2005 May archive at James Mok’s Soliloquy

Archive for May, 2005

F1 Kids

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at 22:31 HKT May 29, 2005 in Sports. 2 Comments

Webber, to move forward means you must go with the turns, not to be a harpoon hitting everyone in the process and take yourself and only yourself out of the race. It is, however, very gentlemanly of you to admit the fault. Pointing those who refused to open their eyes, despite watching tiny TVs, in the right direction.

Raikkonan, another last lap Finn bomb. If Alonso could hold everyone off behind him including Michael for several laps, couldn’t you just hold yourself off for just 2 more laps with a 4 second lead and safe that front axle from collapsing for the win?

Quick Nick, zero mistake! Another great race.

Wirelessness

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James

at 18:25 HKT May 28, 2005 in Computing. 17 Comments

Bought a Buffalo WZR-RS-G54 wireless router with VPN capabilities in preparation for possibly sharing a B&W photo printer with my cousin in the neighborhood. Not a cheap router at HKD$950 but seems to be the most inexpensive one with its kind of features.

Setup needed a little getting used to. Manual and UI is not as straight forward as the 3 Linksys I have setup before or the Belkin I have just setup for my other cousin a couple of days ago. Took me about an hour to have it setup with 3 wireless connections for my notebooks and a wired connection for my desktop vs like 10 minutes with the Belkin. Oh well, the Belkin does not do VPN.

Everything seems to be in good order. Back to the Net I dive. SOMEBODY STOP ME!

The Derek Hyde-Lay XV

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James

at 17:10 HKT May 28, 2005 in Sports. 0 Comments

Rugby has been a Shawnigan Lake School tradition. Although I hated Rugby at first, I quickly became loving the sport during my first term at SLS.

This year’s Derek Hyde-Lay XV vs Team Canada game was held on May 14 at the campus.

Derek was the first SLS staff I met at SLS and he was my Track and Field coach. A great man we all missed very much.

Wirelesslessness

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James

at 11:30 HKT May 28, 2005 in Computing. 2 Comments

Lost my Linksys wireless router last night. It just died all of a sudden. There seems to be no life for me after midnight without the Internet.

Although I could have wired direct to get a connection, I couldn’t be bothered for it was already 01:30 hours. I used to do some more reading on the net by the bed before just bed time but I fell asleep just as easily last night without the Net. Just a little unsettling that’s all. Perhaps it’s better without it.

Well, the Linksys worked well with the PB17 and the wired PC desktop, but the Fujitsu notebook with its built-in wi-fi has been dropping the line every so often. Not sure which end has the problem, but my cousin’s Linksys with her HP notebook and Dell desktop with a Linksys USB wi-fi connection are both acting up ever since the beginning with her router. Again my PB17 worked well there. It seems to be a client end problem but it beats me why there are so many failings in different brands and type of clients’ connection.

Have to get a new router, but which? Buffalo and Belkin are said to use the same chip as Linksys’. ZyXel might be better but at almost 50% higher price, I am reluctant to try. Surecom, Sercom, PCI, and Plenex all looks the same, and my Sercom wired router was even slower than my wi-fi Linksys in wireless mode! Level One - don’t get none. That leaves ASUS, Netgear and whatever.

Might have to bite the bullet and go for the ZyXel.

The Boys

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James

at 12:22 HKT May 27, 2005 in AudioVisual. 0 Comments

One of the greatest duos since Simon and Garfunkel with equally great lyrics as theirs as well as Bob Dylan’s.

Pet Shop Boys Commentary has detail explanations of their albums and lyrics.

Ken Harai

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James

at 2:21 HKT May 27, 2005 in AudioVisual. 3 Comments

Don’t know what people see in him. All he does is fake highs with barely (not) enough gas to finish each sentence. Whereas HK’s own Leo Koo does a much better job in fake highs and can switch back to real sound quite naturally.

Broken Chain of Thoughts

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James

at 11:19 HKT May 26, 2005 in Thoughts. 6 Comments

Perhaps it’s an age thing.

Whenever I have a thought, either an idea or about to do something, if I were to be interrupted by the phone, the door bell, or whatever, when I come back to it I would have lost that thought. I would know I had a thought, but I couldn’t remember what it was. It may take half an hour, a few hours, or a few days to get back to the thought. It may never come back to me. Simply put, no short term memory.

