Mighty Wingman

I was reminded of this Coors Light commercial (which I guess I've never posted, because it's older than my first blog entry), while watching an episode of Flight of the Conchords on HBO while I was making black sesame ice cream last night.

The episode involved a gender role-reversal, in which the two guys try to date two girls who work at a bakery. One of them (Jemaine) asks the other (Bret) to be the wingman, but while Bret has all the luck with the girls, Jemaine couldn't get either girl interested in him.

Bret's (eventual) date turns out to be very aggressive, behaving like what's typically described of guys--The other girl went along as her wingman. When it became clear that Bret didn't want to have sex with her after only two dates, she told him that she has to ship out for war in Iraq so that he'd have sex with her. She's done in five minutes, then falls asleep. When Bret encounters her again at the shop, she claims that they changed her schedule, and that she'd have to ship out the day after, then saying that they both used each other and dumps him. As Bret and Jemaine leave, she's seen high-fiving the other girls in the shop and mocking Bret.

I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way

This is quite impressive. Here you see the guy in the process of mapping real human textures onto the cartoon Jessica Rabbit character. You can get the full-sized picture here.

He's also done the same for Homer Simpson and Mario (of the Super Mario Bros.).

Aliph Jawbone

I got myself a new Bluetooth headset and a new cell phone... Primarily, because my old headset's battery had to be charged every other day--too often to my liking. So I bought the Aliph Jawbone, CNet's highest rated Bluetooth headset for cell phones.

It has such a high rating for two things--"Noise Shield" and "Audio Enhancement." Both work great. However, there are several caveats to using the headset.

As you can see from the above picture, the top cover came off. How did this happen? While trying to remove the charger. Chalk this one to bad design and lack of documentation. There's no "release button" or anything like that on the charger, but you're not supposed to just pull the thing off the headset, despite there being no instructions on charger removal in the owner's manual. Only after contacting their support staff, am I given proper instructions for removal.

1. With the top of the Jawbone facing up, hold the Jawbone in one hand.
2. With your other hand, grasp the cap of the USB charger cable on the top and bottom (not the sides) with your thumb and forefinger.
3. Gently bend the cap of the USB charger cable downward and away until the Jawbone is disengaged.

Without these instructions (which, as of this posting, cannot even be found in the FAQ section of their website), you're likely going to get the top pulled off eventually.

The next caveat, which is probably the first thing anyone would notice on a non-broken unit--the design and size. This is just a quick comparison of size...

All of the "professional" reviews I've read for the Jawbone talk about how good the Jawbone looks. I do not concur. They also do concede on its large, bulky size. On that, I do concur.

As you can see, not only is the Jawbone larger in terms of surface area, it is also much thicker.

Not surprisingly, the Jawbone looks huge when worn properly.

Still, the most important thing about a headset is that it should work properly. Looks are secondary. As I've mentioned earlier, what this unit is top-rated for, works great. Also, despite its apparent size, it's still quite light--at 0.5 ounces, it is by no means heavy.

Noise Shield--Jawbone identifies your voice (through an "activity sensor" that must make contact with your face), and eliminates virtually all other sounds, so the other side of the line can hear exactly what you're saying.

Audio Enhancement--Jawbone monitors the volume of the noise around you, and adjusts the volume of the headset accordingly, so that you should be able to hear your call even if you're surrounded by loud noises.


But that brings us to the next caveat. Jawbone is apparently very susceptible to the many radio frequencies around us, as after pairing it with my Z520a (a Cingular phone, which Jawbone all but promised to work well with), it would constantly drop the Bluetooth connection--even though they are sitting right next to each other. After the connection is dropped, the phone will try to find it again, and reconnect, only to have the connection drop again 20 seconds later. This often continues for 10 to 20 minutes, until the phone finally gives up trying.

During this time, however, the phone's battery is considerably drained. Whereas before, I could keep the phone on standby for about 4 days before I had to charge it again, with the constant searching of the Bluetooth device, the battery needs to be charged again the very next day... which rather defeats my purpose in getting a new Bluetooth headset. And since the Z520a never dropped the connection to my previous two Bluetooth headsets, I know the problem is not the phone.


However, upon getting a new phone--I was up for a free upgrade, and wanted a new phone anyway--Jawbone does work much better with it, and hasn't dropped the connection once... it basically means anyone buying the Jawbone has to be very careful about what phone they have, as I've read about many other phones that don't pair well with Jawbone.


As mentioned earlier, I've contact their support staff--more about the broken cover than about the Bluetooth connection. Although they were initially very quick to respond, giving me instructions on requesting an RMA, they've yet to respond to the RMA request, even though they mentioned that I should be getting a response within one business day. Two business days later, I still had no response.

GoPhone

What normally would have been a corny commercial has become awesome because of Meat Loaf.

