Earth from Space.

I remember hearing as a child how the Great Wall of China was one of the few man made structures visible from space.  And then I saw all these National Geographic published photos of the earth, all blue and green.  They didn't have night shots back then.  This is incredible.

 
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Capture One 6.3: A Performance Review

Shortly before moving out of California, I noticed that the latest version of Capture One (C1) uses OpenCL. Capture One 6 was announced last December, so it was well over half a year at that point, and I was really surprised that I hadn't heard any buzz about it, especially from the NVIDIA or AMD marketting machines. You would think either would leap at the chance to sell more GPUs. Although GPUs could make RAW editing a whole lot smoother, NVIDIA has never paid serious attention to the photography market. I'm assuming someone must have crunched the numbers and determined that it was too niche a market to address. I know that there was some investigation at some point, which determined that the speedup for processing RAW was not significant enough. This was mostly because part of the RAW decode was done on the CPU, and memory transfer times between CPU and GPU nullified much of the benefit of the GPU decode. I suspected though, that the analysis didn't really reflect real-world situations where users would want to upload the video to the GPU once, and decode the RAW multiple times as they adjusted various settings. This would be a huge improvement for photo editing apps and make the UI much smoother. It looks like Phase One has gone and done that, at least to a degree.

So it's been about a month since I've gotten back, and I've barely touched my pictures in that time. I decided finally to sit down and give Capture One 6 a shot, since I switched over to Lightroom a couple of years ago. The software is already up to version 6.3. I used the trial version, so I could check out Pro. I was curious about some of he features, especially the advanced noise reduction and local adjustments. I'm running on Windows 7 SP1 64-bit, on a Core i7 930 with 12GB of RAM, and a motley assortment of hard disks. I tried using both a GF106 (GeForce GTS450 or Quadro 2000) as well as a GF100 (GeForce GTX 470 or Quadro 6000). I'm playing with full resolution RAW images shot on a Canon 5D MarkII. While I was pretty happy with C1 versions 2 and 3 for dealing with images from my Rebel and Rebel XTi on an old Athlon system, the huge images from the 5DMk2 has put some annoying lag into the workflow, that never went away even after upgrading to the i7.

OpenCL Benefits
C1 allows you to turn on and off OpenCL support in the Edit\Preferences dialog. There's a setting for OpenCL, either Auto or Never (this setting doesn't appear if your system doesn't have an OpenCL driver). Other than the setting, there's no other indicator that OpenCL is being used. There's information in a Phase One knowledgebase article on when OpenCL is used, it's pretty accurate, but not very detailed.

After poking around with the OpenCL setting enabled/disabled, I figured OpenCL is only used for processing the pixels onscreen when viewing a RAW file. This is pretty limited, but it does provide some noticeable benefits that do impact my workflow.

1. the view updates much quicker when switching between images, particularly when zoomed in
2. the view updates much qucker when making adjustments, particularly when zoomed in

*1 Given that these were all visual changes, it was difficult to give any benchmark measurements. Situation 1 was where I noticed the most measurable differences. When switching from one image to another on CPU only, the new image would load in very blurry, then get less blurry, then crisp. There was also about a 0.5 second delay before the image changed at all, but that happened with both CPU and GPU, so I'm going to ignore that in the comparision. My rough attempts at measuring the time with a stopwatch makes it look like this: new image appears very blurry -> 0.5 seconds -> less blurry -> 1 second -> crisp, so it would take almost 2 seconds every time I changed from one image to the next. It gets painful if you're sorting through 150 images after some sort of shoot. The first 0.5 second delay after the keypress was there on every GPU, so I'm going to ignore that, and focus on the first delay after the image appears, and the second delay when it becomes clear.

GPU behavior looked the same, but upon closer inspection it looks liek the pipeline was different. Instead of going from "very blurry"->"less blurry"->crisp, it went through a "blurry"->"crisp"->"denoised/sharpened" stages. It was barely any time at all on either GPU to get from blurry to crisp. I'll say 0.2 seconds. Additionally, the final "denoise/sharpen" stage seemed to vary a bit depending on the zoom level. Initially I thought the speed depended on the GPU, but then I noticed that in zoom levels > 100%, it looked like it would do some sort of denoise, while if the zoom < 100%, it would sharpen. The sharpen (at low zoom) would take about 1 second on both GPUs (I'm guessing it was actually performed on the CPU). The denoise seemed to take about 0.5 second on the GF106, and was nearly instantaneous on the GF100.

For Zoom < 100

Processor	Time to Clear Image	Total time for Final Image (including initial delay)
CPU	1.8	2.3
GF106	0.2	2
GF100	0.2	2

For Zoom > 100

Processor	Time to Clear Image	Total time for Final Image (including initial delay)
CPU	1	1.5
GF106	0.2	1
GF100	0.2	0.3

*2 When making adjustments with the sliders, it was noticeably smoother on the GPUs than the CPU, though even the GPU wasn't perfectly smooth. It also depended on the setting. For example, adjusting Exposure was reasonably smooth on the CPU, and wasn't too much smoother on the GPU. The Moire slider though, which was completely un-smooth on the CPU, showed a marked difference. The biggest difference however, was that when zoomed in, the CPU version of Exposure, Curves, and Colour would use the preview sized image while adjusting. Once you move the slider, the image would get downsampled and blurry to show the adjustments, and then come back into focus. The GPU version would remain in focus the whole time. The GF100 was a bit smoother than the GF106. This isn't something you'd notice initially, since it just seems like the way it ought to be. But if you go back to the CPU version, it's horrible.

