via www.youtube.com

Made by the Russian actor's group "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница).

I haven’t had time to play with either of these tools. It’s nice to see that Go can be compiled for Mac OS X (my platform of choice).

Walead Beshty is the most “painterly”: he takes a very large sheet of photographic paper, and exposes parts of it to various colored light, masking out areas by using the sheet itself. 

Leslie Hewitt’s work departs the least from traditional photography, and I found it very evocative. He photographs other photographs which are placed within a setting of common objects, sometimes with some personal significance.

Anyway, will write more about my trip soon.

Canon immediately follows with announcement of their 1D Mark IV (Gizmodo coverage) which also shoots at 102,400 ISO, but trumps Nikon with full 1080p HD video. Check out the short video that Vincent Laforet shot at 6,400 ISO.

The only added feature is that it supports IM: AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. The built-in email client, however, is pretty braindead and doesn't have GMail as an option, and there is no way to manually set the account info.

This is why I reflashed my phone with the generic Sony Ericsson firmware. My phone is actually useful, now. Not bad for $16.

On the other hand, I am not terribly impressed with Sony Ericsson's quality control. This is the second replacement. I've had other SE phones in the past which never had problems, and I tend to use my phones for 3 years or so.

Fortunately, they must have gotten enough questions about it and they posted a simple solution. Basically, disconnect pin 5 of one of the chips on the circuit board. Beats the more complex solutions for some of the older models. And it works like a charm.

Anyway, what’s a bit ironic is that I got one of these for free right when they first came out. It was a promo with Wired magazine. I think I threw it away. It used a PS/2 interface rather than USB, anyway.

I don't think I've seen a bag as well-thought out since the Brenthaven laptop backpack I got years ago for my Powerbook. The Brenthaven is barely worse for wear despite being 7 years old, except that the stitching on the shoulder straps has come undone on one side.

Mostly I slept a lot, and ate out: Franchia (a vegan Korean restaurant, with some really fancy tea -- favorite place of the friend I stayed with), Corrado, a ramen/sushi place (run by Koreans), a cheapo sushi place. No street meat this time around, though.

I didn't go to the Guggenheim, as I usually do, but they've finished the renovations so it's not covered up. I did go to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum: they had a special exhibit on felt. Watched some cool videos of Mongolian felt-makers making it the traditional way with ponies.

There was a surprise art stop at the Niagara Bar. My friend Marissa who I stayed with runs a weekly music and art show there, and some of her artist friends know Nara. He did some graffiti in the bar, which is now preserved behind plexiglas sheets. Unfortunately, he was arrested for doing graffiti in Union Square station.

Sarah wasn't the only Boston friend who happened to be in NYC that weekend. Some other friends happened to be playing in Brooklyn.

All in all, a fun, short vacation. Sucks to be back, since I came back to a ton of broken things.

I also just got Google Voice. Their rates are somewhat better than Skype’s for calling to Malaysia. Google charges 3¢/minute to a landline, and 4¢/minute to mobile. Skype’s charges are 2.1¢/minute and 5.8¢/minute respectively. I think I’ll be switching to Google Voice completely since I won’t need to use client software on my mobile phone.

Crickets?

Which means that this is one component that they have to keep re-writing on various platforms to use whatever is native. Which is probably why Mozilla went with their own scheme.