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As of 4PM today, Grace was admitted into labor & delivery. They are expecting a June 12th (1 to 3AM-ish) baby.

Stay tuned.

One of the downsides of working as a contractor doing most of the work at home, alone, was that I never really interacted with my peers professionally. All I had was Google and a few books. So I had to learn and teach myself everything based on what I “read” as best practices. A lot of those learning experiences were trial and errors. But in many ways, this was a good thing because I was a clean slate without the burdens of pre-existing, outdated methodologies an established company may impose on its staff.

So when I decided to take up a “job”, one of my objectives was to find out if what I know is what’s being practiced by my peers. I wanted validation to my methodologies. And I wanted to learn more from others. My new job basically gave me a free reign on most of what I’d like to implement. So I brought with me my methods of client-side development in terms of CSS (and CSS resets), Unobtrusive Javascript programming, semantic XHTML markups, separation of structure, presentation and logic… etc etc. But I still have no idea if there’s more to be learned. Surely there was.

The company decided to hire a technical auditor to audit all the technical aspects of what we do and how we do it. I was thrilled and was really looking forward to learning from this guy. About 15 minutes into my explanation on what I do, I asked if he’d recommendations on how I can improve on what I do. He answered, “Nope. You are ahead of the game. You are doing everything I’d recommend my clients do.”

I was really pleased to be validated by someone who’s job is supposed to magnify and correct inefficiencies and issues. He was surprised I was even using Unobtrusive Javascript programming because so few people even have heard of it, let along practicing it.

So that made my day. Now I know I am actually up to par with the top ranks and I should probably raise my rate.

For those who are wondering, Grace is now officially one day overdue and counting. We went for a stress test last Thursday (on the baby, not on me). And all signs point to “normal”… so the doctors are not in a hurry to rush baby girl Chu until next week. They’ve given baby girl Chu until June 13th to pop naturally. Or she’s going to have to surrender that comfortable womb and return that belly to her mommy with help of us inconsiderate adults.

Grace is doing fine — still walking and bouncing (figuratively speaking) around with lots of energy. She’s been on her nesting mode for a couple of weeks. So this should give her an extra week to tidy things up before the little one is fully baked (or over baked?).

As for me, here’s a poem rigged from Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” that describes my situation best:

The nights are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And thousands of images to go before I sleep,
And thousands of images to go before I sleep.

I named this poem “Stopping by Lightroom On A Humid Evening.”

As I am going through the thousands of shots I’ve made in the past few weeks, I realized that the Nikon D300 has made my post production process a nightmare — not because it generated any lesser quality files or colors, but rather the sheer volume of shots I’ve made by taking advantage of its relatively huge buffer — six burst shots a second for a few seconds, and do it abundantly throughout the day — I ended up with hundreds of similar-looking shots I have to go through and decide which ones I want to keep (being as indecisive as I can be)…

Fuji S5 (and previous generation S3 and S2) owners have a saying that “it’s not the number of shots you can make, it’s the quality of shots you capture that matter” And this trip has certainly made that philosophy sink in that much more.

When the D300 and D3 came out, I asked myself if I’d upgrade to them had money not been an issue. Though the D300 is a really solid camera, I now no longer believe the D300 being an upgrade because I just like the files that my Fuji generates more (the film-looking grain, excellent white balance, incredible handling with high ISO… etc). I’ll probably get another Fuji if they ever made a full frame camera. Until then, my next move would probably to get another S5 so I don’t need to swap lenses as often on the field or during sessions.

It took me 3 hours to get home on Friday from work. The passengers on my Caltrain cart soon learned that someone had committed suicide at one of the stations (San Antonio).

About two and half hours into the delay, my cart passed the San Antonio station where the suicide occurred. I saw a couple of workers in white full body anti-contamination suits still cleaning up the tracks. Though there was no sign of blood or body parts, bright colored, official-looking plastic bags with “stuff” inside of them were still visible from where I sat. They were probably bits and pieces of human remains.

One passenger complained those who chose Caltrain as a method of suicide were very inconsiderate. They cause enormous delays and inconveniences for others. But I guess death in any situation, suicide or not, is an inconvenience for those who are involved.

On the whole trip home I wondered if it was harder to commit suicide or to live with what life has dealt us. Choosing to commit suicide is just so counter intuitive to nature that when what all living beings do in the worst of conditions is trying to survive. Have we humans become so arrogant against nature as to defy what all living beings have the innate ability to do?

I can only keep wondering.