Things that don't improve with OpenCL
For all the improvements, there are a lot of things that don't improve, and really reduce the effectiveness of the OpenCL implementation. As I've already mentioned, it looks like there's a CPU sharpening pass that slows down the image rendering. Other noticeable items are:

- Speed depends on whether the image is cached. The numbers above are the best case. If you switch to an image that isn't cached, it could take a few seconds to read from disk, regardless of your CPU or GPU. This actually happens a lot, so you don't really get the optimized speeds listed above unless you're going back and forth between a set of images.
- JPEGs don't go through the GPU pipeline, so if you happen to have JPEG thumbnails, sorting through them will slow you down, even though scrolling through RAWs is now faster.
- Zooming in isn't sped up, you still see a bunch of pixelated pixels for half a second before the proper pixels are displayed.
- Panning isn't sped up, so when you move the image over, you get a bunch of new pixelated pixels for half a second before the proper pixels are displayed.
- Final rendering doesn't take advantage of the GPU. You might get a slight improvement if they're going on in the background, since the CPU is a little less busy with the UI.

Shoehorned in
As I mentioned initially, it looks like Phase One took whatever was visible onscreen, and sped up the processing of that bitmap using OpenCL. This makes sense given that they have an existing codebase, This means they don't have to start from scratch, and they can reuse existing functions like their CPU sharpening algorithm. The problem is that their original design is based on the fact that processing many pixels is processor intensive, so they optimize by only processing the pixels onscreen. Trying to shim the GPU using their existing design is rather limiting. They're most likely sending the visible bitmap to the GPU for OpenCL processing, which is fast. Then I suspect they're copying back down to system memory so that it can fit right back into their existing pipeline and have the CPU finish whatever work it needed to do. There's a few items that are sped up, but they're far from perfect, and in the grand scheme of things, they perceived improvement is just not that spectacular given the bottlenecks.

The ideal design to take full advantage of the GPU would be to upload the entire image to video memory, and manipulate it in video memory using the GPU, and display it, without copying it back down to system memory. With GPU memories being typically 512MB or 1GB+ these days, it should be a problem to fit multiple 20MP images in video memory. Making copies of the images is much faster on the GPU as well, since video memory tends to be 3-10x as fast as system memory. The result would be much smoother performance in adjustments, as well as smooth zooming and panning.

The main drawback, and I suspect the reason Phase One didn't go down this route, is that it requires rewriting the entire application. All the complicated image processing algorithms would need to be rewritten. Not only that but they'd need to maintain both pipelines. It's hard to argue against this. While technically far superior, this would mean twice the work. Phase One would need twice the sales to justify it. If C1 was fully GPU accelerated, I'd probably switch to it over Lightroom. One strong argument is that an i3 laptop with a midrange GPU could outperform a much more expensive i7 system. It's quite possible that C1 could take a sizeable share of the Lightroom market if their app is that much faster and smoother.

They could also potentially support one pipeline with OpenCL (or CUDA), and rely on CPU implmentations when the user does not have a GPU.

A third, weak argument to design C1 around GPU processing is that the CPUs on forthcoming Wiin8 tablet PCs will be rather weak. A GPU solution would far smoother, especially for allowing the user to drag the image around with their fingertips. A RAW editing app on a tablet would be great, but I suspect it would HAVE to be GPU oriented. Problem is none of the tablet GPUs are particularly programmable yet. We'd probably have to wait another generation - I suspect late 2012, and at this point I wouldn't know whether CUDA, OpenCL or DirectX 12 would be the way to go.

Other Bottlenecks
The other major bottleneck in C1 is the disk while rendering final images. The rendering is done purely on CPU. Tests across the multiple GPUs showed the same time, roughly 3:20 for 30 RAWs from a 5D MarkII. On a quad core i7, the CPU cycled between 0-100% load. The average was only maybe 50%. I suspected the bottleneck was my disk, so I tried using two disks, using one as the source, and the other as the destination. That made no difference. What I did notice was that C1 was writing to 8 output JPEGs at once. Most likely, the thrashing caused by this was limiting performance. The disk output was pretty slow, maybe 1-5MB/s, probably due to the thrashing. Phase One may be relying on their customers to purchase SSDs or use RAID arrays, but if they queued up their disk writes, it could potentially halve their rendering time on quad-core CPUs.

As a side note, I probably bought the wrong components on my PC. With a quad core i7 and 12GB of RAM, I rarely saturate the CPU (only when compiling using MSVC), or the RAM (only when running multiple VMs). Very few apps seem to be optimized for a fast CPU and lots of RAM. I had though that the extra RAM would mean fewer disk accesses, but there's still many cases (like both C1 and Lightroom) where I'm disk bound, with plenty of free memory.

Other notes on C1
Capture One LE was my first RAW workflow application, and I'm probably biased towards it because of that. I never fully got used to Lightroom's model with different modes, and the Lightroom's export to JPEG always felt a little weird, since the UI features rendering for print or web, and I never do either. When C1 was redesigned with the new .NET based UI, there were a number of things that turned me off, and I eventually switched over to Lightroom. I always organized my RAW files in folders by date. I hated the way C1 would put its working folder into every one of my folders. I loved the way the older C1 let me put all my final output files as subfolders of the image folders - now this seems to be available in the Pro version only. I find this seriously annoying.

In addition to those annoyances, the slowness of C1, the poor noise reduction, and the spot healing tool led me over to Lightroom. The OpenCL support has definitely improved the performance. The noise reduction seems much improved as well, though I haven't played with it enough to really judge it against Lightroom 3. There's a new spot removal tool that works pretty well. They've also added in keystone correction, which is only in the Pro version.

Right now I'm quite happy to use C1 Pro over LR3. It's $399 though, which is pretty steep unless it's discounted. There's a handful of features that I'd use in the Pro over Express - the output folder management, along with keystone correction, and maybe RGB curves. If they could come up with a third intermediate version that would match the LR3 feature set, that'd be perfect.

Canada vs. The World

Did a bit of research on current smartphone OS market share.

