First Try of My Nikon 14-24mm

I got my new Nikon 14-24mm lens two weeks ago, but was too busy to go out shooting. Things didn't improve this weekend, but I decided to take a break, or I will break (all work and no play make me a very unhappy person).

Summer is not the best time to take photos along the California coast. It's is usually foggy, and the light is just too bright (and very dull). After some scouting, I decided to stay at this hidden beach. (Somebody named it "shark's fin" beach, can you tell why?) I had been here a few times so I knew when the light hit the cliff in the magic hour, it would be dramatic. I hadn't been practicing photography for a while and had felt quite rustic. The 14-24mm is such an amazing lens and I hope some day I will really do it justice.

Mid-Life Crisis or No-Life Crisis

My Ideal Vacation

"Enchanted April" is one of my all time favorite movies. Like the story, the movie has a wonderful restorative power. If you can't rent a beautiful villa and have a perfect one-month vacation, watching the movie will be your next best thing.

For some unknown reason, the DVD version of the film was not out till lately. I guess this 8-minute you-tube version is as good as it gets.

So, You Always Want To Be A Teacher

Sarah Dunant's New Book: Sacred Hearts

I hadn't read "The Birth of Venus" yet, but I was deeply moved by Sarah Dunant's "in the Company of Courtesan" (so much so that I started dreaming which actor/actress should play the lead roles. Naturally, Scarlet Johanson is my first choice for Fiammetta). This new book completes her "Renaissance Trilogy". A lot of so called "historical" novels are just romance novels in another name. Dunant, however, managed to catch the Zeitgeist. It is moment of reading books like "in the company of courtesan" reminds me that I am still alive.

CLI and Swiss Army Knife

Recently I have been in charge of building our product's CLI (command line interface). It is a low profile project because the management team of our company put their focus on our super-cool-super-easy-to-use-and-fun GUI (our CEO wants it to be the iPhone of enterprise software). The lack of attention turns out to be a good thing, because the user-interaction focused approach may actually be a very bad thing for the CLI (after all, a CLI is run most of the time by the machine through scripting, not human interaction). It also gives me a freer hand at negotiating features and choosing the technologies used. I thoroughly enjoyed building it.

Yesterday we did a first end-to-end integration demo of our product using the CLI. Since we only finished integration two hours before the demo, I was quite nervous and worried if we would run into issues during the demo. I didn't focus much on the CLI (that was not the purpose of the demo anyway). Only after I was done with the demo I realized I forgot to mention some of the "cool" features. For example, a general problem with CLI is there are too many options, so I add a "history" feature to record the user typed commands to a file. The file can later be executed by the CLI so it will save the typing (and becomes very handy for cron jobs.) Things like this are small, but they can be combined to make the CLI a very useful tool.

I remembered an interesting conversation with an ex-coworker. (I was trying to recruit him to our company to no avail.) We were talking about software design. He said if you planned to design a perfect system (or language) which did everything, most likely it would fail (anybody still remember Ada), but if you focused on some design principals such as simplicity and adapability, you might build a system that lasted longer than the "big-bang" solutions (he used the UNIX system as an example.) Looking back at the CLI design choice I made, I realized that it might not be an iPhone, but it might well be a Swiss Army Knife!

First integration demo done in my new job

After weeks of toil (and midnight oil burning), finally I can have a weekend without working. The first end-to-end integration demo was done today and quite well received. (It's probably the most stressful integration I had done. We had the demo scheduled at 4pm, but I only got things working at 2pm.) Now my adrenaline level has nose dived and I feel totally collapsed, but it's great to see my efforts paid off, even just for a moment.

To Elisabeth (a very bad poem)

How much I have missed you, dear friend.
The mountains are still there,
yet all the fortunes in this world
are not enough
to exchange a glimpse of your smile
(then what is the use of them?)

Yet you are with me, I know,
and I can hear you whisper:
Live this life
and we shall meet again.

P.S. my roommate T.F. died young. I used to send her my writing. I hope she wouldn't mind this bad poem.

Things I want to do (whether I am rich or not)

One of the driving force for start-up employees is the dream of becoming rich some day. Every day I hear my coworkers talking about things they want to do (buy a fancy car, own real estates all over the world, get a flying license, etc) once they "make" it. (No doubt without the day dreaming it's hard to endure the start-up life.) Though I don't share much of their enthusiasm about "making it" (you can say I am older and wiser), I can't but think what I really want to do. (I took 6 months off to sort it out without much success, but my mind seems to be more clear now.) My wishes are small. I am surprised that some of them are even doable whether I am rich or not.

