Random Musings and Nicknacks

Interesting.

What do I find interesting? Well, I’ll give you some hints.

-Black hair
-Beady eyes
-Vocal

Still don’t have it? Punky. And his ears.
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I want to avoid turning this into my personal bike complaints space, but today really took the cake (even better than the woman who changed direction to run over my water bottle after I dropped it).

On my bike, I was turning left onto Marine drive in North Van. This intersection always puts me in a bad mood.

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I went out to shoot some landscape photos this morning. It turned out that I got bonus for insects photos. I was never able to catch a bumble bee on flower before. This morning I got a nice treat and able to take a few photos of the buzzer.

I switched to Aperture as my photo editor now. So far I like it

Ling recently posted her discoveries about colour profiles, which is funny because I have been reading about the exact same thing the last two days. Is an interesting topic — if you looked at Ling’s recent study of colour and shapes in Windows, you would see much duller colours than she did when she posted it. However, if you look at my picture above on Windows you will see nearly the same thing I do (the difference here is so subtle you would have to put it side by side). On a Mac you can see the differences by putting a Safari and a Firefox window side by side. Try it with Ling’s picture, you’ll be amazed at the difference.

The question really is not what is colour, but how do you describe colour…

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Well, the first thing is that my mom is really, really, downtight. She has some sort of weird thing for Punky. She doesn’t seem as strict for him.

The first thing is that when she feeds him food, he tells him to sit, he speaks. She says sit, he speaks again. So she stops. She says sit again and he lies down. She says good boy! And starts patting him on the nose. So then she accidentally pokes his eye, she start worrying.
“Did I poke your eye! I’m so sorry! Sit!”
And he sits.
“Good boy! Sit!”
And he lies down. So then she says “good boy” and feeds him…

What?

The second thing. She tells me that I should not feed him. She tells me not to feed him off the kitchen counter. Also she says I can not feed him from the table.
The table I’m fine about, but it’s the other two.
She tells me to not feed him or he’ll attach himself to me. So I agree, and then she starts feeding him. Why can’t I? So a few weeks later she tells both of us to feed him because the dog is attached to her? Why?
So I cannot feed him from the counter. That’s not a rule anymore, but it bothered me. But when she said that, the night afterward I saw her feeding him off the table, no one cares anymore, but that’s still a weird thing…

More coming up soon…

I can’t believe this. All this time I have been doing wrong things without knowing it. The colors of my photo always look dull and could not figure out why. I blamed my old Minolta and got frustrated with my new Nikon D40. I study color theory and work hard to understand why colors of my photo are always off?
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Last night was the first night of the HSBC Celebration of Light. The lead up to this caused quite a bit of consternation around Vancouver as, with the current CUPE strike on, there would be nobody available to clean up the mounds of garbage that are left behind after. This is quite a problem — last year English Bay was in horrible shape the next morning, with cartons, papers, drink containers, beer bottles strewn everywhere.

There was discussion of cancelling the fireworks entirely (the amount of garbage that piles up is quite a health hazard — the radio this morning said it is measured in tonnes!), but they decided instead to plead with everybody to take the garbage away.

To, I think everyone’s surprise, it worked and this morning English Bay was not much worse than a typical morning. I saw a few volunteers picking up paper, that was it.

What bothers me is this — there has obviously been no reason for all that garbage and pollution the previous years. People were throwing it on the ground because they knew somebody was going to come along and pick it up.

I think that is more disgusting than the garbage they were leaving behind.

Tim made a short movie, “The bad day…” published on youtube.

The movie has no sound. But I like it. It has a plot and focus. It’s kind of cute and funny

So I’m sketching Punky, and I told mom earlier, it was a bad idea, but she ganged up with dad and they both insisted he would stay very still on the couch.

I still can’t disprove that, but I couldn’t get him onto the couch on the first place, so I’m on square one.

I decided to sketch him at the bottom of the stairs, it was easy, for now. He was fine for about his bottom half, but when I moved to his other half, he started licking himself…

15 min later… (or what seemed like that)

What? He was still licking himself! I couldn’t stand it! I had to struggle to pull himself from his… well, let’s not get to that. So I started sketching again.
When I was about to his ears, he started barking, and ran outside. I jumped as he suddenly did that though… it was really creepy.

So, 1 hour later, he keeps on shuffling, I can’t stop him, so I just sketch him on every position he’s in and combine it, and also using some of my imagination…

- Moral: Don’t sketch Punky!

I read some colors theory recently and started to experiment with different color combination in my photo. I choose colors by intuition. It works most of times but I am also disappointed sometimes without knowing why. I hope that knowing the color theory will help me to improve my photos.