Okay, I give up: I’m going to start Twittering. I have created an account (@ggbaker) and everything.
Given that I can’t usually be bothered to update my Facebook status, I don’t know how this is going to go. I figure if a few people are following it, that might motivate me.
We’re back from Vegas. Many pictures were taken. A small amount of money was lost, more was spent. Some highlights from me:
We had a meal, and took many pictures at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon. My favourite courses were probably the lobster carpaccio and the sea bass.
Now that I think about it, I might have been up slightly. I have photographic evidence of being up a total of $85. I only lost money when I sat at a slot machine a couple of times. The dollar slot that Kat told be was good was the worst of it. I reckon I’m up $20–40.
At one point, Kat wanted to play a dollar slot for a while. I said I was going to see if there was a quarter slot or something nearby. I circled a couple banks of slot machines and came back. Kat was done, having lost $40 in like two minutes. Stay away from the slot machines, kids.
My best gambling experience was when we found a roulette table with a $5 limit (as opposed to $10) at the MGM. I sat down and started playing pretty randomly. Every bet on the roulette table has a house edge of 2/37, so it’s not like my decisions meant much anyway.
The dealer was nice and very helpful (since all of us cheapskates at the $5 table were amateurs). I got a free drink while sitting there, and happened to come away $43 up (actually $48, but I left $5 with the dealer). That was pretty much everything I wanted from the casino.
The best picture I got in the casino was right before a pit boss walked up to me and told me that “for future reference, pictures are allowed anywhere else on the property, but not in the casino.” Polite but firm. Very good.
There are probably 27 ways to cheat at the tables using a digital camera, none of which I would be able to figure out.
The Neon Museum/Boneyard was really good, and a great opportunity for pictures. Definitely recommended for anybody going to Vegas.
My 30mm f/1.4 lens did come through very well for some night shots on the strip.
My Vegas status: total bets $26, total winnings $36, so I’m up $10. I’m trying, but I just can’t bring myself to put $10 down (the table minimums) on, well, anything where all I might get is the thrill of losing $10. I want my $10!
Kat’s status: down significantly more.
We went to the Neon Museum/Boneyard yesterday, which was cool and provided many picture-taking opportunities.
We had dinner at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon last night. It was really very good: one of the best meals I’ve had, although both Kat and I agree that our first meal at Lumiere (when Feenie was still there and it was a fixed menu) was better. One gets extra critical as the bill blasts past $100 each. 🙂
Cirque de Soleil tonight. I’m hoping to get out on the strip tonight with my f/1.4 lens to get some cool night shots. Many pictures on our return.
As some of you know, Kat and I are heading to Las Vegas tonight. Of course, we will see things and do stuff, but that’s not what I’m worried about right now.
I’m psyching myself up to actually gamble something while I’m there. Any previous gambling experiences I’ve had have ended with me thinking “shit… now I don’t have five dollars.” But, I figure I’m probably not going back to Vegas with any regularity, so I’d better do it while I’m there.
So, I’m worried about how to look the coolest while I’m losing whatever money I decide I can part with. My options, as I see them:
Opinions?
Edit: Eugene’s comment reminds me of another option: poker. I refuse to be one of those guys that sits down at a poker table practically screaming “I started playing poker when it was trendy and have played with my friends three whole times” and then proceeds to lose everything to guys who are actually good at poker. Plus, I’m not even that good at it.
I wonder if they have Euchre tables.
Even those familiar with the food court in Metrotown might have missed a place called “Cultures”. In fact, the best description I can find of it online is a page offering a franchise.
The place basically does sandwiches and salads (in the potato salad, coleslaw, pasta salad vein). There are some other wraps and lasagna and stuff that I haven’t tried. I have been going there for a while out of fast food fatigue: it’s all tasty and different than the usual mall faire. They have a sandwich and two salads combo: I usually get a tuna sandwich, potato salad, and some pasta salad. It’s like having a little personal picnic in the middle of the mall.
But, I’m not blogging to praise their food: it’s good, but not worth blogging about.
