Swarthmore, a small place.

This was a while ago but I dropped a friend off here and then just walked around with my camera.  I like little out of the way places like this.

They say it's a "bus/train station town."

This place sells something called a "blondie," vanilla brownie with chocolate chips.  Its even better slightly microwaved!  (Thanks for introducing me to this Mary!)

Under the tracks and up to Swarthmore College.

Reminds me of HWS.

Facing the other direction.

Bell tower?

Back under the tracks.

I have never seen an array of utility mains all clumped together like this before.  

"It's going to be a long night in New York City......."

Went to see John Mayer in the round at the end of February for his "Battle Studies" tour.  First time I'd been to a concert in a 360 degree arena since Santana live at the Budokan in '03 or '02.  Didn't have the best seats but not bad.    I had invited my old friend Mary whom I went to high school with back in Japan.  I hadn't seen her since winter break in 2005.  It was good to see her again.  We nearly went to see Jack Johnson live in Tokyo for his "In Between Dreams" tour but she couldn't go at the last minute.  Nevertheless great performance, lots of catching up, wow it has been a long time!  I managed to snap some pictures with a little point and shoot:

The band had this four-sided mesh screen which was dropped down over the stage that had a projection of Mayer's "Who Says" music video which was very cool.  Pretty deep song too.

Here's a wider angle shot to give a better idea of the projection.

In the round.....

From left to right: Pino Paladino (bass), Steve Jordan (drums), John Mayer (lead guitar), David Ryan Harris (rhythm guitar).  The large vertical dark band right of center of the image is a column that supports the mesh screen.   

The encore performance, John was wailing on the blues and playing his strat on the floor Jimi Hendrix style!

As close as the camera would zoom.  


Madison Square Garden is an awesome venue.  Seating all around and concession stands all around the corridor behind the seats.  If you buy a beer on tap, they give it to you in a plastic mug that has a cylindrical space in the handle for a pretzel stick which you get with the beer!  


I wish John would have more concerts in NYC and perhaps at smaller venues to really get that rockin' atmosphere.  Later we met up briefly with another friend that I went to high school with: Yuri.  I think if I'm not missing anyone, I've run into 6 ASIJ alums in the geographic area.  It's nice to see old friends again.  

blinking caret

Will soon post recent photos and text of John Mayer, Swarthmore with Mary (microwaved blondies yum!), Skydiving, Blackberry repair 101, the new dent in my car and other stuff.  Been very busy/lazy lately.  My commute to Manhattan is stressful and downright dangerous not to mention expensive.  Work is meh, and I've been spending a lot of time micro napping.  I fell asleep last Thursday while stuffing envelope and dreamed I was still there stuffing envelopes.  My coworker tells me I was just sitting there with one hand on an envelope and the other on the stuff that was going to be inserted into the envelope.  Recipe for disaster.

Losing power and running water for a little over a week didn't help and discovering that you can't party/drink till the sun comes up in the Village (like we used to do in Tokyo) is kinda sad. So much for the city the never sleeps, liars!  But hey I met up with Mike and Brian and Katie in Brooklyn, shit has it really been 5 years?

Grad App. Results:

UCSB-No (phone rejection.....where have I heard that before? GREs not good enough and that I should take them yet again and re-apply for next year.)
UCLA-Nadda. (So much for getting my copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel" signed by Jared Diamond.)
UHM:-Mahalo but no dice.

Awaiting: UC Merced (guessing zip.)

Safety: San Jose State (i just don't know anymore.)

What to do after finishing the internship at AGS?  My boss thinks I should take a stab at being a foreign correspondent.  Journalism?  Photo journalism?  Huh?

Aerial photography and remote sensing companies still not hiring but impressed with my CV and will hold on to it for a set period of time.

Flight School in AZ or CA 90 days from 80hrs and Private certificate all the way to Airline Transport Pilot?  (need $40k and change, and then what? Fly regionals after dead-heading for less than $20k a year? (It's better than zero-k.)

I think it's safe to say now that even 10 months after graduating and only being able to get an unpaid internship  that I have to try something else.  It's hard not to be a pessimist now. I'm ready for the red pill!

Perspectives of Magnitude:

Outside Looking in...

Inside looking out...

Ubique!

Ay it's been a while since my last post.  Have been quite busy working at AGS for a little over a month now.  Done everything from e-mails to new agencies, envelope stuffing, editing promotional flyers, in general just stuff.  They've got me digitizing the archives finally.  I've spent the last 3 weeks photographing leather bound volumes of the Society's minutes one page at a time.  It's a long and slow process and it's difficult to ignore the hand written text that's over 150 years old.  It's interesting to see just how well previous generation's handwriting was compared to today's chicken scratches.  I managed to give AGS some ideas on how to make digitizing easier and more efficient than just simply holding a point and shoot above the page and snapping away.

