Categories
photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2005

I started 2005 using the same Sony Ericsson K700i I took my best 2004 mobile phtos [confusion.cc] with. I used it for the first half of the year, and the only photo worth sharing during that time that is not a portrait is another panorama:

ABC food center at lunchtime

The photo stitching is much better in this one, as the camera was sitting on the table when I took all the photos, I just had to rotate it for each shot. So maybe, just maybe, the software was good and the photos in that shot of the Singapore CBD skyline I shared from 2004 were really not level.

Moving on. At some point in 2005 I got a new phone, one that I loved, I think it was the best phone on the market at the time and I can’t understand why it was not more popular. The Sony Ericsson Z800i. A flip phone with a rotating 1.3 megapixel camera, a step up from the K700i’s 640×480 (with an “extrapolation mode” which output photos at 1280×960). The Z800i output photos at 1280×1024, which isn’t much bigger than the K700i’s extrapolation mode but they look much better:

“Life, uh, finds a way”

There are still a serious lack of actual good photos in my library. Focus was an issue, on both the K700i and the Z800i. Also, action was an issue, even the slightest movement is blurred.

I actually went through two Z800i’s, as shortly after I got it my wife —now wife, then girlfriend— sent my new phone for a ride through the washing machine. One night after drinking I left it in my pocket and she decided do to the laundry early in the morning due to the smell of smoke and alcohol on the cloths. At the time I was living in a shared corporate flat and I didn’t even know the phone when through the wash, I found it on the table in the living room and just assumed I left it there. But when I tried to turn it on it was dead. I spent the afternoon waiting in Wisma Atria to see a Sony Ericsson agent to get it fixed, since it was nearly brand new. After waiting for my number to come up it took the agent all of 2 minutes to tell me the damage was not covered by the warranty as it was water damage. Apparently there is a little white square of material on the battery that turns blue when exposed to water. At first I couldn’t figure out how the phone got “submerged” and argued that it could only have been sweat or a splash from normal usage, I had not dropped it in water. I was only when we got home and my co-worker cum roommate told me he found the phone in the washing machine when he went to do his laundry that we managed to piece the story together.

So I had to buy a new phone… I don’t remember how much it cost but I do remember it being painful and my wife being surprise I did not get angry with her. C’est la vie.

Anyway, here are a couple of more photos for the Z8ooi that I can count as my best mobile phone photos of 2005. First a photo of the US flag from my hotel room in Washington DC on a trip back in July of 2005 to attend a wedding:

Taken from a hotel in Washington DC

And… then there is this:

Death with nasty, big, pointy teeth… and a Guinness hat

That’s my killer rabbit that used to look down on my cube in the office in Virginia wearing a hat I got at a St. Paddy’s day pub bash in 2002 in England. I gave the rabbit away to a coworker, and the hat eventually got trashed. C’est la vie.

Categories
photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2004

I have embarked on a mission to cleanup my mobile phone photo library. As long as I’ve been taking photos with my mobile I have been ignoring them after I back them up. These days I back them up to Lightroom and I have even managed to find and imported photos from before I used Lightroom into my Lightroom library. There are a few gaps but I have a long mission ahead.

My library of mobile phone photos goes back as far as 29 September 2004. There are a couple of shots of people I was working with at the time, which I won’t post, and then this gem:

Alkaff Bridge at night

That’s the Alkaff Bridge [wikipedia.org] over the Singapore River, just down the quay from the hotel I was living in (The Gallery Hotel, no longer there) in September 2004. Having arrived from the US on, as I recall, September 4th (thought looking back at my 2004 post here on Confusion I seem to have left the US on August 30th [confusion.cc]… I know you skip a day and I took a crazy long, multi-stopover route, but it does not seem to add up, maybe I left well after midnight, I can’t remember.)

In any case, that photo was taken on a SonyEricsson K700i [wikipedia.org]. I’m sure I should have photos that were taken on even older photos, specifically the T610 [wikipedia.org] but it seems those are lost to time, so the K700i are my oldest. They are mostly crap photos, but there are some fun shots of people I worked with.

Sunset from the office

For some reason about half of the photos from the K700i are 1280×960 while others are only 640×480.

