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About Me

Welcome to my Web site. My name is Chris, and I'll be your host. I live in Austin, Texas, with my partner, Ray, and our child dog, Mocha. You can read more about me, learn 100 random things about me, and if you're wondering what the heck a khowaga is, click here. Feel free to browse, read, and leave comments!

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Flickr Photos

39/365: The Eyes Have It.

38/365: Qahwa

37/365: Pensive

More Photos

 

Gay Blog Award


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Fun at Costco

I’ve been teased about taking my camera everywhere in the past, but I’m always trying to keep my eye open for a potential photo for the 365.

My friend Allan from high school, who exists as “foshydog” on Flickr, is also doing a 365 photo project. Recently, he posted a photo that he took in a fabric store, raising questions about how easy (or not) it is to take photos in various stores.  I almost got tackled once in HEB when I took a photo, so I tend to be surreptitious about it (and never in that HEB (note to non-Texas: HEB is a big local grocery chain here in the Lone Star State)).  It’s easier in a place like Costco!

I didn’t find anything 365-worthy, but I did find a couple of oddities:

Does this strike you as somewhat odd packaging for men’s underpants?

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And this just made me laugh:

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Reminds me of the time I was at the store and saw a bag of “all natural Cheetoes.”  Potstickers are the Cheeto of chinese food.  They’re barely “Chinese,” contain absolutely no recognizable ingredients (not in big bags at Costco, anyway—the ones you make at home don’t count), and I don’t, for a second, believe they’re all natural except by some really sketchy definition of what constitutes “natural.”

After lunch we stopped at TacoDeli, where I enjoyed myself a cochinita pibil taco.  And, no, my mother never taught me not to photograph my food :)

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How’s your Saturday going?

Another Cooking Post

I’m taking today off. I’ve worked the past couple of weekends, so I decided to use up some of the comp time that I’ve accrued. I should probably be doing some of my Arabic homework, but I pulled out Rick Bayless’s Mexican Everyday instead because … well, I was actually thinking of making dinner in the slow cooker, but instead I lit on the recipe for Tortilla Soup.

Yes, it’s another cooking post!!

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The recipe calls for a pasilla chile, but I didn’t have any fresh ones (yes, they’re dried.  I don’t want to talk about it), so I used an ancho instead.  First ya toast it.

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Once toasted, it gets pureed with a can of fire roasted tomatoes.

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A little olive oil …

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… some onion …

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… a little garlic, sauté till golden …

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… and into the blender to puree with the tomato and chili.

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Puree goes in the soup pot to cook for a bit …

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… until it thickens.

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Add some stock and simmer for 15 mins.

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Add some chicken.

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Toast some tortillas in the oven.

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Just about done!

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Soup in bowl.  Crunch up tortillas, sprinkle on top. Add cheese.

Lunch is served!

Yes, but what does it *do*?

You know, it’s funny.  I’ve been feeling guilty about neglecting this blog in favor of my 365 photo project for a while (although all I really have to do there is upload a photo and come up with a short caption, and the caption is optional), and then I came to the realization that it’s always this way at the beginning of the year.  I have, each year that I’ve been blogging, gone through a low-post slump in the late January/early February phase that picks up again as we get on toward spring.  Maybe it’s a light thing – who can say?

Anyway, in all of the not blogging, I haven’t made any comments about the keynote that shook the Internet last week (was it last week?).  You know what I’m talking about: the announcement of the iPad.

Within moments, I jumped on the feminine product bandwagon – because, yes, it is the dumbest name ever. Heck, I tweeted it.  I think that the all-female team that hosts All Things Considered on NPR had it right when they opined that clearly Apple has no women on its marketing team.

On the other hand, I don’t quite get the premature vitriol being lobbed at the iPad from a bunch of people who’ve never actually handled the damned thing. How do you know you hate it?

“It’s just a big iPhone,” goes the common complaint.  Well, what’s interesting about this armchair observation is that everyone who’s actually picked one up and used it has commented that it is very much not just a large iPhone.

“No one will want to write on their iPad screen,” I hear.  Do you know how many people I know who have stopped carrying a laptop in favor of an iPhone or an iPod Touch?

“I kind of want one,” I told some people at work the day after the big announcement.

“Why?” was the typical scornful reply from many.

OK, let me rephrase.  I can see how one might be useful—even neat—for someone like me.  I travel a lot.  My laptop is small, but would it be nice to have a thin tablet that fits into my briefcase with my itinerary?  Sure it would.

That said, I can already think of several reasons to wait for iPad 2.0, or a reasonable competitor (the HP Slate is not out of the running).  For example, I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as my main photo cataloguing and editing-on-the-spot program.  Each night I come back to my hotel room, wherever I am, dump the photos off of my camera and happily spend some time going through them, editing, enhancing, and basically seeing what I can do to make them more interesting.

My camera takes a compact flash card.  The iPad may or may not have a Secure Digital port, which does me no good.  The iPad doesn’t even have a proprietary USB port – you have to buy an adaptor ($30), and even then there are some questions about exactly what you can plug in to it.  I graduated from iPhoto years ago when I wanted more control than the “magic fix” button.  Sometimes the “magic fix” and I disagree with what is wrong with a photo and what it takes to fix it.  I want to be able to control what it’s fixing.

And given that the iPad doesn’t support Flash, I can’t imagine that Adobe is rushing right out to create Lightroom for iPad.  It would be nice … but I’m not holding my breath.