Flickr Video

Earlier today, I read that Flickr is now beginning to offer video hosting to its "pro" members. That's almost perfect timing, as I had only just started to make more videos with my digital camera, and was not sure about uploading them along with the other stuff I've got on my YouTube account.

The current limit is for 90-second videos, not larger than 150 megabytes in file size. For the moment, that length is sufficient for me, as none of the recent videos I took exceed that length. The saxophone solo from my uncle, on the other hand...

The upside is that, as you can see, the resolution of the embedded videos seem to be higher with Flickr video than YouTube (although you can also get higher quality playbacks from YouTube if watch it directly from the site). Hopefully they'll be able to offer the full resolutions of the uploaded videos in the future, like they do now with pictures.

I also read that it takes AVI, MOV, and MPEG files. Wasn't sure if that included MP4s that I've converted to work with my PSP--which, coincidentally, I've just made a 720x480 conversion of last night. Perfect for me to test with, and it worked, so that's good to know.

Hillary and Barack, sitting in a tree...

Neeerrrrds!

In case you don't know, LARP = Live Action Role-Playing.

Here's an example:

So wrong

Internet People

We like the moooon~~~

I've been wanting to take pictures of the night moon with my new camera ever since I got it. Unfortunately, at first I couldn't get the settings right. Then after the eclipse, it's been nearly a month before it was visible in the night sky long enough for me to photograph it (it had already set by the time I got home from work for the past few weeks).

Well, not tonight. Tonight, I got it. The picture on the left was taken with flash fired, while the one on the right was taken without flash. Of course, flash would not reach something as far away as the moon, but I was hoping it would decrease the exposure time. (The moon is quite bright, so longer exposures with the camera would result in pictures with just light, and no details.) Alas, it did not, but the results are still interesting. As you can see, the moon appears with more of a golden hue when the flash was fired, and is closer to the color we're used to seeing with the naked eye.

Once again, feel free to compare with my previous attempt. It should be noted that in this previous entry, the picture where the moon is smaller... was taken with my 5-megapixel Minolta camera, while the the one where the moon appears to be larger was taken with my 2-megapixel Panasonic (with 12× optical zoom). The 2-megapixel camera's moon looks almost as big as the 7.2- megapixel counterpart! (It is still smaller, but the resultant size might have more to do with the angle of the moon than anything else. It also lacks the detail that can be seen from my new camera.)

Um... What?

...

Cell Phone Towers

Sometime last year, I noticed a cell tower very close to where I live as I was driving home--Most of the time I take a different route home, and it's also often dark by the time I get home, so I don't know how long it's been there before I noticed it.

Then, about a month ago, I noticed another one, only about a block away from the first one...
I've circled the cell towers in this satellite map from Google Maps. You can see the long shadows each tower casts...

And for perspective, the same map, without satellite imagery. I've overlaid the same circles to mark the locations of these towers.

For the curious, these cell towers were "disguised" as very tall trees. The one on the left is an AT&T cell tower. I didn't get close enough to the other one to see which wireless carrier it's for, or if it's for multiple carriers.

Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon

In case you don't know, Jimmy Kimmel is the host of the late night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, on ABC. As a running gag, he often ended his show with apologies to Matt Damon, because they ran out of time and had to bump his appearance on the show. They took the joke further when Matt Damon was finally scheduled for an appearance...

At the premiere of Ocean's Thirteen:

Prior to the release of The Bourne Ultimatum:

Not too long ago, Jimmy's girlfriend, comedian Sarah Silverman, was on his show, and they extended this joke with the following music video:

And last night, on the post-Oscar show, Jimmy Kimmel showed this reply video:

Example of Range

Most digital cameras have "3× optical zoom," which is really only adequate if you never need to take shots from a long range. Having "10× optical zoom" means being able to get that close-up shot from the back of the room, without getting out of your seat to block other people's view. Or get a good look at something you can barely make out with your naked eye.

So here, an example of the zoom in use from pictures I snapped at Taipei 101:

This was taken without using any zoom.

The zoom in this photo is around 3.4×, which is slightly higher than what most digital cameras are capable of.

At 10× zoom. Also note that these pictures were sized down for Blogger, so the original, 7.2 megapixel picture is almost twice the size of the 1600×1200 images you see here (and about 8 time larger than the thumbnail images in this post).

Wide angle

I've been wanting to do this for a while now--since my new camera has a "wide-angle lens"--to take pictures with the new camera, and with the old camera, from the same place, to see the difference in how much you can see from a regular camera, as compared to a wide angle camera.

This was taken with my old Minolta:

And this is with my new Panasonic:
Of course, neither one is being displayed at their full resolution, as Blogger doesn't allow pictures larger than 1600x1200.

Why is this wide angle important? Well, for instance, if you were hanging out with a group of friends, do you need to get some extra space in order to fit all of your friends into the frame? Sometimes you might not have that extra space available to you. When the camera has a wider angle, you won't need as much of that extra space.