we woke up to the sound of roosters crowing in the morning. outside the sun was not yet up and the dim sky was lit with streetlamps up to the point where the town ended and the farm began. the farmers were probably already up and working, and we would be leaving for the taekwondo training soon. i am going to go downstairs to a holiday inn express breakfast. pictures to be posted.
my jewelry product photography has been posted by the seller, adina designs. i'm not advertising for him or anything. i am using his page to advertise for my photography =)
Adina designs, photography by Bobby Ren
today i finished the rest of the pieces for this set. i used the new 100W daylight bulbs in the two can lights, and it works really well. this is my awesome ghetto setup: 2 lights, 1 plastic bin light tent, one tall tripod, nikon d90 dslr with an 18-105 zoom lens. i shot the pictures at f11 with 1/13 second exposure, with a white balance set for daylight/sunlight.
last night i did a photography gig for mark and his girlfriend. he threw her a surprise birthday party on his awesome north end apartment roofdeck. i got some spectacular shots not because of any skill of mine but because the setting was so great. here is mark surprising his girlfriend.
the past few days i did a bit of work to put together a light tent for some photography projects. also, everyone and their mother seems to be doing home renovation so I made a trip to home depot for some lighting. i bought two sets of CFLs - a pair of 40W equivalent daylight bulbs (5000k color) and a 100W equivalent soft white for a shower light. and then i ran across two small can light lamps (kinda like this) that would have been pretty cool for my light tent. right now, it's a large desk lamp and my aquarium light. so i learned a couple of things:
1) bulbs have a couple of measurements: wattage, lumens, and color temperature. a CFL produces higher lumens for a lower wattage, and bulbs of all wattages and lumens can be bought at various color temperatures. daylight bulbs are best for light tents.
2) warm white, which has a more orange glow, is around 3000K, and cool white, which is typical of fluorescent bulbs, is around 4000K. daylight bulbs, which provide a full range of the sun's spectrum, is around 5000K.
3) bulbs are also designated by their sizes and shapes. the cans i want to buy use R20 or P20 bulbs. but as long as the fluorescent bulb fits, it should be ok. wattage limits are usually to protect the fixture so that the heat from the bulb doesn't melt the casing.
so now i'm going to set up a better photo tent. i'm not quite up to Ken Rockwell's level but maybe soon. I have a few jewelry photography pics from my last project posted on the designer's website, and hopefully this weekend i'll get more product pictures done, and also a picture of my very temporary, but fitting, setup.
i just discovered jon la joie.
"Every Day Normal Guy"
Sex Criminal fashions
i think i'll download this song and sing to it when i'm driving or at the mall
this morning when i drove out from the peaceful residential area near harvard square i understood why annual moving is such a necessity to me. even though having to rent a uhaul, packing mostly the night before, and recently, moving for three or four days straight in little trips every hour, is such a pain in the ass, it is a cathartic event. my old apartment is almost completely empty of my belongings. it's a way to clean up your life. maybe, to wipe clean all the surfaces, and leave an old room empty, and to eventually fill a new empty room. i dropped off steven at his bed and breakfast and the summer ended. i left behind all the chaos of subletting, packing, scheduling, making things workout and ends meet.
maybe it's also a bit different this year. for the next couple of weeks i don't have to worry about unpacking any of my old life. instead, it's going to sit in cardboard boxes and black trash bags in a basement, and i will probably drift on the graces of friends and my car. it's not nearly as a complete severing of worldly possessions as the epic trip of self discovery of our friend, the supersalsaman, zebo, but it does feel liberating to have nothing but an empty room and a futon to sit in. maybe i'll just throw away the boxes when i get my new place.
and what of next year? if i end up buying a house, i will have a place that i could nest down. but i dont think i'd do that. i can almost see my three year plan: i'd get tired of living in a small house in east cambridge, and move out next year to a large empty studio (much like 456 putnam, one of my favorite homes) and rent it to people. then the following year i'd get tired of boston and move back to san diego, leaving behind a mortgage (or investment). then i'd become lonely again in sd despite the surf and the fantastic korean bbqs, and finally move to sf. but there it begins again, the initial apartment that isn't as ideal, the upgrade that is financially sound, then the househunting.
without all the chaos, life would become stagnant. the reward of sacrificing a few days in your life before september 1 to reorganize, rebuild, and clean it up, is a calm, fresh feeling of finally having a place of your own (again).
