sangsara.net

Category: General

  • Florence: IRL vs. Assassin’s Creed 2

    One of the things that struck me about walking around Milan and Florence was, and I know this is going to sound lame, how much the old architecture reminded me of Assassin’s Creed 2’s environments. One of the things I was surprised to see were fist-sized holes in old castle walls that I figured were only placed in the game as justification for Ezio’s ability to climb any surface — I didn’t think they existed in real life!

    This afternoon, I fired up the game again to have a virtual walk-around in Florence (or Firenze, to Italians), and captured some shots that lined up with photos I’d taken.

  • On the Loss of Go Go Curry in Singapore, and Monster Curry

    Happier times: this might have been my last Grand Slam, at Millenia Walk

    Go Go Curry was one of my favorite things IN THE WORLD.

    For the uninitiated, a primer: a casual dining restaurant serving Japanese curry rice of the Kanazawa variety — which has no surviving example in Singapore now that the gorilla mascot-fronted Go Go (“Go” being the number 5 in Japanese, 55 being the jersey number of a Japanese baseball player with which the franchise owner is obsessed) has left the country.

    There were three outlets in Singapore, with the brand brought in and (mis)managed by the En Dining group in 2009, I believe. Some elements of the experience were lost in the journey over (the original low-rent diner aesthetic, with food served on metal plates, somehow translated to porcelain in a FOOD COURT setting here, to say nothing of the missing red pickled vegetables) and it was clearly underpromoted — I’ve told my sad story of curry withdrawal to many who returned blank stares, “What curry?”, and then, “Oh that sounds like the kind of thing I would have liked, too bad.” We often say Singapore is a small place, one easy to tire of, but things in the middle of town can still elude notice.

    Every time I’m in Japan, I find myself eating at least two precious mealtimes’ worth of the stuff, just because. I was grateful for the Singapore branches, only the second country outside Japan to have any, but it’s naturally best in its native land.

    Native habitat: the Go Go Curry branch in Shinjuku

    And so, finally, after a couple of years of disappointing sales despite my best efforts (I sometimes clogged my arteries there more than once a week), it just disappeared. I haven’t a clue if the contract just expired, if it was given up, or taken back. Tears were cried on the inside. I blamed myself for not soliciting a job with En Dining’s marketing department when the thought once occurred to me; the conceited idea being that maybe I could have helped prevent this. I daydreamed about making it big so I could one day buy the franchise rights back and do it right by myself. I railed on Twitter, I had a public breakdown on Facebook, and then I renounced this awful life and shook its grasp on me, wandering into the mountainous hinterland of my gastronomic impulses. Over time, in between the valleys of fading memory and hopeful promise of one day meeting its rich, dark, peppery flavor again, I finally found peace. And now I am ready to address its would-be successor.

    Of all the colors in the world: the Monster Curry identity is too close for comfort.

    Monster Curry. From the first moment one sets eyes on its circular yellow & red logo, featuring a cartoon dragon face where the gorilla’s face should be, there is the overwhelming sense of deja vu, and treachery.

    With the birth of this new enterprise, in the same three places where Go Go Curry once stood, The En Dining company has engineered itself a stand-in to the throne. The large serving options are intact, and some new twists added. Inspired by the more successful CoCo Ichibanya chain, 5 levels of spiciness are now offered. In addition to the handful of fried meat options from before, some new menu items, including NATTO CURRY (abandon hope, all ye who dine here!). The porcelain plates have reached comically-large proportions: I swear the one I just ate off was larger than a 12″ pizza.

    And yet somehow, the same staff who once cooked pork katsus under the Go Go banner now do a worse job in their Monster uniforms. Something’s not right, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the curry.

    Heart disease by any other name: the Mountain Monster Curry comes satisfyingly close to the decadence of Go Go’s Grand Slam/Major Curry.

    It’s thinner, and doesn’t taste anywhere as moreish. I don’t think it qualifies as Kanazawa style. This situation is helped a little by the proprietary new hot sauce they add according to your scale-of-1-to-5 spice wishes. I don’t want to give it too much credit, but the hot sauce is the best thing Monster Curry has to offer. If you don’t get at least one dollop of it (that’s my personal limit), you may as well not eat here.

