Wednesday, 1 January 2003
11:59pm
| H |
This camera is much better than my old 880 in several ways, the most important way being perhaps the fact that it takes better pics! And while it may not have the sharpness of the Zeiss lens in the renowned Sony F717, Nikon color still owns all in my book! Anyway, you can head on over to my Giant Repository of Digital Camera Pics and see the pics I took today at my family's little new year's gathering, which was pretty much the first time I really got to fiddle with the different settings and such on this camera since I've been pretty busy since I got it.
Well, it's very late now, so I'm not really gonna write much more than this, cuz I need to go to bed and I got this mean cough that just won't go away. But again, happy new year everybody!
Friday, 3 January 2003
11:59pm
| I |
The more I think of it, the more I can't believe I'm where I am today. I'm incredibly lucky to have all that I have today, and where I am now, my 16 year old self could never even comprehend just how great things are now. When I was 16, I was constantly getting in trouble from my father for always tinkering with my computer instead of studying or doing other supposedly more productive things. Now that love for computers is what puts food on my table and keeps a roof over my head!
And the technological advances since 1994 alone have been staggering in ways people from then would have never conceived. I can remember thinking during that age of hiding dirty magazines under the mattress, "when I get my own place and my parents aren't around, I'm gonna have a closet full of Playboy magazines and it's gonna be the greatest thing in the world!" -- little did I know that no closet would never be able to hold the amount of porn you can find at the touch of a button over the internet haha.
I mean back then, I was running a 2400 baud modem. If you have no idea how slow that is, think of a 56.6k modem, which by today's standard is now "slow" as far as internet access goes. 2400 baud is the equivalent of a 2.4k modem.... 23 times slower than what we now consider slow. Slow enough that when something that is just straight text coming through (which is about all we really had in those days anyway), it was slow enough to read as it came in. At those speeds it took a couple minutes to download just one, small 320x240 picture, and if you were lucky it had 256 colors. Now days with a cable modem you can download a picture that's 1024x768 (a resolution most monitors couldn't even produce in those days), with millions of colors to choose from, sometimes in under a second! Wow!
OK. So enough about internet porn. Why am I suddenly even thinking about my sixteen year old self anyway? Maybe it's because my bedroom back at home (ie my parents house) has pretty much remained untouched since I was 16 years old. My parents have been threatening to take down all my old posters and junk, and turn that room into my dad's study. And I gotta admit, all those posters look pretty damned ugly now. But I wanted to some how preserve the memory of how it was.
And armed with my new camera (which by the way, at it's fully zoomed out is remarkably wide-angled, something like 28mm equivalent), I was finally able to capture what my room looks like, and will share it with you all and for posterity, so that I can finally allow my parents to tear it all down in peace. A lot of that stuff has actually been there since my junior high school years.
In the first pic, the desk is actually different. The desk that used to sit there is actually right next to me in my bedroom here in San Diego. That's actually my sister's old desk from when she was going to school in Riverside. You'll see some gems from the early 90's, like an authentic early 90's Ren and Stimpy poster, and "Not the Mama" from that Dinosaurs show. The big poster on the right actually used to hang in the hall at my high school, and it featured Mariah Carey who I was infatuated with before she became a big booty hoochie. Beneath that and to the right is my Louis Armstrong Jazz Award which I received basically for being the only guy in my high school jazz band that could improvise haha.
In the second pic there is that famous pic of Christian Hosoi the renowned skateboarder catching some huge air out of the half pipe. The black poster on the right side I thought was really cool because it was the one hanging inside the earthquake simulator at the California Museum of Science and Industry. That bed and dresser I've had since I was 6 years old!!
Anyway. I hope you've enjoyed this look into my past and my younger, still nerdy, self. It's really late and Cami's family is coming to visit tomorrow really early. I gotta get at least a little sleep before then! They'll probably be here about 6 hours from now! (by the way, it's not 11:59pm, don't worry, they are not showing up at 6am!)
