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Mini Me Meets Diana Mini

I was stumbling on a lomo guy's desk months ago and saw Diana Mini's prototype and instantly every possibility of such a little gadget lit up.  That hugely admirable guy could've told me the whole story but I was soon being pushed away from the birth place of such cute, cool, fancy 35mm camera by other lomo guys sworn to keep the secret.  The mini will certainly touch people's heart and I suggested them to add a keychain type of strap so people can hang their mini on their bags like a charm.  At least lomo should have a different camera strap instead of the usually ugly ones they produce.

Diana mini vs Diana

I'm among the first to grab a Diana Mini in the world, just last night.  Reason being that not only does the Diana original was a Hong Kong product, its current versions are manufactured still in China and Hong Kong is the closest hub to dispatch mini to the rest of the world.  Even though lomo offices world wide was having a little teaser to launch the mini on the same date, we Hong Kongers are lucky enough to have it first logistically speaking.

Mini version of me holding Diana mini

Without the 24mm lens (not that it is removable), the Diana Mini is smaller than a LCA.  You can shoot 35mm film in half frame or square with just a flick of switch between your shots, I'm sure this means the Diana 35mm back will get a lot less attention.  The tiny mini feels actually more solid than its mother not only because of natural density but the solid clicks of the 4 switches (shutter, exposure, N/B and frame switch).

I'm yet to load film to the mini coz my son is still playing with it.  He has learned how to use the flash tonight, once he learns how to turn the focus dial I will let him do his very first roll of film photography.  You should see how he likes this cute camera, he grabbed it almost instantly and asked before he tried the shutter.  After a few shots, he showed me the back of the camera for photos he shot :)

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What's in My Bag - Seminar Edition

Here's yet another post about what's in my bag.  If you like, check out the "What's in your bag?" flickr group to see what other people carry, you will be amazed.

Recently I sold my Ricoh GX-200 camera, so I don't have any digital camera with me all the time.  I'm waiting for the white Olympus E-P1 to arrive as it is out of stock now.  So here you go, what's in my bag in yesterday's My Moleskine 2.0 talk: Lomo LCA+ decorated with MT-tapes and Staz-On ink, Fujifilm Natura Classica, KOLO Essex Travel Book in leather, Shiny self inking stamp with my email and website info on it, Lomo film, Voigtlander R4A with 35mm f1.2 lens, leather camera strap and film canister holder from Monogram/CameraPeople, Citizen WR 200 or night hawk watch, Pilot Capless retractable fountain pen, USB memory with leather cover and envelope enclosure, iPhone, Moleskine weekly leather diary, shopping bag.

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Back To School - Style and Gear Guide

Time flies and summer is nearly gone, this year's back to school event has already started in several stores.  We started to think about the theme almost right after last year's event.  Lots of improvements were made in the whole process of planning and thanks to our stationery team's effort, each really played an important role in making this event successful.

Back To School 2009

The entire layout was planned using Google Sketchup, the first in city'super's history and I'm particularly proud of it.  I started using it for this fair last year but lots of measurements were inaccurate, but this time it is near perfect!  When we were standing on the aisles after 4 hours of setup, we could see the big difference and we could feel the satisfaction rush to our hearts.  Layout is only one of the many critical success factors, the way our team "pour our hearts" to this really makes everything click and I can't be thankful enough for that.  In the process, we all better ourselves.  Almost everyone had some innovative small moves, gee I appreciate a lot!  What can I do?  Buy you gals lunch?

Back To School 2009

One of the backdrop was my overnight illustrator work and the result is stunning to me.  It is a "personalize + stylize" your notebook section.  Here you get all the components you need to create your own perfect notebook, in addition, pen holders, pen, clips, stickers, stamps, MT-tapes are all there for customers to create something unique for themselves.

Back To School 2009

6 years ago when I first became a stationery buyer, I introduced computer related products for this fair coz school was no longer paper based.  Since then we had a deal with Apple Computer directly to be in the fair and offer something special no other places have.  If you carry a student card or show them your teacher's identification, you will get discount and a free iPod touch when you buy a computer, in addition a few free gifts for you to choose including hubs or computer carrying cases.

I had high hope on the leaflet of this fair too, to make it like a magazine offering useful tips instead of just a product list brochure.  It didn't happen as expected, but it is already one big improvement in terms of communication between various teams.

So in short, this year's back to school fair in city'super/LOG-ON, you can find Apple Computer's exclusive offer, colorful computer carrying cases, super funny and beautiful USB memory/gadgets, fashion headphones, cute portable speakers, hottest Korean stationery, Staedtler gears, personalize and stylize your notebook, newest stationery gadgets, Pilot's erasable gel pen, etc etc....... Just come over!

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Letter Delight

I wrote most letters during my university days, to a girl who went to Australia to study while I was in Canada.  I would drew and make every letter special so she would be anticipating the next one coming.  Then I wrote to my parents to assure them my well being from afar (my mom's heart was aching coz the image of a telecom TV ad was burned into her mind: a lonely 10 years old boy sitting on a window seal, snowy stormy outside, a long distance call came in, mom's voice and happy faces.  Honestly I had a great time away from family :P).

A letter to be written

Then all of a sudden every letter sent was an email.  These days I send letters for my own pleasure, putting interesting beautiful stuffs inside, like stamps, tapes, drawing, stickers, etc.  The rewarding thing is that you can almost visualize the delight on the recipient's face, that I deem also my own pleasure.  So this letter I prepared last night is not yet written, perhaps I will do so in this coming weekend.

