“With overall membership on the wane in Japan, union leaders were only too happy to welcome newcomers, no matter how unconventional the trade.”

• In Search of Justice and Enlightenment • Los Angeles Times • February 23, 2006 (or via SFGate.com)

I’ve finished putting in all of my old blog entries from TrailBlazing into this one. I haven’t posted any photos yet, so all those links are still broken, but everything else is in. As I was categorizing my entries for the first time, I realized how many different topics I’ve blogged about. The blog’s living up to its name!

It’s been more than a month since I came back from Taiwan, and I’m still organizing our photos from our trip to Asia. In Taiwan, Matt and I had CDs burned with my photos and some of his. And then a couple of weeks ago, Michael gave me a DVD with photos from him and John, and some of Matt’s. And then I just downloaded the rest of Matt’s photos from his server.

As you can imagine, the resulting collection was a mess. The photos all had different names. The timestamps of the files were useless. The EXIF timestamps recorded by the camera were better, but most of us forgot to change the time on the camera until one or two days into the new time zone. (I never changed mine, because I knew I’d forget.) So I amassed a collection of useful software tools to plow through and organize the photos and video clips.

• Adobe Photoshop Elements not only lets me view, organize, and tag photos in general, it also makes it easy to shift the EXIF timestamp of a bunch of photos by any number of hours. Although it took me a while to figure out which photos needed to be shifted, once I did, I asked Photoshop Elements to advance the timestamp of those photos by 16 or 17 hours. Bam!
• However, that didn’t change the timestamps of the files themselves, and having them match the EXIF times makes it more convenient to view them in Windows Explorer. So I wrote a Python script to do just that, using an EXIF Python library I found called EXIF.py, for reading the timestamps.
• That worked fine for photos, but videos don’t have EXIF data — I had to change the timestamps of those files manually. So I wrote another Python script that allows me to shift the timestamp of the file by any number of hours.
• Finally, I wanted to give all of the photos a consistent naming convention. Renaming over 1900 files by hand was a non-starter, so I found a free batch renaming program for called THE Rename.

At last, I have over 4.5 GB of photos and videos renamed, re-timestamped, organized, and ready to show off. (Although I still need to finish captioning them…)

I saw MythBusters on the Discovery Channel for the first time last Saturday and again tonight. It has instantly become one of my favorite TV shows. Tonight they fired handguns and rifles, including a 50-caliber, into a pool to see how deep underwater you would have to be to avoid getting hurt (at 30 degrees, only about 3 feet).

They also found that a person cannot go 360 degrees on a chain swing under his or her own power. But it is possible—if you strap a rocket to the person (or dummy, in this case) at 40 degrees.

Sweeeeeet. All in the name of science…

It’s odd that, now that I’m living in the South Bay, I seem to be going to San Francisco more often than I was in Berkeley. In fact, I’ve gone up once a week for the past 4 weeks: to visit Francis, Simona, Rich, and Agata [photo]; Ame and Chris’s wedding reception; a Super Bowl party with Jon; and a Lincoln Highway Association meeting [photos]. And I’m probably going up next week to visit Norman. It’s all about being done with grad school…

Are the Winter Olympics being held in Turin or Torino? Yes. Different media outlets are using different conventions: the Chronicle says “Turin,” while NBC and CBS Radio say “Torino.”

I find “Torino” to be a little jarring. We don’t usually use the local name for a city if it has a different English name: we don’t say Firenze or Köln or Moskva. Swedes don’t expect us to say “Göteborg” (pronounced something like yohtuhboree) instead of Gothenburg. Indeed, there was no reason to switch from Peking to Beijing, except that the Chinese government wanted us to (although I admit I like “Beijing” better).

And it turns out there’s another wrinkle to Turin’s name. According to Wikipedia, the area around Turin speaks not only Italian but another Romance language called Piedmontese. And in that language, Turin is called… Turin.

While Yahoo 360 has an easy-to-use blogging service, it’s a little too basic for me. There are three things that are missing:

• Putting my entries into categories
• Importing entries from my old blog
• Changing the template of the blog (let’s face it, I’m a control freak)

So now I’m giving WordPress.com a shot. It’s got the above features, it’s free (woohoo!), and if it’s good enough for Robert Scoble and Dave Winer, it’s good enough for me.

There a few restaurants that have been featured on Check, Please! Bay Area on KQED Channel 9 that I want to try out.

• Ninna in Oakland: Mediterranean/Thai fusion. Sounds weird, but all three reviewers thoroughly enjoyed it.
• Piperade in San Francisco: Basque
• Bissap Baobab in San Francisco: Senegalese
• Aziza in San Francisco: California-inspired Morrocan (or is it Morroco-inspired Californian?)
• Salang Pass in Fremont: Afghan
• Manresa in Los Gatos: but only if I win the lottery

With Check, Please! reviews, your mileage may vary. For example, Vik’s Chaat House is a favorite place of Berkeley students for chaat. 2 out of 3 reviewers weren’t impressed with it, but one of them doesn’t like Indian food in general, and the other one usually orders Chicken Tikka Masala and was bewildered by the chaat menu. Argh! This place definitely deserved better reviews. Thankfully a ton of people have defended the restaurant on the Check, Please!‘s web site. I’m tempted to chime in.

It’s also unfortunate that the vast majority of restaurants that are reviewed are around San Francisco. I know there is good food down here in the South Bay — it just may not be in the most classy setting (OK fine, they’re all in strip malls). Which reminds me, there’s a hole in the wall that serves great pot stickers and noodles in west San Jose (near Cupertino): Tong Dumpling Pot. Highly recommended.

(This was originally posted to my Yahoo! 360° blog)

Unfortunately, the site that was hosting my blog, TrailBlazing.org, has unexpectedly gone down, and its maintainer, my friend Francis, doesn’t have time to track down the problem. Plus, I don’t want him to spend time fixing something that, essentially, only I was using. So I’m now posting new entries here, on Yahoo! 360°.

Besides hosting blogs, Yahoo 360° is also a social networking site like Friendster or Orkut, and it pulls in your contacts from Yahoo Messenger (which is a relief, I really don’t want to enter my contacts in yet another place). Eventually, I imagine it will integrate more tightly into Yahoo’s other sites, especially del.icio.us for social bookmarking, and Flickr for photo sharing — which I’ve also been meaning to try out.

Unfortunately, at first glance it doesn’t look like it will be easy to import my old blog entries in here, so once I can get them, I’ll probably put them up in a separate web site somewhere.