But, yes, would it be neat to have a device like the iPad that could serve as photo storage, power my road warrior PowerPoints, and let me check  my e-mail?  You betcha.  Being able to use the iPhone Kindle app and Skype would be even better.

So, maybe I won’t be running out to get one on launch day.  Money’s a bit tight in the khowaga household right now, and I have this here laptop that I’m writing on that’s zippy and does everything I need it to.  But will I keep my eye out for iPad 2.0 and or Adobe products on the iPad?  You bet.

The iPad may turn out to be Apple’s biggest flop since the Mac Toaster (and does anyone remember Apple’s first attempt at a portable computer that was roughly the size of an adding machine from the mid 90s?).  But, unlike 75% of the blogosphere, I’m going to wait until I actually see one before I pass judgment on it.

To do otherwise would just be … Republican.

February 2010 Desktop Calendar

In honor of my first photo to crack the elusive Flickr Explore feature, I’m putting out a desktop calendar for February 2010.

Download it (right click and choose “save as…”):

Standard Width: 1024 x 768 | 1280 x 1024 | 1200 x 600

Widescreen: 1280 x 800 | 1440 x 900 | 1680 x 1050 | 1900 x 1200

Things I Learned This Weekend

This weekend I attended one of the weekend workshops offered by Rocky Mountain School of Photography.  I’m not planning to turn this into a commercial for RMSP, but I did enjoy it and I learned quite a bit that I hope/plan to try to use  in my photography.  A flier landed in my mailbox in early December and, since the price was right, I signed up almost right away, figuring that it might be a good way to work on those skills that I’ve been trying to hone for a while.

See, as someone who travels around and does training, I was able to appreciate not only the course itself, but how it was executed.  The two presenters had two different styles, but I appreciated both (note to self: learn to speak in bullet points). They made the opposite decisions of some that I’ve made over the years (they opted for a long morning, late lunch, and short afternoon–I usually do the opposite, usually because it’s requested, but I was reminded that doing a 60/40 split has its merits.)

I did share a sympathetic laugh when one of the presenters lost his train of thought in the middle of a talk–when you do the same content all the time, it happens.  You mentally check out while you’re talking and sometimes the autopilot fails.

The conference facility left a little bit to be desired.  One of the rooms was floor-to-ceiling windows.  The Venetian blinds didn’t cut a good portion of the light–a bad idea when the presenter is dependent on PowerPoint (or, in this case, Keynote–which looks neater than PowerPoint but has the misfortune of being a Mac-only program).

Among the other things that I learned inadvertently is that I still don’t like a good number of people out there in the universe.  It amazes me that some people can sit in a room with 200 other people and be completely unaware of their existence — or, more to the point, not actually care.

There are, for instance, the people who are so focused on the question they want to ask that they don’t notice that it’s already been asked and answered.  Those are annoying.

Then there were the people who didn’t turn off their cell phones.  And let them ring.  And ring.  And ring.  And didn’t actually seem to feel that acknowledging the disruption was necessary.  File those with people who can’t whisper.  And the lady who scraped her way along the metal blinds in one of the rooms…twice.  While the presenter was talking.

But mostly, the people I found annoying were the ones who honestly believe in the mantra about there being no such thing as a stupid question.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to give you a definitive answer: there is such a thing as a stupid question.  Let me demonstrate.

This morning, we had f8 lady.  I was attending the class on photographing sunrises, sunsets, and flowing water.  Nearly every time a different photo was shown, she would ask, “Did you shoot that at f8?”  For a while the instructor patiently indulged her, but, finally, displaying far more patience than I would have given the number of times the same question was asked, he replied, “I don’t honestly remember what I shot this at.”

“Well, what f-stop did you use?” she asked.
“I don’t really recall.”
“What was the aperture?”

Now … let me explain this in different terms so that you will understand exactly why this is a stupid question.  This is exactly the same thing as asking:

“Well, how many miles per hour were you going?”
“I don’t really recall.”
“What was your speed?”

The other reason why this was a particularly ill-advised question is that the instructor had just spent some time explaining that the technique he was describing could really be used at any aperture.  Granted, I didn’t go to the class where they discussed f-stops in detail, but it was pretty clear that he also didn’t quite get her fascination with f8.

There were also an inordinate number of people who seemed to completely miss the point of “principles that can be applied to any situation like the one I am describing.”  These tended to fall into one of two categories:

1. People who insisted on asking whether their situation–which was identical to the one being described–”counted” for the principles being described (the answer always being “yes”);
2. People who insisted on asking about a completely different situation and whether the principles being described would also apply to it.  While more understandable, what these did was slow the conversation down by causing the poor instructor to repeat, “We’ll get to that in a bit.”

Then, of course, there was the guy who had to argue with everything.

“I’m telling you to shoot in manual mode,” the instructor would say.
“But,” this guy would say, “Aperture Priority mode can do the same thing.”
“No it can’t,” the instructor would say, and explain why.
“But Aperture Priority Mode does that.”
“No, it doesn’t,” the instructor would say, and repeat.  Finally, someone else in the audience would try to explain it.  Eventually , the guy would get it.

And then ask the same damned question in the next class.

So, what I have gotten out of this weekend is as follows:

1. I learned that I shouldn’t be shooting with Auto White Balance.
2. I think I’m ready to try using manual mode on a regular basis.
3. I might be ready to try more portraiture, too.
4. And I learned that people really, really, really annoy the crap out of me.

And how was your weekend?