vincent.yu.net.nz

Grind, knock, dose, tamp, pull, steam, pour.

I’m learning how to make coffee. My redundancy has given me a lot more time to do those things that I could never be assed doing. Like learning to make coffee. I’m up at 5am and at the café by 6am to practice my dosing and tamping before the place opens at 7am (whereupon I take advantage of the breakfast menu).

At the moment, I’m on espresso and flat whites (latté, cappuccino, macchiato will come later)

It’s not as easy as it looks and I now have a newfound appreciation for a good coffee. Even to the point where I drank my cup this morning without sugar when ordinarily I would’ve reeled back from the slight bitterness.

I treat the whole thing like a game. Dosing out about 6.5 grams of coffee and tamping it with appropriate force so that 30ml of water at 90°C and pressurised to 9 bars takes 24 seconds to filter through the coffee.

Most of the shots I pull taste horribly bitter, but adding milk makes that all disappear. Thankfully.

Almost all the R&D Team were made redundant last Wednesday. So I am out of a job as I write.

It’s surprising how news travels fast. We were told of this last Tuesday-week and given a “5-Day Consultation Period” as a matter of formality. Within 24-hours, I had messages from friends all over the world asking me if the news was true. Ah, the power of the internet (and networking too, I guess).

This was probably the longest week ever since I had to sit and wait for the inevitable.

I don’t feel too badly about this whole affair given my severance package was reasonable, and that I’ve been unmotivated about my job for quite some time. I just took the money and ran. Sadly, not everyone’s severance package was as favourable as mine. And perhaps even more disappointing was how the company handled the whole affair with different individuals.

For example, I e-mailed Human Resources requesting a copy of my employment contract on Wednesday, the day after we were notified of the proposal to lay-off the team. I was still waiting by Friday morning, almost 48-hours later so I paid the HR representative a visit. When asking how long it’d take, he said: “24-48 hours”.

Me: It’s almost 48 hours and I still haven’t received it
HR: It’s not just us you know Vincent. You should have a copy too. There are two parties involved, not just [CompanyName]. You should have your own copy too.
Me: But is it an unreasonable request to ask for my employment contract?
HR: I didn’t say it was unreasonable. I’m saying that there are two parties here, not just [CompanyName]. You should have your own copy too.
Me: You sound a little aggressive? [I think I meant to say "defensive", but the word escaped me at the time]
HR: I’m not being aggressive at all.

A few hours later, I receive an e-mail from HR asking for a meeting. So I pop down to pay him a visit.

HR: Look Vincent, there’s no easy way for me to tell you this.
Me: Ok, I’m listening.
HR: We can’t find a copy of your employment contract. We don’t seem to have a record of it.
Me: Well, that’s no good. I’ll have another look at home for my copy over the weekend.
HR: I’m really sorry about that. It would be really great if you could have a look for it.
Me: I know, there are two parties involved, not just me. You should have a copy of it too.

Now that this whole thing is over, I’m going to take a little break over the next few weeks and then decide what I’d like to do for the rest of my life. I’m looking forward to doing stuff around the house, finally updating the café’s website, teaching my dog new tricks, writing games for my (and Holly’s) new iPod Touch, practicing photography, practicing taiji and getting back into a training routine with wushu, fitness and strength training, maybe even teaching taiji to seniors… learning to make coffee, another language, or even cooking. You know, stuff that I actually enjoy doing.

I did a spot of retail therapy the other day and bought an 8GB iPod Touch. These things are slick!

It’s a very sexy looking device that doesn’t just play music and movies. I bought it mainly to try out app and game development and the games that I’ve seen so far are pretty slick too. It’s just giving me more inspiration to get out there and have a go. I could almost see it replace my notepad/diary/pencil combo that I use right now to Get Things Done.

Typing on the thing is a little clunky and there’s no cut & paste - but right now, just holding that sexy gadget is enough to make me ignore the craptastic text editing capability. One really cool thing is handwriting recognition for Chinese. I’ve had a little play with it and I’m quite impressed! I’m not sure if a stylus would have more precision than my finger but I guess it just takes a little getting used to.

I now take it everywhere with me. Not to listen to music, but to watch video, play games, and surf the web. I wish I had an iPhone just so I could be online all the time. Aside from that, I can’t wait to get started with app/game programming on it!