    There’s a spiel I’ve seen written up on a couple of food blogs around the net (must have gotten the same press release), about the lengths En’s head chef went to in the creation of this ‘ultimate Japanese curry’. The stuff is purportedly cooked for two whole days before being given another day to collect itself in silence before being served. He needn’t have bothered! It’s flat and devoid of character without the hot sauce. I’ll bet that’s made in a blender in under 5 minutes.

    I’ve been back to eat the stuff several times now, not nearly as frequently as before, but close. It’s all I’ve got for now, anyway.

    In all fairness, would I have willingly traded Go Go Curry in for this? Of course not. But the list of things I wouldn’t pick over having Go Go in Singapore is long: The Whopper, Colonel Sanders’ original recipe chicken, Frappucinos, steady employment, the love of my parents…

    I’ll end with an excerpt from my smartphone diary:

    My $19 “Monster Egg Curry” large enough for two (pfft!) has arrived. The cheese is off to one side instead of being placed on the hot curry to melt. Why are they getting this wrong now? It’s as if being privy to the methods of a leader in Japanese curry as an official franchisee for over 3 years has taught them nothing. What.

  • Ten Days with Android & the Samsung Galaxy S III

     

    Fulltype7

    I’ve been an iPhone user since the first day it was possible to be one in Singapore. I love the platform, but I’ve been intrigued for awhile now by the larger-screened Android devices that I see every day on public transport here. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these enjoy greater acceptance and penetration in Asia than elsewhere in the world. The comments thread that begins here on an Asymco post are quite enlightening, for further reading on the Korean market.

    The short version of those insights, from memory: the Korean market is heavily dominated by Samsung, which predominantly makes Android devices. Koreans (and other metropolitan dwellers in areas of low urban crime must fall into this category — e.g. Singapore, Tokyo) spend a lot of time commuting on public transport. Large screen phones are more suitable for information consumption than tablets in such situations, where one stands in a crowd and holds a handrail; in some cases a single session may last 1-2 hours. An interesting phrase in one of the comments called Koreans “diligent information sponges”. It’s hard not to imagine a face glued to a large 4.8″ screen, hoovering up the day’s news and social media updates on the way to work. Games and movies are also better — I see many a Chinese drama series being watched on large phone screens whenever I take the subway. My theory is that personal security concerns may deter commuters in some cities from being fully immersed in such devices. I’d love to hear more opinions on this.

    More so than for users who drive or walk or have shorter commutes, where typical smartphone sessions throughout a day are counted in minutes and not hours, the impracticalities of a large screen are tolerated here. Women I’ve spoken to say they wouldn’t mind at all if the next iPhone had a screen that was as big as or nearly as big as the Samsung Galaxy S III (4.8″). They ‘can’t put the iPhone 4S in their pockets anyway’. The Galaxy Note seems impractically big, even to me, but I see many women here on a daily basis who appear to enjoy using it. The difficulty of one-handed operation does not seem to be a deal-breaker for the Singaporean/Korean/Asian user.

    —

    So having managed to resist the urge to buy an unlocked, off-contract Galaxy S II a year ago at full price, just for research, I recently found myself fixated on the idea of getting the new Galaxy S III at a subsidized price as my contract comes to an end. Note that my first reaction to the phone was amusement, followed by dismissal. Their launch presentation was absurd, and had more than a couple of WTF moments (for example, one of the presenters slipping and using the word ‘bizarre’ to describe it). But within two weeks, I’d convinced myself I should get one. I don’t know how this always happens to me. I figured with 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Android was finally ready for prime time.

    —

    It’s been 10 days. Here’s what I’ve experienced.