	Android	iOS	RIM	Symbian
Global	43%	18%	12%	22%
Canada	12%	31%	42%	6.4%
US	36%	26%	21%	1.9%

I assume the high adoption for Android and Symbian globally is because cheaper phones are more common in less wealthy countries. Canadians must be pretty well off, since they love their iPhones, and hate on Android. I'm not sure if the RIM-love is patriotism, deals between RIM and Bell/Rogers, or some kinda of duty implication that benefits RIM handsets. (US/Canada data from Comscore, Global data from Gartner)

Road Trip Day 11

The next few days will be a bit of a break from this vacation. That is, we've been going pretty much non-stop, from one city to the next. And while great fun, it's also a bit tiring. I'm sure most travellers have had that feeling at some point. Today we headed up to Chicago. We stopped by at the Arcade Pancake House in the town of Paxton, for some hearty small town grub and hospitality. The rest of the drive to Chicago was pretty straightforward. We first went downtown to Millennium Park, with its silver bean sculpture and animated fountains. We discovered though, that the parking was geared towards all-day parking. For example, the Millenium Park lot cost $17 for 0-8 hrs, the best deal we found was $14 for 1pm-midnight. Both were really expensive since we only planned to stay a short time.

The rest of the evening was spent hanging out with cousins. The next few days will be similar. We will however, find the end-of-Route 66 sign, there must be one around here.

Road Trip Day 10

I was to arrive in Chicago on the August 29th, but somehow I was a day ahead of schedule. To kill a bit of time, and inspired by the Whithers gallery, we went to visit the Lorraine Motel, where MLK Jr. was shot. It's been converted to the National Civil Rights Museum. On the whole drive over, I could hear U2's Pride playing in my head.

The museum was educational. I had read about Rosa Parks before, but the museum put many of the different parts of the civil rights movement together in perspective. It also helped that Memphis, unlike say Toronto and San Francisco, has a significant black population.

A few years ago, I had this sense that San Francisco was a city stuck in the past. It was obsessed with its significant history, especially in the Vietnam and hippie era. Many of the buildings were old, and I couldn't really see where the city was going. My view on the city has changed over the last two years, seeing the significant development in the Dogpatch area, as well as spate of new and fairly innovate restaurants. The start-up scene is picking up again as well.

It took me a while to see the development in SF, so I'm probably wrong with my two-day impression of Memphis, but I did get a feeling of a city somewhat stuck in the past. Most of the tourist destinations were celebrations of the 50s and 60s. The National Civil Rights Museum was beautiful. While the neighborhood around it was gentrifying, it still wasn't that well developed. There's probably some cool music going on in the hipster scene which we mostly glazed over. Memphis was a fun enough town to be worth visiting again, but I'd hope that the city that gave birth to rock and roll would get its groove back and give birth to something new again.

The rest of the day was a drive up north. It was about 9pm by the time we made it up to Champaign, Illinois, so we stopped there for the night. Having had a good few days of BBQ, we finally had some asian food at Arirang, apparently an old student hangout. The dol sot bibimbap was as good as any.

Road Trip Day 9

My priority in Memphis was to check out the local BBQ. It was a little hard to pick out an top BBQ joint in a town chock full of them. There were a few that were rated highly on Yelp!, Chowhound, and Urbanspoon, I ended up going to the Bar-B-Q Shop.

Now I'm no specialist in BBQ. I was told there was a wet style and a dry, and one was from Texas, and the other was in Memphis. I'm just as confused at this point, because they both seemed about equivalently dry. Bar-B-Q Shop had a special platter including brisket, pulled pork, ribs and BBQ spaghetti, which was perfect since it had everything I wanted to try! The ribs were served glazed, with a dash of dry rub on top for flavor. It was delicious, fall off the bone, juicy. It would definitley be in the running for the best ribs ever. The pulled pork and brisket though, were much leaner than I expected. The pulled pork was a bit moister, but the brisket was pretty much completely lean. Both had a great smoked flavour, but a bit more fat would have made both juicier. The supposedly award winning sauce was way too salty for me - as was the BBQ spaghetti. The spicy version was pretty good though.

We had passed by the Sun Records studio the previous evening, and we headed back after lunch for the tour. Known for the discovery of Elvis, and Johnny Cash, as well as a number of other blues greats, and the "birthplace of rock and roll", the tour was entertaining and informative. The studio was originally started in the 50s, recording blues and rock and roll acts that eventually became stars. It later declined, and was closed, but re-opened in the 80s, when a number of significant acts recorded there for its history, including part of U2's Rattle and Hum album.

We returned to the hotel, and took the downtown trolley to Beale St., Memphis' answer to Bourbon St. Lined with neon, bars, live music and crowds. It was plenty touristy, but also a lot of fun. One of the most interesting shops on the street was the Ernest Withers gallery, which covered both music artists, and the civil rights movement, including many photos of MLK Jr. We closed off the night in a bar, watching the Ghost City Blues Band live.

Road Trip Day 8

After a 500 mile+ driving day, we still have another 300 miles to go to Memphis. Already having cut north off of I40, I decided to take the side roads across Arkansas instead of driving back down to the main highway. For the majority, it was a single lane in each direction, twisting broadly through the Ozarks. The sides of the roads were mostly shrubs and fields, barns, but very few houses. There were many churches though, many of them "First"s. First Baptist, First Methodist, etc. etc. I'm not sure what happened to the Seconds or Thirds.

We were getting hungry after noon, and decided to stop, randomly in the town of Yellville. We passed by a Subway and local pizza place, which seemed promising, but I waited another half mile down the road, and we passed by Razorback Ribs, a promising local BBQ joint. I got a "tasting size" order, of 4 ribs, along with deep fried pickles, okra, and beans. I'm probably not the pickiest BBQ eater, since these ribs were just as great as the Texas ribs, though maybe not as meaty.

The total drive to Memphis was maybe 6 hours. At the end, we crossed over the Mississippi, into Tennessee and into town. There was a Tenessee welcome center at the first exit, we stopped by briefly, seeing the statue of Elvis, the statue of B.B. King, and a random guy picking through a trash can.

