The Nine Lives – Ian Cheung, Information Architect in Osaka, Japan

It’s the start of the summer season here in Japan.  Toasty 36C days and 30-31C nights.  It’s a bit too hot to sleep without air-conditioning but for some reason when we set it to 28C it is too cold, and when we set it to 29C it is too hot.

Jamie caught a cold maybe because of the air-conditioning itself and maybe because of the dust being kept in the air by the air conditioning being on.  While he doesn’t have asthma, his lungs are sensitive to dust.  But he is also the one that sweats a lot and wakes up at night if it is too hot.

So when we took him to the doctor’s we asked the doctor’s advice and she said one idea is to turn on the air-con in the next room, and keep the door between them slightly open. That way the air temperature isn’t too cool and there is less churn of dust.

That’s what I’m doing right now, and he’s been sleeping for almost 3 hours.  Hope it works at night too
BTW I don’t claim that this idea is eco-friendly.

I’ve just moved server for this blog from Joyent to Linode. The shared accelerator server on Joyent was really quick at the start but has been slow of late.  I’ll be slowly moving my other sites over, but since it is a VPS, if it slows down it will be my own fault. So far it has been pretty cool running a VPS but it is not for the faint-hearted.

I haven’t been blogging of late, something my nephew picked up (thanks Michael), and there are various reasons. The biggest two are probably procastination and lack of inspiration.  (other factors are facebook, twitter and flickr).  So I had a think about it and wondered in the gaps between posts what I would have written.  What things or topics have happened in my life that were worthy of a blog post.

From now on I will try to write about those things (hence the sub-title).  A partial list includes photography, in particular strobism, inspiration or positive takeaways from meeting up with friends, football and geek stuff like being stucked into vim.

Oh and the blog has a new theme by WooThemes called Mainstream.  I should mention that I took out the link at the bottom, not because I want to hide the fact but because it just stood out so much.  I do intend on adding back a text link when I get the time.

by winged photography via flickr

This is a post about a lifehack that helps you be productive every day. With little effort. But before we get to that a couple of my favourite marriage jokes.

1. marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence.
2. get married first thing in the morning, if it goes wrong at least the whole day isn’t wasted.

Those jokes were easier to tell (and safer) when 90% of my friends and family weren’t married. But there is a reason to for the jokes, the second one anyway.

If you’ve ever gone through a day procrastinating, or not getting anything done and then beating yourself up about it this may help. Start the day with 30 minutes of work. Just 30 minutes, and of anything of importance. And it has to be the first thing. That does not include checking email, news reading or even my favourite pseudo-work item – planning.

After the 30 minutes of work, do anything you like. You can waste the rest of the day if you want. The thing is that you will be less likely to do so and even if you do, you can look back on your day and see that you got something done. At least you didn’t waste your whole day. *boom boom. I thank-you, I’ll be here all week*

I’ve been using a Canon DSLR for over 6 years now.  But the next camera I get will probably be a Nikon, most likely the D700 or the model that comes after.  I thought I would explain why, if for no-one else but myself.

There are various reasons but the top reason isn’t megapixels or ISO performance.  I’ll come to those later.  The top reason is handling and ergonomics.  Even after using my 10D for 6 years plus, the doubling up of buttons drive me crazy.  One button controls two things, like ISO and Drive.  You press the single button and one control dial adjusts the ISO, the other the Drive but there is no logic to which is which.  Same with White Balance and AF.  And because changing those settings is not a regular thing, muscle memory doesn’t come into it.  When you are shooting and need to change one setting and end up changing the other you waste time and there is a chance that the opportunity is lost.  It happens a lot more that you might think.

Nikon designs their cameras with the photographer in mind, Canon designs cameras with consumers in mind.  There are other examples, like how the built-in flash on Nikons can control other external flashes, but with Canon you have to buy a separate flash or expensive IR accessory.  [...]

I started a new job with messaliberty (will post more about this later) and it is a mostly OSX shop.  So I upgraded my mac mini and brought it in to use.

Some things I’ve noted.  OSX works well at 1920×1200.  My previous experiences at 1024×768 (iBook) and 1280×1024 (on a 17″ monitor) felt cramped and annoying.  I’m sure 1600×1200 would be fine too but definitely the experience has become a lot more pleasant.

I upgraded the HDD to a 320GB/7200rpm one and upgraded ram to 2GB.  I’m running a one of the orignal core solo models and had planned to upgrade the cpu to a core2duo but couldn’t find a second-hand processor at the right price.  But even without the cpu upgrade, the mac mini feels much more snappy.  Less lags all round.  The upgrades weren’t really that difficult, took about an hour in total.  Hard drive migration was handled by the excellent SuperDuper. The cpu upgrade would have been a little more difficult and time consuming. The only thing that I am not comfortable with running are virtual machines.  Before the upgrades, it was painful.  Now it is bearable but not fun.

Most of my time I use QuickSilver to launch programs.  (I use Launchy on Windows)

Keynote is great, to knock up a presentation using Keynote is way faster than PowerPoint.  I still use Firefox rather than Safari, and I use Thunderbird instead of Mail.  Partly because of familiarity, partly because of plugins and partly because I still use Windows on my thinkpad and at home so I can use the same programs regardless.  OpenOffice is clunky but free. skEdit rules as a html editor, though Maruo/Hidemaru on Windows is possibily the best editor to handle Japanese encodings without breaking anything.

My monitor is big but only so-so in terms of image quality. It’s a Dell 24″ E248WFP.  Definitely not suitable for photographic work, but for web design/programming it does ok.  I can see colour shifts with only small head movements.

In summary life with OSX has gone from a D- to a B+. Hope to upgrade to Leopard in the future to use Time Machine and will report back from time to time.