I convinced the AGS staff and a Prof. Fritz Nelson (University of Delaware, polar geography specialist) that we needed a copy stand with some lights and that would hold a camera still directly over the material we were digitizing. Sounds simple at first but being New York City nothing is ever quite simple. After a 2 days of arguing with Adorama Camera over non-profit tax exempt forms, we managed to procure a very large copy stand and some lights.  Not a bad price either.  However we ran into some trouble not realizing that 100 year old pages don't lie flat for reproduction.  So I then thought of some ideas that could be used to hold them in place.  Paper clips were suggested but they can damage the paper by introducing creases and rust.  We tried fingers, but that leaves no hand free to fire the cable release for the camera's shutter.  After failing with metal rulers, we came to sheets of non-reflective glass and then non-reflective plexi-glass as the current solution.  Glass was determined too heavy and could cause damage to the already crumbling book spines.  So plexi-glass is what I'm using now.  It works well, is light, flexible and seems to get the job done.

I finished digitizing 13 volumes of 200 pages (1852-1903) each last week despite the mid-week blizzard (unusual for NJ, a reminder that I've got to get away from the east coast.)  Now I've moved on to 20th century material and a larger size volume.  More to come with digitizing old aerial oblique photographs of South America that were used to design the "Millionth Map" see links: http://www.life.com/image/72399641 ; http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/millionthmap.htm It's huge, 1cm = 10Km.  All done by hand to mylar and then copied.

Also got to take a look at AGS's Flyer's and Explorers Globe, which was made in 1903 and still sent around the world today to the first people to take on unique expeditions.  Some notable people who have signed it are: Amelia Earhart, Dr. Livingstone, Neil Armstrong, Bertrand Piccard to name a few.  The last person who was supposed to sign it was Steve Fosset for the first solo, non-stop fixed-wing aircraft flight around the world.  Unfortunately Steve died in a plane crash in 2007.

Here's some images of the globe:

               Interesting?

It's getting very crowded up there.  Now people just sign and don't bother plotting routes.

      

                                                     Amelia Earhart's signature in the Pacific.

                                    Aldrin, Armstrong, Collins 1969.  Picture on a wall at the AGS.

Nothing much else happens, I ran out of heating oil on sat night and was staying warm using a wood stove and splitting wood all Sunday morning.  The delivery truck came Monday morning and topped off the tank.  I got to photograph some deer that were eating my bushes but that's about it besides eat, sleep, commute, work, traffic and not enough sleep.  I'm thinking of some things to do after I finish up here at AGS in mid April after the American Association of Geographers Annual Conference in DC.  (Managed to get a free ticket and will hopefully meet up with faculty from U Hawai'i at Manoa!)  A friend from Portugal and I are planning a transcontinental road trip form NJ to CA just to see what happens.   Hopefully I'll be able to sell my VW and get something a little more sporty and spartan for the drive ;)  Lastly John Mayer live at Madison Square Garden next week with an old friend from Japan!

Here are some more photos from Wall St, the South St. Seaport, home in NJ and underground at 34th St. Penn Station:

                                        Started to miss Japan and yaki-nikku so I tried this place.

         Bowl of guy-don.  Looks alright, tastes like microwaved poly-urethane and cardboard with nikku-tare.

                           Not worth the $10 I spent.  Though I do miss the Ito-en brand of Oolon-cha.

                 A cold, wet day at the Seaport.  My tolerance for east coast weather has reached it's threshold.

                    Just another view of the "Ambrose" lighthouse boat at the Seaport, I like the contrast.

                 "Guitar Ron" underground at 34th st. jamming to Wes Montgomery and Hendrix.

                                          This little one came to visit during last week's blizzard.

         Don't worry I'm not that good of a wildlife photographer.  Both these images where shot through windows.  However I was less than a foot away for this one.  Deer don't see well through glass I don't think.

                                                                             Cozy.

Interning at The American Geographical Society.

I started my internship with The American Geographical Society on Monday, January 11th 2010; almost a year since I began my job search.  So far I've been getting reacquainted with Manhattan and figuring out the most efficient and economical way to commute from New Jersey.  I work on Wall Street.  (It's ironic to be able to say that!)  To be exact, I work on the ground floor of 120 Wall St.  It's a building that has offices consisting of all non-profit organizations, mostly granite and brass, very philanthropic looking. The Society or "AGS" as I will refer to it from here on consists of four to five staff.  The executive director, an accountant, resident geographer, secretary, and of course the intern.  AGS is the oldest american geographical society.  They were commissioned in 1851 to document and archive all information on exploration.  Essentially a library of historical exploration.