Lanterns and menu at Ice Cold Beer on Emerald Hill in Singapore

But the K700i did have a fun panorama function built in. I made a few attempts but it wasn’t always so good at handling my inherent inability to keep the camera level from one shot to the next (a problem I have with my DSLR too). These buildings look like they are drunk or auditioning for Inception or Dr. Strange a few years early:

Singapore CBD from the top floor of the Stamford Raffles Hotel

So I really don’t have any good mobile phone photos from 2004, the title of this post is a bit misleading. I plan to post a few mobile phone photos for each year as I continue my cleanup. We’ll see how much the phones and my ability to use them advanced. Not sure what year I’ll stop at. I started using Lightroom mobile to take photos on my phone sometime in 2017 so that’s a logical place to stop… let’s see if I can get that far.

As a final aside, the photo of Alkaff bridge was taken on the night of September 29th. According to Confusion [confusion.cc] I visited the Chinese Gardens to view the lanterns setup for the Mid-autumn festival with some colleagues. But I don’t have any photo, or DSLR photos of that night…

Categories
ranting

The gall…

Last year I posted about my first ever experience spending a night in the hospital [confusion.cc]. Initial diagnosis was that I had an H. Pylori infection. Which was true, confirmed by endoscopic examination. But… 10 days later and we’ll into taking all my drugs I woke up at five in the morning in a hotel in Jakarta —I was on a business trip— with the same crazy agonizing pain in my lower chest and even in my back. I struggled through it for hours hoping it would go away, drifting in and out of sleep till close to noon. At that point I gave up and managed to pack my shit, checked myself out of the hotel and get to the airport where I took the next available flight back to Singapore. Luckily these flights run every hour or so and they are used to business travelers changing to the next available one when they finish early.

As a side note: with all the scanners and health checks, in place even before COVID19 in this part of the world, no one questioned a guy who looked like death warmed over, sweating and pale, wincing in pain at either the Jakarta or Singapore airports… anyway.

When I landed I went straight to the hospital and checked in. After a long discussion with the doctor who was treating me, going back over the entire history of issues starting in January and describing the pain again he asked about the back pain. Was it present in the other attacks? Yea I think so. After that he suggested that I might be having gall stones and based on that he requested a specialist to take over.

The specialist was fairly certain it was gallstones after an interview and a few hours later it was confirmed by an ultrasound. Ultrasounds are much, much, much more pleasant than endoscopic examinations. Someone sliding a plastic thing like a tennis ball covered in lubricant over you is weird but not so much unpleasant, even if the lube is cold. Endoscopic examinations on the other hand is… well, read the other post [confusion.cc] for my thoughts on that. But the ultrasound worked, diagnosis: gallstones, treatment: cut them out. So the doctor explained the surgery:

In summary, it’s a laparoscopic procedure, meaning they poke a few holes in you and use instruments on sticks to look around and cut shit up. Then they pull said shit out of one of the holes. Basically surgery by chopstick through a button hole. There is always a small chance they can’t complete the procedure via laparoscopy and will still have to make a big hole so they can get in their and work better. 

And now, a second aside: doctors handwriting is really another language they learn to speak in med school. Why do you think it takes them so long? As evidence I posted the doctors explanation to Facebook to see if anyone could guess what it was. Answers ranged from the location of the lost ark of the covenant to, oddly, Vladimir Putin’s notes (I have a wide variety of friends…), to a lost page from the Necronomicon or Voynich Manuscript. A few observant people did note that the words liver and gallbladder are there and so guessed it was something to do with anatomy. But the winner was my uncle, a surgeon himself, who was spot on:

It sounds like he’s making it up, but no, I checked: Pancreaticoduodenectomy [wikipedia.org] and Cholecystectomy [wikipedia.org]. I did not, in fact, need a Pancreaticoduodenectomy but I was going to have a Cholecystectomy. So, yea, anyway enough five dollar words: I had to have my gallbladder removed. Unfortunately, before I could have my gallbladder removed, I had to finish my H. Pylori treatment which would take another month. So surgery was scheduled for September.

