[caption id=“attachment_4400” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Laptops might be seized at the UK border[/caption]

Orgzine has an article complaining that in the UK when crossing the border you don’t get the same protections as you do within the borders. This does not surprise me since we have the same issue over here and we tend to have more robust civil liberties than our cousins across the pond. (Hence why libel suits are so often filed in England - their definition of libel is slanted in favor of the company or star while ours is the other way around) Basically, if you’re going to England you better take a burner phone and burner laptop because:

If Audio Embeds Aren’t Working For You, check out this support thread in which I figured out what was going on.

I’m not somewhere between halfway and three-quarters done with fixing the site to align with my new theme. I moved all but the ads to the footer. (No one’s going to pay to not be seen) I actually like the new design philosophy. Why constantly distract the viewer’s eye form your content with links to other posts or other sites. That can be saved for the end. I’m done with this post - now what? Well, what about these links here at the bottom. I might still need to move some of those around.

Go check out the awesome video explaining the new features in Wordpress 3.6.

Finally switched over to Twenty Thirteen now that Wordpress 3.6 is out. It’s going to take some time for me to get things looking the way I want them. Anyway, I LOVE the new fonts - much better readability than the previous theme.

Back in 2009 I went to Manhattan at night with my Rebel XTi and my 50mm f/1.8 to do some night time photography at Times Square. The 50mm was key because its wide aperture allowed me to keep the ISO low and get nice, clear photos. (Although there’s something to be said for the aesthetics of grainy night shots of busy cities) Of course, it also helped that Times Square is quite well lit. Cities like Toykyo and New York City are well-served by color photography when you’re trying to document the crazy, colored buildings, but I think when doing street photography, it helps to have the output be black and white so that to focus is on the people rather than the colors. Here are my best shots from that night:

K-Pop has been making a splash in America in a big way. Although they have nearly subsumed all music in Asia and are getting big in parts of Europe and the Middle East, K-Pop in the USA seems to be about where J-Pop was during the height of the anime/manga crazy in the last 1990s and early 2000s. That is to say, huge within a niche group that’s made up of expat/second gen immigrants and Americans who love asian pop culture despite often not completely understanding all the lyrics. Of course, things were brought into mainstream attention with last year’s “Gangnam Style”. There are quite a few articles that examined why Psy emerged as the face of K-Pop. If I had to pick out the top reasons, I think it would be the easy and silly dance, the catchy beat, the fun of yelling “Oppa Gangnam Style!”, and the fact that he’s a pudgy Asian man who doesn’t threaten America’s notions of Asians. As to that last reason, Dan sent me a few articles during the height of the Gangnam craze that suggested part of the reason other artists like Rain have had a hard time penetrating is that American can only accept the goofy asian (Jackie Chan, The Donger, Kevin Jeong, etc) or the Karate Asian (Mr Miyagi, Jet Li). Even though the 1800s are long behind us, we can’t accept the pop star sex symbol Asian man. If there is interest among my dedicated readers, perhaps Dan can post links or do a followup blog post. At any rate, there’s a much higher chance of female-led K-Pop groups infiltrating the USA - given that we already have the stereotype of the sexy Asian woman coupled with the fact that there is a huge emphasis on gender, sexiness, and cuteness in the K-Pop system.

In a lot of ways I really don’t care what happens in the video game console world. In the last 2-3 years I have rediscovered computer gaming. Actually, to be more accurate, game publishers have rediscovered computer gaming. I remember in my youth when the best of the best games came out for computers and the consoles were mostly just arcade ports. At some point the pendulum swung the other way and, other than the Civilization and Blizard’s franchises, gaming had mostly died. Whatever games were released on computers were an afterthought and pretty poor quality. I don’t know if it was the unusually long console cycle leading to a lack of graphics innovation or the success of Steam making publishers realize they couldn’t afford to leave money on the table or a combination of the two, but computer gaming is back in a big way. (And, I’ve been saying computer gaming because Apple has seen a resurgence in gaming unlike any it has seen since the early to mid-90s and, thanks to Steam, Linux gaming is finally becoming a thing that doesn’t need WINE) So everything but the console exclusives - Halo, Mario, Uncharted - now come to computers. If I’m going to have a computer anyway (and I will), why ALSO play $300-400 for a gaming console? In the years since I’ve bought my Playstation 3 it’s been used WAY more often for Netflix than anything else. A Roku box serves that purpose a lot cheaper.

[caption id=“attachment_6698” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] The “Family Dinner” Early July[/caption]

Unfortunately, my work situation dictates that Scarlett does not have any local grandparents; one set’s in NYC and the other’s in Tampa. Scarlett’s current age  necessitates being taken care of by someone who’s raised children, so Danielle and I don’t get to go out to the types of places you’re not supposed to take kids like uber-fancy restaurants. When we went to Tampa recently my mom wanted to give us the gift of some time away from the baby so she gave us tickets to go to Universal Studios. So we jumped in to the middle of the pond and learned how to speak rather than dipping our toes, so to speak. Scarlett was left with my parents,adopted brothers, and dog all day long. A day or two after that my parents took us to a nice restaurant to help us celebrate our anniversary and left the baby with a close family friend for a few hours. A week or two after that, we found ourselves in New York City on the same night that my sister/brother-in-laws were getting together with their best friends and cousins for their monthly dinner. My sister-in-law invited us so we left the Scarlett with my mother-in-law. Finally, as I write this, a couple weeks before it appears on the blog, we left Scarlett at our house with my visiting mother-in-law so we could have a nice dinner out.

I mentioned about two weeks ago that my scheduling for the site might temporarily fall apart. I finally got caught up so now I should be able to focus on meeting my weekly schedule. I’m going to try not to let things get that far behind again because I had to discard about a dozen blog post ideas because, while I saved the URL, I didn’t really feel the passion to write about that topic anymore. In some cases I couldn’t remember exactly what point I wanted to make. In other cases, I just couldn’t muster the same feelings for the topic so I just dropped it. I hope you do enjoy what I’ve written and queued up. I know I’m enjoying the comments of my regular readers.