The five of us dwell in a small office, living amongst stacks of hundred year old + archival material, file cabinets, dated furniture, some paintings of explorers, lots of old monochrome photographs.  We share the space with the largest known finished (polished) piece of petrified redwood (800lbs)  and a brick from the Wall of China, lots of maps and a few globes.  The places has an old parchment smell to it.  It's not stuffy.  Actually very relaxing.  If you stumbled into the office you'd think we all lived in a time capsule.  Even the secretary looks like he came out of a late 70s heist movie.  (elbow pads on the suit.)

To my surprise, I was given a corner office with a view.  I was expecting a table or a cubicle.  Not bad for a job I have to pay for.  The view is to the south east overlooking FDR Drive and the East River.  At the moment the view is blocked by a temporary enclosure for construction of a floating extension of the south street sea port.  The City is looking to make downtown Manhattan more residential and plans on having a floating boardwalk, recreation area that would appeal to property owners down here.  As for the construction it is a bit noisy as they drive pilings into the East River bed.  I had to purchase earplugs as I started to get a headache the second day of working.  They definitely worked but then I couldn't listen to music (another nice perk.)  So tomorrow the David Clarks are going with me (my passive noise attenuation aviation headset.) They have great bass and are good in 93dB cockpits so this should work well with the new tablet.

The actual work I do is a mixed bag.  Currently we're updating our Op-Ed email lists and I have to tediously hunt for the less than obvious location of these addresses on online news sites.  At the same time I've been reading as much material I can stand to look at.  Read a few Op-Ed articles by our webmaster who's a prof. at Western Kentucky U and some from a UC Berkeley grad student.  The former was one the geography of happiness or if we can find places on the planet were people are the happiest and vice versa.  Turns out the happiest place to be based on the author's findings and travels was (shit I can't remember.) The saddest place was Moldova in the former Soviet Union.  Go figure.  The later op-ed was on the forgiveness of genocide in East Timor as a means to move forward to rekindle public relations between East Timor and Indonesia.
My goal is to get my own op-ed published in the next few weeks.  Just need to decided on a topic.  Perhaps something on the dwindling infrastructure in America and lack of efficient urban planning.

Aside from the op-eds, I'm also in search of potential employers who would be interested in using our job board, Geojobs.org.  So far I've come across two NJ based aerial survey firms.  We're looking for cartography, land survey, statistical, engineering and construction and a slew of other traits.  That's pretty much my day besides the rat race of a commute I have from Hackettstown, NJ to Jersey City to catch the PATH train into the World Trade Center then either catch the 2 or 3 from Chambers st. to Wall. I only have to get up at 0530 in the AM to be at work by 0900 but because of congestion that can mean arrival times of as late as 10am.  It's not anything that I can't handle.  I used to commute an hour on a honda cub to my internship in Hanoi through a river of other motorcycles and blue two-stroke exhaust.  Only problem is the cost.  It's almost $40 a day just for transport.  I'm considering taking a bus from near home that will drive me right into Wall St. at something like $100 per week at the sacrifice of not being able to explore the city after work.

In a couple of weeks I will be working with Prof. "Fritz" Nelson who is a physical, polar, cartography and methods geographer from University of Delaware on the preparation for the centennial to the 1912 Transcontinental Excursion.  98 years ago a group of American and European geographers, naturalists, scientists and writers went on a 13,000mile trip using whatever means they could to go around the continental U.S.  We're working to try and get a commemorative excursion organized for 2012.  13,000miles or at least trying to recreate the same trip as close as we can using rail, street car, automobiles and even horses.  We're looking to complete the excursion over the period of 5 weeks instead of the original 3 months.  We would like to encourage anyone who may be interested.  You needn't be a geographer or academic to participate but you need to pay.  The trip will include traveling geographers who will give lectures and anything and nearly everything.  As well as the 2012 excursion, AGS also has a number of spring and summer expeditions:  Africa by Private Jet, South Asia and South East Asia can be found on our website at amergeog.org.  (I'm not going on any of these sponsored trips as the cost for a seat is something in the ball park of $35,000USD.  My guess is the trips will most likely have university faculty conducting research and rich old people who have nothing better to do.

I'll continue to try to keep things interesting here as I ponder the "why of where."

Here's a quote from Dr. Peter Mires, U Delaware Geog. Department taken from his op-ed "Happy to Be Here."