The place is run by a Chinese family (or they seem like they might be a family). As far as I can tell, between the group of them, they speak the following English: “sandwich”, “tuna”, “white bread”, “brown bread”, “toasted”, “mustard”, “mayonnaise”, “drink”, and the various numeric/money/change-making vocabulary. Even at that, about half the time, somebody other than the first person that addresses me has to be summoned to deal with complicated things like “tuna”.
I’m also not blogging to point out that there are some people in Vancouver who don’t speak much English. Nobody who has adopted the city as their home would be bothered by that.
I’m blogging to point out that there is pretty much no such thing as Chinese people (who are from China, with Chinese tastes in food) who like potato salad and pasta salad and beet salad and whatever other salad they serve. That means that every morning, these people wake up, follow some recipe that they got with the franchise, and think “I can’t believe white people eat this. It would be so much better with MSG and some kind of dried fish flakes or something.”
I’m blogging to praise their entrepreneurial spirit. Anybody can sell a product they like. It takes some real stones to sell a product that you probably are at best indifferent towards. I couldn’t do it.
So, go to Cultures when you’re at Metrotown. Get a sandwich and marvel at their courage.
I’ve been looking for a new pair of sunglasses since I lost my last pair. Tonight I went on the Oakley site, and (OMG! OMG! OMG! *jumps in chair while typing*) they have Asian Fit sunglasses and goggles! Now, this may seem strange to non-Asian people, but finding glasses/sunglasses that fit properly has always been difficult for me (and presumably other Asian people). Usually frames are too tight around my temples, slide down my nose, and touch my cheekbones (creating unsightly dents in my cheeks that take a while to go away). And now on their Asian Fit frames Oakley has made the ear stems more rounded to prevent touching at the temples, narrowed and deepened the nose bridge so the glasses will stay put, and reduced the curvature of the front to prevent touching at the cheeks and temples. I am so excited to try these on. I wish I had seen this two weeks ago when the mall was still open at 10:30 pm. I hope they didn’t sell out of these on Boxing Day.
UPDATE: As of this afternoon I am a proud owner of a pair of Oakley Asian Fit Five 3.0’s. 😀
So Greg blogged about his camera set-up, and I guess it’s finally time that I blogged about the food that we had at our open house. In typical Kat fashion, I planned for WAY too much food. But, it’s better to have too much than too little! 🙂
So, here’s what we had out: (links to recipes where we can)
Here’s what we had left over:
So yeah, I guess we went a little overboard on the amount of food. Greg thinks that for next year we should have twice as much of half as many things. I, on the other hand, like the variety, so I’m thinking we should have the same amount of what we had out. 🙂
A few notes from me…
The beer/cheese/potato soup was nice, but I’ll never make it again in a million years. Because of the melted cheese, it fused to every surface it touched. I washed the slow cooker it was in three times, and Kat still rewashed it because it wasn’t clean.
For the butter tarts, I usually make a double pie shell worth of crust and double the recipe there. This time I doubled again because Kat encouraged me. 🙂
The trifle has to have the best appreciation to effort ratio of any recipe I make. It’s dead easy, and everybody loves it. I use grocery store pound cake and the custard in the sidebar of the recipe (you need 1.5× that recipe). I usually double the recipe (3× the custard) and make a big bowl, because it goes fast.
For the fruit coulis, I use a 600g bag of frozen berries, a little sugar, and cornstarch. Simmer to cook, and mash if the chunks are too big. Add a free-pour of sherry once it has cooled and you have enough for a double recipe.
We had our first (annual?) holiday open house on Saturday. We had a good turnout: thanks to everybody that came. I think the whole thing was a success.
There was food, and Kat has promised she will blog about that sometime soon.
For me, the conversation piece was the camera on a tripod in the corner. It was hooked up to my laptop and taking an image every 30 seconds (then displaying it). The setup was based on somebody else’s instructions on creating a time lapse movie in a similar way.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with these pictures. I thought that a time lapse movie of the party might be cool. I thought it might accidentally capture some good images. What I didn’t realize was that neither Kat or I was going to have a chance to take any pictures anyway, so these were almost the only ones that we would have.