I've been taking a training course to become ServSafe certified so I can work at a bartending job. Of course those training videos are silly and just a time sink. alot of the facts you learn either have to do with laws that usually go in one ear and out the other, or are facts you learn from older drinkers as a freshman in college. But i discovered some interesting facts that seem to go against popular thought, or have a weird reasoning behind it:
1) given equal conditions (body height, amount of alcohol in a drink) a fat person will have a higher BAC than a skinny person. apparently it's because alcohol will not pass through fat and thus will stay in the bloodstream while a skinny person will have more alcohol absorbed into the muscles.
2) an emotional person will have a higher BAC. this is because their blood is diverted to the muscles, so the lower bloodflow causes alcohol to build up in the stomach and NOT be absorbed in the blood. this causes them to continue to drink because they are not drunk. they, when bloodflow increases, they become more drunk.
i don't know how scientific or realistic these explanations are. but they are part of servsafe and as long as you test right, it counts.
3) how to read a license:
a - a driver's license number is always 1 letter followed by 8 numbers
b - the DOB always overlaps a ghost photo (a smaller copy of the photo)
c - the state seal overlaps photo and ghost photo
d - the state seal must be repeated in a pattern that changes color when angled (not present on MA license???)
hurricane bill is hitting this weekend. that's the one weekend i had free to go surfing. perfect timing, or disaster?
i looked at a few surf forecast websites. surfline actually says "sunday forecast: EPIC. SURF: 10-15 ft. - 2-3 times overhead and epic conditions." this scares me just a little. even saturday conditions, 3 ft overhead, would have been terrifying for me.
the nantasket swell info says that a 2 pm, there are shoulder height waves (3.3ft waves). and the chart goes from a bright red to a calm green color at that point. i am a bit more confident from this website's forecast.
today's nantasket cam shows a very calm, bright sunny day in nantasket. what will it look like saturday?
I got my bartending license from drinkmaster yesterday. i feel so empowered, independent, and entrepreneurial. i am now legally allowed to get people drunk for pay! but not only that, it gives me a drive to start looking for gigs. before, i could have looked for gigs, but it's much harder to go to a bar, restaurant, or even a private party, and say "i have lots of experience, bartending at my frat." but now it's like i can present them with a little business card that says "Bobby Ren, bartender" and they'll take it with much more confidence.
and this business card is awesome. i'm willing to bet, though, that almost every bartender who is new to the business has a similar one, and every old bartender has their own custom made one. or they just dont care anymore and get jobs through connections.
and one other thing i realized. craigslist is like a MUD or MMORPG quest board. you just have to go after as many gigs postings as you can, and eventually you'll level up. when you think of it that way, a job can be awesome. i tried to apply that feeling to a regular job, ie projects, but it just isnt the same when you're not looking at a one time "quest" with a specific payoff.
i have very little food in my fridge because i havent gone to haymarket recently. so to finish the rest of my food to prevent it from spoiling, and because i'm also out of costco canned soup, i've made two really really tasty salads. i'm completely over using salad dressing. you don't need it with these salads.
wednesday: avocado, bean and egg salad
christine submitted a picture of her dumplings and the green tea ice cream pic to tastespotting and recently there have been hundreds of hits on cooking to procrastinate. this morning, someone also asked about using some of our pics in her personal food blog - joyce chao. and christine said to her in the reply that they were my photographs and i should be the one to give permission, and that sounded a bit strange but really cool. people are going to use my photographs on their blogs? hehehehe :-D now about posting that serbia album.......
when the sun is out in boston it just evokes a desire to do and create things. i have a seasonal set of hobbies that come and go with the nice weather. well, they dont really go, but in winter usually i'm just not interested in doing much so they mostly manifest around now.
