Currency exchange

In preparation for the Taiwan trip next week, I went to the Mechanics Bank downtown today to exchange for some Taiwan dollars. It's always good to have some cash on hand to at least get from the airport to the hotel. 

In doing so I was reminded of the last time I visited the same bank this past May: to buy some Korean currency. Both times I purchased around $200 worth of local money. 

On the Korea trip, I could have easily not used any of the cash I exchanged: the country is fabulously accepting of credit cards. From the airport bus kiosk down to the elder ladies peddling food in front of the baseball stadium, I was amazed at how often i can use card to pay. For a person living in the States used to seeing 'cash only' signs in many storefronts, it's a pleasure and convenience I wish America would adopt. 

Unfortunately, Taiwan isn't nearly as friendly to credit cards as Korea, at least from my previous experience two years ago. Perhaps it'll be different this time: on the last trip we had to take a one-hour bus ride from the airport to get into Taipei, now there's a dedicated subway line taking half the time. 

I for one cannot wait for a true cash-less society, with my wallet's contents all residing in the smartphone. To pay for anything, all I have to do is hover my phone over an NFC device. Apple Pay on the iPhone is getting there, but there still exist a huge dearth of places that accept it. I will not be surprised if Korea is the first country to go truly/completely mobile wallet.

Wait, would that mean I'll have to switch to a Samsung phone and get Samsung pay?  

It'll rain in Taipei

Next week is Thanksgiving, and by the virtue working in higher education I am able to take the entire week off. I'll be off to Taipei, Taiwan for some much needed vacation time in my beloved Asia. The Google Travel app sent me a notification today alerting me to the weather conditions, and it is forecasted for rain the whole time. My travel good-luck charm appears to have finally deserted me. 

I thought November in Taiwan would be chill and sunny. I guess not. 

Amor fati, as stoics say. 

While I'm not thrilled for the rain, at least it isn't monsoon season (that's during the summer), so it'll just be periodic bursts throughout the day - entirely survivable, just have to purchase an umbrella upon touching down. Rain will force us indoors most of the time, which is just as well because for me the biggest reason to travel to Taipei is the fabulous food so we'll be doing lots of that. Instead of drinking plain water I plan to replace it completely with bubble tea. Even the most hole-in-the-wall tea spot in Taipei is on par with the best we can get in the States. 

Better bring the North Face jacket, though. Shoutout to whoever invented Gore-Tex.

These past years I've been listening to kpop almost exclusively, but in order to get in the mood for the Taiwan trip, I've momentarily dusted off the Chinese music playlists and got immediately taken back to the early 2000's. That's the magic of music: it can transport you back to any time period and let you relive the moments. In my case, that would be my late teenage years of much angst and lazy days. 

Hearing Chinese songs again made me realize I probably should brush up on my seldom-used mandarin. I would not be surprised if my first words towards a person at Taoyuan International Airport is in Korean.  

Excited. 

Veterans Day weekend

The wonders of having a three day weekend (Veterans Day) is whatever I had planned to do, instead of having two days to execute, I get three. The leisure time afforded in between was quite welcomed and made this past weekend a refreshing one indeed.

On Friday while performing oil change on the car - $35 total for 5 quarts of synthetic and filter, the heavens decided to open up and it rained biblically for a good half hour. To avoid getting soaked the easy thing would be to stay under the car for the duration, but I believe too much in superstition to be beneath a vehicle supported by jack-stands for any longer than necessary.

At least the rain washed away the oil puddle that invariably forms due to the stream missing the catch-can. No matter how good I think I've positioned the reservoir, the first unleashing of oil from the engine pan will always find the ground. For sure it isn't the most environment friendly thing to do, but I'm not paying the $80 or so the dealership charges for a simple oil change - the Miata needs one every six months. 

On Saturday I went over to my sole house-owning friend's place. He's in the middle of having solar panels installed on his roof. The reality of having a climate-controlled house year-round is extremely nice indeed, and because the friend doesn't live in San Francisco - no fog, the place will get plenty of sun. To achieve the same level of pampering I'd have to live in my car. 

Sunday was the first opportunity to try out intensively the iPhone X's camera. Perhaps I'm spoiled by my Sony A7R2's 42 megapixel images, the X's camera isn't completely wowing me, save one feature: portrait mode. It's been one year since Apple introduced the feature, and it's gotten spectacularly good. The boundary between what's in focused and blurred is executed so well now that it's often difficult to tell the difference from a proper DSLR. Check out these flowers I took yesterday, unedited:

Twitter's 280 character limit

Yesterday twitter expanded the 280 character limit to everyone after a soft rollout. We can all now tweet twice as long. In place of the word counter inside the text window is a circle that fills up as your type. Fascinating. 

I hate the change. 

280 character tweets is TL:DR status. Perhaps more of an inditement of my outrageously short attention span, but my eyes automatically gloss over these longer tweets. If the first 10 words don't capture my attention then I move the heck on.  

The twitter timeline with these long tweest starts to resemble the Facebook feed, and that's never a good thing. 

I like twitter because it's quick, concise, and to the point. Trying to articulate well within the old 140 character paradigm was downright artful. Shakespeare and Mark Twain both were fans of brevity. Countless times I was up against the limit and had to prune/revise what I wanted to say - it was excellent practice. Sadly, wont' have to do that anymore. 

