With E3 being scaled down next year, I figured it was time to belatedly reminisce about the extravagant and smelly spectacle that it once was. So I’ve uploaded a number of photos from the 2002 show, the one and only time I attended.

Bonus content: The Decline of Western Magazine Design and The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover. Also, My Animated World, a stop-motion day in the life of a gamer.

Those that follow my flickr stream might have noticed my new acquisition:

To be honest, I was very hesitant about getting a Sony. Their brand identity with personal electronics is to me like Firestone is to tires. In other words, when I get a Sony I half expect it to turn into a crashing wreck.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons why I opted for the Sony was because I fell into that Sony Proprietary Trap of Doom™. I already bought a 2GB Memory Stick Duo Pro Super Duper for the PSP and I didn’t want to buy another memory format or risk being stuck with someone else’s proprietary trash. I already have a camera that uses Smartmedia, which is useless to me as it’s a dead format. In fact, I don’t think it ever went beyond the 128MB range. At least with the Memory Stick, if my camera becomes obsolete, I can continue to use it with my PSP.

The other obvious reason was that the Cybershot had fairly positive reviews. I was cautious about the touch-screen interface, some like it and some hate it, but playing around with it in the store eased my worries. I still prefer the UI on my old Fuji Finepix, but the Cybershot is intuitive enough (though I haven’t played around with the manual settings enough yet.) The photos are fine too, I guess.

What I really want to bitch about (always need to be negative) is the battery. This is my biggest problem with the Cybershot: to charge the battery, you have to take it out of the camera, put it in a charger and plug it in. On its own this isn’t so bad, but the problem arises from the fact that when you plug the camera to your computer via USB, it doesn’t draw power from it. Thus, if you are charging your battery, you can not connect the camera to the PC. Similarly, if the battery is in the camera, leaving it plugged in drains it. I’ve already had the battery die on me in the middle of a file transfer.

This is a basic feature that I expect from a camera, especially at this price. Not to my surprise, I did discover that there is a dock for the camera, but it’s a $100 more!

That right there is the Sony that I have grown to despise.

Microsoft releases Max. A free photo organization app not at all unlike Apple’s iPhoto or (Ballmer: “I will kill”) Google’s Picasa, but late and with more Microsoft. Worry not, though, because this piece of software is not made by robots, as they boldly say right there on the site.

That seems like an odd thing to mention. The kind of thing robots would say to mislead the general public. But they might be right. After seeing this new product that is not like any other product (but actually a heck of a lot like iPhoto or Picasa) come out after their competitor’s products, I can only conclude that they are actually clones. Possibly with cybernetic implants. So, not robots, but close enough on the evil future overlord scale.

I can’t comment on the actual merits of the software, as I have no need for such a tool (and if I did, Picasa works fine enough.) If I did need this, though, I think I’d choose something with slightly more realistic requirements. It’s not that I don’t meet the system requirements — I do — but a fucking photo app shouldn’t be recommending a 2.4 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. To compare:

Microsoft Max (photo organization)

• 1.0 gigahertz (GHz) processor.
• 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM.
• 200 MB of available hard disk space.
• Super VGA (800 x 600) resolution monitor.

Google Picasa (photo organization)

• PC with 300MHz Pentium processor and MMX technology.
• 64 MB RAM (128MB Recommended)
• 50 MB available hard disk space (100MB recommended)
• 800 x 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor.

Half-Life 2 (full 3D game with physics and AI)

• 1.2 GHz Processor
• 256MB RAM
• DirectX 7 capable graphics card

Microsoft’s photo organization app: slightly less system intensive than Half-Life 2. No wonder Vista is going to be a major system hog, they can’t even get their photo software to be light. Screw that.

The final weekend of the Canadian National Exhibition is the final weekend of summer (sort of.) It is also the weekend of the Canadian International Air Show. As with all things happening over the lake near Ontario Place, I have a pretty good view of the event. So I just sat around on the balcony a lot this weekend, got my arms sorely tanned, and took a crap load of photos. Well over two-hundred. A few of them actually didn’t turn out quite so crappy! I’ve posted those to my Flickr account.

It was good to see the Snowbirds, because without their appearance (which was up in the air due to recent problems), the show would have been quite boring.

This morning I could not find my umbrella. I searched all the obvious places in vain. I thought about the last time it rained and where I took my umbrella. I remembered walking to a GO Station with the umbrella, but I did not go on that train. I remembered taking it with me to work. Did I leave it on a Streetcar? Did I just forget it at work? No, I remembered taking it with me after work. Where did I go?

Then it dawned on me. The umbrella was in the refrigerator. How obvious!

Apparently, I had taken it with me to the liquor store after work, when I went to buy Killer 7 (these two things are not related, though after playing the game, I can concede that they might be.) Upon purchase I threw the umbrella into the bag with the beer. Once I got home, I placed the whole bag into the refrigerator, umbrella and all. Then I forgot about it. duh.