i've started a fishtank again - it's a 15 gallon with a glass top. there are two whisper filters in it but their motor is finnickey so i went and bought a new 20i today. i'd forgotten how much the aquarium hobby costs...so far, it's been:
aquarium on craigslist - $35
lamp hood - $32
filter - $21
need filter cartridges - $15
need full spectrum lamp bulb - $15
need heater - $15
fish food - $4
2 plants - $10
plant substrate gravel - $17
and of course, since the sun is out my garden is in full bloom. well, by full bloom i mean the wild tomato plants that grew by themselves are tall and spindly and have small fruit on them. the potatoes that were sitting on my counter for a month before i planted them are sprouting in the backyard amongst the weeds. my flower garden (lilies, morning glory, and gladiolus) are kind of growing. mainly the weeds are doing great!
i also have a few herbs that actually survived seedling stage, and i'm thinking about making guac tonight so i'll have to harvest my cilantro. problem is i came in to the office today and the plants are all down and almost withered. maybe i forgot to water, but i hope they're not dead. this herb gardening thing isn't going to well.
the last thing i always want to do during the summer is work on bikes. i've got about three frames and partial bikes in my basement, and so far all i've managed to do is remove the ball bearings from the wheel hubs and not get them back in. but if there was a source of broken/cheap bikes around here other than the annual MIT police bike auction, i'd totally buy more and fix them and sell them...or just have them sit in my basement.
so i either need to get a bike repair thing going, or actually do something with my photography, in order to get a side income to feed my aquarium money sink.
i have a ton of media from serbia. literally about 4 gb a day for 6 days. i blame the size of raw video, the large resolution of my camera (2144x1600 is the min) and my trigger finger in the high speed photo mode. i'll slowly sift through them and upload a gallery very soon. meanwhile, i had to do some work for the food blog (cooking to procrastinate) so i finally took pictures of some recent things, like the ice cream, but now i'm stuck with two delicious scoops. what to do?
it's good to be home and there are several comforts that i have missed. one is running drinkable tap water. two is the availability of wall plugs without having to use converters. three, laundry. more thoughts may or may not come, but all in all it was a fun trip, but tiring. of course, we ended up at cw coming straight from the airport and kicked for the remaining 30 minutes of cw practice.
after competition, there is a second aspect to the universiade games. and that is the huge amount of trading that happens between countries. all kinds of things that represent your country are traded. first, we traded pins - the US had few pins to begin with, basically only the ones that alicia and i bought from target for $1 for five. during opening ceremonies, we went around and traded some, but more and more people would come up and ask for your pins during the taekwondo, during lunch, just while you're walking. trading pins helps overcome all language barriers and fears of talking with foreigners. after a few tries, we became adept at lifing our credentials (where the pins are kept), pointing to the other person's pins, and motioning for a trade.
Later, as we got over the need to wear certain outfits (red polo, blue shorts on monday, blue polo, red shorts on tuesday, blue shorts, white tshirt on wednesday, etc) we were able to start trading our other USA gear. I had my eyes set on korea, thailand, and brasil, but other countries like vietnam, chinese taipei, and china were also game. unfortunately, the super nice korean athletic shirts where in high demand and low supply. i managed to get a thailand shirt for my white polo, and a vietnam shirt for my red polo. i went to chinese taipei and china and spoke chinese - it's way easier to get them to think about trading than to approach in english. in the same way, anthony had an easier way to communicate with the koreans. unfortunately i couldn't get a taipei shirt but he did, as well as a korean shirt. later, i also got conflicting information about my chinese - china's women poomse team thought i was taiwanese because of my accent, but a few guys alicia and i talked to said that our chinese was really good.
so every day i've been going out with my USA hat, USA shorts, team tshirt, blue polo, and extra tshirts inside my bag and looking for people to trade with. sometimes i felt like a street hawker, carrying my wares on my shirt and displaying it to everyone who is sitting outside their dorms. sometimes another street hawker would meet me, looking to trade a portugal shirt or hat. i'm still looking for the elusive china jersey, and maybe tomorrow i can close the deal.
