Many Faces, One Heart 1

Some people build model cars. I’m building a shrine at the moment. Really, there are pictures here. Actually, more accurately, I’m one of a large group of amazing, beautiful people building a shrine.

It’s an incredible experience when a diverse group comes together with a single purpose and I want to write a long, eloquent post about it, but the past few days have been madly busy and the next few days don’t seem to be letting up, so instead I’m going to stall for time by introducing you to some of the people I’m enjoying spending time with right now. Then I’ll backtrack at the end and verbalise.

This is my partner Yang’s father, Guan Thong Chua, though I’ve only ever heard him referred to by anyone as Gong Gong

This is Zong Herc

This is Bryan. We try not to pair Zong Herc and Bryan up for tasks if we actually want the tasks done.

This is Irene

And, this is Kelvin

Is My Camera Making You Horny Baby?

 

In my travels lately, and that includes my walks into Chinatown for lunch (because there’s no shortage of tourists there to watch), I’ve noticed that big black cameras are the new must-have fashion accessory.

People used to carry normal cameras, and for a while the trend was the-smaller-the-better, but these days they’re kitted out like modern-day Ansel Adamses (or Annie Leibovitzes if that’s your gender preference). I saw a guy on Lantau Island who had 3 of the suckers draped around his neck, with lenses so long he was probably photographing landmarks in China rather than Hong Kong.

I’m all for bringing power to the people and let’s face it, an entry level DSLR is a very attainable object these days. In 2007 sales grew  by about 42% over the previous year, and they’re predicted to grow another 22% this year.

I like to watch people drive these big black beasts. If you’re a manual car driver you can probably tell what kind of car someone is driving, and how they’re driving it, by watching them for a minute. Are they changing gears manually? Do they use the handbrake or the clutch on hills? It’s the same thing really. Watching someone take photos I can guess what settings their camera is on, how they’ve got the focus set up, whether they understand the distance their flash will travel or not.

As you’d expect, a lot of people have their cameras set on auto, quite a few use a shutter or aperture priority and not too many people are set to fully manual. There’s a fair bit of point-and-shoot snapshotting going on, but I’ve been really surprised by the number of people who are taking their time to get a cool angle and compose a scene. We’ve become a photographically visually-literate society and a lot of people are having fun exploring that, which is great to see.

But I wonder: Is a DSLR overkill for a lot of the photography I’m observing? Or just downright less fun?

I mention all this because it was my partner Yang’s birthday this week and we had an addition to the family that went in the opposite direction. We’ve now got a Canon Powershot S5 IS in the house, which isn’t tiny, but i think is what they class “compact” in retail-speak.

In addition to heavy equipment I’ve got a little cigarette-packet sized, underpowered Nikon I carry in my bag, but it’s been ages since I owned a compact camera, and I’d forgotten how flexible and how much fun they were. This one has image stabiliser, face recognition (new to me, kind of spooky, but you’ve got to love it), macro, something called super-macro, a pretty impressive zoom range and more shooting programs hidden in its menus than you could poke a lens at. And it’s about half the size and a quarter of the weight of the DSLR I carry around to do the same thing (and that’s without a macro lens in the bag as well).

It’s left me thinking that bigger is not necessarily better. Well, at least in this instance.

I’m not about to trade down my SLR for a compact, because I need the raw format and the control of fine points like bokeh for what I do, but it feels like the difference between driving a Rolls Royce and driving a sporty little convertible. Sometimes I think it’s fun to feel the wind in your hair.

pic: creativespark scares the New York locals

 

Singapore Telcos - They Love You While You’re Dating, But Get Into A Relationship And You’re Old News

My telcos are cheating on me. Like amped-up coffee-shop uncles with pockets full of Power 1 Walnut, they’re lavishing gifts on fresh, new faces and hoping that the faithful spouse at home doesn’t notice. After all, as long as they remember our anniversary I shouldn’t mind, right?

It started with my mobile phone operator, M1. They sent me a letter last week to offer to cut my monthly subscription from $26 to $16. But only if I locked myself into the relationship for another 2 years.

That’s lovely, but what exactly are you telling me M1? If it was a loyalty bonus or a thank you gift for being a great customer, then why not just give me the discount with no strings attached? I’m exactly the kind of customer you should be rewarding. I’m faithful and monogamous, I pay my bills on time and I’ve been giving you kopi money for 6 years already.

What’s wrong with me M1? Is it the frumpy house-dress? Would you lavish more attention on me if I dressed in a Tiger Beer uniform and flirted more?

As we say (often) in Singapore… “nevermind already”. Just when I’d got over my mobile phone company lavishing attention on fresh, pretty faces when they should have been lavishing it on me, my broadband company did the same.

My cable provider, Starhub, began running ads on the weekend for free mobile broadband with their home plan. For no extra cost, they’ve throwing in a little portable laptop modem and unlimited mobile surfing.

“I love it when a company I use surprises and delights me with great products and services”, I thought to myself, excited at the idea of whipping out my laptop in the supermarket and checking my shopping list on Remember the Milk.

Foolish me. Blinded in my role as the faithful spouse I failed to notice their indiscretions until I got to the small-print.

“Offer applies only to new customers, or existing customers whose contract has expired”.

