Justin Wu

Got the Nikon 50mm f1.4 D

I've sold my Nikon 50mm f1.8 D prime lens to my brother so he can take great portrait photos with his recently purchased D70 of his family and friends. It is a great lens with a great price. The 50mm f1.8 D street price in Toronto is about 170CDN and that is a bargain in the SLR lens world for a fast prime at f1.8 stop.

Now that my brother took ownership of my departed fast f1.8 prime lens, I have a choice to get between an even faster lens, the 50mm f1.4 or the 35mm f2.0. They are both in the same price, the 50mm being faster than the 35mm by one stop while less wide. I've read various forums and the consensus amount users of both lenses are they are both great lenses but the deciding factor is the 50mm is great for portrait shots and the 35mm is great for group shots.

As the title implies, I finally decided to get the Nikon 50mm f1.4 D lens because at the end of the day, I'm looking for a portrait lens but I paid quite a bit more for an extra stop. So I'll be testing it very soon and see what the extra stop will give me. Stay tune for the latest updates in my photo album portfolio section with shots of this exciting lens.

Updates on May 2, 2005: I've added two images in my photo albums using the new lens. Have a look under Interesting Shots and Nanocube Aquarium.

Cheers,
Wuju nonono!

Music Play Evolutions: Part II

If you haven't read Music Play Evolutions: Part I, please read it here.

With the mass distribution and media attentions through the early days of Napster's music sharing in the Internet, MP3 is becoming a household name these days of playing music at home and on the go. There are at least a dozen variations of hardware that can play the music file but were only accepted by early adopters. The reasons why it didn't reach critical mass quickly because MP3's nature of being a digital file format of easy distribution over the Internet brought on a lot of copyright lawsuits from the music industries early on. In additions, there is also the high cost of memory cards used in the player produced. Lastly there was a lack of a user friendly easy-to-use software to sync the music from your computer to the MP3 player. Thankfully, things have changed.

Apple's iPod came to the rescue. Today it has dominated the portable music player that Sony did with their cassette tape player Walkman back in the 80's.  Sony has in fact admitted that they have missed the boat and they are playing catch up but it's going to be a tough one. The hardware is only half the equation here. No only has Apple brought us this amazing iPod hardware to play our music but they have written a software called iTunes. It allows the user to rip their own CD into MP3 files in their computers, to organize them and upload them into the iPod. Best of all is the software is FREE to download. Now that is marketing, half the solution is free and the other half for purchase.

One critical factor  that  made iPod  so successful is its use of hard drive technology versus memory chip/card to really cut the price down on cost per megabyte to store the music files. iPod's award winning zen like design and ease of use to navigate through hundreds of songs for playback separate iPod from its competitors. Let's not forget its signature white ear pieces that tells everybody walking by that we are listening with an iPod even if the unit is out of plain site. That is brand recognition if I ever see one.

Today, there are three variations of player from Apple to target different types of users in the market. The regular sized signature white iPod that holds anywhere between 20GB to 60GB of hard drive space for someone who needs to put their entire CD collections on the go. That's me. :) The iPod mini, the size of a small cellphone, comes with a 4GB and a 6GB model with multitude of colours. It's a hit with the ladies and the most popular colour had to be Pink of course. Lastly, is their latest memory flash based player called the iPod Shuffle which comes in with a 512MB and a 1GB version. It's for the athletic players out there or for anyone who simply want the smallest screenless unit with the ability to charge it via a usb connection in a computer without an AC plug like the former two models. However, iPod Shuffle loses the ability to play songs in the order that you like and it plays your songs in random, hence the name.

With the different changing formats on how music gets played in the past two decades, the landscape has changed significantly where once we would see and showcase our collections of records/CDs in our homes to represent our taste in music is now represent on what we use to play our music on. Accessorizing your iPod is a big industry now with three different iPod models, there are not shortage of options to get you to buy at least one if not two. I bought a leather case from Vajacase and a Griffin's iTrip FM transmitter so I can play my tunes through any FM radio frequency. Now I'm looking at the Bose SoundDock so I can dock my iPod to setup a self contain mini home system. Happy shopping!

Cheers,
Wuju nonono!

Music Play Evolutions: Part I

Since the day I first started to listen to music on a cassette tape player, if you remember what those are these days, I have always been fascinated with the changing technology on how music is played from one medium to another. Both on the format that the music is on and the hardware that plays it.