Today marks the start of New Zealand Sign Language Week. I don’t know anyone who signs, nor do I live or work in an environment where sign language is used, but I was slightly odd how I came into contact with Sign.

I usually go for my lunchtime walk down Queen Street, with my headphones on and music loud to serve as a social shield from stalkers on the street looking to sign me up to some charity or survey or religious cult. They ignore people with headphones on; what’s the point of talking to someone if they can’t hear you, right? I think it’s a great ploy.

Last year, at the start of NZ Sign Language week, a lady walked in front of me waved hello and handed me a flyer. I was slightly taken aback - I wasn’t used to being interrupted. I looked at the flyer and realised that it was about NZ Sign. I thought this was pretty cool as I’ve always loved languages. I saw the sign for “Thank You” on the flyer and thanked her.

It wasn’t until much later on - a year later - that it struck me: my having headphones on isn’t a barrier if hearing isn’t used to communicate. I’ve been narrow-minded enough to think that I can shield myself from all the marketing on Queen St by donning a pair of white earbuds. I’m quite thankful that I had my encounter, it’s taught me that there is more than one way of getting a message across. Oftentimes we tend to speak louder when we can’t be understood - instead of finding a different way.

I’m looking forward to bumping into more NZ Sign volunteers on Queen St this week.

I switched ISPs!

Finally, after being a Telecon customer for the last 13 odd years (since 1996), I’ve decided that I no longer want to get shafted. And my butt is already feeling better! Thanks Orcon.

I’m actually able to watch YouTube videos as they’re being downloaded! (like how it should be). In High Quality! I used to load the page, hit pause and come back 5 minutes later.

Signing up was a piece of cake; I would’ve done it weeks ago if I’d known my Telecom account number. One little hitch was not researching ADLS modem connection settings so that I could re-connect once the switch-over happened. We were without internet for a few hours until I resorted to surfing on my 240×320 mobile phone at GPRS speeds (i.e. slow).

Now I’m back online and happy!

Funny story: 5 minutes after signing up online and announcing it on Twitter, I get a tweet from @Orcon welcoming me onboard, and 5 minutes later a tweet from @Telecom farewelling me. Someone’s got their eyes open out there.

(Now that you’re done here, go and watch this: Telecon Parody on YouTube)

Here’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time now and only just managed to get around to it.

My brother recently bought a new computer which means he no longer needs his old one, or actually: my old one. I bought that PC about 6 years ago and loaded it with a whopping 1GB of RAM and massive 80GB hard drive. I thought it was nice that my brother upgraded the USB to 2.0. Thanks bro, that’ll help heaps with the external storage, especially if I’m going to be using it as a file-server.

I’m trying the FreeNAS route. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based distribution that offers SMB, AFP, FTP, Rsync, iTunes/DAAP along with a whole bunch of other stuff. It runs headless and uses a web-based console. It also offers HTTP serving and has DynamicDNS integration.

Right now, I’m only using SMB and AFP, and using the web console and SSH to configure the beast.

Installation is pretty simple: download and burn the ISO, boot from CD, and you’re away. The hardest thing about running headless is how BIOSes don’t like it when the keyboard is absent. My BIOS had the option of “Halt on all but keyboard errors” (I know Compaq has a network server option that’s only accessible once you set a BIOS password).

I took the option of installing the OS onto hard disk - this way, any changes to the settings is preserved on disk. I used the default UFS (Unix Filesystem) format for the hard-disk, and in a happy coincidence it turns out I can use Apple’s Time Machine to target the network storage as the destination for my backups. A little fiddling required, but overall quite smooth. I’m not sure if I trust it enough to use it, besides it’s going to be slow over 802.11g.

Sadly, the box is very noisy. And ugly. And I’m thinking of hiding the beast in the garage. This means I need a long network cable, about 20 metres so I can run them down the corners of the walls and not turn the house into a rat’s nest. A 20 metre network cable at Dick Smith: $60, at Surplustronics: $30. I went Surplustronics.

The other Macs in the house are all running off 802.11g - which means an effective transfer rate of about 5 MB/s which is enough for single-definition video. I’m toying with the idea of wiring them up to gigabit ethernet, or upgrading the entire network to 802.11n by purchasing a router and Mac-compatible USB dongles.

