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After finishing Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, I dived into his collection of essays, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones.

I thought Kitchen Confidential was very good, an exciting adventure and insight into the goings-on of professional kitchens (at least in New York). If you think that your job is hard, think about the poor cooks who have to manage up to 10 dishes at a time sometimes, and they have to know the different temperatures, times, etc for each dish!

 Mind-blowing multi-tasking. The Nasty Bits is enjoyable as well (thus far, I am currently still halfway through it), it expands further into topics of course related to his craft. Both books are highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: anthony bourdain, kitchen confidential, the nasty bits

Every DSLR photo hobbyist needs a camera bag. Are you really going to let your expensive equipment (not to mention all that glass) be tossed around in your daypack?

I use a Crumpler 4 Million Dollar Home photography bag, costs about CAD$70 (about the same in USD, cheaper at Amazon dot com).

It’s a shoulder bag, it has one flap and two loops on each side that you can hook your tripod or other equipment with. When you open the flap, on the inside of the flap is storage (the flap inside is mesh), that I store my memory cards, spare batteries for the flash, pen, lens caps, and exposure card. On the bottom front of the bag is another flap secured by velcro, which I store the charger for my camera battery. In the main compartment, I can fit my Pentax K10D camera with Pentax 16-45mm lens attached, and there is room for another lens or a flash. I usually put my Pentax FA 50mm lens in there, but lately because of winter and the low-light conditions I have my Pentax AF360FGZ flash in there.

It’s a pretty compact bag, and you can get the Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home bag which is much more roomier, but that takes up more space. I find it is the right size for travelling around taking pictures, and even stuffing the whole thing into a larger backpack with my MacBook Pro laptop.

Technorati Tags: photo bag, pentax, k10d, crumpler

Ok, so this daily blog writing thing has not gone so well, since my resolution.

It’s not that I don’t go to the computer to write, it’s figuring out what to write. Writing original articles is hard, collecting various tidbits of information out there and commenting on it is a bit easier. Let’s see, it’s Dec 28th now: I didn’t write for the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th and of course the 28th, for a total of six days. I could chalk it up to the holidays, with it being Eid-ul Adha, Christmas, Boxing Day and all, but I won’t. I’ll try to submit six postings dated on this date, to catch up.

Well, what do you know, one post down, five more to go!

Technorati Tags: blog writing

No, it’s not a superband consisting of musicians from Aerosmith and Soundgarden, it’s Kevin Kelly’s site, Cool Tools. As its name implies, it is a treasure trove of cool gadgets that may or not be considered “techy” enough to be in Engadget. Here are some of the ones I like:

• Aerogarden: Grow your own herb garden with just light, water, and some nutrient tablets (NO soil needed!). A con is that your electricity bill will increase (but of course that is expected, with the lights on the device needing to be on).
• BookGem: Hold that book open and prop it up with this gadget. Perfect for people that like to read when they eat (myself included!)
• Electrilite flashlight / radio / cell phone charger: Does not need batteries with its hand crank, and the bulbs are LED too (thus uses less power). It can charge your cell phone, and you can listen to the radio on it. Its small size is perfect compared to the other larger all-in-one emergency light/radio devices.
• Rite in the Rain Notebooks: Considering Vancouver is wet all winter generally, this could prove useful. What is great is that they also offer waterproof paper, my cat has gone missing recently and it will be great to print out the “lost” posters on waterproof stock to post outdoors on lamp posts, and the like.

Technorati Tags: cool tools, riteintherain, electrilite, aerogarden, bookgem

The LongPen seems to be a great device at first glance, but what about the social aspect of book signing? Imagine this, “Margaret Atwood, famous author, here to sign your book, but oh, she’s not actually here”. Do people actually go to book signings to get the autograph? Or is the primary purpose to meet the author? Also, this blurs the line of “authentication” of an autograph, is an autograph diminished if it was not done in person? Not that anyone can really tell the difference aside from having the latent fingerprints of the author on the book!

I can imagine the future now: Margaret Atwood signs, say 10,000 personalized messages in her books as a nice sample. Since the signatures are digitized, they can be captured. And since she has to be connected by audio to hear what the fan wants as a message (or at least the person’s name), that audio can be captured as well (the speech is converted to text automatically, and captured).

Somehow this data can be analyzed, and an “author profile” for the LongPen can be derived, which will generate her personalized “signature font”. In the future, if she is deceased or is unable to write with her hands anymore, the computer can take over and sign for her. She would be able to sign her books in perpetuity, with she herself being replaced by a digital actor that looks and talks like her. In a high definition world, no one will ever know.

Technorati Tags: book signing, LongPen