Selamat pagi!

I'm currently in a Malaysian town called Semporna, which happens to be the gateway to some of the best diving in the world, including the renowned Sipadan island. Tomorrow is my last day of diving, and I'll be heading back to China the day after that. Afterwards, I'll be stopping in Tokyo for several days to visit some friends and maybe do some snowboarding. I'll finally be back in the states on the 24th, just in time for a Tahoe ski trip on the 25th.

Anyway, enough about frozen water for now. I've been spending alot of time under the sea the last few days. I'll be putting up some albums with GPS-tagged pictures and all, but for now, while the internet is somewhat spotty, here are a few samples.

Here is a picture of me with my awesome divemaster, after surfacing from a dive:

Here is a batfish:

a whitetip shark (it's actually much smaller than it looks, only 4-5 feet or so):

a triggerfish:

a hawkfish:

a unicornfish:

and a moorish idol. If you've watched Finding Nemo, Gill is this type of fish:

of course, I have to include a picture of a sea turtle. They were everywhere! You could see at least several every dive, if not more.

As you can see, there is quite a bit going on underneath the surface. It's alot of fun, and you get back just in time for dinner and beers at the local bar. Quite a nice trip. Highly recommended for those interested in marine life.

On Thursday, I'm supposed to get on a plane and go to Asia for six weeks. I'll be traveling to China (where my parents are living), Thailand, Hong Kong, Bali, and Japan. I'll definitely put up some geotagged photos from each place once I take some!

For now, it's (somewhat) crunch time. Gotta get some work done, although I work remotely now and will continue working in Asia. Gotta pick up my passport from the Chinese consulate, buy some presents for the family, pack...

Anyway, look for more updates in the next few weeks. Should be lots of fun. Happy holidays everyone!

Just got done with a hectic two weeks. First was a week in Los Angeles to visit friends and my sister for Thanksgiving. Next was a week back in SF with some of my friends from LA coming along. Lots of food, drink, and fun, but not much time for much else...

Anyway, at the prompting of a friend, I decided to sketch a "still life" (a.k.a. my teacup) one day. I used to draw all the time, but it'd been years. And hey, doodling is still fun.

Then I decided to be extra "artsy" and take pictures of the materials associated with the sketch. I also played around with the color modes on the DSC-W80, which was also given to me by Sony. Here are the pictures in sepia, black and white, and color:

:

The graininess works decently well in sepia and black and white, but not so much in color. I must've used a somewhat high ISO setting, since it was indoors. I personally like the sepia photo best.

It's getting darker and colder in the bay area. However, that also means that winter surf is kicking in, which for me means several potential good days of surfing a week :o)

In fact, I went surfing the last three days in a row at Linda Mar in Pacifica. It's easily accessible from where I live and has plenty of parking and showers. Not necessarily the best or most exciting waves, but it's a decent, fun workout. Plus the sunsets over the water are just beautiful.

I brought my camera and GPS unit along yesterday in hopes of snapping some awesome sunset shots. Unfortunately, the sun was mostly obscured by the incoming fog. I still took some random shots of the surf, hills, and fog, and uploaded them to Picasa, which has a "map view" of the pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jessie.suen/1152007/photo#map

And here is a screenshot of the Picasa map:

As far my opinion of the GPS-CS1KA unit, I have to say it's more useful than I thought it would be. At first, I thought it was somewhat silly to have a GPS receiver that only took time and location stamps every 15 minutes, then required an external piece of software to match and geotag pictures with the stamps. But hey, it definitely gets the job done, and it is pretty cool to have a geospatial context in which to reference your photos.

I can also see lots of different ways to "hack" the GPS log files and pictures and produce some really cool stuff. Unfortunately, Sony's Picture Motion Browser software doesn't allow you to do much with the maps... for now. You can't save maps or manipulate them. However, there are outside resources, such as Picasa above, that allow you to create, edit, and save album maps. And maybe the geek in me will end up learning the Google Maps API and writing some code to do more stuff with the GPS unit...