1. driving around the country with my camera, in the footsteps of many great photographers I admire (Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Edward Western, you name it.) Personally I think it's a rite of passage for every would-be photographer.

2. learn to sing. My best friend had proposed this idea many times. She has a soprano voice and I am probably a mezzo. It will be fun to sing duets with her. Also, I'd love to sing the aria "Mi Lusinga il dolce affetto" (Alcina) with my full voice.

3. learn Italian. I have always wanted to read The Divine Comedy in its original, and, Gosh, being able to listen to my favorite opera without translation, that's divine.

4. visiting England, listening to Kate Royal in Covent Garden, eating oyster in Whistable. England to me is like Italy to 19th century writers (so you get the idea). I doubt if my Anglophile can survive a real visit, but at least that will be a cure for my buying countless books about the subject.

OK, enough daydreaming, back to work. Now I will be happy if I can finish everything and go home in 2 hours.

Guardian Interview with Kate Royal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/24/kate-royal-opera

Interesting, she took one month off every year (no singing). I wish I could do that with my job.

Received My Kindle DX Today

Finally, my kindle DX arrived! In the few hours of owning my newest gadget, I had downloaded (i.e. bought from Amazon.com) 3 ebooks!!! Here is my first impression:

content (integration with amazon.com browsing): ***** (5 stars)
wireless speed: ***** (works better than my home internet connection)
easy to use: *** (it's not iPod, the buttons are not very well balanced)
feature: **** (native pdf support is pretty handy)


Now with my new Kate Royal CD, I am in heaven (almost).

Midsummer Night - Kate Royal's New Album

On stage (if you are lucky enough to see her perform), soprano Kate Royal has the look of a Bond girl and the grace of a princess, with a rich voice melting in your ear like dark chocolate. Attending her recital last year at Berkeley was an event of lifetime to me.

Since event of lifetime doesn't happen every day, I am more than happy to find that her new album just came out lately. Better yet, she's singing the arias of 20th century English operas (something rarely recorded). Usually I don't like 20th century English operas (I prefer the more melodramatic Italian ones), but Ms Royal's performance of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" in her previous album convince me to reconsider. So now I am more than happy to try new things and broaden my horizon.

Still, I am eagerly waiting for her Strauss album, but I know for that I have to be patient. No soprano before a certain age can really sing Strauss's last four songs and Ms Royal definitely hasn't reached that age yet. Right now, she's just too young and too beautiful!

P.S. I don't know who did the promotion at EMI. Her last album's promotion photos were bad enough, the new ones are even worse. For heaven's sake, do they really think making her look like Keira Knightly will sell the CD?

P.P.S Just finished listening to this CD. It's wonderful, even better than Ms Royal's debut. One thing is for sure, Ms Royal has graduated from the "rising star" status to be a true star now. Her singing sometimes reminds me the great German soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. (Yes, I know, another unbelievably beautiful soprano.)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Be Careful What You Are Reading!

Some books are dangerous. They reminds you how ridiculous and absurd things often are and you start to question them and eventually become a discontent (at least secretly). Often that's not a good thing, it conflicts with the single-minded "focus" (I sometimes think it's a form of lobotomy) demanded by most jobs. That's why I put away "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" when I started working. The free spirit of the protagonist Poloma makes me sad about my current life.

Grand Illusion

Almost all my friends know I had a crush on a writer many years ago (just a minor crush, nothing happened). I had never seen her in person or heard her talking. Lately I found some video clips (thanks to YouTube) of her giving speeches or doing interviews. I was quite surprised that in person she was neither as smart nor as witty as the "writer" I found in her writing. In fact, had I seen her in person, I would probably think her too boring to talk to. I find this experience quite amusing. (Many years ago I might be heart broken, but now I am older and wiser.) How many times are we fooled by our imagination and find reality fails to match our perception? No wonder Buddism treats the whole world as a grand illusion. But, never a Buddist, for us Romantics we just need another grand illusion to pursue. When we are out of illusions, we are also out of life.

Glad I Am Not Secretary of the State

Taking a break from my work, I read on the Chinese newspaper that Hilary Clinton said she hadn't read a book or went to a movie in the past 100 days. Poor Hilary, at least I got time to watch a few DVDs in the past 30 days. Am I glad I am not Secretary of the State!