In a Nursery with Zeiss 100mm Makro

Meatball (the cat) is very camera shy. Took me a long time to get a  good shot.

My best friend Chinchih and her boy friend were going to a nursery in Santa Cruz Mountain to buy some native plants and asked me if I wanted to join them. Though I had no interest in gardening, I thought I could use the chance to play with my new lens. (I also remembered there was a cute cat in the nursery.) Long story short, it was fun but I think my focus and dop control still need a lot of practice.

The Woman Who Had It All?

Carina Lau as Empress Wu in "Judge Dee"

I was watching Hark Tsui's "Judge Dee" (a quite entertaining movie, fits Robert van Gulik's original really well), then it occurred to me, was Empress Wu the "woman who had it all"?

In Chinese history, Empress Wu was a controversial figure. She was, in the thousand years of long list of Chinese emperors, the only bona-fide female one. And we are not only talking about just being a regent of a established dynasty. She had the ambition to usurp the Tang Dynasty and created a new one (you could say she rebranded it), Chou. Well, the Chou dynasty didn't last, but she was never treated as a true traitor (those were buried in the ashes by the Chinese historians and you almost never read about them) in history. Why? 

You see, here is the trick: she also happened to be the mother of the crown princes. Her "husband", the late emperor, had four sons, and they were all from her. Even if they were going to kill her to get back the throne, they couldn't deny that she's their mother, they were her flesh and blood. She knew it and leveraged it. She had conditioned her sons to fear her, she knew they were weak.

She knew her womanhood was her best weapon. She was beautiful, that was why she was sent to the harem of the aging emperor*. She was also smart enough to grab the attention of the then prince (a young man who was not sure of himself and forever under his father's shadow) and won his heart. After the old man died, she was sent to a Convent to be a nun (standard treatment for the previous emperor's concubines after his death). She managed to  get herself "rescued" back to the palace. (That of course didn't get her the approval of the moralists. After all, she slept with both father and son.) Her fertility was her greatest help. While the previous empress couldn't produce any heir, she quickly produced 4 sons for the emperor (and made sure no other woman was sharing her bed). She even had a daughter in her 40s!

She was full of energy. The emperor suffered from diabetes and often had headaches. She took over the responsibility (not doubt got a lot of thanks from the emperor) and soon started issuing her own "executive orders". The old guards hated her. They were either killed or banished. Even her sons was sent to far away places. But she's not a fool, she knew if there was one support she absolute needed, that was the support of the people she ruled. If she treated them well, whatever happened "inside the palace" was just "family business". She was right. She might be a dictator, but she was not an incompetent ruler. She used both carrots and sticks, even threw in a little bit religion (she spread the rumor that she was the Mila Budda reincarnated). When the time was right, she changed the name of the empire and ascended the throne. Tang was now Chou. She was the new emperor.

Though she was eventually dethroned (or you could call it a "forced retirement", it was planned by people she had promoted**, she seemed to have foreseen that, her sons were too scared of her to take any initiatives), she lived to an old age (80), and had numerous young lovers (gave those moralists/historians yet another reason to hate her). No other woman in Chinese history had ever surpassed her to become an emperor again. 

Looking at history 1300 years later, I sometimes wondered what she would think and pondered the price she paid to "have it all". What drove her? Was it pure survival instinct, or it had something more? Did she ever regret, feeling qualms for the blood in her hands***? Was it worth it? I knew I would not be able to find the answers from the history books. Empress Wu might have had it all, but she had yet to find her Hilary Mantel.

* Her family was very much like Anne Boleyn's family.
** Empress Wu seemed to be a firm believer of "keep your friend close but your enemies closer".
*** Rumor had it that she poisoned her first born so she could blame the accident to the then empress. Lady Macbeth would be proud.

What Would Freud Say?

I had a short (lasted about 30 seconds) dream a couple of days ago. In my dream I was holding a cell-phone like object in my hand (exactly the same size as my Razr Maxx). It had a quite different interface. (The display was showing some patterns. Each looks like a mix of Maya glyph and QR code.)  I was looking at it and thought: "this is certainly not an iPhone, I heard Google was developing a new android*, it must be the new android. How should I use it?" While I was still contemplating its usage (no sense of anxiety, I was feeling very calm), my alarm clock woke me up. My first thought was "wow, I need to tell Freud about this, I wonder what he will say"**.  