I have gone through the pictures in a cursory way and posted some (along with the few pictures we did take by hand) in our gallery.
I did put the frames together into a time lapse movie (that link is about 24MB; I also did a smaller 12 MB version, or use the direct link to the movie if you’re having plugin problems, or the Facebook version if all else fails).
I’m actually pretty happy with how the movie turned out. I kind of wish I had left the camera running until we had really finished the cleanup that night (with the last frame being lights-out, say), but that didn’t seem as important as actually cleaning stuff up at the time.
I played with the camera settings for a while before I got it rolling. What I ended up with was the smallest image the camera would take (about 2 MP), my Sigma zoom at 18mm, ISO 1600, auto white balance, auto exposure (most shots were around f/2.8 and 1/30 s), manual focus at about 3 m (depth of field was surprisingly good for the wide aperture), LCD image review off (to save battery).
If I was doing it again, I might lock the white balance and aperture, just to keep everything in the video as consistent as possible.
I swapped out the battery in the camera twice during the day. I’m not totally sure that was necessary, but I didn’t want to take the chance of it running out.
The net result was 1800 exposures in 15 hours: almost as many as I usually take in a year.
When I had the idea, I thought I was going to have to do some low-level USB hacking, but it turns out gphoto2 will do exactly what I want. The script to start it was this: (gphoto does die occasionally, which is why it’s in the loop)
#!/bin/sh INTERVAL=30 killall gvfsd-gphoto2 2>/dev/null # kill program hogging the camera gphoto2 --set-config /main/camera/setcameratime=1 # set time from computer while true ; do killall gvfsd-gphoto2 2>/dev/null gphoto2 \ --set-config flashmode=0 --set-config beep=0 \ --capture-image --interval ${INTERVAL} --hook-script hook sleep ${INTERVAL} # keep going if gphoto dies done
And the script “hook” that just bumps the display:
#!/bin/sh if [ $ACTION = "download" ] ; then gqview -r $ARGUMENT # press "f" for full screen fi
I did have a small problem with gphoto and the Rebel XT which was fixed with a one-line patch. Also, the original instructions above are pretty liberal with the bitrate: I encoded with 1000 and 500 bps for the large and small movies. I also had to crop the frames from the Rebel’s 3:2 aspect ratio to the 4:3 of your average video.
It has been a trying day so far:
Overall, a generally unpleasant day, with parts 2, 4, 5, and 7 really sucking. Perhaps a decent dinner will raise my spirits.
Since my last prediction worked out so well, I have decided I should make more. [Keep in mind that I’m totally making this stuff up: I wouldn’t bet the farm on any of it. I’m also not saying that I want this stuff to happen, just that I think it will.]
First, the most important thing in the whole universe, ever: the US presidential race. It’s no longer terribly controversial to predict that Obama is going to win, so I’ll have to go wackier.
Prediction 1: In the lead-up to the election, McCain will continue personal attacks on Obama. This will annoy voters and open up Obama’s lead. Obama will continue to do what he has been doing the whole time: “I don’t want to make personal attacks; I want to talk about the issues and have this good economic plan.”
Prediction 2: Obama wins with 55–60% of the vote. I’ll say 57% (a 14 point spread). I have no good sense of how that plays out in the electoral college. (At the moment, electoral-vote.com has 343-184 with 11 too close to call.)
Prediction 3: The Dow Jones will continue to slide down until late October, and will begin to rise slowly after that. Pundits will blame this on Obama’s pending victory, even though it’s just bargain hunters in the market. Either way, I will effectively be betting real money that this guy is right (about the market, not the lame money-saving tips). [Edit 10/12: and this guy.]
Prediction 4: As to the Canadian election, electionprediction.org is currently predicting another Conservative minority, which is probably where the smart money would go. I’m going to go crazy and predict a Liberal minority. No real reason other than 4 parties beating up on Harper might take its toll.
Let’s see how I do. Anybody got anything to add?