So once again as an existing customer, under contract and dutifully ponying up on time every month, I’ve been shafted (… or not shafted because my shaftor has gone off flirting with someone else, if you want to keep with the coffee-shop uncle analogy).

Does anyone else think there’s something wrong with this approach to marketing?

Pic: Nostalgia Phone Home by creativespark

The Spaces We Claim

The pulchritudinous art of Jason Andrews is really inspiring me at the moment.

Do My Neighbours Have Enhancements She Can’t Wait To Notice?

I eyed the 10 houses in my street suspiciously when I took a walk this afternoon. Could I recall ever seeing a FedEx man ringing a bell? Mysterious brown envelopes being pushed through letterbox slots? Anyone with a watch a little too flash for their income? The man of the house walking to his car a bit like you’d expect John Wayne to walk to his horse?

It’s the 30th anniversary of spam, and surveys show that 12% of us connected folk have actually bought something from a spam email. Can you imagine that? 12%!

No wonder I hear strange noises outside in the middle of the night. Statistically, one of my neighbours has been dipping into the online pharmacy cookie jar.

Looking For A Nano-Improvement

I’ve been writing about Singapore restaurants that serve “local food” today, so I thought I’d use it as an excuse to try out our new local search engine, RedNano.

Good and bad results.

The Bad

• It’s quick to load (good) with no visible advertising, but if there is advertising it’s hidden in the search results (bad, although I don’t know if that’s the case or not)
• It’s not necessarily as smart as Google. For example, entering “Swissôtel the Stamford”, I plowed through 5 pages of “besthotels” and “discounthotels” results before finding a link to the hotel’s site. Google put the corporate site at number 1.
• The “Images” link is next to useless. All the images returned are from SPH publications and clicking on a thumbnail brings you to a slightly bigger thumbnail and the option to buy the picture.
• At the moment blogs aren’t indexed well (I vanity-searched mine, which was visible through ping.sg but not on its own)
• It’s not always accurate. It returned a link for “Taste of Singapore” Sentosa to www.sentosa.sg, which pulls a 404 (correctly it’s www.sentosa.com.sg)

The Good

Generally it’s a quick and easy way to find relevant results if you’re looking for something Singapore-specific. Looking for Giraffe Restaurant and Bar was as easy as typing Giraffe into the box (relevant result was number 5)

Is it offering any advantages?

Google users here default to google.com.sg and it’s necessary to actually apply a bit of brute force to get out of the .sg zone (you can do it in the “advanced search”). Typing “Giraffe” into Singapore Google got me equally good or slightly better results (relevant result was number 3). It definitely got me better results for Swissotel. RedNano, on the other hand, turned up some nice Singapore-centric links for Street Art, though it didn’t take much to persuade Google to turn up better ones by adding “Singapore” to the search term.

Was RedNano any more local? It didn’t seem to be. It was a nice enough search experience, but I was hoping it was going to offer something a little better (in this case more local) than I could get elsewhere. Otherwise why bother? Instead of offering more it seemed to offer less. I quite often flip between Web and Images in my searches and RedNano wasn’t helpful in that regard. It did have some kind of seemingly hard to navigate Directory of Services though. Search terms in the Directory turned up an assortment of irrelevant results and a law firm called Joyce A. Tan & Partners seemed to come up number one for many of the search terms I tried, but perhaps it will develop into something.

I wanted to like the experience, I really did. But I didn’t.

Young Me, Now Me

I’m going to stop boring you with holiday photos now and give you someone else’s photos instead. Ze Frank has a nice user contributed “young me, now me” then and now photo series happening here. It’s being held on Twitter and there are flash drives to be won if you want to play.

A couple of my favourites - by nonoboy

and by by johnwilliams713…

Hong Kong Musings 2

More tales of the city…

pics by creativespark

Hong Kong Musings 1

Some random sights and sounds…

pics by creativespark

Hong Kong Typecast

Every industry will have an equivalent of this, but graphic designers who came through the type of training that I did are a funny bunch when they get together. We talk lovingly of darkroom chemicals, bromides and paste-up grids. Confessions are made about which model we had pinned to the inside of our lockers (the Mac II or the Mac SE). And of course eyes mist over as we mourn the death of typography.

I remember sitting in classes with cut out letters and blocks of text. Moving them fractions of a millimeter to the left or right until they were juuuuuust right. It felt a bit like safe cracking with high explosives attached to the dial. At some point it would just click into place, and you’d realise you’d been holding your breath for two minutes.

Along the way we had grunge, led by Raygun, The Face and music in general… but despite the way it looked, that was no less accidental. Type was king and we were humble servants.

OK, as Mark Twain might say, rumours of type’s death have been greatly exaggerated. There’s some beautiful typographical things going on in the world, and even in Singapore. But even now, something as humble as a sign giving directions for a train, a matchbox or a beer bottle can get me really excited if the type is interesting.

The rightful ruler of Kowloon, the late Tsang Tsou-Choi, once said “Emperors in China have always been calligraphers” and for 50 years he staked his claim with notices on lamps, pillars, walls and pavements on the island. I was all set to track some of his works during my visit but in an air-headed early-morning-flight moment I left my notes at home.

Still, Hong Kong was fun for the wide variety of typography on offer… from the slick to the lovingly rough-and-ready…

pics by creativespark