So I figured tonight I would try to get some great images of the city at night, including some of the beautiful bridges. My cousin Steve was nice enough to drive around with me to find the perfect locations. Around midnight we find a nice park overlooking the city and I take some photos and panoramic images. Then I decide we should try to find an even better spot, and we find one at about 1am. After fending off a bunch of rats in another park, I get my camera and tripod setup and begin taking my first few images to determine proper settings for a beautiful panoramic. Just for kicks, I take a quick set of slightly defocused photos in a pano series, because I like the way the lights look out of focus... Then I start taking the real pano shots from this amazing, pretty much perfect location. At 1:17am, there's an audible click off in the distance, and the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension cable lights turned off... Annnnd, that's a wrap. Will have to try to make it back there tomorrow, unfortunately. Here's a teaser of the view I got thanks to the defocused set:

Given the type of photography I'm doing here in NYC, I think this is appropriate:

In case you're not keeping up with all the important me-related news... I'm uploading shots from each day of my NYC trip to a flickr set, so check 'em out if you haven't already. Please feel free to comment on the photos on flickr or email me with any questions.

Today I headed over to Times Square in mid-town to get a few of the typical shots and to try to get some creative new takes on probably one of the biggest tourist spots. I spent much of my time shooting for a series idea I had involving [relatively] long exposures in daylight (1 second), to de-emphasize the actual persons in the shot and give greater weight to the movement of said persons. For me it's sort of like capturing the soul of the city, as it breathes. The original idea was to take 60-second exposures, but it became a little more abstract at that point than what I was really aiming for. Half my time shooting today was probably spent in the subway system. At day's end, I'd recorded a bit more than 600 images and I narrowed those down to about 115. Here are some of my favorites from the day:

// day five

As I mentioned before, I'm uploading shots each day to a flickr set, so check 'em out if you haven't already. Please feel free to comment on the photos on flickr or email me with any questions.

Today I strolled through Central Park for a bit again, mainly around the 'mall' area and Bethesda fountain... Then I headed back downtown towards NYU and the SoHo area... And then I took the a train back uptown to Rockefeller center, hoping to get to the 'Top of The Rock' to catch the sunset over NYC, but I was a bit late to that party so I hung out for a bit around the skating rink. I shot over 500 images today and narrowed those down to about 100, which I'll further narrow down when I get back home. Here are some of my favorites from the day:

// day four

I just thought I'd make a quick post to mention that I'm in NYC through October 28th (I got here on the 18th) to take photos in the city. Some of you already know I'm a photographer at heart, and I decided it's time to start pursuing the craft aggressivly in my spare time. I'm uploading shots each day to a flickr set, so check 'em out. There's a lot already, and I still have 5 days of shooting left!

[As a side note... Before I left for NYC I installed a 500GB laptop drive in my Macbook Pro, which only had 20GB of free space left on a 320GB I'd installed shortly after I bought it. Well, it's a good thing I came prepared, because I've already eaten up 25GB of the new drive with photos from the trip just so far. I'll end up with at least twice that. It's not hard to do when you're filling up 8GB CF cards.]

I'll definitely have to narrow things down a lot when I get back home. When it's all said and done, I'll be putting some series' of prints together, along with some coffee table books, etc... Please feel free to comment on the photos on flickr or email me with any questions. Here are a handful of my favorites so far - I'll post a couple new ones each day [on TheTechLounge; I'll post a ton on flickr], but I have some catching up to do:

// day one


// day two


//day three

For a long time now, we've had the Hot Deals link at the top of the page. There was a time when it was full of really amazing deals - I purchased several Dell displays and computer systems over the years with huge discounts, and I even bought some lenses and then sold them for a profit thanks to the deals. Unfortunately, the quality of the deals has been going downhill for the last year or so... That's about to change.

We've struck up a partnership with DealNews.com so that we can provide better deals than ever before, with improved functionality and helpful Hotness ratings to help you spot the best deals. And this is only the beginning. We'll be working closely with DealNews to create some features that will make the Hot Deals more useful than ever. Check it out, let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more!

Despite the first Mass Effect being billed as an Xbox 360 exclusive, famed developer BioWare tells Joystiq that it has "never confirmed any plans of Mass Effect exclusivity for the trilogy."

Though the sci-fi action-RPG later appeared on PC, the title is still considered an Xbox 360 exclusive in terms of the console market--meaning it has not appeared on rival systems PlayStation 3 or Wii.