And it isn't like twitter will ever go back: can't take the cake away once you've given it. 

I hope this one time jump to 280 will be the end of it. At 280 it's already looking less like what twitter should be - with character-based languages like Korean it's practically an essay; any more increases it might as well be tumblr. 

$1,000 for a tin-can*

People are getting on Tiffany and Co for its new collection called 'Everyday Objects', in which they sell ornate mundane objects like a sterling silver tin-can for a thousand dollars. 

I don't get the outrage.

Sure, items like silver toy blocks seem on the surface superfluous and money down the drain, but it isn't your money down that drain, is it? Why are people caught up with what a company decides to sell and what other people chooses to buy? Even if I think it's silly (and I do), if someone will gladly part with their $400 for a silver triangle ruler, bully to capitalism. 

I guess not many are familiar with the time the streetwear company Supreme sold a limited-edition brick  - yes, an solid ordinary brick with the Supreme logo on it. While it retailed for only $30, in the secondary market the bricks were going for about the same range as what Tiffany and Co is selling its new collection, and people bought. 

Let companies sell all the ridiculous stuff they want; it may be absurd and it's indeed good for a laugh, but let's stop with think-pieces and twitter diatribes. 

Because we've all spent relatively insane money on things others would find laughable. I'll go: I had a perfectly good car entirely paid for, yet I went and spent many tens of thousand on a brand new car just to be cool and fast. I don't regret it, but from a strict financial standpoint it was pretty idiotic. Thankfully, the world and our being isn't run strictly on financial motivations. 

I'll gladly buy a $9,000 silver ball of yarn if I could. 

iPhone X first impressions

It turns out I was lucky enough to have my iPhone X order bumped up from the original third week of November date to it getting delivered yesterday afternoon. Major kudos to Apple's supply chain prowess: to launch a brand-new phone simultaneously in 55 countries where initial demand is surely in the tens of millions is an astonishing feat. 

Or perhaps that's just happy me who got his iPhone X way earlier that expected talking. 

Nevertheless, I've had about a day's worth of use, and here are some preliminary impressions: 

• Face ID is fast and works seamlessly in all lighting conditions. That said, Touch ID is still faster, which is expected as the fingerprint technology is matured while this is the first go for Face ID.
• One Face ID quirk for winter months: it doesn't work if you're wearing a mask/half the face is covered. I hope in future iterations the Face ID system will add technologies like retinal scanning to its repertoire so that it can unlock the phone under more situations. 
• The OLED screen is perfection. It makes even my 5K iMac display look pedestrian by comparison: infinite contrast ratio, precise calibration, and fantastic viewing angles. I'm glad Apple waited this long to introduce OLED in the iPhone because early Samsung OLED screens were atrocious.
• With the combination of glass front and back with polished stainless-steel surround, the X is the best feeling iPhone to the hand since iPhone 4. There is no chance I'm putting a case on it; the back glass is grippy enough - an upgrade from the soap-like aluminum of iPhone 6 and 7. 
• I don't miss the home button: swiping up from the bottom edge is quite natural. What isn't natural is the gesture it replaces: control center - it's now swipe down from top right. Rejiggering that muscle memory will take longer.
• Of course, apps that have yet to be optimized for the new display arrangement look awkward at best and unusable at worse. Most frustrating part is the keyboard - outdated apps don't use the new keyboard layout, and your muscle memory will hate you. 
• The X is slightly heavier than the 7 Plus, even though it's dimensionally smaller. I personally don't mind it because it'll be less prone to fly out of my hands/easier to clutch. 
• True-tone is so amazing that I wish all my other displays have it. I turn it off when I need to do photography work (read: instagram), but otherwise it's a pleasure on the eyes. 

More in the weeks to come as I get familiar with the phone, including taking it on a trip to Taiwan during Thanksgiving week. 

Good riddance, Flickr

How was your weekend? Hope it was splendid. I spend the two days entirely in from of the iMac. 

Because I finally got off my ass and finished porting over the rest of the data from my old tumblr website and flickr page over to this Squarespace site. Transferring photos is the easy part - I did it a month ago; the rest of the metadata such as titles and captions I had to do manually. It's as dreadfully boring and tedious as it sounds. 

A hearty good riddance to flickr. It used to be wonderful back in the day before Yahoo bought its parent company. These days it's one of the company's many neglected children: no substantial updates of any sort in the past years. Photographs still get compressed to hell, the layout is in desperate need of redesign, and its geolocation maps are utterly useless (Apple Maps at its troubled infancy was better). Surely the only reason me and others have continued to use flickr despite its glaring shortcomings is friction: it takes considerable effort to move hosts.

And now that Yahoo has sold to Verizon, flickr users shouldn't hold their breath for updates. It's a platform way beyond its prime. Instead of a flickr landing page, photo hobbyist and professionals should have their own website: hosts like Squarespace or Smugmug make it too easy, and quite affordable. 

With my flickr page is shuttered, I only have this website, instagram account, and twitter page to manage in regards to online presence. It should be much streamlined and focused going forward. I haven't been on Facebook in years, though I still have a LinkedIN account that for all intents and purposes is there because every other working professional has one. Not sure why exactly, but here we are.