Luckily I had no more painful issues after that and I arrived for surgery early on a Monday in mid-September for a quick three day stay. After all the checkin and prep they put me under and…

I woke up in the early evening back in my room with tubes running into me and way more bandages than a few small holes would justify. A bit later the doctor came to explain to me that he was not able to remove the gallstones laparoscopically and had to cut me open. Apparently my gallbladder was in fairly bad shape so he was not able to separate it for the liver using he tools-on-sticks.

Long story short, I spent a full week in the hospital on good drugs but still in crazy pain every time I moved or, especially, when in coughed which I was told to do regularly to ensure I didn’t develop pneumonia. Though the doctor did say I had a very high pain threshold as I was able to get up and walk after only a day and usually it took people two days due to the pain. Maybe he was just encouraging me.

In any case I made a full recovery, even going on holiday on schedule in November though I was not able to do any heavy lifting of luggage so the kids had to help, and we packed light. This did not prevent us from doing over 150km of walking around Amsterdam. And I’ve had no problems since. I have an 8 inch scare across my upper stomach like some sort of war wound and I got to keep the gallstones. Yea! Souvenirs:

Categories
ranting

INWO

The election is upon us. As this season of the greatest show on earth comes to a close are we looking forward to a better world or a longer slide down the dystopian rabbit hole of the last four?

It didn’t really begin in 2016, of course, but shit hit the fan so hard and in such volumes in 2016 it’s going to be the year we all remember. Aside from the historians who study these things; they can debate if it began with 9/11 or the financial crisis, or back in the Clinton years or even earlier. But for most of us 2016 is going to be our inflection point. Towards a better world or the end of the world depending on your political persuasions. But either way it was the start of some sort of new world order… or was it?

You see 2016 is when most of the world got a glimpse but some people have known about the plans for a New World Order for much longer. We were warned before I was even born. The shadowy powers behind the curtain were exposed by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in their seminal work The Illuminatus! Trilogy [wikipedia.org]. But many didn’t listen. I wasn’t born.

I had been born when, a few years later, in 1982 another attempt to pull the curtain back. But, I was only four in 1982 when Steve Jackson Games released Illuminati [sjgames.com]. But I was too young.

It wasn’t until 1994 when Steve Jackson Games tried again, releasing Illuminati: New World Order [sjgames.com] as a trading card game.

In 1994 I was old enough to understand and to see behind the curtain. To know who the players were:

To understand the groups involved…

And to understand their tools:

Alas, no one is keeping the things up to date: Brexit, Trump, Hilary’s emails, Harambe, QAnon, TPP, Elon Musk, Amazon, i-devices… and so much more. How will people know the truth? Or are we all doomed to be puppets?

Categories
ranting

Spider Jerusalem and retro-future election dystopia

Ponder Jerusalem on the Beast
Spider Jerusalem explains the incumbent candidates plans…

Less than two weeks to go to the 2020 US election… greatest show on earth, the US election; can’t make this shit up: megalomaniacal fascist vs demential pederast both up to their ears in corruption nepotism. Or so social media “the feeds” as Spider Jerusalem would scream, tell us. Or at least tell me as best as I can follow in my personal filter bubble.

Actually, you can make this shit up, and Warren Ellis did, in his comic Transmetropolitan [wikipedia.org], specifically in the The Year of the Bastard story arc where the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem takes on both the incumbent and challenger in a eerily predictive dystopian presidential election. How eerily predictive? Well… the candidates are neo-nazi/American fascists, fake smile authoritarians, nepotistic, corrupt scum bags. Either straight up spewing their white supremacy or hiding their secret cabal of power faces behind a made-for-the-media facade. You have to read it; it’s drug addled cyberpunk crazy written at the turn of the century under Clinton and Bush the younger and is somehow more relevant than ever. I mean when you set aside the fact that eating tank grown people and injecting Ebola is day-to-day normal in The City. It’s not for everyone…

This is the fourth presidential election I have watched from afar. And each one, with the exception of 2012, seems like one more step along the path to some sort of end-of-the-American-experiment. The polarization and breakdown of what made the system work is soul crushing.

Ok. Enough election depression for the day. But I have one more election inspired trip back to the 90’s to post before November third. Oh the antici……pation.