little while, I have concluded that I cannot tell the difference in speed between storing my images locally and on an iSCSI volume on the ReadyNAS Pro. In theory, I could store my entire RAW image archive on the NAS box and work off of the network.
There are two issues stopping me from going with this set up:
I’d have to set up an additional NAS box to back up the working NAS box. I’m too paranoid to be comfortable with storing files on only one machine, even if it uses a RAID.
The ReadyNAS’ maximum iSCSI volume size is 2TB. I don’t like managing multiple volumes, and would rather have a single large volume.
At the moment, my Mac Pro contains two 4TB data volumes plus SSD boot and swap disks. Crashplan continuously backs up my data volume to the NAS, and each night, the data volume is automatically synchronized to the local backup volume (that’s three copies, locally).
Since I’m about to exceed the capacity of my current (local) 4TB data partition, I may end up just changing my RAID configuration to a single 8TB stripe, which would be backed up to my NAS box over gigabit (traditional share — not iSCSI). Having good backups makes me feel secure using a 4-disk stripe, and since I’m starting to do more video work, the local speed boost would be useful.
In any case, it’s good to know that iSCSI is an option for the future — it’s certainly less expensive and complicated than setting up a SAN over Fibre Channel (which I’m wired for). When the ReadyNAS supports >2TB iSCSI volumes, I may go that route.
Struggling to empty my email inbox. Too much chamber music: sleepy, and left trapezius is sore. #
Charlotte is a bad influence. Going to In 'n Out for post-dinner snack. #
@alexkingorg "settled on a BlackBerry for PIM and email, and an iPhone for camera, web and apps" –funny, "phone" is not mentioned at all :) in reply to alexkingorg#
@alexkingorg I've got a HTC Incredible on Verizon. Calls work well. Apps & web work well. I stopped thinking about my phone and just use it. in reply to alexkingorg#
Hulu Plus will be $9.99, and will be available on computers, game consoles, tablets, handsets, and more. http://ech.cc/ceT7RW#
1. Select 49 images to upload to Facebook. 2) Firefox on Mac freezes while using 125% CPU. Facebook's fault, or Firefox's fault? #
@manukumar I've been using dimmable VHO fluorescents for awhile, but haven't seen good CFLs. Mine have huge ballasts & want own circuit. in reply to manukumar#
I recently expanded my ReadyNAS Pro to 6.422 terabytes! It took 2 days because I had to add the two 2TB disks one by one, but it’s finally (almost) done.
Now, dare I convert the data volume on my main machine from 4TB to 8TB? At the moment I have two 2-disk striped volumes that are 4TB each. One backs up to the other every night, which provides peace of mind (along with ReadyNAS backup, that’s 3 spinning copies of important data in-house). I could stripe the four 2TB drives in my main machine into a 8TB volume, but I’d have to upgrade the ReadyNAS again to provide enough local backup space.
The other solution is to wait for bigger drives to come out, but I only have 100GB left on my main data volume — I’m cutting it close. I could also investigate using iSCSI and dual-gigabit LACP…
Today, I went through one of my old Aperture libraries and fixed some of the corrupted image entries. This post addresses the specific case of referenced files in Aperture spontaneously pointing themselves at other images on the disk. In my case, I opened up an old library from 2 years ago, and 61 images spontaneously pointed themselves at images I took just a couple months ago.
I didn’t have time to manipulate the SQLite database directly, so I had to re-import the corrupted images manually. (read more »)
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