Photon Torpedo

Sochi - Handover Video

The Sochi handover video caught my eye when watching the Olympics closing ceremony and I was searching around the web to find it. Fortunately, the art director of the video, Alex Mikhaylov posted it on his Vimeo site.

Thoughts on Vegetarianism

I had a discussion over at Facebook and it prompted me to go back on what I had thought about vegetarianism quite a while back and take some time to jot it down.

For one, we came from the apes and apes are omnivorous so we must have inherited that attribute quite well. Then humans evolved for the large part living in forests as tribes. Civilization is relatively new for humans and any evolutionary adaption due to civilization must be miniscule compared to adaptation to the hunter-gatherer type of life humans had for about a million years. 

My take on diet is that human body from an evolutionary stand-point must be closely adapted to the food that a hunter-gatherer environment can provide. In such an environment, diet is predominantly fruits/berries and nuts with an occasional hunt providing meat. With civilization of course we don't need to go in search of berries and nuts, nor do we need to hunt to get meat. This enables people for better or worse to stray away from the hunter-gatherer diet. The two extremes that arise out of this are vegetarian diets and eat-meat-at-every-sitting diets. 

Being a vegetarian has one significant advantage in that it is lower down the food chain and so you are closer to our chief energy source, the Sun. From that perspective you could be consuming less resources to live. On the other hand, one has to pay close attention to protein and other nutrient intake that's taken for granted in a meat-based diet. In the plant-world there are very few food-items that have complete protein. One has to choose food-items that complement each other in their essential amino-acid count in order to ensure adequate protein intake. Amongst other nutrients vit-B is something to watch out. Apart from eat-meat-at-every-sitting diets, a diet around eating meat couple of times a week is closer to the hunter-gatherer diet and should hopefully demonstrate its benefits to the human body in the long run.

Why working from office is better!!

Work from office:

Work from home:

 

Uploading Photos to Facebook

I got the trial version of Aperture 3 and thought it would be great to process a few pictures and upload them to Facebook. So I end up uploading to Facebook and to my dismay find that the photos have the wrong colour all over. Upon digging into things it looks like Facebook strips out the ICC profile (for colour management) and as such the photos looked awful. Besides, Facebook only displays photos with a leading dimension of 604 pixels and as such scales the photos badly (probably with a computationally non-intensive algorithm to save some CPU cycles) and so images end up being unsharp. So at the end, one is left with an image that lacks lustre due to colour and scaling. 

I tried exporting the pictures from Aperture using a few different colour profiles and uploading without success and finally upon frustration just hit the Facebook button on Aperture (which I should have done in the first place). Interestingly Aperture seems to take care of converting the photos just the right way so photos look the best on Facebook. 

So, long story short, Aperture (and presumably iPhoto) users can just rely on the dumbed down Facebook button and leave the details to the devil. I'm of course no expert in this and was just getting my hands and feet wet with Aperture so if any experts want to chime in to tell me what's the best way to go about please feel free to do so.

First video with the Flip MinoHD

Not much of a video guy but shooting video with the Flip is sure fun, simple and easy. 

Another Look at Flickr

I have been a SmugMug user for about one and a half years now. I chose to be on SmugMug because when it ultimately comes to presenting photos to viewers, SmugMug does the best job. It tries to show pictures in the largest format possible in the browser window of the viewer while maintaining the context of photos by including a grid of all the other photos in the album. The other differentiating factors about SmugMug are that videos can be much longer (about 10 mins) and you can have password protected albums and albums that exist as islands. 

What I miss with SmugMug is the idea of photostream that Flickr is built on. The photostream concept is quite suitable to someone who takes casual photographs and uploads them on the go. So you take a bunch of photos, mark few of them as private and group them into a couple of sets and send them away. Viewers can see your photos when they appear in your stream and if they are more interested will dig into your sets. With SmugMug all photos need to appear within albums; this is great if all the photos you take are about events and occasions. So where do casual photos go? This is one problem I always had with SmugMug. I take a lot of casual photos and every time I need to upload them I am stuck with what album I should put them in. I tried to address this by creating a new category called Lifestream and subcategories for each month/year and one album within this subcategory for general photos within the month and other albums for any photos that can be grouped together. Here are some photos I organized into a Lifestream. While this seems to work fine, there is much more work involved whenever you need to upload photos. Flickr incidentally gives this sort of a year/month/day organization for free if you just dump photos into it. Take a look at my Flickr archives for example.

So why this post? Simple. I am torn between the convenience of uploading to Flickr versus the uber-coolness of SmugMug's presentation. Is there a good middle ground?

Flip MinoHD

Got the Flip; was on sale at Bestbuy. 

 Excellent little gadget; very comfortable to use. Will post more on using it soon.

Google: We May Remove Buzz From Gmail

Google says it may end the marriage between Buzz and Gmail. That may be a welcome move from users of both products, especially in light of the substantial privacy concerns voiced this week about Google Buzz.

via searchengineland.com

Thank goodness.. actually, I don't have much problem at all in using buzz if it had it's own page and stays away from GMail.

Test post from Flickr to Typepad

Don't miss the ceiling
Originally uploaded by PavanGpd

I got this shot when I went to the Carlingwood mall to see if I can renew my driving license at the kiosk. Learning that I can't, I walked past the food-court to find this interesting ceiling. Goes to say that we miss quite a lot if we don't look.

Buzz off..

Turned off Google Buzz..

Social media is great and I don't mind spending some time now and then to post updates on what's happening with my life and find out what's happening with the people I am connected to. To bring it closer to work and make it ubiquitous is another thing. Google Buzz rubbed me the wrong way; the buzz was right in GMail. GMail to me is in the work territory; the contacts I have in gmail are work related. I suddenly opened GMail to realize I was following a bunch of people I didn't want to and likewise they didn't want me to follow them. 

I'm sure Google wants this big. But in doing so, they are actually pushing a product into "email space". In the net world, I look at "email space" as personal space. They did this before when they introduced Google chat and I had to disable it to make sure the world doesn't know I am emailing.

So if you want to turn off Google Buzz, scroll to the bottom of your GMail page and you will find a link in small font saying "turn off buzz". Click on that and be done with it.