PS3 guys, I'm going to ruin it for you. Mass Effect was a beautiful, plot-driven Cleavland steamer. With it's fantastic visuals, the game actually starts in on choppy when you're talking and smiling at the same time. The incredible voice acting insures that no matter what decisions you make, the actors say exactly the same thing and none of your decisions affect the game, and then at the very end, you can talk the boss into suicide. HAHA, spoiled!

But you see, that's not clever, it's, God damn necessary, since, you know what? there's no point in wasting your time fighting, everything after hour 4 you can pistol-whip to death. I know because I did that with my spy--who can use sniper rifles but not assault rifles. You do have to make a handful of chicken-shit decisions where you can pick some of your party to kill, which is fine because they're totally static and you don't care about them anyway. It's not like you don't have more pleasure girls on your battleship The Casual Encounter.

And I hope you like pointless, derivative, and dull minigames, oh yeah. There's only the two, but you get to do them, like, anytime you aren't having sex with a tentacle.

Making Gaming Better @ bit-tech.net
Buy the games
Piracy is a topic in itself. It goes without saying that devs need to eat and if a game doesn't sell you can kiss goodbye to support, sequels and similar games. If you are playing a game you haven't bought, you are invisible as far as the developer is concerned. Only by buying the games you like can you possibly encourage similar, good quality games to be made. And confront other people who are pirating games too. You are subsidising them getting free games, so make sure they know how you feel about such freeloading. People asking for cracks on developer forums are the worst of all – report them, and tell them it's not acceptable.

How to Fix PC Gaming Once and for All @ ExtremeTech
Fix the Piracy Problem or Shut Up About it
I, and a great deal of gamers, are so damn sick of hearing developers whine about piracy. Look, if it's that big a deal to you (and noting that unprotected sometimes make a killing), fix it. And I don't mean by making your CD keys 10 digits longer than they are now. In fact, you can shove those CD keys somewhere painful, because they obviously don't work. If you want to stop pirates, quit whining and use your heads. If you can program a game that takes up five gigabytes of my hard drive, you can figure out a way to make it uncrackable without forcing me to stand on my head and recite the alphabet backward to play it. Maybe online distribution is the key, with online components that, unless they're present, cripple the experience. I know that would piss off anyone without a decent online connection, but who cares?

What the hell is wrong with me!? I'm in complete agreement with ExtremeTech and, holy shit, Cliff Harris, you're a Goddamn pussy. If I can't act like a jerk online, I'll wither. And I'm not going to dick around trying to get Dwarf Fortress to work if I can just play some Bioshock.

So if you're reading this, and think that maybe playing an hour or two of Team Fortress after work just to tell a n00b that you fucked his mom with a pole* sounds like a great idea, kick it up a kick tonight--and maybe Cliff will just give up.

*you can all thank kurtis for introducing this idiom to my lexicon--it's pretty funny, after all

Many months ago I purchased my first HDTV, and I wanted to take full advantage of its capabilities so I ended up purchasing both an Xbox 360 + HD DVD add-on and a Playstation 3. The format war didn't seem like it was coming to an end anytime soon, and I was impatient. It didn't some as much of a surprise when Toshiba officially announced the death of HD DVD, but what did come as a surprise is the email I received from Best Buy shorty thereafter.

The email basically said how they were sorry for my poor choice in techno-gadgetry, but that they were dedicated to my satisfaction (that's what she said) and would be sending me a gift card, no strings attached. This is really where I was surprised. I wouldn't have thought it particularly unusual had they only offered a trade-in, but to just offer a gift card for nothing in return is a really nice gesture. Today I received my $50 gift card from Best Buy along with a short letter - so I guess they weren't just kidding. Here are some choice excerpts from the FAQs on the back side of the letter:

Is my HD DVD player still useful?
Absolutely. It will continue to play HD DVD movies and continues to be an excellent player for your regular DVDs, improving the picture to near-HD quality.

I bought an HD DVD player as a gift. Can I still use the gift card? As the purchaser of the HD DVD player, you've received the gift card. You can choose to use the gift card yourself or pass it on to the gift recipient. But you'll be a total douche if you keep it for yourself.

Okay, so they didn't really say that last little bit. Image above the result of "HD DVD for teh win" on Google Image Search.

Last week I bought an Xbox 360. I've been thinking of getting an HDTV recently, and I was bored, so I figured i'd get the console and it would be even more fun when I do take a dip in the HD pool. My experience up until now has been positive. And by "up until now" I mean now I'm not so happy with it.

I was minding my own business, playing Forza Motorsport 2, when I suddenly realized that in horizontal orientation, the green player indicator light on the front of the Xbox was oriented differently than I'd remembered. Then I suddenly thought to myself... Ooo, I bet it re-orients itself when placed horizontally or vertically. So, making sure to pause my game so as not to lose my current race, I walked toward the console. The child inside of me beckoned, Make it vertical, you know you wanna... And so I did. KCCCHT EEEEK. WTFOMG!!1!!one! I feared the worst. And I was right. El disco scratcho fantastico.

