Museum Fun

really-old-art
Originally uploaded by Wasting Moments.

Had a pretty mellow day today. Slept in, woke up, got a little work done re: prep for conference next week (I am officially here to be involved in proffesional development), wrote a few postcards. I was up pretty late, im-ing with my dad, getting absorbed in the news of crazy shit transpiring in Iraq, posting numerous pictures, etc. Woke up to more news of unpleasantness in the middle east, this time in Isreal. Now CNN's talking about US airstrikes in Falujia. Great.

Well, I'm not here to rant politics. I did something I've never done before: had a few pieces of laundry done by my hotel. Again, much cheaper than it would be in the US. 100 Yuan, about 12 bucks, got me clean jeans, slacks, 2 pair socks, 3 t-shirts and a polo shirt. Plus washed some of my own stuff in the sink. Thrilling post so far, eh?

Went to two museums, took a walk on the city wall, wandered around the Muslim Quarter, stopped into a bar for a beer. That was my day once I got a late start. Took 109 pictures, most of which are museum pieces. Probably would bore the hell out of you if I posted more than one to the blog, but there's two or three more on flickr. And you can always ask me to see more pics when I get back. Maybe I'll put together a cd or dvd as my dad suggested.

Between museums, I was getting a bit hungry. I often skip lunch (as many of you know), but wanted to do a late dinner tonight at a muslim place near my hotel. I'll be going there right after posting. So I did something I've been wanting to do, but feel guilty about. I had a Big Mac, fries and a Coke. I wanted to see if it was the same here. It is. Exactly. The place was packed. Absolutely packed. They all always seem to be. There's even little walk up McDonalds on the street that only sell Ice Cream. We don't even have those (do we?). So I guiltily indulged in American Fast Food while in China. You gonna hold it against me? Huh? Are ya?

Aside for the techies reading: I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but shell scripts are cool. My camera's 5 megapixels. 3 or 4 pictures would wipe out my monthly flickr allotment. So, I've been automating the generation of large thumbnails using a combo of imagemagick and bash. All I have to do is say:
for img in *
do
convert -resize 500 $img small_$img
done

This creates a small version of each image in the current directory with a width of 500 pixels. It's these I've been posting. When I first tried to do this, I had image magick too far back in my path, and windows was trying to run the windows convert app, which reformats a partion. Fortunately, the arguments weren't right and it resulted in an error rather than converting a Fat32 partionion to NTFS.

Aside for the photography buffs reading, I've discovered that the flash on my camera is pretty well useless beyond 4 or 5 meters. The secret to taking night photos is to click into manual mode and shoot at 100 ISO or lower. Now, what I don't understand is the fact that reducing the EV by 1/3 to 1 step improves the image as well. This is the equivelant of increasing the f-stop to let in less light, right? Why the hell would that help? It makes the image a bit darker, but greatly increases the clarity, makes the likelyhood of blurring much less. Don't get it, but it works.

I've thrown a "Dave Attel style" shot of me on the city wall on flickr, to appease my mom. I've got ones like this from the great wall and a few other places, too.

I'm going to go out and eat dinner, and maybe do a bit more street shopping. I find that I really enjoy the bargaining with vendors for random trinkets, knick-knacks, souvineirs and gifts. I've gotten myself some pretty good deals (I think...)

Hank, the football stadim was built in the 70s. They since realized that the sunlight really isn't good for 2200 year old artifacts, so the other two pits are much more dim. Not as great for photography. But, until recently, they didn't even allow photography in the pits, so I can't comlain. By the way, the only other person who posts as many comments as you is my father. He's retired. What's your excuse? Shouldn't you be methodically making your way through the names file or something? Jeez.

Tomorrow, I'm going to go up the Drum and Bell Towers early am, then come back here, write a few more postcards, try to do a little more work, maybe hop on AIM and see who's around, and watch the debates. Then I'll check out, leave my bags with the concierge, and do a bit more wandering around before my 3 pm flight. Then it's back to Shanghai. 2 more days, and the blog becomes considerably less entertaining for most of you. Instead of posting about exotic travels, I'll be posting about DC2004, metadata, digital libraries, and interoperability. I'll probably lose most of the readership I've established thus far, huh?