Punk music is a joke, it’s really just Baroque

Following the theme of an earlier post on recycled chords, here’s a YouTube video of Rob Paravonian ranting about Pachelbel’s Canon in D.  Totally cracked me up.

85

She is 85 and I met her on my medical mission trip to Cambodia in August. Sign-language goes a long way when you don’t speak the khmer and she was very proud to tell me that she was 85. Indeed, there was a lot for her to be thankful for. There aren’t that many old people – for obvious reasons.

I took about 1,000 photos on that trip and I really wonder what is the best way to use them. I sent some over to Cambodia as Christmas presents – some good portrait shots of the children might be the only photo they have.

It humbles me that at any one given moment I have at least 2 cameras on me – my mobile phone and my palm and can travel with up to 4, including the dSLR and my regular point-and-shoot. What am I doing with all this technology and how can it be used to bless people who don’t even own 1 decent photo?

(To be fair, this lady is relatively well-off. Our main mission work was in a dump-site community in the inner city. That experience really put my life in harsh perspective. More photos on that when I get a chance.)

What the Duck.

Click here for more of Aaron Johnson’s amusing online comic strip. Will appeal to photographers and duck-lovers.

The Rules of Photography

Thanks to Digg, I came across this lovely article, which gives readers a couple of great photography basics. I’d heard about the whole “rule of thirds” thing before but seeing it applied to an actual photo was quite a revelation.

(I’m sure this is all pretty obvious information and one day, when I am a photography snob, I will roll my eyes at this. But for now, there is no such luxury and us beginners need all the help we can get!)

Also pretty cool, the podcasts from tipsfromthetopfloor.

My 4-chord repertoire

I play crummy guitar so my entire repertoire probably only has 4-chord songs in them so it was quite a revelation to find out that so many songs could be played with C, G, Am, F. Actually, seeing this video brings me some measure of comfort about my sore lack of guitar skills. Ahh… what you can create with a couple of chords and some music theory.

(Of course, if you were a *real* musician – unlike me, this won’t surprise you and you would figure out pretty quick that the progression (I-V-VI-IV) is really quite common.)

PS: How random is Benny’s video-gaming mate on the bean bag chair?

Whee!

 

I foresee hours of time-wasting fun with this nifty thing:  Line Rider.

It’s not exactly a game, since there’s no score and no real objective.  But there is a pencil tool and Mr Line Rider with his spiffy red scarf and virtual sled.  Basically, you “draw” in a bunch of hills and slopes and other terrain/obstacles.  Then click play and with the help of some basic laws of physics (like gravity!), Mr Line Rider zooms along the course till he swerves into something/crashes/loses momentum/falls of a cliff!

During my first attempt, I drew from the top-right to the bottom left, which left Mr Line Rider pummeling horribly to his death pretty quickly. (I don’t actually know if he dies. I was too horrified and quickly closed the window!) It turns out that a pre-requisite to using this is the ability to read and follow instructions. But once you get the hang of it, you’ve just opened the door to some bizarrely addictive entertainment.  (Not surprisingly, the popularity of this thing has just exploded.)

Some people are pretty hardcore. Check out the links on YouTube here.  It’s great to see what you can do with a bunch of lines and a couple of simple rules.

 

Decoupled

I was watching an archived clip of Bono on TEDTalks. He talked about how technology has closed the gap between dreaming and doing, about how imagination and idealism have been decoupled by the old constraints. The idea of technology marrying idealism with pragmatism fills me with hope.

I think I’ll let that thought linger in my mind for a while.

Link: The One Campaign

Dictionaries are the vodka of literature

I’d been meaning to slip a post in about Erin McKean and the earlier post on the Oxford Word of the Year seems to be a good enough excuse since she is the editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

She spoke at Pop!Tech and absolutely blew me away with her casual, witty style. I mean seriously, who ever thought that a talk about language research and dictionaries could be this much fun? I really did think of lexiographers as the pronunciation police. (Actually, I didn’t think about lexiographers and dictionaries very much at all.) But thanks to Erin, I now think dictionaries are like vodka. Distilled literature – “odorless, colorless, tasteless but really powerful. And it goes great with Red Bull.” (Her fantastic words, not mine)

And just because she asked us to, the word of the day is “erinaceous“.

Photography anxiety attacks

I used to have one of those manual-zoom, film cameras. I’ll always remember the frustration of trying to take a picture of my friends standing on a bridge yet being unable to zoom in any more because that would mean one foot in the water. But it was a real work-horse (it bounced down the stairs on more than one occasion) and once you got used to the technical limitations of the camera, it did what it was supposed to do and everybody was happy.

In a single, ambitious over-estimation of my own technical skills, I decided to upgrade and bought myself a Nikon D70. It’s not the world’s most sophisticated camera but when your old camera doesn’t even zoom, switching to a dSLR and getting your head around aperture settings and shutter-speed is a real challenge.  So now, I own a beauty of a camera but am basically too stupid to use it!  Instead of being limited by my camera, my camera is limited by me!!  The only half-decent thing I can do is portrait shots (or in the words of a friend “face big big, background blur blur”).  

Unfortunately, I’ve also volunteered myself to take photos at various Christmas events. I’m now getting anxiety attacks about unforgiving florescent lighting and unflattering photos. Oh dear.

I think I may need to read the manual…

The Oxford Word of 2006 is “carbon neutral”

Al Gore must be pretty happy about this and if you haven’t already, check him out on TED talks. So great to see his wit, passion and energy. Where was *this* guy at the elections?

Anyway, I like the idea of a self-enforced responsibility for your greenhouse gas emissions – like correcting a negative externality, no? The idea is that you do what you can to reduce the polluting emissions and for what you can’t reduce, you purchase offsets. These offsets in turn go to funding projects that work towards reducing emissions (solar panels, wind farms, tree planting… you get the idea).

I guess “Carbon neutral” being the Oxford word of 2006 means that the green movement has moved beyond the realm of the tree-hugging hippy and is reaching ordinary people. Not that we don’t love the tree-huggers. But the more people looking critically at how they can live in an environmentally sustainable way, the better.

Click here to calculate your carbon footprint.