This way please…

Thanks to Rita Crane for letting me use her picture on this year’s edition.

As you may have noticed, pictures are back in full force on this blog. This rebirth is due to my finally caving in to the trend and buying one of these fancy new cellphone things. One of those that come with a color LCD and, gasp, a camera.

I was until now quite happy using my antiquated prepaid cellphone (about 50×100 pixels of monochrome goodness and such cutting edge features as “call”, “send SMS” and even “address book”), until I started gathering last year’s pictures, for my yearly New Year’s Card project, and realized I had close to none. Even though I own a reasonably nice and compact digicam, and use it sometimes when I feel artistically inclined, it just isn’t the same as a camera-phone…

I was never a big fan of cameras, especially in group settings. Actually I suspect the “let’s take a souvenir photo” bug is mostly a female thing, and tends to grow hundredfold with motherhood. But going over all the drunken (and less drunken) pics I took during my stay in Tokyo, with my trusty keitai, I realized how much I liked having those around. To me, they are nothing like the sort of pictures you take with a “real” camera. Cameraphone pics, for one, are lower quality (especially mine, since I purposely downsample them in order to use less bandwidth when sending them over email), which means you treat them differently: being lo-fi, badly lit or with a strong visible grain is expected and nearly part of the journalistic charm of the medium. The other aspect I noticed with myself and friends while in Japan, was the psychological difference: people usually do not react to a phone the way they do to a camera. Phones are slightly less intrusive and allow you more easily to take pictures without breaking the flow of social interactions; with a camera-phone, even usually camera-shy people tend to be more exuberant and less self-conscious. It is possible that Japanese society is special in that respect, considering how ubiquitous camera-phones have become there, but I reckon things will be moving in a similar direction everywhere…

Anyway, from now on, you can expect a fairly regular influx of live views from my life in Paris. Incidentally, this will help me fill my quota of diary-esque entries on this blog, without having to resort much to boring “did this, did that” text entries. I liked the balance I had found with the older keitai log format, with tons of pointless but short photographic entries on one side, longer verbose rants on the other.

For now, enjoy the pretty random pics of drunken friends and Parisian locales.

As is now customary around these parts at this time of the year:

May 2007 bring you kittens, happy puppies & ponies with very little thermonuclear wars on the side…

PS: If I recently met you long enough to snap a pic, your face is probably up there. Full size version here for the unbelievers.

PPS: To make up for the sharp decrease in picture-taking this year (linked to a switch from my nifty camera-equipped keitai back to the basics of 19th century cellphone communication), I innovated by adding a couple pics of online acquaintances whom I have not met in person this year, but spent more than a share of my time exchanging communications with. Yea, this is 21st century alright.

PPPS: Collage quality is really not all that great this year. Ironically, part of my studies lately have involved the very algorithmic tools I need, to come up with an elegant solution to this very tricky problem (yay for Operational Research). Unfortunately, said studies also meant I really did not have the time to implement it. We’ll try to have it for 2008.

Becoming sort of a tradition around here, this year’s edition of Dr Dave’s Wishes of Peace and Harmony to the World:

And if you are bored or too hangover to do anything better, you can go look for your face in the full size version (huge file warning).

Tokyo’s shock rocker extraordinaire has recently been spreading noxious germs memes batons, and kindly asked for my participation in the process.

Unfortunately, I will have to decline, seeing how:

1. I have already posted enough list/sample/endless ranting around the theme of music, digital version thereof included, to fill a few medium-sized encyclopedia. I am sure all the answers to the questionnaire are already there, in one form or another.
2. I like kittens.

However, not one to stay on a grumpy note, I went extra miles to participate in another of her cool ventures and add my contribution to her neat flickr group idea.

Yes, it’s a picture of myself. And I’m naked. So what? other people have done it before. There’s no shame.

What can I say, I was a sexy mutherfucka in my youth… Can you sense that raw sensuality oozing from my bare muscular buttocks?

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This is an automated post logged on the 05/25/05.

To put at ease conflicting rumours that the author of these lines might be either the fruit of extra-terrestrial genetic engineering, or spawned straight from the mouth of Hell…

Here is a shot of my grandma…

She was born in Cairo and grew up in colonial Egypt.

Her dad spoke 12 languages, worked for the MI-6 and received a lethal gunshot wound while on mission in Vatican at the end of WWI (I couldn’t make that stuff up if I tried).

During the blitz in London, she drove an ambulance under the bombs, while her husband (my granddad) was hard at work figuring a way to Calais that did not involve swimming all the way across.

Nowadays, she does Tai Chi five times a week, goes to her club from time to time, and half-heartedly grumbles about the youth of today, the way only real grandmas can.

Problem with making your New Year’s Card on homemade pre-alpha software is that, if there’s a bug, all your friends will know it…

Well, two days after I had uploaded that last work of art, I realized I had screwed up monumentally somewhere: despite what I thought, the software hadn’t included all the pictures and nearly half my library was omitted. Meaning that many a friend that should have been there, wasn’t. Turns out the algorithm to do all that mosaic computation was a tiny bit more complicated than I originally thought. Which is great, since it’s always fun solving these problems, but also fell on a rather bad timing, since you are usually not expected to spend your days in front of a computer between Christmas and New Year… I will probably write a separate post full of geekerish about the solution, later on.

But nonetheless, we made it: it’s 5:30pm here, still 6 hours to go with this year, and I am proud to introduce the newer, better, bug-free version of my New Year’s Card… this time, you’re all on it (provided I had your picture in the first place).

Happy New Year Everybody!

Update Jan. 2^nd 2005: OK, I lied… it was still buggy and missing half the pics… this time it’s for real, go ahead, check the full-size version (huge file warning), you’re there, I promise…

All pictures were automatically harvested from the keitai sideblog archives, the huge majority taken with my cellphone during the year 2004.

If I have met you (long enough to take a picture) in the past 12 months or so, then chances are your mug is somewhere in there (full size here if you wanna print your own poster at home).

Hence, the kanji: 友, which means ‘friend’…
For, if a few here are a bit more than friends (and a rare few are, well, complete strangers to me right now), most of these faces are the friends who made that last revolution around the Sun somewhat bearable overall. Enjoyable, even, at times.

So, thanks everybody for being you: You rock.

And have a wonderful holiday season… may you find many a bottle of high quality, triple-filtered vodka in your Christmas stocking.

For those not easily bored: Gory technical details below
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I think the only reason I can stand the freezing winter in Tokyo (ok, freezing is a relative matter, but let’s just say it’s much colder than Tanzania right now) is the fact that it is sunny all along: that does make a big difference.

Great light for pictures.

The one on the right was taken right behind my house… I’ll let you guess what it is.

Been happily back home for two days now.
Just got around to cleaning the last few pics I took while walking around in Paris last week. Unfortunately not much to save: too bad they haven’t figured how to add a special DrunkUser™ feature into these digital thingies yet.

The other south.

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South is the way to go… good riddance Parisian clouds, Bonjour Mediterranean sun!

Getting there was something else…

Suffice it to say that, a close second behind French universities in terms of administrative bondage and institutionalized pointlessness, comes the French national railway company (SNCF).

Those who know both may start suspecting that I only do all this because I enjoy pain and suffering. Which might be true, though I’d rather it be mixed with a fair amount of sensuality, leather and eye-pleasing nakedness, certainly not inflicted by a bunch of middle aged counter zombies wearing faded green suits and stern faces. Or worse yet, involving getting whipped into submission by an army of cold faceless iron machines supposed to be spitting our tickets for a train departing exactly 4 minutes and 30 seconds later.

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