While I was in Atlantic Canada, taking many pictures of the highway, my sister was in Poland taking many pictures of buildings. When I went to get my disposable camera film developed I dropped off her rolls of film too. They were supposed to digitize my photos, but as I found out at home, they had digitized her photos instead. Since I have them here with me, I present a sample of my hometown (with an extra cock photo as a bonus!).

Read the rest of this entry…

I have uploaded the rest of my least crappy roadtrip photos to Flickr, save for the shots taken on the disposable film camera. As I do not have a scanner, those will not be going up anytime soon.

Read the rest of this entry…

While at the Fortress of Louisbourg, I went through a slightly less traveled tunnel to the outside of the walls. There was a small brook and pond there, and the grass was very green. It contrasted well with the strong, stone walls of the fortress. It looked nice, so I took a photo. I posted it to Flickr.

Then I looked at public photos marked with the tag “Louisbourg”, and lo and behold, someone else took the exact same shot from the exact same spot. The weather is nicer, but everything else is the same. Nice.

Toronto Photography Festival this month. Several of the exhibits involve using billboards to show photographic work rather than advertising. This is good. Most (if not all) of them are in the Spadina + Richmond area, close to where I work. Wish stuff like that was done more often. There are only so many obnoxious mortgage or bikini ads that I can stand.

This weekend has been the catch-up weekend. Today alone, I caught up with various online writings and news, got some neglected cleaning done, watched a pair of movies that I bought weeks ago but never even opened, reorganized my gaming set-up, got some badly needed groceries taken care of (no longer do I have fridge consisting of a jar of mayo, some old mustard, two onions, and some beer), rejigged n0wak.com, updated some minor things here and, somehow, even managed to replay some good ole Gradius V.

Now that the gaming setup is cleaned up a bit, I can show it (posted on Flickr with notes).

I tagged it with GamingSetup but, sadly, I am the first to do so. I browsed through other similar tags, but I couldn’t find any geektastic setups. Which is unfortunate as I find those interesting in a voyeuristic/geek sort of way.

What needs to be said is “I hate those shelves”. They’ve been with me since I was in grade-school. Seriously. I want to get rid of them. I will get rid of them. It’s just that on the furniture/decor priority list, “new shelving” is far below “counter table” (next week), “stools for said table”, “new couch”, “something to make the walls less boring”, “another DVD tower”, and possibly “new bed”. The need for some of these things is quite evident in the larger scale living room semi-panorama. Kinda bland, I know, but I’m slowly getting there. Give me another six months.

I don’t know where that black line on the left (in the living room shot) came from. Even with the Photoshop-like UI tweaks (WinXP port down in the comments), GIMP is still a mess to use.

Hey! My delicious inbox is back.

Thankfully, I missed out on all the lame April 1st absurdity on the web on account of being *gasp* away from the computer and *double-gasp* out in meatspace. It was in this “real world” that I attended my first ever Toronto Rock lacrosse game and a (close to first ever) comedy show (for free, thanks to the connected comedy maven that is Jenn — I thanked you already but I’m going to do it publically as well). Two social outings in two days? That might just be a record for me.

Sad as it is, my camera has been grossly neglected. To make up for a lack of crappy photography, here’s a small sample of crappy photos from the small batch of crappy photos taken over the summer.

Also:

No sir, I don’t like it.

The Windscreen Gallery is very much like the Mirror Project (knock-off *cough*), except it’s for pictures from cars instead of pictures of yourself in a mirror. Drastic difference. Or not.

Random, crappy photo taken two days ago.

Site-to-site comparisons aside, the concept is one that has a certain appeal. Let’s face it, I’m lazy. I like to go on long drives, get some fresh air, see the countryside; but I hate walking. Naturally, a large percentage of my digital photos are taken from within the car, often without bothering to stop.

Just aim in the general direction and hope for the best. That’s my philosophy. Sure, most of the photos end up lousy, but I like the sense of spontaneous passing that they capture.

I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures (including one taken two days ago — how convenient), but they’re still pending approval. So here’s my mirror project photo from 2002. (Has it been that long?) Not surprisingly, that photo perfectly illustrates the parallels between the Mirror Project, the Windscreen Gallery, and my lazy drive-by-shooting techniques.

Edit: three windscreen images are up.

I just got back from the 2003 World Rock Paper Scissor Championships, held here in Toronto, and organized by the WorldRPS Society The grand champion, winning $5000, was a member of the “Legion of the Red Fist.” I was an official tournament referee there, so I’ll have an update later.

Update. Photos from the event. The Official Photo Gallery.

The following image, titled stupidxbox, has been sitting in my dump directory for some months. It is a picture of an odd error message that the machine gave me, and it’s very subtle in its idiocy. Yes, my XBox is officially retarded.

I attended a Classic Gaming Collectors of Canada swap meet on Sunday; here’s some quick photos of the event. I didn’t have many traders — and even less cash — but despite that I, once again, have a classic NES. It’s been about ten years since I sold my last (and first) one. I grew to regret that, but no more. Now I can set out to reacquire my old favourites (luckily, I kept my copy of Final Fantasy — box, maps, and all). Huzzah.