We tried out Chick-Fil-A, a fast food chicken burger joint, common in the South, and followed a NYT article around the "hipster" scene in Memphis, through two dive bars, somewhat empty (although, it was only 8:30 or so), and finally to the more upscale Mollie Fontaine, which had a great vibe, with two bars on two floors in an old Victorian home, and a baby grand piano in the living room.

Road Trip Day 7

It doesn't seem like a week since we've left. The days have been full, either of driving, sightseeing, researching tourist sites, eating, and occasionally attempting to catch up on emails and chatting briefly with friends. Day 7 started off with a debate of where to go. We could stop off in Oklahoma, but the most notable city was Oklahoma City, and we've been told by multiple parties that it's not a particularly exciting town. Alternatively, we could continue straight through to Little Rock, Arkansas, but we didn't know much of what to see there either. Finally we found an old New York Times article on 36 hours in Fayetteville, AK. It sounded interesting enough, so we made that our destination.

The storm from the previous night seemed to have blown over, with a lot of lightning, but not much thunder and just a bit of rain. The sky was clear and the temperature was rising. It was already in the mid-20s as we left, a little before 10am. We got back onto the I40, and just drove, watching the landscape change. For the first two hours, there was little variation. We were surrounded by flat fields of golden grass. Occasionally cows could be seen grazing. The radio stations contained mostly Christian and country stations - I'm not sure I noticed any spanish language stations anymore. As we crossed Texas into Oklahoma, we lost data access on Verizon. we stopped off for lunch at Lucille's Roadhouse off the highway, an American burger/diner/steakhouse kinda place running on the Route 66 theme. The patty melt and deep fried chicken bites were surprisingly tasty, for a roadside diner. While greasy, the portions weren't outstandingly huge, which made me feel a bit better. The temperature outside had jumped to 35C at this point, though as we got back on the road, the brush started appearing in the fields, first brown, then turning green. Green watered farm fields also began appearing. About four hours into the drive, we got to Oklahoma City, with surprisingly tall high rises in the plains of farmlands. About 15 minutes later, we were past the city. Route 66 would head northwards towards Tulsa, and onwards to Chicago. We would take the slightly longer route through to Memphis, but we'd eventually get to the east end of Route 66. The plains got steadily greener. Brush turned to trees and the plains got a little less flat.

By the time we got to Arkansas, another four hours later, the landscape reminded me a little of the Ontario countryside, with a highway cutting through small deciduous forests. The temperature had peaked at 37 somewhere through Oklahoma, though it was still stayed in the 30s. We finally got data access in Arkansas, and called up the Inn at the Mill in Johnson, just outside Fayetteville. It was featured in the NYT article, and was only $89 on a Thrusdays night. We finally broke off of the I40, which we had followed four states ago since LA. The highway curved through the foothills of the Ozarks, and the green hills rolled on into the distance. The Inn at the Mill was definitely the most beautiful hotel we had stopped at up to this point. It incorporated an old waterwheel mill as the main lobby, with a separate building for rooms, as well as another new glass building for their upscale restaurant. The aqueducts that fed the waterwheel were fashioned into mini waterfalls, and there was plenty of bubbling water running through the property. I had imagined Texas being a wealthy oil state, and Arkansas being somewhat of a backwater. In stark contrast, Amarillo seemed like a suburban, underdeveloped wasteland, and Fayetteville, a university town, a center of Confederate history and culture.

After checking in and showering, we drove down to Fayetteville. We stopped by the Confederate Cemetary for some photos on our way to downtown. The semester at the University of Arkansas starts next Monday, and students had began filling the town. Dickson St, the main street running through the town featured a variety of bars, pubs, and even one upscale lounge. There was a biker convention at one of the bars, with a lve band on their outdoor patio. There were at least two other live bands on other patios on the street though. We grabbed dinner at Hugo's a student burger joint with more going with the ambiance than the food, though the food was good enough. I had pretty low expectations for Arkansas, but this town was one of the nicest places to spend the night so far.

Road Trip Day 6

Having walked through downtown santa Fe last night, I didn't feel like we needed another full day, so we decided to move on to Amarillo. This would put us two days ahead of schedule. We spent the morning at the outdoor pool, making up for the hours of just sitting in the car, and eating American food.

I used Urbanspoon again look up a good brunch place. Harry's Roadhouse topped the list, but it was a ways out of downtown and close to the highway, so we walked back to browse some of the downtown shops a bit more before leaving. The shops were mostly closed the night before, so it was a bit different to actually walk into some of the shops. There were an abundance of art galleries, as well as shops selling kitschy knick-knacks. Native american themes were popular, but there was a huge variety as well, both in art and widgets.

While looking up hotels for Santa Fe, there were a lot of upscale options, upwards of $300 a night. It was interesting to note that the people browsing around town mostly seemed to be elderly and well off, or young and dressed like punks or white-trash. While walking around, the fancy hotels didn't really stick out. They must have been located outside of the downtown plaza a bit. Though not dumpy, the downtown didn't seem too upscale either, except for the prices on some of the pieces in some galleries, and the prices of the local gourmet cupcakes. Dream Cakes sold $4.50 cupcakes. That's $0.75 more than Los Angeles. Unfortunatly, it was closed for the one day we were in town, so we didn't get to sample it. Maybe that wasn't too unfortunate, otherwise I might need to do quite a few more laps at the pool.

By the time we got to Harry's, breakfast was no longer served. Dissapoined but hungry, we went for the lunch fare, which was still good, though mayber not amazing. Healthy options were available, which was a good thing, since dinner would be BBQ in Amarillo.

Most of the afternoon was on the road. Again, lightning flashed in the distance. We drove through two 3-minute downpours which cleaned off the windshield again. Otherwise, the drive was mostly sunny, straight, flat and boring. The landscape slowly got greener. First the brush, which eventually got replaced by trees and gold grass as we moved from New Mexico to Texas. The red mesas in the distance eventually disappeared into the rearview, and grazing cows and cornfields became the norm along the higway.