Please bear with me as I go through a series of events that may or may not have anything to do with each other — all in one post. I still think an entry per story/event is still the best way to approach blogging. But time seems to keep running out on me these days, hence the “mega posts”…

So I finally got to meet ????????Sebastian in person after having read and left messages on each other’s blog for seemingly eons (in blogsphere time, that is). We had a series of very interesting and only-if-we-had-time type of conversations over dinner in San Francisco. How I enjoy intelligent conversations…

On my new “job”, one reason I took the job was so that I could finally jump into Flash and Flex full time. But all that hope is all but gone now. Due to the relative shortage of qualifying candidates the company needs to develop the project using Flash/Flex, they’ve decided to switch strategy to meet the internal deadlines using JSP, CSS, Javascript, Ajax with a dash of Flash. It’s good and bad news all rolled into one. On one hand, I am glad they made the call because this means my existing skills in CSS and Ajax would make the development process a lot more rapid. But I am also disappointed that I won’t be leveraging the project to further develop my Flash/Flex skills. But I guess this is all good considering the baby girl is arriving anytime this week now… Lack of sleep makes learning new things an impossible task.

Also, given my relatively unique combination of skills and experience in interaction design and programming, it seems like both the design and tech teams are trying to leverage my strengths to their own advantage in all-but-invisible company politics. OH Crud…

Then came Thursday morning — just another normal working day for me. But that morning almost became a traumatic day for me as I, along with dozens of other Caltrain passengers, witnessed someone almost got run over by the very Caltrain I was supposed to catch for work. Luckily the train missed him by about 1/3 of a step, ending up clipping him on his right temple (at which spot blood seemingly came pouring out nano seconds later). The train would’ve crushed him if only he’d accidentally stepped into the track 1/10 of a second earlier….

The blow knocked him almost unconscious. Unable to stand straight, he almost fell towards the track, which would have been fatal. Fortunately a couple of cyclists were close enough to drag him away from the train, which was just about to come to a complete stop. Everyone was shocked and froze as if nobody believed this was happening — me included. I called 911 and was told by the dispatcher that a flood of calls also came in at the same time about the same incident.

The fire fighters were the first there at the scene along with its own medic unit. Then the police came one after another (3 on motorcycles with 2 others in 2 separate cars). The ambulance, of all services, came the last — looooooooong after the fire fighters arrived. Caltrain also dispatched a supervisor almost immediately, arriving after the ambulance.

It was a shocking experience that reminded me of the collapsing of the NYC Twin Towers on 9-11, of which I also witnessed as the towers crumbled…

I learned a few useful things having watched the entire event unfolding: (a) Fire fighters are awesome. If anything, they need more funding, not to be cut back! They were the first responders and the very last to leave besides the Caltrain supervisors. (b) Police weren’t really all that helpful except to be there to “investigate” what happened. They showed no urgency nor sympathy towards the person who was injured (as I saw a couple of them were even smiling and laughing as they rode away on their motorcycles — the little respect I had left for the cops was diminished that much more). (c) Look both ways when crossing the road, train track, whatever… (d) Humanity usually shows its best side at the worst of times. (e) Life is fragile. That very well could’ve been me.

Then came Sunday. Grace scheduled two photo sessions for me almost back to back. Now I have around 5,000 photos (along with ones from Missouri) to post process in the coming weeks… And the baby is coming…. and the looming deadlines of the new job… Oh, life…

The Missouri trip was a lot more draining and tiring than I’d expected. The nine days I was there taught me a lot about quite a few things… And overall, I think I am a better person (and photographer) because of the trip.

So what have I learned from this trip?

1. Midwest Chinese food sucks no matter how much the locals rave about it — it ain’t Chinese… It’s… Frankenstein Americanese food…

2. People who are serious about guns and treating them as sporting equipment make tremendous financial, emotional and physical investments in the sport.

3. Action pistol is an expensive sport — each round of bullet costs $0.30 (more if custom made). And on an average practice shooting session, one can go through 700 to 1,000 rounds — that’s each day times almost seven days a week.

4. Based on what I gathered, action pistol sport is 10% skills and 90% mental, just like many competitive sports. They say you can only learned so much on the skills, and the rest is all in the mind.

5. Most shooters I met are great people — not the “red neck” image I’d stereotyped them as. But that changed when I heard the speech from the president of NRA on the last night of the event. He made a few comments about NRA, guns and politics that made me shake my head a few times even among a room full of gun owners…

6. Missouri does have a NPR station. But I guess it doesn’t get enough funding to have all the good stuff that other big cities enjoy. Instead, it plays classical music most of the time for which I mistakenly wrote it off entirely as a NPR-less state.

7. Driving on gravels can feel like driving on ice sometimes — when it skids, the car may or may not stop…

8. There’s a place for big gas goessling American trucks, and that place is called the American Midwest. And I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or negative way. When my client wasn’t practicing shooting, I took some time off to drive around “the woods” in the more rural areas of Missouri. And I soon realized those were no place for luxury gas-friendly Toyotas or Lexuses… Those were some rough roads with car-unfriendly conditions. And by being big, cheap(er) and possibly more capable of standing up to abuse, American trucks would fare well there. And indeed 90% of trucks I saw there were American — and they are huge and mighty.

9. For whatever reason, gas prices in Missouri was just as expensive as California.

10. Australians have far superior gun control laws than those in the United States. Americans could learn a few things from the Australians on gun control.