Let us rewind back to the early 80's, back in my early youth when there were only two medium/format to play music; one being the very versatile cassette tape where one can listen and record musics on the go and the other being the vinyl records strictly for play back only. Both mediums have their obvious advantages over one another where cassette tapes are portable and recordable while vinyl records are great for DJ to play and scratch with on the dance floor. One thing of great interest in the record format is the packaging presentation of its cover and inserts. I had a collection of cassette tapes of a particular singer (remain to be nameless here) to listen to long ago with but I still have her entire album collection simply to own and see because of the great album cover and the extra photo booklet/calendar sheet inserts in many of her records. Even though I don't have a record player to play the records with. Cassette tape has some nice packaging but it was the vinyl record that wins here for its size and presentation. The hardware innovation for cassette tape changed over time from size reductions, auto reverse to play both side of the tape without manual flipping the tape,  music search to skip one song to the next song on forward or reverse and other functional perks like radio and voice recorder. I've gone through quite a few cassette players myself before the next format comes along.

Now let us forward to the early 90's and we see the infancy of another superior format that ends the vinyl record album dominance in the music format and we called it the Compact Disk (CD). Why is it superior you ask? Cassette tape technology plays its music on a very long magnetic film where the music will deteriorates over time with repeated play or the film inside the tape gets tangled in the cassette player due to mechanical malfunctions during play. Vinyl record are more robust and has a longer play life than tapes but it's huge and the music quality will deteriorates eventually over time. CD is a new technology where the music plays back digitally using laser on a shiny spinning reflective disk in a contacless way. Hence music recorded on CD will theortically last forever and the quality will never deteriorates unlike the former two formats. Physically, CD is quarter the size of vinyl record therefore it's portable.

CD is the revolutionary format that pretty much replaced both the cassette tape and vinyl record, especially so when recordable CD were out to the public to record and backup their musics like the cassette tape would. Its physical size still works very well for packaging so consumer still gets a kick of seeing what the cover looks like and looks forward to great CD inserts from publishers to reward the fans & attract  new consumers. So there is still the need for packaging artists out there in the music industry.  The  hardware to play CDs  started simply from  home  units to eventually portable units  over time and  one can see  quality inprovements on both fronts on size reduction, better playback quality to added features one can find besides playing CDs.

Now fast forward to the 20th century and we have a new kid in the block and it's called MP3. So what is it exactly, is there any physical size to it, can I buy it from my music stores down the street and what packaging will it come in? MP3 stands for MPEG layer 3 where it lives in a digital format in megabytes. Say what? That's right, MP3 is a digital music file that get stored in your computer to play. It is small in file size and though the sound quality is not in par with the CDs, it's better than the cassettes and vinyl records in the analog era. In terms of MP3 format goes, there is nothing for us to touch and feel like the formats before us and therefore no packaging to go with. So there is nothing physically to  see or show our friends of our music album collections. We are truely paperless and formless here. That's bad for business in more ways than one.

So what can we do to play this new electronically transferrable medium beside using our computer. I can't play it in my current stereo system and I can't carry my computer everywhere to listen to music even though computers evolves quite a bit in size but it's simply not portable nor does it looks great in my living room. There are many attempts to solve the problem from different hardware manufactures to play MP3 files but it was Apple that brought us the ultimate hardware solution called the iPod and its ease of use with the iTunes software that changed the landscape on how music is played. The music hardware finally gets center stage for everyone to see, to talk about and to own.

To be continued in Music Play Evolutions: Part II

Cheers,
Wuju nonono!

Sydney Opera House

This is the picture of the world famous opera house that my brother took from his recent trip to Australia. I always thought the shape was interesting enough but even more amazed at the exterior construction of the opera house when I saw the picture. It is very alien like with a reptilian skin like pattern to it. Click the image for a close up details of this fabulous architecture.

I'm sure the Australian are very proud of this monument and rightly so. I could be wrong but I believe it is considered to be one of the seven wonders of world?

Dare Not to Click

A co-worker from work sent us a link to a site called "Dontclick". The idea is interesting & refreshing. It's not in my nature to turn down a challenge. So I went there and tried out their click free environment to read their stories and to see for myself if I can browse the site without clicking.

I survived the test! I can surf their site without clicking but it was awkward and hard to resist on my part. Having a mouse without any button might help in my future attempts. It was a very interesting experience but I believe it's in our nature to click since the invention of typewriter. Tactile feedback is essential to many of the input devices we use daily, without it we would need to guess if something is on/off, unless we get instant feedback by our other sensory means such as sound or vision. Same thing with the click of a mouse to confirm a selection on a web page.

Another problem with the Dontclick methodology is how to tell if I want to initiate a link click versus simply moving the mouse across the screen. They have three ways to tackle the issue but the glaring problem is any one of the alternative solution creates confusion to the user than a simple click. In addition, a button click is always faster than moving your mouse across the link horizontally, make a circle around the link or rest your mouse pointer over the link for a given amount of time to confirm a clicking action.