-"Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think.  Family is important.  So are friends. Envy is toxic.  So is excessive thinking.  Beaches are optional.  Trust is not.  Neither is gratitude."

Welcome to my office.

Futureproofing (or at least resisting)

My 4.5 year old IBM Thinkpad X40 has now been replaced with a new, sleek HP Tx2z touchsmart tablet pc!  Not that I had any issues with the thinkpad except for XP dying almost a year ago.  Probably my fault for having it's hard drive completely stuffed to the point where it didn't have enough virtual memory.  Nonetheless, the thinkpad kept on trukin' after I installed Ubuntu 8.something "Hardy-Heron."  What was a slowish, thin, light, bulletproof ultraportable became a faster, more capable machine for another year.  I also experimented with solid-state memory, swapping the proprietary Hitachi drive out for an adapter that ate two compact flash cards.  Pretty neat, very quiet but my 4hours battery became a 40min battery at best due to solid-state requiring constant power.  I primarily made the switch because the little thinkpad even with Ubuntu running was unable to run graphics intensive tasks such as QGIS open-source cartography software, or edit large 12 megapixel RAW files from my Canon Rebel, and crashing every time I tried to run Flight Gear (open-source flight simulator.)

So now the trusty little thinkpad will become a backup to the new machine.  I must say I'm still really impressed with the quality of construction of thinkpads. They really should be called thinktanks.  Mine had survived drops, soda, extreme humidity, heat, cold, accidental power surges from Vietnam's 220 volts, sand, rice, ramen, and a New York City hot dog loaded with the works (i can still see little bits of dried up sauerkraut under the keys.)

So HP Tx2z initial impressions:
It's not so business looking.  A bit more plastic on the exterior, unlike the thinkpad's rubber coated titanium which I will miss.  But with PCs it's what's on the inside that matters.  I've built desktops for friends and myself 10 times since the year 2000 so I think I know what I'm taking about here.  Brands are all pretty much the same as the hardware is usually supplied by intel, ASUS, MSI, AMD, NViDIA, ATI, Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor.....and I could go on.  So aside from the high gloss gray finish with interesting graphics, it's about the same size as the X40.  Still a 12inch but widescreen instead of the almost square screen on the IBM.  Keyboard is snappy, quieter than the X40's.  It has a touchpad which I loathe instead of the 'clit.'  I don't understand why more laptops don't come with 'clits,' they're faster, you can keep your fingers on the keys and move the pointer at the same time.  However the Tx2z's touch pad is pretty good and I think I'll get used to it.  It's got an interesting dimpled texture to it and it is recessed into the frame so your palm won't activate it.

One thing I do like the most with the Tx2z is it has an internal optical drive, so I don't have to carry around an external usb or ridiculous docking port if I want to rip a CD or watch a DVD.  As the title of this post suggests, I tried to futureproof this baby to the max.  That is I loaded all the RAM it could ingest all 8GB of it and the largest drive available, 500GB 7200rpm.  I'm just tired of lugging external drives around to accommodate my music and photos anymore.  I used to velcro an external HDD and optical drive with electrical taped usb cables to my X40 and it was just not backpack or arm friendly.

The ATI Radeon 3200 gpu is going to blow the thinkpad out of the water in terms of graphics processing.  I'm hoping that this will run QGIS or even ESRI Arc GIS without crashing and be able to use the pen input for map digitizing.  Also think running X-Plane 9 should be no problem so I can practice instrument flight for my instrument rating without paying for extra time in the sim or in the aircraft.

The dual digitizer display is something I'm not used to but so far it's pretty impressive.  Being able to use the stylus and fingers to execute commands is very useful.  Handwriting recognition is amazing compared to the old Palm V from '99.

I'm running windows 7 64-bit and it's pretty good.  I'm still in the process of deleting all the "bloatware" that HP preinstalled to "enhance" the user experience.  As soon 7 is fully configured to my liking, I'm going to partition the drive and figure out how to run Ubuntu 9 on it.  People on the forum are saying it runs great on the touchsmart but there's going to be quite a bit of tweaking and debugging involved I'm sure.

At the same time I've also gone ahead and installed google chrome to see what it's like compared to firefox.  (I'm using it now to type this post.)  So far it's very fast and I'm impressed.  Will probably wind up switching soon.  Other stuff I added are: GIMP and open office.  I forgot to order MS Office and don't think i will as I can't stand the cartoony GUI they've adopted for it.  I can't wait to resurrect my old external drive which has sat dormant in a bag since I returned from Vietnam in early 2008 to revive my old iTunes music library.  So much music that I have not listened too in a long time!

Well that's it for now.  enjoy the picture.