Letter to Friend

A letter this elaborated was sent last year: Letter to New Found Friend.

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Trading Paper for Film

The world has become so small now.  10 years ago it seems so impossible but now I'm trading from Hong Kong with Kelly from a horse farm in Walla Walla!

Stationery Goodies

Kelly was kind enough to grab me dozens of Polaroid 600 films when they were just US$11 per box of 10, and in return I owe her certain amount of stationery goodies she can't get from the states.  It took us a long long time to complete the trade, more than a year, but in the process I get to know more about her and her unfortunate incidents.  That's something fun, exchanging life stories through exchanging stuffs, not money, not transactions but stories.

Stationery Goodies

Kelly added additional thoughtful stuffs to her box to me, I added some from mine to her too.  So today, just so happen city'super is having a rare (twice, each 2 days, per year) 20% off for loyal customers, I grabbed the chance to get Kelly more stuffs at the same price.  I can't believe tonight I shopped over HK$2800 from the company I work for, a personal record.

Stationery Goodies

Someday I got to visit her horse farm and the river beside it.

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Elaine Morgan Says We Evolved From Aquatic Apes

Absolutely love that woman! A TED conference session.

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A Visual Person's Links

I am a visual person, I'm blind when I look at numbers, so in all of my careers (customer service, network operations, software development, retail) I dig out visualization tools to help.  Many of the tools are no longer supported such as Eureka Lens, Parallel Coordinate, but I still actively use Treemap and constantly looking for new visualization tools.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Check out this cool visualization of How Different Groups Spend Their Day from NYTimes, you can interactively change criteria to see different results and insights.

Here's a list of sites aggregating visualization tools:

• Visual Complexity (a source for so many cool visualization projects)
• Marumushi (a design engineer's collection of cool visualization projects)
• Many Eyes (an IBM group to explore data visualization techniques)
• Infosthetics (a blog to explore creative design and the field of info visualization)
• Visualization at HCIL (University of Maryland's collection of active projects, a good starting point for me)

And for specific fun, you should check these visualization toys:

• Newsmap (world news in treemap style mosaic)
• Xplane (I bought several of their posters when I was a customer service manager)
• Wordle (generate word clouds to see the messages in text clearly, fun to play with your director's speech)
• Gapminder (I wish Google make it more accessible, it is so useful for retailers like us)

Start demanding your IT department to have good useful data visualization tools, it makes life easier for many of us.  Don't forget to check out Macrofocus' Treemap, my favorite treemap program which I helped to make suggestions and translation to Chinese.

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Olgua Says Soba

I'm not at work today because of a consistent neck pain lasted for the past two days.  iPhoto was opened and my son saw this photo I took in Hakone and instantly recall his favorite noodle experiences in his first overseas trip, in this case cold soba!

Hakone Soba

I especially like how coffee was being served in this shop and the look of this lovely soup kettle.  Photo was taken with a Voigtlander 35mm/f1.2 on AGFA 100 slide.

Olgua

And this is what he said when he first saw this photo.

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Voigtlander, Time Travel and Socrates

Destiny drove me into owning two Voigtlanders.  I bought a Voigtlander R4A 35mm range finder a few months ago after saving up for a year.  Now bear with me for this time travel episode.  Last year I visited Steve Light's home during a business trip in NY, knowing that I like photography, he was kind enough to give me a Voigtlander 120 cameras he picked up in a flea market.  Absolutely lovely camera, but I was not particularly conscious of the brand when he gave the camera to me.

Voigtlander Bessa 120 and R4A 35mm

Not long ago before that trip, a photo lab friend (Tommy) and a lomo big brother (Ming) told me about ç¦å€«é" (Voigtlander) - how beautiful the shutter sounds from a poor man's Leica.  So I did some research and started to consider getting one.  Yet earlier in 2007 when I was walking the street of Portobello with a camera enthusiast (Cat) and a French lady (Géraldine), Cat bought a Bessamatic (Voigtlander)  camera with 3 lenses and carrying case at a super low cost, he was super happy about it.  I took pictures of his new found camera without registering the brand in my mind either.

Cat's Portobello Found

These are 3 totally un-related events.  I wouldn't recall all of them (there could be more which I am not aware of) and link them together if I weren't trying to show off a Polaroid of the two Voigtlanders I own in this post.  I'm lost in causation, implicit learning, unconscious registering of brand, etc etc and ... TIME.  Which event, words or person triggered my purchase of a Voigtlander?  When was the decisive moment?

I am in this state of mind probably because I'm reading The Plot To Save Socrates by Paul Levinson, a great read related to time travel after the romantic Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  Oh BTW, because of this post I found Time Traveler's Wife is to be released in two weeks (long awaited! IMDB here and trailer here).  Can't wait to see the last scene which I did cry when I was reading the novel.

World Traveler vs. Time Traveler

Now let's go back further to 2006 when I posted World Traveler vs. Time Traveler.

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My Lomolized iPhone Hack on Page 354-356

Yesterday I received by post this iPhone Hacks book published by O'Reilly's Make:Magazine.  Selected by author Damien Stolarz, my Lomolized iPhone hack is on page 354 to 356.

My Lomolize iPhone Hack on page 354-356

I didn't realize until now that I have a total of 4 hacks published in this blog:

• Lomolized iPhone Camera Hack
• iPhone Kaleidoscope Camera Effect
• iPhone Polaroid Theme - How to Do it
• Polaroid iPhone Stand

It will be interesting to see when will these hacks be obsolete as new iPhone features emerges.

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