also, tonight we went to see the USA men's basketball team compete with the Serbian team and a large, hostile home crowd. The USA did have a small cheering section - the US taekwondo team and the women's basketball team led cheers from the "athlete's section" behind the goal - the best seats i've EVER had at a basketball game. when we entered the stadium, it was like we were the actual team, emerging from under the stands to the court itself. and looking up at the stands to see waves of serbian fans cheering for their home team and against the US was daunting, but incredibly exciting. we hoped for an upset victory - to defeat the more popular team is the dream of every underdog. each cheer we led was filled with all of our heart. the serbian crowd would roar when USA had the ball - it was such a loud racket that you couldn't hear anything, except, strangely, your own heart beating. in the last 30 seconds, the US had the ball and a 1 point lead, and was fouled. everyone jumped to the front of the stands - one ball missed, another bounced out, but was rebounded and the US was fouled again. during the second chance, the US player missed both foul shots again, and the ball was rebounded and US was fouled. Finally, on the third attempt one shot was made, and at this time i stopped watching the game and started watching the crowd, and serbia could not get a goal in the last 5.3 seconds. we cheered our way out of the stadium with a large police escort under the glaring eyes of thousands of angry serbs.
serbia has been a huge learning experience. i've had a bunch of things that i've accomplished, and so many that i haven't. some of these were real goals - some were other stupid things that i wanted to do just to make myself a better person.
achieved:
poomse competition at an international competition. (duh)
exchanged pins with people who don't speak english
gotten to know some people (anees, kris, stefan my roommate) better
reach a new level of photography (filling up a whole memory card)
getting random pictures with people (korean spectators, mexican player)
missteps: (mostly involving social aspects)
fucking talk to a french person in french, with mon accent americain (i'm such a wuss)
not have things lost or stolen (rain jacket and black belt)
get a picture with the peru poomse and sparring people
get more pins
get a koala pin/token - i thought the aussies were really only giving it to cute girls
other bonus events:
drinking a beer in broad daylight, in the mall, and drinking wine with the korean masters at the food court. as one serb said, "here, you do anything you want in public."
our poomse competition has ended. right at this moment, i feel both relieved and sad. it's definitely been an exciting trip, and i've learned so much, as cliche as that is. i've felt that both my general taekwondo (paddle kicking, speed, etc) and my poomse have improved, and i may have even lost weight. just watching people warm up in the taekwondo arena has slowly increased the power and height of my sidekick. because without improving, it would have been impossible to stand up on the world stage with all of its world class athletes.
after the competition there is always a bit of regret, and perhaps anger. what if something had gone a little better? what if this was different, or that didn't happen, what if we'd just had a bit more time to gather ourselves? why weren't certain people there, and would it have even made a difference? there's blame put on the judges, as if the scores immediately following our performance were outrageously higher than they deserved, and ours were unreasonably low. but looking at the big picture, none of that would have mattered because the winners were still clear winners, and we still have much to accomplish to reach that goal. but i did realize one thing, that collegiate poomse is still within my age limit for 2011, so i will be looking forward to that.
i'm grateful that this competition will be going on for another several days. now i can relax a bit, and really try to get the most out of the opportunities here. i can not only cash in on all the taekwondo experiences, but also the many other sports here. watching the opening ceremonies, and reading the daily papers on the games, you realize that taekwondo is a small world - a comfortable and familiar one - and that the world of sports, and the sports at the world level, offer so many more new things to explore.
most of the details for day three, competition day 1, are at the mit sport tkd blog:
http://mitsporttkd.com/blog/2009/07/01/day-three-competition/
just a few more personal thoughts from today.
each time as the iranian team competed, they kept changing with a lot of vigor, Iran! Iran! Iran! I could almost imagine the same youths in the streets protesting the election. i almost wanted to chat with them about current events but i wasnt sure how political they wanted to be at this time and place, or which side they were on and whether talk would be taboo.
i also got my back adjusted today. my lower back cramp has been pretty severe for a few weeks now and i've gotten a lot of massage done on it. but with our doctor, she did a bunch of muscle work, and also did some adjusting to my spine. it was like being completely compressed under a pincer until the air bubbles in your popped. but it did feel pretty good.
just to get a sense of the facebook phenomenon, or perhaps the facebook scourge. stefan webb and i were waiting in the computer lounge where they provide a bunch of computers for people to use if they needed. it was a long wait, and people were standing around waiting for other people to finish whatever they were doing. and i looked around and every single person, except for one, was on facebook - people from spain, italy, switzerland, etc etc. one person was on some other social networking website that looked like facebook.