* I actually never heard of such a thing in my waking life, but in my dream logic it was a fact I picked up from some online newspaper. 

** I was probably half awake.

Snaps (Bean Hollow State Beach)

Highway Lookout near Martin's Cove. I have yet found a way down. 

The foam makes me want to have a cup of latte.

A small lagoon on the beach.

Look what I have found!

At Bean Hollow State Beach

Flower on the beach. The 50mm Macro comes in handy now.

One month without seeing the ocean, I was suffering from cabin fever. At 4pm, I packed my camera and drove to the seaside. The weather was lovely, slightly cool, not too windy. I sat on a rock and watched the waves come and go. (I could sit there forever.) Eventually I forced myself to take out my camera, but I had no desire to take photos at all. "Why can't I just sit here and enjoy the view?" I debated with myself. Still, I pressed on. My half hearted effort kind of showed. The photos I took today were almost all junk. I vowed never to force myself to take photos when I didn't want to. I should have just sit down and enjoyed the sunset, instead of doing the gym workout with my D3x! 

Incoming Education Revolution

I attended a tech-talk given by the two founders ("the super stars of machine learning", Dr. Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng) of Coursera. The talk was quite interesting. After listening to the TED talk given by Salman Khan and attending this event, I really think we are on the brink of an education revolution. Here are some highlights of the event (recalled from memory). 

1. Dr. Koller first presented some statistics. From the 80s, the health care cost had grown 251%. You think that's bad? Then you should know that college tuition had grown 460%. (At this moment, I realized how serious this issue really is.) Now the student loan may even be a bigger bubble than the house loan crisis in 2008.  

2. So far research indicates that the most effective way to assess and reenforce learning is, surprise, surprise, test. That's why they specifically designed their course to have a short quiz after 5-6 min online video viewing. It ensures the students have mastered the subject before they proceed further. 

3. A lot of students feel more comfortable at taking online courses because they can learn at their own pace. You will not feel embarrassed to ask a dumb question or repeat a video 7 times until you get it. Course videos are broken into 8-10 minutes video chunks, each chunk is easier for students to digest (and for instructors to revise in the future).

4. Self evaluation of your learning progress is actually the most accurate one. Next is peer evaluation. (Another surprise to me.) They trained students to do peer evaluations. For essay type of homework, peer evaluation is chosen, though the grading can also be done by machines. The reason? Your peers can give you feedbacks, machines can't. (It reminds me what Einstein once said "computers are useless, they only know answers". )

5. They proposed the idea of "Community TA". Basically students from previous year who got good grades can volunteer to be TAs and help answering and monitoring online forums.

6. The average time between a student posts a question on the forum to the time an answer is posted is 22 minutes. Way shorter than a real teacher can do. (The online forum is like the site stackoverflow and all the answers are ranked by other viewers.)

7. Their site is running on AWS. (Confirmed once again cloud computing is real.) With all the user interaction data available they can run analytics to find hidden patterns (for example, 2000 students give the same wrong answers, why?)  and to improve the learning experience.


8. There were 100,000 students registered in Dr. Andrew Ng's online "machine learning" class last fall. About 43K students submitted at least one homework. Around 10,000 students finished the course. Dr. Ng said there were usually 400 students attending his machine learning class at Standard per year. To reach the same number of audiences, he would have to teach 25 years!

My First Prezi

The Dream Life of My Retirement on Prezi

I attended a meetup last week and noticed the presentation software used by the speaker was quite cool. The speaker told me he was using something called "prezi". After I went home, I decided to check it out and found it was a cloud based presentation tool. It has an interesting concept. Instead of treating presentations as decks of slides, the whole prezi is a giant canvas. You can treat it like a drawing board, or a mind map. It's a perfect tool for creating things like visioning boards. 

After watching the demo video and played with it a little bit, I felt it could also be a great storytelling tool. I wanted to do something with it, but didn't know what to say. Then a conversation with friends on Facebook gave me an idea. I had a vision of our conversation in images. I decided to make a Prezi. 

Even though Prezi's concept was easy, I was really struggling with the first few frames. However, after mastering the basic operations, I got better. I felt more comfortable with frames and paths. It became more and more fun. I was quite proud about the finished Prezi, even though it was quite primitive. (I wish I had the technique of a UI designer.) I decide to keep a record here. Who knows? Maybe someday my dream will come true.