I’ll still need another network cable to patch in my 1st generation Xbox - and that means purchasing a switch/hub as well.

Right now, Apple’s Airport Extreme supports 802.11n and can serve as a 3-port hub, but I’m thinking about doing this on the cheap - so I’ll see how far I get.

I wanted to play around a bit more with glass in the lightbox to observe how light got reflected in the surfaces.

This necessitated the purchase of a bottle of whisky. The photos below are unprocessed. I messed up the light a little so the background didn’t end up completely blown out. I also did try to play with floor reflection of the bottle as well. Some photos here:

I got stuck with wedding photographers Dreamlife to take our wedding photos and video. Anyone who can avoid them should.

I suspect they get most of their business simply because they’re the cheapest around. I’ll make this rant quick as it’s been going on for the last year or so; we finally got our final enlargement and I’m glad to be finished with them.

Given that I know a little more about photography now than I did a year ago, I’m starting to cement the idea that these guys are a bunch of amateurs with fancy gear out to make money.

Most of their photos look good because they’re hugely post-processed - and cheap labour means they can do this to hundreds of photos. Photos that are blown out are passed off as artistic. The photographers (most that I’ve seen) are just a bunch of poncy kids with flash gear (e.g. Canon 5D II with a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens) but they don’t know shit when it comes to taking photos (letting shorter people stand behind taller people in small group shots - at least the photographers job should be to make sure that everyone’s visible, right?)

We had two shoots with them: pre-wedding shoot, and the actual wedding shoot.

On the pre-wedding shoot, the guy had an assistant who did nothing buy adjust dresses, hair, and props - no reflectors or flashes here (would’ve been good given that it we were outdoors on a very sunny day and we weren’t in the shade). They also offer to do makeup and hair, but discovered their hairspray had run out (a basic ingredient when it comes to hair). I borrowed their clothes for their shoot, as they suggested, but they forgot to adjust the trouser legs, making me look short due to the inches of crumpled trousers at my ankles.

On the wedding day, the photographer was an ass. Sloppily dressed and only seemed to just point-and-shoot. He didn’t offer advice on where to stand for the better photos, he didn’t move people around so the photos would be better. He was just pointing and shooting.

Post wedding, it took a year to get the photos and videos. The customer service is polite but ineffective. They were such a pain to deal with. My advice: you get what you pay for - so if you’re happy putting up with monkeys, then go with Dreamlife.

Otherwise, go somewhere else.

Wide-angle Lens

I forgot I had a wide-angle lens - until I whipped it out to show a friend. It just reminded me of how awesome they are if you actually use it.

Meet Calvin:

Flash

I tried taking photos of some flowers that Holly bought a few days ago. I had this picture in my head of flowers on a jet-black background. It didn’t quite work out as well as i’d hoped. I couldn’t get the light from my flash to fall-off enough to under-expose my white walls. I think I’ll be needing to make myself a snoot and/or grid of some sort to get this under control.

These photos were taken in an almost dark room - with barely enough light

On the positive side, my light-stand and umbrella are working fantastically and I can’t wait to spend more time playing around with the possibilities that they bring.

Lightbox

I’ve been wanting to make one of these babies for a while now. I guess ever since Holly and Jen bought their cafe, I’ve wanted to take “product shots” of the cafe’s meals to put onto their website.

I used an old cardboard box, 3 sheets of 80gsm white paper, sellotape, and a roll of white lining paper - a.k.a wallpaper (51cm by 10 metres at $20 damage from Bunnings). Finding the paper was the hardest part; I’ll try OfficeMax next time I go hunting for paper. Total construction time: 5 minutes.

I used two desk lamps on the left and the right of the box, and my flash for the top.

The real pain was having to set the white balance. Granted it’s easy enough to do with the custom white balance setting in the camera, but it seemed that I had to to it every time I changed the flash power setting or messed with my aperture/shutter settings.

I took a few sample shots, but I’m really looking forward to trying this out with food… mainly because I get to consume it afterwards.

This is probably a good thing but I don’t remember how much we spent. The food and beverages were fantastic and we came home with fancy booze and ceramic knife.

Posted from my mobile phone