So the rhetorical question of the day is... Who makes a re-orientable consumer electronics device that doesn't play nice when you re-orient it while it is on? Obviously, the answer is Microsoft.

A quick search on Google brought up plenty of results, showing me that I was not alone. Some might call me an idiot for moving my Xbox 360 while a drive was spinning. I'd like to point out that, while such claims may be valid, this is not a universal problem for any optical drive. I can shake my laptop around while a drive is spinning and not have a problem. I can lay my computer on its side while a drive is spinning and have no problem. So what genius decided to put a drive in the Xbox 360 that will etch such a horrible scratch into your disc that it can no longer be read, by simply moving it when it's on? And taking that question a step further, why does the pretty green ring on the front re-orient itself? That's why I moved the damn thing, because I saw that it had re-oriented and I wanted to see it in action. So yeah, that might make me an idiot, but that's why companies are supposed to idiot-proof their products, and not create pointless tantalizing features that queue such "idiotic" behavior.

So, that ended my night of gaming... Hopefully tomorrow Best Buy will replace the disc for me, but I really don't know what to expect from that. I didn't buy the replacement plan for the disc (I mean, who screws up a disc?), though I did buy it for the Xbox 360 in light of all the overheating issues etc. that have plagued it since launch.

For the curious, here's a link to a site I came across on google when searching "xbox 360 scratch disc" - they talk about how it happens and even show a video of it happening.

The image above the result of searching for "the child inside of me beckoned" on Google Image Search.

Bit of an upgrade from the Camaro. Me so happy. :)

I don't understand. Maybe it's pro-Windows, maybe it's anti-Windows, or maybe that abject confusion is the point? Either way, it's hardcore for hard coders.

Check the comments on this link for more geek tats. Come on Max...an AMD tattoo is screaming your name.

Another site with the artist's explanation here at ModBlog.

What Paul loves most is the idea of explaining this tattoo to his grandkids, when Windows 98 is so outdated as to be completely obsolete.

Wasn't Win98 pretty much obsolete when it was released?

Insurmountable evidence points to the cause of the power outage: my neighbor's tree grounded a bolt of lightning. I thought it was peculiar that I could see the lightning and hear the thunder at the same time.

For being such a nice day, everything's wet. The whole city got hit by a flash flood and cars were shorted out at rush hour as far as the eye could see. It would have been funnier if my power wasn't killed by the same precipitate...

Apparently, it is unclear to the executives behind Transformers why we, and many other nerds, watched the show to begin with. We suppose the burden of responsibility falls on us to clarify: It's the giant robots fighting each other . In case you guys weren't sure–if, perhaps, it was neck and neck between robot-fighting and data analysis–we pray ours can be the deciding vote. When you have five loose-cannon robots, all of whom are just itching to fight other robots with or without a reasonable excuse, for Christ's sake, don't ruin every single one of them by sticking them together to make Nerdmotron 6000.

The most enlightening thing about this article was how all grown up Cracked is on the Internet.

That, and how could they not make fun of Cosmos? The dude transformed from a tiny green spaceship into a GoBot.

Independence day. The day we were all saved by one of the Quaids plowing right into the wang of a UFO. Also, we were saved by an Apple, what was it? A MacBook? 'Cause that Objective-C be tight. We shall never forget the day Jeff Goldblum stuttered, insisting we must go faster, and the downed Will Smith punched an alien instead of barbecuing. Long live the First Lady, re-born as the once-again dying--what I mean by that is she's dying--President of Battlestar Galactica.

This Friday, July 6th The Tatamimats will be doing an encore performance of "Dark Side of the Uke", their ukulele-only version of Pink Floyd's classic album "Dark Side of the Moon". The show takes place at The Knockout in San Francisco and is in celebration of The Knockout's 2nd anniversary. The Knockout is in the venue that was previously Chicken John's infamous Odeon Bar.

I heartily recommend that anyone who enjoys "Dark Side of the Moon" check out "Dark side of the Moon 2001" by Out of Phase.

But this is definitely as cool as While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the "uke". Of course, the guy looks like his mom was a Muppet and his dad was a bottle of cologne.

Tonight I decided to try my hand at something that I've always wanted to do... take photos of water, you know, in drippy-drop form. When I feel like I'm a bit more experienced at it, I'll write up a thorough guide on how to take drippy-drop photos, but for now I'll just show you some of my experimental results thus far, and continue practicing. =)