As we pulled into Amarillo, we stopped by the Cadillac Ranch, an art exhibit of sorts, of 10 Caddilacs half-buried vertically in a field. Around are strewn cans of spray paint. If you're lucky enough to find one that's not yet empty, you can contribute to the painting of the cars. After a few photos, we moved on to Tyler's Barbeque. We got in before closing, and had a taste of authentic Texan BBQ, complete with a smokey crust of dry rub over some tender, but extremely lean brisket, and some of the best ribs I've had. I would have preferried a fattier brisket, but overall the food was great, and pretty cheap. Tyler was very friendly, and came out to chat with the patrons of the order-at-the-counter restaurant. It wasn't as busy as I expected, but it was also earlier to closing time than I had expected. We had passed through another time zone without realizing it.

We didn't do much more exploring of Amarillo, but we did find a ghetto laundromat to do our laundry, while lightining flashed overhead, rather silently.

Road Trip Day 5

Entry here.

Road Trip Day 4

We didn't do much exploring in Flagstaff - there didn't appear to be much as we drove through in the evening. We started out a little earlier today, well rested. The first step was to grab food at McDonald's and Safeway, both in the same mall. Lunch would be sandwiches; I had packed some kitchen equipment in the car. We had planned to spend tonight camping in or near Petrified Forest National Park (PFNP), but given the daytime heat, and the flash thunderstorm last night, I decided to go the easy route and camp out in a hotel in Albuquerque instead. We'd have to leave PFNP earlier in the day, but it would put us half a day ahead of schedule on the rest of the drive. So far, it seemed like a good decision.

Route 66 goes all the way through Arizona, and we followed parts of it along the I40 from Flagstaff. The landscape had dried up a bit, and the greenery around the Grand Canyon area turned back into Mojave-like shrubs. Rock formations started peeking up through the desert soil and yellow sandstone mesas started appearing, first in the distance, then closer. The first stop on the drive was Meteor Crater. Along the highway, signs advertised AM 1610 on the radio, which contained a looped advertisement for the crater, as well as the town of Winslow. We took the 6 mile drive to the crater, but balked at the $15/person entrance fee, and dceided to take a photo from the distance. Next up along the route was the Jackrabbit Trading Post, a small curio shop just off the I40. I suspect the shop had seen better days, but as we pulled up, we were the only car in the lot. The store had an assortment of curios and Route 66 souvenirs, as well as a far back wall that had an assortment of suede moccasins, though the wall was about half empty. I remember as kids, we had bought mocassins on some road trip through Utah or Colorado. I wonder if it was at a similar trading post stop. This one had obviously seen better times.

A few years ago I had considered switching fields to photojournalism. In the process I had met a bunch of photographers, and some journalists. During that time, I heard a lot of stories of the glory days of photojournalism in the past. Those were the days when American photographers could be sent to exotic eastern countries, paid well, and put up in expensive hotels. They were the glory days of film, that fantastic medium that evokes nostalgia, but that simply doesn't compete with modern digital cameras. Still, I met photographers who swore they would never stop shooting film. That was a long aside, but the Jackrabbit Trading Post, a fossil stuck in time, refusing to move on, reminded me of the whole industry of journalism, as it struggles to adapt to an age where information flows much more freely through the internet.

The next bunch of fossils appeared at the PFNP. Immediately at the south entrance were petrified logs, behind the visitors' center. Along with giant sequoias and redwoods in California, the petrified forest was something I had read about a good 25 years ago, but had never been able to see until recent years. We had a picnic lunch under some corrugated metal picnic shades by the visitors' center, and spent the next two hours checking out the various sites along the main road. This park seemed like a smaller version of Death Valley. Some of the eroded desert landscapes were familiar, but the petrified logs and petroglyphs stood out. There were plenty of European tourists around, which was a bit different from the flood of Korean tourists in the LA area.

As we got back onto the I40 and headed eastward toward Albuquerque, the landscape got greener, and the mesas got redder. Again, lightning bolts struck far off in the distance in front of us. It was a 4 hour drive onwards to Albuquerque. We made it about halfway when we pulled off to check out Sky City, a native american casino. We probably should have waited until we got to the Route 66 Casino, which seemed far grander and flashy. The Sky City was far less impressive than the highway ads might have suggested (no surprise). The bathrooms were mighty clean, though the sharps disposal container (i.e. syringes) seemed odd. Either there were a lot of diabetics, or addicts. I'm guessing the former, given the number of elderly and obese people I saw around the place. As with most other casinos, the place felt dreary and depressing to me, though the large Bingo room was fairly full, and seemed a bit more social than the slots.

By the time we checked into the hotel and settled down, it was past 8pm, which actually meant that it was past 9pm, since we had passed one time zone. Downtown Albuquerque seemed a little on the sketchy side, most places being open being bars, pool halls, and a strip club. A quick Yelp! search for "late night" at the "current location" didn't turn up anything - most results were closed by 9pm. A Google search popped up an Urbanspoon page, which suggested Frontier restaurant, close to the University. College kids know how to eat cheap. The place was just 10 minutes away, and was still fairly busy. After ordering at the counter I watched fresh flour tortillas being made as I waited for our order. The soft tacos contained a ground meat mix, unlike Californian style carne asada tacos, but they were also served on a 12" flour tortilla, making thems pretty much like half-sized burritos for less than $3. The green chili was delicious, and the large came with two flour tortillas. The iced tea was also surprisingly good, with a strong black tea flavor. A hearty meal for two for $12.61 was pretty much a quarter of the price of dinner at Son of a Gun in L.A., which was a quarter of my last dinner in S.F. I'm pretty sure I'm hitting the bottom end of this trend.

Road Trip Day 3

While we had passed by the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica the day before, day 3 felt like the first day exploring the historic route. We took part of the old route 66 off of the I40 to Amboy, passing the non-extant town of Siberia, and the Amoby Crater along the way.