What’s may seem to be worse though, I have too good of a long term memory. What hurts, hurts forever! Not that this kind of hurting matters too much in life but rather frustrating nonetheless.

The Digillogic Period

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James

at 15:09 HKT May 23, 2005 in Arts&Crafts. 2 Comments

In this day and age of Digital Cameras, where entry level DCs still costing 4 to 5 times the price of their film based counterparts, which is outrageously expensive, yet end users help defend manufacturers’ high pricing strategies, saying something like if the upcoming mid end DSLRs were to be priced at such low prices, then the manufacturers would be killing both their entry level models and flagship models.

The fact of the matter is, DCs are mostly electronic components with some direct descent mechanical components from their film based bodies. It is the mechanical parts that cost most money. Electronic parts, by the time any model has been selling in the mass market with a mass production well in its way, costs should not be far from a film based. Although I do not have any figures, I’d bet DSLRs have been selling much better nowadays than film based did a few years before the digital camera era. Which should mean higher revenue, and with the higher volume, in turn should mean an even lower production costs.

Yet, with these outrageous pricing, even with a flagship DSLR costing over HKD$36K, we still see so many having problems as basic as focusing as mentioned here and here . Not to mention the same problem with other models and a whole bunch of other problems such as the missing flashed images problem that I have experienced with my older model.

I have been using 135 film based cameras among other formats for over 30 years. Perfect focusing is the basic essential of any camera. Of the tens of film cameras that I have owned over the years, I have only come across one used 6×6 camera that had a focusing problem where it was nothing more than a new proper focusing screen that couldn’t rectified. However, here with these DSLRs, frustrated customers after paying a huge sum of premium for the body and lenses, they have to deal with red tapes, incompetence, and unwillingness of the service department to get any service at all. Ridiculous.

Although there might not be much we end users could do, I think it is time for the manufacturers to face the problems head-on and prevent them from surfacing at all if they choose to continue selling at such high prices. After all, even though people are buying, no mass produced camera is actually worth that kind of prices - enough to buy a decent used car for crying out loud! Especially when the product life cycles of DSLRs is not even half that of their film based counterparts!

F1 Monte Carlo Monaco

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James

at 23:40 HKT May 22, 2005 in Sports. 4 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged F1. In fact, this is the first time this season. The races have been quite boring until today at Monaco.

Great strategy and excellent driving won McLaren’s Kimi Raikkonan his second crown in a row this season. Awesome driving by Williams’ Nick Heidfeld, McLaren’s Juan Pablo Montoya, and Toyota’s Ralf Schumacher.

Renault’s Fernando Alonso suffered from bald tyres and lost 2nd place to Nick and then 3rd to Williams’ Mark Webber only to come in 4th barely in front of Juan Pablo who came from 16th place at the starting grid.

Nothing new this race from poor performing machines and tyres of team Ferrari where there had been nothing much that our 7 time World Champion Michael Schumacher could do. Although there is still a lot in Michael to go, Ferrari has pretty much lost it this year. It was nice to see Michelle Yeoh in the Ferrari pit though.

And oh, Mr. Irwin, the only thing that’s really bore about our 7 time champ is your words against him. Michael maybe boring you, but at least he is still in the race. Whereas you can only sit on your butt bad mouthing non English racers.

As a fellow Canadian, I can only say this to Sauber’s Villeneuve - quit. There is really no point in racing when all you could do is take out your teammate along with yourself.

That goes for you too, Webber. The whole point in racing is to go forward. Not defending a position and hold everyone else behind, and not being able to get pass anyone. I have no idea what everyone sees in you, Mark. Leave the not-being-able-to-pass job to Ralf alright; he’s been doing a great job at that before today; however, not bad for Ralf from 17th to 6th today though.

Tough luck for Jordan’s Karthikeyan, India’s first F1 driver, who suffered from some break problems and had to quit early. Karthikeyan seems to be one of the best rookies in the past few years. There should be a great future in F1 for him if he could get a car that could really perform.

In watching F1 races on TV, I have never liked listening to the Cantonese commentators so I have always been listening to the English ones. I tried listening to the Cantonese for about 10 minutes today, and it was already too much to remind me not to switch to it again. First off, the name of Ferrari’s Technical Director is Ross Brawn, not “Ron Bronze”. Secondly, that’s “pit stop”, not “piss stop”. And the race today was in Monaco (Europe) , not Morocco (Africa)! Get your act together, will ya?!