I'm very impress with their idea and concept but I imagined it would find its usefulness in a limited fashion. A potential application for a click free interface maybe in a touch screen kiosk environment.  A fun idea nevertheless. Another note is their website is developed using Flash and the medium isn't widely used versus text based built pages in the World Wide Web. Another blockade to become a standard.

Cheers,
Wuju nonono!

Cool Monsieur Z!

A while back while I was travelling to a client site inside our Toronto subway train, I recall seeing a series of promotion from Lavalife and I was quite impressed with the illustration used for their advertisement. Though I haven't had the chance to find out who did those illustration pieces but I hit the jackpot today and came across Monsieur Z site from France. I'm speechless.

His work is very modern, chic and stylistic in his own way. I especially love his elegant use of lines, patterns, colour schema and stylized characters in many of his illustrations. Alot of his theme conveys modern sophisticated living, high fashion, to pool side parties. Have a look as I'm sure you'll be impressed with his work. I know I did.

> www.monsieurz.com 

Splinter or Gear

Rain, Rain, Rain. It's going to a rain all weekend long so I have some time to kill indoor aside from writing this weblog. Gaming off course! However, I have a problem as you'll see in a second.

Here is the dilemma, for someone who likes espionage strategic action gaming, among other things, has a limited amount of gaming time in between work, study and live itself to decide what to play. In the TV console platform, there are only two contenders that I would like to sink my teeth into; to the left Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory and to the right is Metal Gear Sold 3: Snake Eater. I've played the 1st and 2nd incarnation from both franchises and I'm happy to say that I had a tone of fun with both. Hence the dilemma when the third series are available from both on the store shelve for purchase and play.

It's a difficult choice here believe it or not. In my opinion, Metal Gear Solid series has always been very interesting on the story, character development and boss fights. Splinter Cell series has been fun with the realistic playing mechanics and interaction with the environments. However, the latest installment on Splinter Cell's Sam Fisher infrared view has changed to an eliptical bubble like view in the game is distracting. The SC designers went overboard with the realism here and I'm forced to play in a circular view as opposed to a rectangular view in our conventional TV box. I've only played through level one in SC3 so it's not too late to switch GEAR. :)

Both side of the camps are superb in every-way but in the end, I have to decide between better story telling in Metal Gear or realistic play mechanics in Splinter Cell admitting the circular view issue I have may be the show stopper here. I'm leaning towards playing the Metal Gear 3 as I'm finishing this commentary but who knows. Off course I have Splinter Cell 3 already as you'd imagined but I have to get Metal Gear 3 from the store today if I decided to play it first.

Off course there is the PSP version of Metal Gear Ac!d which I'm about to finish soon but should reserve for travelling. :)

Cheers,
Wuju nonono!

Metal Gear Ac!d - Glad I bought it

I've recently bought the Metal Gear Ac!d game for the Sony PSP system inspite of bad reviews from various review sites.

I'm glad I took the risk and went ahead and bought the game anyway because I ended up loving it. Metal Gear Ac!d use of card playing technique in a strategic game environment is refreshing. Granted, the game mechanic of a card/strategy turn-based game is not as visually stunning or fast pace as the PS2 format where you move the character in a real time 3D environment but it requires just the same amount of thinking and strategy to play the game.

So the lesson here is one may read reviews to get a sense on the quality of any given game but if you want to try something new, take a chance and try it regardless of the reviews. I'm glad I did.

What's in the Name?

With the help of a friend, we've came up with the title for my weblog and as you can see, it's called "Wuju NoNoNo!" So what does it mean?

Wuju is my alias on the web and it sounded great when I first used it on my first job in Grey Interactive and it stayed with me ever since. In fact, my scooter license plate is labelled "Wuju". So what does NoNoNo got to do with the title? Since this is a weblog and it grants me the power & freedom to write as I please, I would expect someday someone will say "No, No, No" to my views and commentaries. This way, I'm ahead of them saying "No" to myself but I go ahead and write it anyway. Hah!

So there you have it. It's official and I'm proud of it. :)

Dive, Dive, Dive

I'm excite here as you'll see in a minute but what got me into this weblog business is a dear friend of mine (D. Lougheed) who introduced me to his Weblog site two days ago and the rest is history. So why am I excited, you asked?

Well, for one thing, I need to write more for personal improvements. Practise makes perfect as they say so this would help me engage in the world of self publishing and authoring with no restriction but my own free will. The difficult part is to write about interesting things that I encounter daily or weekly if I'm lazy. ;)

Another goal I would hope to realize is a categorization of the various interests that I have in photography, marine aquarium, games, tech gadgets and lastly the things I do at work.

So this is an introduction to you and myself that I'm on-board and ready to type away whenever I found things of interest both at work and play. Until next time.

Cheers,
Wuju nonono!