We also stopped off at Seligman for lunch. It was pretty much as expected, with touristy knick-knacks of a declining (actually, mostly dead) tourist route. The Roadkill Cafe was pretty much a gimmick, and we were hungry. The food was basic "american" fare, a BLT, and a chicken wrap. Both were reasonably well done for what they were, but the lack of truly "healthy" choices reminded me why America is so fat. The desert landscape, however reminded me how fortunate California is, with the wide variety of fresh local fruits, vegetables, livestock and seafood. Something like San Francisco's green "locavore" movement doesn't work nearly as well in Arizona, where it seems like there's a wide variety of desert shrubs. With all the sun though, I wonder if it might make sense to grow food in greenhouses here at some point.

There were a few hours of driving to go to the Grand Canyon. As we moved from the Mojave, up through the mountains, and to the plains of Arizona, there was a clear change in the landscape. The land flattened, the shrubs got slightly greener, but most tellingly little fluffy clouds appeared in the sky. San Francisco has its share of fog, but rarely cumulus clouds, and rarely so many.

I think the last time I had been to the Grand Canyon was when I first moved down to California, before I even started this blog. There had been a long hike that time, an adventure a battle of youth vs. nature, where youth fortunately prevailed. This time around was far lazier. For one thing, it took two and a half days to get there, and there was no hiking involved this time, except for the walk around the paved rim trail. We managed to catch a gorgeous sunset from one of the less crowded vantage points. Unlike the last time, the beauty was not marred by the concern of hiking in the darkness. What hadn't changed was the sense of grandeur staring down into the canyon, and across to the distant rim. The little fluffy clouds had gathered into a a giant dark cloud on the far North Rim. While it was relatively clear and peaceful where we stood, we could see distant lightning on the far rim.

While driving around the rim, we also happened on numerous elk. At one point, I spotted a huge stag, through the trees. We were driving along, not slowly, so the trees nearby whizzed by, but the stag stood tall and grand in the distance. It was a regal creature.

The drive back to Flagstaff in the dark was mostly uneventful. We were hoping to drive past the Sunset Crater, which we did, but it was not visible in the pitch blackness. The sun had gone and the clouds had gathered. The lightning we had seen in the distance got closer and brighter as we drove along. Eventually, a stroke covered the sky from end to end outside our windshield, and torrents of rain came down for a few minutes. For a few moments as we hydroplaned through huge pools of water on the road, the rain and the water splashing up rendered the windshield a sheet of water that we could not see through. But as quickly as the rain came down, it was over within a few minutes, leaving the windshield clear, and free of the myriad of dead bugs that were previously on it.

These moments are beyond rare in the everyday.

Road Trip Day 2

We had stayed at the Marriot near the Burbank airport, which was pretty cheap off Priceline. We planned to see Santa Monica, which meant a bit of a drive, but fortunately, the traffic wasn't too bad.

We spend the late morning on the 3rd St. Promenade, where a farmer's market was running. While it was pointless to get groceries, we did get some interesting pastries (marmalade/onion, pesto/goat cheese/mint), and some incredibly delicious "flavor grenade pluots".

Time was spent on Santa Monica beach, which wasn't actually all that busy earlier in the day. We also rented a tandem bike for an easy ride down to Venice beach. The whole Santa Monica area feels clean and yuppie, while the hippies hang out at Venice beach. Cast of characters included a homeless looking Santa (in August), and a tanned dude that looked like Conan the Barbarian. There was less weed in the air than I'd expected, but maybe that's just after living in SF for so long.

After a few hours on the beach, we drove over to Beverly Hills for a stroll. Window shopping at Rodeo/Wilshire resulted in buying a cupcake at Crumbs, which we noted was at least 50c more than a cupcake at Kara's (though, somewhat bigger as well).

For dinner we drove over to Monterey Park. I hadn't been in the area since the early 2000s, but it didn't really look like too much had changed. We stopped at Savoy Kitchen for the much praised Hainan chicken rice, which was quite good, as well as the beef brisket curry, which was quite outstanding.

I napped a bit in the car after dinner to kill some time, and headed over to Pomona for teh Body Language show there. I probably should have showed up earlier this time, since they were playing last and there were some other bands playing before them. Pomona was a surprisingly hip town. Just stepping out of the car in the parking lot, I could hear at least two different live bands playing. Walking around showed even more tiny venues with live music. Most of the crowd looked college aged, but there were a few older folks around. It wasn't a crazy party environment, but definitely fun on a Friday night.

Unfortunately, I had already booked a hotel further down on our route, and we moved on for Barstow before the night got late.

Road Trip Day 1

I had initially planned to leave San Francisco on 8/16, but I discovered later that Body Language was going to be in town on the 18th. I delayed the start date by a few days, which ended up being perfect, since it gave me a few days to rest for the drive after a hectic weekend.

Viv most generously hosted me, since I already moved out of my apartment. Hence we were well rested as we left on the morning of the 19th. It was a few hours after I had originally planned to leave; I had brought the car in for an oil change the day before, but they ended up replacing the water pump and a valve gasket as well.

We left Burlingame around 10am and took a quick stop for breakfast in Santa Clara, and then drove on to Carmel. It was cloudy all morning, but fortunately skies were clear by the time we got to the beach. We passed through the town pretty quickly, but took some stops to admire the beach and some of the fancy oceanfront properties. We also stopped by the Carmel Mission, which I had never noticed before. It had a satisfying historic feel to the museum in the restored building. Definitely worth visiting on a trip to Carmel.

Next down the route was Big Sur. We only stopped a few times for photos, but the beauty was constant on a wonderful drive. We stopped for a moment also in San Simeon to see the elephant seals. I had read about them ages ago, but it was the first time seeing the blubbery giants. I could see that it wasn't really worth a trip just for the seals though. They mostly just lie there, and scratch themselves lazily occasionally.

We also made a quick stop at the Hearst Castle visitor center. It was almost 4, and the tours were already done for the day. I didn't realize that the visitor center was miles away from the actual buildings and you could only see it from afar, perched at the top of a distant hill. It did give the estate a sense of grandeur, but wasn't really interesting enough to make me want to repeat the drive.