I enjoyed the trip, enjoyed seeing more nature, and enjoyed the learning experience. I look forward to processing 3,500+ images I shot there in the coming days…

So I survived the early morning flight, the long drive from the airport to the hotel, and the frustration of the GPS unit running out of battery in between destinations. And i haven’t seen my first tornado yet. The images below are far from the quality I’d like to show. I’d planned on editing all the images shot in the same day at the same night. But because I’ve had to bring a lot of equipment with me, I forgot to bring my monitor calibration kit; so the colors are going to be off, images unsharpened and a few other quirks. But I really want to post some of the stuff I’ve seen here. So I’ve decided to go ahead and post them first and swap them out later on Flickr (since as a Pro member, I have that feature available to me).

Hit the link to read additional notes on this image at Flickr (mouse over the image once at Flickr to see the notes).

A few interesting observations I made in the first 3 hours of arrival:
1. Interesting signs are everywhere!
2. Local radio stations have more country music than anything else combined.
3. Local car mechanics advertise not only to fix your car, but also your tracker on the radio!
4. I couldn’t find NPR on any of the local stations. The only thing closest to it is some feminist station talking about all things Girl Power (or at least in the 2 hours that I tried listening to parts of it).

So tomorrow is going to be a full day at the practice range… Bang! Bang! Bang!*

*Good thing my client offered an old pair of her ear muffs to me…

In less than eight hours, I will be flying to Missouri for a seven-day photography assignment. Actually, nine days counting the two days of travel. It’s a bit overwhelming in many ways.

My client is known as the best woman action pistol shooter in the history of the sport. Though I am not all that fond of guns, I’ve come to appreciate the discipline and focus it takes to master the “sport” by having to study my client and the sport. This will be the first time I am going to be surrounded by constant firing of gun shots (counting out experiences in Savannah, ha!).

The assignment is especially overwhelming because of the discipline that’s going to be required of me having to follow the daily regiments of my client (whom is an early riser). This is also happening at a time when a lot is happening in my life — entertaining an active three-year-old, expecting a newborn in less than three weeks, a demanding new full-time contract gig… etc. The assignment is also mentally and physically overwhelming because of the scope, distance and the relative significance of the event my client is participating in.

For this assignment, I rented a Nikon D300 body, a Nikon 70-200mm/f2.8 VR lens and an Epson portable media backup drive as an insurance policy in case my own equipment fails. This is also a prefect opportunity for me to find out if I am capable of carrying heavy duty equipment for an extended period of time — something many wedding photographers do all the time, which is a market I’d like to get into because of all the explosive emotions in such events (and not to mention the relatively high pay out if I am really good at it).

Enough babbling… Time to get some sleep before the 5:30am wake up call from the shuttling service to the airport. Good times.

So I survived my first full day of work. Though I spent most of the time reading the Internal documentation on the projects, I still felt like I over used my brain for the entire day.

One thing about returning to a full-time job is that I am not working alone anymore. And I get asked questions from time to time, which also helps sharpening my mind a little more. Being able to bounce ideas off of other is an important learning process, especially I’ve hit a certain plateau in terms of programming techniques. I needed to be with other programmers and artists to move to the next level.

Another advantage is I am forced to walk to take public transit (which is slightly cheaper than driving to work). I have to walk 15 minutes to and from the Caltrain station, which is just like when I lived in NYC. This will definitely help reduce some of that fatherly fat around my belly.

So the week will progress on with meetings after meetings in handing off workload to me to start implementation. Good times.

After almost four years of freelancing and eating Bryan’s food scraps, I finally caved in and signed a short-term contract with a local startup as a Flash developer. Since the company is in this super stealth mode, I don’t want to reveal too much about what it is. But I sure look forward to learning some enterprise-level skills after having worked almost entirely independently.

Actionscript has come a long way with v3.0. But I was surprised how fast I picked it up with my first Flash project a while back considering how much I hated Flash. It’s going to be interesting to see how I will be using it in an almost entirely Object Oriented environment using Model, View, Controller concepts — both of these things I actually wrote on my white board earlier this year as my new year resolutions for 2008…

I will probably hop on the “full time” train once I have checked out the potential of the project. I am definitely not going to repeat the same mistakes when I was a full time employee last.

Ah, life.

I think this is a happy news. But this came at a time when I am also the most stressful — my photography seems to have taken on a life of its own.

While I am not all booked up or anything for sessions, I do have a pretty important assignment during the 3rd week of May that requires me to be away for a full week to complete. The pay is extremely well, and the assignment itself is also very interesting. Needless to say, pictures will be posted for preview when they are all fully processed.

This assignment is important enough to me (and the client) that I will be renting backup equipment from a local shop here in the area. Since they don’t carry Fujifilm S5 Pro, I will get a chance to try the brand spanking new Nikon D300 and see how I like it compare to my Fuji in terms of picture quality (I already know its speed and file size nail the Fuji hands down). Another thing I want to find out is how its dynamic range and high ISO noise compare to my Fuji.

I can’t wait!