I thought I would make this blog for stuff that doesnt fit in The Couch Casbah
or on Gyronet. This blog is less of a ranting site, but more of a place where I can just frolic.
Meeting new people is good and all, but right now, I want a break from all that. In fact I AM having a break from all that. Meeting new people can be really exhausting, I even find it pointless. I mean, what the point of meeting new people? I already know people, I don’t need new people. It’s a good exercise in social skills I guess, but I’ll leave it for a week. At this time, right now, NEW PEOPLE SUCK. I have spent the past two days at the house, just eating and sleeping. That’s pretty much it, a simple life, but its good just to hang around sometimes. I get to talk to family members more and watch some good ol’ TV. One program I watched was the glorious fight between Pacquiao and Morales. Yes, THE PACMAN won. Evil Mexican scum.
Ahhhh yes, Filipino TV. Really random shit. I remember when I was a little kid watching a TV Show called “Eat Bulaga!” The Filipino version of “Hey, Hey It’s Saturday” except on every weekend and there’s no weird puppets like Dickie. The latest TV show to really take of is a game show (of sorts) called “Wowowee!” One of the features of this show is the excessive use of dancers and attractive females in the show. Often, for no reason at all. For example, when a quiz question is answered, irrespective of whether the contestant was right or wrong there will be a cut to dancers doing a short 10-second routine then yelling out the answer. This is for every question, for about 10 questions. It can get repetitive, and I still have no idea what purpose those dancers serve except for embellishment of the answer, that I’m sure bold text and a border surrounding the answer would do.
Another quiz, called “Bigate 10” (still on “Wowowee!”) is where a contestant gets 30,000 Pesos and 10 randomly selected people from the audience face off the contest one-on-one with one question. If the audience member gets it right, they get 3,000 Pesos, if the contestant is right, he/she keeps going to the next audience member. At the end of this (this is my favorite bit) the contestant can either choose to keep the money she won (whatever that is) OR “THE MYSETERY BOX”. Straight out of a Family Guy episode. Except you know what’s in the mystery box, it's just that there large chips inside the box. One side black, the other white. There are five chips inside the box. The contestant chooses a combination, e.g. 3 white 2 black. Then the box gets tossed around the audience then if the open the box again and the combination is the same as the contestant predicted then they win a really prize (worth more than the 30,000 Pesos obviously). Confused? I know I am, it took me 2 years to get this TV show and I explained it in a paragraph.
I should watch more TV. Uploaded two more photos, these are from the Philippines. Pikoy the parrot and Max the dog. Found on the Flickr account.
Tonight I’m going to start downloading some pics from around the place. None of them are from my trip to the Philippines though. These pictures are from Victor Harbor and Adelaide. I’ll keep uploading more, if I have time I will start to upload Philippines pics to Zoto and Flickr as well.
Bear in mind, I have compressed these pictures A LOT. From 3MB a picture to about 300kb takes a lot of quality out. But still, they should be good enough for web viewing, it’s just I won’t be running to the printers with these copies. Most of them, especially the daytime ones should be ok. I did some photoshop work on these photos. I used a technique called Unsharp Mask, on some of the photos then ran some of them through a noise reduction software.
For those that are into photography:
I use two cameras, A Fujifilm Finepix A910 and a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5. After this trip, the Finepix will be phased out. I am very pleased with the Panasonic, its full manual control has allowed me to explore my photography creatively compared to the Finepix, which was also very good, it did not let much leeway with customization of settings.
I like playing around with Depth of Field and compostion, so two thumbs up for the Lumix. According to all the reviews I saw, the Lumix’s lens is the best quality lens out of all the cameras in it’s class (ultra zoom class). No purple fringing (chromatic abberation) and little barrel distortion. I tested its competitors in its class. Kodak is too saturated, Fujifilm, while solid, didn’t have Optical Stabilisation, Canon had some purple fringing and mild barrel distortion. Nikon Coolpix wasn’t up to the scratch in this class.
If you like these photos, go to my latest post on Gyronet, I processed a photo while I had some free time.
My trip here has been fun and busy. I do volunteer work at an Elementary school in a city called Malabon. My Godmother is the principal there and I teach computer classes there once a week, with two classes, one hour session each. I attempt to speak Filipino and English at the same time which produces some funny results.
I also made some new friends. One of which is a Chairman for a suburb youth council. Theres a youth council in every Filipino equivalent of a suburb. This meant that I was able to meet different people around the community and really get to know the community oustside my local neighborhood.. Apart from council members, I caught up with a friend I made on my last visit. His name is Michael, and he is now the president of a Theatre Arts group. I was made their photographer and I followed them around gigs taking photos (obviously) and having a few drinks while I’m at it.
That’s just a glimpse of what I’ve been doing. I will try to upload some photos so it’s easier to explain everything (for those interested). That’s all for now though.
You know, I never understood why the American system of writing dates was different to the English method. Why would you write the month first then the date? I thought it never made sense, why on Earth would you write the order of the date mucked up? It clearly should be the day then the month then the year, it makes simple sense.
Well, this is the dumbest discovery I have made. But because I have been taking lots of photos I organize them into folders, according in chronological order. For example, all the photos I took yesterday I would put in the folder 17.1.06. Should be organized right?
But because I have been here in the Philippines for a touch over a month now, I thought my photos should be organized properly. But when windows sorts through the folders, its sorts them by the day, then the month. But I prefer them in months, in looks kind of strange, when my photo library looks like:
It’s just jumping all over the place. So for my purposes, I guess that it was better for me to sort the American way to make it more organized and logical. Such a small realization but it could save me some confusion in trying to remember when I took a photo.
On my travels I have managed to meet many characters along the way. I caught up with a lot of my family, met some people I knew, met new friends, made new enemies. Luckily, I bring my camera everywhere along with me so I can capture the people I meet and STEAL THEIR SOULS. MUHAHAHAHAHA. I use a 5MP camera so I will have to process each of the photos to make them suitable for uploading/downloading. I plan on printing some of the photos I take and captioning them. It’s cheaper to do it here. Anyway, for those (if anybody reads this, including myself) interested, I’ll start to place photos on my Flickr and Zoto accounts in the near future. I’ll see what size is appropriate to store the photos.
Through many unorthodox means (such as hooking up to a neighbors telephone line, which means there’s a telephone line sticking out between our houses) I have managed to acquire dialup internet. But I’m only able to go on after 11:30pm Adelaide time. Still time to do stuff I guess.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