The next stop was supposed to be the Griffith Observatory in LA. It was hard to tell what the quickest route would be. We stopped off at the Main St. Grill in Cambria to grab a quick late lunch. Sinyee had recommended it almost 10 years ago, and the fat dripping BBQ tri-tip sandwich met expectations.

We took the route through Paso Robles, passing the vast field of oil wells at Lost Hills. It was a bit of a detour, and took about an hour and a half to get back to the I5, but the route was mostly straight and clear. We made it to the Observatory around 9, an hour and a half late for sunset, but the place was still open.

You have to drive past the Greek Theater on the way up. Death Cab for Cutie was playing that night, but the concert had already started and there wasn't too much traffic, though the Observatory parking lot was packed.

After checking out the view of LA, we swung by Son of a Gun for dinner. It was featured in Bon Appetit the previous week, but surprisingly there was no line when we arrived; I guess we were late enough. The smoked mahi dip wasn't bad, but far less interesting than the Bon Appetit article might have suggested. It reminded me of a tuna sandwich filling, with the addition of a nice smokiness. The alligator schnitzel, crisp and thin, exceeded expectations. There was no fishy flavour, it could have been mistaken for tender pork. The lobster roll compared favorably to the one I just tried a few days before at the Old Port Lobster Shack in Redwood City, though this one was about 1/3 the size, and 1/3 the price. I preferred the "naked", mayo-free version at Old Port, but the SoaG roll was better toasted and buttered.

The lime frozen yogurt though, was fantastic. Hands down best $5 dessert with the sweet meringue and graham crunch on the side. I have to say this was better than the dessert at Benu the night before, and that meal cost 4x as much (though that meal was also great).

Gas tracker

8/19 Pilot, Lost Hills, CA 10.626 gal, 305.6 miles, $3.819/gal
8/20 Shell, Pomona, CA 9.510 gal, 249.8 miles, $3.899/gal
8/21 Chevron, Ludlow, CA 5.434 gal, 138.2 miles, $4.599/gal
8/21 Chevron, Seligman, AZ 9.374 gal, 237.0 miles, $4.099/gal
8/22 Chevron, Flagstaff, AZ 7.635 gal, 218.6 miles, $3.799/gal
8/23 Circle K, Albuquerque, NM 12.882 gal, 388.0 miles, $3.679/gal
8/24 Love's, Amarillo, TX 2.747 gal, 367.3 miles, $3.639/gal partial
8/25 Toot, Amarillo, TX 11.404 gal, 15.8 miles, $3.699/gal
8/25 Love's, McCloud, OK 10.489 gal, 281.6 miles, $3.639/gal
8/26 Citgo, Springdale, AK 10.451 gal, 253.8 miles, $3.789/gal
8/27 Exxon, Memphis, TN 13.843 gal, 343.7 miles, $3.799/gal
8/28 Citgo, Farina, IL, 12.497 gal, 318.0 miles, $3.899/gal
9/01 One Stop, Chicago, IL 12.478 gal 299.5 miles, $4.299/gal
9/04 Shell, Port Huron, IL, 13.392 gal 356.9 miles, $4.10/gal

Farewell

Today I bid farewell to my colleagues.  I bid farewell to my apartment.  I bid farewell to my bartender.

I'm not comfortable with the concept of goodbye.  I'm not ready for anything so permanent, with people or places that I've grown attached to.

I'd much rather have it be 'see you later'.  I mean it.

Another blast from the past.

An excerpt from my MasterCard bill circa April 2001, on a road trip down to NYC.

It cost $40.64USD to fill the tank of a minivan, and $1USD = $1.57CDN.

Things change slowly and constantly, but when you look back a decade, it's amazing how drastic the changes are.

Oh, I also remember trying to return the rental car with an empty gas tank, which led to me putting in $5 worth of gas twice in order to make it home.

Back when I was a young scrap...

I spent the weekend clearing junk out of my closet, which included piles of old credit card receipts. At one point I used to track my purchases closely, which wasn't that hard when I was a student and only made a handful of purchases a month. While there may have been once where I was able to refer to a credit card bill to check when I purchased an item for a warranty claim, the receipts have been practically worthless.

However, they definitely held nostalgic value. Skimming through them brought back memories. Some were blurrier - meals at Morty's or King Tin - there were many of them, and I wouldn't have remembered one from another. But others that were more unique, I recalled though I would not have thought of them at all without the receipts. A meal at CN Tower stood out, that was in 1998. In a way, they were almost like a journal, a lifetime narrated in purchases and payments.

It was also interesting to look at how quickly the value of gadgets decline. Not that I'm not already keenly aware of that, but to actually compare the dollar values, then and now, can sometimes be pretty staggering. This isn't at all scientific, since for some items I'm comparing what the same product costs now, and for others, a higher end modern equivalent. I also don't take inflation into account. Consider this purely for entertainment.

Ritex 4GB 80X CF $103.50 2006
Kingston 4GB 133X CF $13.29 2011
This one didn't surprise me much because I've been watching the price of Flash drop since I bought my first 128MB CF card for my Canon G1. I think that cost me a few hundred dollars. Anything made with silicon drops fast as the chips shrink. Moore's Law says transistor counts double every 2 years. You would expect prices to halve every 2 years, and be maybe 1/8th after 6 years, but in this case it's more like 1/10th after 5 years.

Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP 30" Monitor $1435.00 2006
Dell UltraSharp U3011 30" Monitor $1349.00 2011
The latest model has much improved colours and connectivity, but I feel like I got a pretty good buy 5 years ago with this monitor. Seems to have held it's value far better than the TV below.

350W Fanless power supply $89.61USD 2006
Seasonic 400W Fanless power supply $151.35 2011
Fanless power supplies were never popular, so they were always more expensive due to the lack of scale. As the desktop market shrinks to laptops, I suppose the market's becoming even more niche. This is probably the one item on this list that's getting more expensive over the years.