Old 135mm Nikkor

Among the many interesting objects my brother had left me (which included a casket of bullets) when he finished his 2-year studies in the U.S., one was a 135mm Nikkor. It stayed in my storage for a long long time. Since it still felt like my brother's stuff, I never thought of using it. Today while I was lamenting how Nikon's lenses felt "cheap and plastic" compared to the Zeiss, I remembered this old Nikkor. I took it out from its now dusty pouch. To my surprise, the lens was better crafted than the new Nikkors I own, and even after 20 years of no use, the focus barrel was butter smooth, just like my Zeiss. I put it side by side with my Zeiss 35mm and they looked like twins.

135mm Nikkor next to the 35mm Zeiss Zf.2.

The truly amazing thing is, since Nikon hasn't change their F-mount since the 70s, I can still use it with my D3X. I couldn't resist seeing how it performed. I took a few test shots. The first thing I noticed was it had a minimal focusing distance of 5-6 feet, a bit too long compared to a modern designed lens. The focus ring worked perfectly, as expected. The test images looked good on my D3X LCD but when I viewed them on my laptop, I could see the colors were dull. (To be fair, the lens needed to be sent back to Nikon to be cleaned up. I saw some mildew inside. I remembered that's why my brother gave it to me.) It's still usable, but does seem to show its age. Now I feel better about my newer, but uglier, Nikkors. Technology does improve the lens designs, you just have to tolerate their outlooks.

Test shot  taken with the 135mm Nikkor. The backward compatibility of Nikon F-mount is amazing. 

Bye Bye Droid 2, Hello Razr Maxx

My Droid 2 went through a slow and painful (to me) dying process and had since become a zombie (it would still ring when someone called me but I couldn't use the phone). Yesterday I finally got it replaced by a Motorola Razr Maxx. Frankly speaking, after my Droid 2 experience (my second one already since the first one also got some touchscreen problem), I was really hesitant to get another Motorola phone. But none of the other android phones in the store looked satisfactory. HTC was too thick and the battery felt hot in my hand. Samsung was too heavy. LG was not appealing. I only liked the design of Motorola Razr but the sales lady told me the battery life was not good so I settled on the Razr Maxx (standby time is 15 days). 

So far it seemed to be ok. However, I already noticed the screen was not made of glass (that's why the phone was so light) so I had a ghost armor installed. (No need for my Droid 2 since it was using Gorilla glass.) The built-in camera has a 50mm focal length instead of the 35mm I like (as on my Droid 2), less useful for me but probably better for most people. The unexpected benefit was since Verizon had upgraded their network to 4G so I got upgraded to a 4G network automatically. Let's see how it goes. At least now downloading my kindle books is faster.

So Many Books, So Little Space (Lament of a Book Addict)

My home has looked more and more like an overstocked second hand bookstore. If I don't do something about it, soon even my cat Miti will not have space to live. After recognizing how serious the situation is I decide to issue a house rule for my book buying habit:

The number of physical books I buy every week has to be less than the number of books I give away or sell to second hand bookstore.

That is, the input has to be less than the output, until the situation is under control.

(OK, eBooks don't have to follow this rule.)

I hope it will be easier than losing weight...

Down to the Beach (Garrapata State Park)

As expected, Amazon was not able to deliver my D800E on time. The waiting will be long (some said 6 months). Right now the only thing I can do is to make best use of the time to practice. D800E will demand my best skill. Unfortunately too much easy shooting with X100 has made me forget a lot of things. It's time to start with a beginner's mind.

Looking at Santa Lucia Mountain from a highway lookout, I would drive past it soon. (X100)

According to fitbit, I climbed 42 floors today. To think that I carried my D3X to climb 42 floors really made me proud of myself.

Looking at Santa Lucia Mountain from the beach.

The warm light of the magic moment.

It's the first time I tried 50mm for landscape photography. To my surprise, it worked well.

All other people had left. I was alone on the beach. 

Last shot of the day. More practices are needed before my D800E arrives.

A Restaurant with a View (Phoenix in Big Sur)

Will you drive 120 miles to dine here? (My answer is yes.)

The Phoenix statue in the yard.

Customers enjoying the view.

My original plan was to have a cup of coffee here before I headed home. Turned out the cafe was closed. 

Point Lobos

A pretty dreary day, so is my photo.

Heading to Big Sur

A Cat with Attitude