Burton Ruler boots $124.99USD 2003
Burton Ruler boots $199.99USD 2011
Looks like the price of snowboard gear is pretty stable, though you can always get last season's gear at steep discounts, which was why my boots are cheaper than the current ones. I think the MSRP is probably pretty similar.

SMC7004AWBR 802.11b router $174.95USD 2001
Linksys WRT54GL 802.11b/g router $49.99USD 2011
There's wireless routers for as low as $25. I'm surprised to see that the WRT54GL still sells. It's a really old product that doesn't support the latest fast wireless standards, but lives on due to it's hackability with DD-WRT. There's also high end $130 devices, but it seems most new devices are in the $50-80 range.

SMC2632W 802.11b PC card $74.95USD 2001
Rosewill 802.11b/g/n USB2.0 dongle $14.99USD 2011
Wifi was new back in 2001, but it's completely commoditized now. What's more interesting is to see how PCMCIA slots in laptops slowly transform to PC Card slots, then to ExpressCard slots, and then being ditched pretty much entirely for USB accessories.

Heine HR 2.5x 420mm Loupe $635.00USD 2001
Heine HR 2.5x 420mm Binocular set $1395.00 2011
Heine makes binocular loupes, they come in pairs, like your eyes. I have no idea why I only bought only 1 in 2001. I must have been retarded. But it seems like they haven't depreciated much in the last decade.

Createive Labs Nomad 20GB $349.99USD 2001
Archos GMINI 120 20GB $249.99 2004
iPod classic 160GB $249 2011
iPod nano 16GB $179 2011
Given how fast the price of a MB of storage drops, either on HD or in Flash, I would have expected the price of MP3 players to plumet like a bomb. An iPod classic stores 8x as much as the GMINI from 7 years ago, and it also plays movies now. But it's still $250 for an mp3 player. The iPod nano contains less than $20 of flash memory, and I'm sure the other parts might add up to another $20. Somehow Apple's managed to keep the price of these products up and reap the margins as the value of the components drop. I'm pretty much expecting this market to disappear as people are using their phones for pretty much everything now.

Toshiba TW40X81 40" TV $2956.52CDN 2000
Toshiba 40G300U 40" TV $659.00USD 2011
Big bulky rear projection TV in the era where 540p was "high definition", compared to a sleek 1080p LCD. Big progress here. Also shows how a 40" TV was considered pretty big back then, now it's about as small as you can get.

Hollywood DVD Decoder Card $120.00CDN 2000
This was an add in card that let my Pentium Pro machine play DVDs, since the CPU itself wasn't fast enough to decode DVDs. Products like this just don't exist now, so I can't compare the current value. Depreciation at infinity.

Denon AVR3300 $1478.26CDN 1999
Denon AVR3312CI $1099.99USD 2011
Audio gear hasn't progressed nearly as fast as TVs. Lack of any significant technology improvements in the power amplifiers may be part of it, but I suspect marketting of home theater audio as a luxury good has something to do with keeping the prices up. Still the audio market has changed a lot. Stereo amps have pretty much disappeared, and Hi-fi magazines have been replaced by home theater magazines. The latest AVR3312CI is networked, which is a big difference from the AVR3300 on top of all the other improvements.

Toshiba SD3109 DVD Player $679.00 1999
Toshiba SD4300 DVD Player $37.99 2011
The pitfalls of being an early adopter, seriously. It can handle 2 DVDs at once though, modern players don't do that!

Panasonic 4x/8x CD-R IDE $370CDN 1998
Sony 24X/16X DVD+R/+RW $19.99USD 2011
Wow I bought that? Oh yeah, I remember, it was for archiving data, and $370 plus a stack of CDs seemed cheap compared to the 10GB hard disks of the times. In addition to cleaning out my old receipts this past weekend, I also copied all my archived CDs/DVDs onto a 2TB hard drive so I could throw out the huge stack of plastic. Optical drives are going the way of the dodo.

Pioneer 10X DVD Slot load $199CDN 2000
Sony DVD-ROM $16.99 2011
I wish everything dropped in price like this.

Twin Mattress $279.99CDN 1996
Twin Mattress $259.99USD 2011
Why can't mattress prices decline be like DVD players?

It's gonna be a great year.

Wow, it looks like 2010 was my least blogged year ever. And looking at the links on the right column, it seems like personal blogging has pretty much died, replaced by pithy updates on facebook or twitter.

Every so often, something crosses my mind that deserves a bit more thought, a bit more organization, and maybe some time to pen it down. It seems like that time never comes though. Today I heard a bit on KPFA 94.1, the ultra-leftist talk radio station in Berkeley, about how this generation of Americans can expect to have a lower standard of living than their parents. A film major called in, talking about pursuing her dream, and how, since all careers were longshots, she'd rather pick one that she was passionate about. This is probably the kind of kid who'd get smacked silly by a Chinese mother. It's interesting to compare the vastly different mindsets out there between America, Europe and Asia. I could probably devote an entire essay to the topic, but my two main thoughts from this are:

1) Regardless of your opinion of Amy Chua's mothering methodology, she's a genius. The purpose of her article was really to promote her book, and it's been a while since I've seen any one article get so much publicity. It's probably got a vastly larger mindshare than any 15 second internet ad.
2) I bet in two generations time, children of refugees from the Iraqi or Afghan wars will be the new model minority. That might seem like a non-sequitur, but it ties directly to the personal drive for success that immigrant parents pass on as values to their children. There are probably few greater motivators than knowing war and destruction and having to struggle to build a better life for your children.

On a completely different note, I had one of those moments at the gym - when they play one of those older songs that you know you know... but you just can't place it. Hanging by a rope, I couldn't quite Shazam it. Anyways, later when I got home, I thought maybe I could find it again... it had a guy and girl singing. Maybe it was The XX? Nope, but the YouTube search revealed that The XX has a song called Stars, which finally triggered the memory that the song was by the Stars. Anyways, here's the old music plus some music for this month.