    Almost immediately, I noticed that battery life wasn’t what it’s been promised to be. Android gives you plenty of ways to break down the battery meter (and plenty of ways to have a nervous breakdown watching stats). You can see exactly what percentage of power consumption is going to the screen, the cellular radios, applications, and so on. I discovered that my phone wasn’t going to sleep when the screen was turned off. It was actively trying to do something, but I didn’t know what. So I shelled out 4 bucks and bought BetterBatteryStats, which promises to identify what those behind-the-scenes “wakelocks” are. If you’re thinking that this is already sounding like more trouble than you want from your phone, out of the box, you’ll know how I felt coming from the iPhone.

    It turns out that it was a problem with Google Backup, a feature similar to how the iPhone will back itself up to iCloud over Wi-Fi each day when you plug it in to charge; except this phone was trying to do it all the time, apparently even over 3G. I turned the feature off, and things seemed to get a little better. The next big battery drain problem came from a background process associated with switching networks to find a good signal in areas of low coverage, except this was happening everywhere. My “Cell Standby” usage was at 30%, when Android users on other phones see numbers closer to 5-10%. Because I’ve encountered this complaint consistently from other Galaxy S III owners on forums, it could be a design or software fault.

    I then spent another day reading up about a feature called Fast Dormancy, which may or may not have been the problem, depending on whether or not my phone provider has optimized their network for it — all of the above a moot point, I eventually found, because Samsung disabled the secret menu option in Android that would have allowed me to turn it off like some American users found was improving their battery life. Oh yes, I spent a few hours messing around with these secret menus too. Remember typing in stuff like *#*#49090** into feature phone dialers, pre-iPhone? That’s still around.

    There also also many apps you can get for optimizing your battery life. Some seem to be nothing more than placebo task killers; others are more intelligent and can disconnect the mobile data network in intervals to save battery life. Unlike iOS, where push notifications are delivered via a single Apple-managed connection that’s probably kinder to battery life, many Android apps have to run in the background and do periodic checks. New tweets and emails, for example, can only be set to come in at 15, 30, 60 minute intervals, depending on the app.

    The built-in keyboard has pretty bad word prediction. You can install third-party keyboards. I’ve tried like four. They all have their own flaws. Don’t like the way the homescreen works? You can install third-party launchers. I’ve tried like four. You can guess they all have flaws. Android defenders point to this ability as a key strength. I’ll admit I had a little fun. I used to waste a lot of time on my PCs futzing around and hacking solutions to problems. But it’s far from optimal for most users. Speaking of touch controls, capacitive buttons are as bad as I’ve heard they are. The “Back” button area is extremely easy to nudge when holding the phone in landscape position, such as when you’re watching a film or playing a game. Even in portrait orientation, if you hold the phone tight, it’s easy for the fleshy bit of the palm under your thumb to creep over the edge and trigger it, exiting you from your current screen.

    Charging: The phone charges via a standard Micro USB cable, but when connected to a USB power source such as a computer, it charges very slowly. I’m talking upwards of 10 hours for a full charge. Online research suggests that for some reason, it only takes in a fraction of the power being delivered to it, if it detects that data could also come down this cable. There are instructions to DIY mod your cable so that it charges as quickly over USB as via an AC adapter. This was just too much for me, so I spent even more of my valuable time tracking down a cable that does the same job out of the box. It’s the McKal MM83A Supercharger cable. You’re welcome.

    After having gone through the things I have in 10 days, where the state and maintenance of my phone has been constantly on my mind, I think the drawbacks outweigh the large and beautiful screen on this phone (quality-wise, it’s not better than the iPhone’s Retina display). I haven’t even mentioned the lack of really solid Twitter applications on this thing, or how Path’s Android app is so inferior to the iPhone version, or how scrolling is still nowhere as fluid or as natural from a physics standpoint as it is on the iPhone, THROUGHOUT the iPhone experience. I believe scrolling can be quite different on Android, from app to app, but I’m not entirely sure at this moment.

    But when I hold my iPhone now, it feels wrong. It feels more like a little camera than a phone (the camera on the iPhone is tons better, as is the selection of photo apps on iOS — I have yet to find a credible, well-designed photography app on Android. There is nothing in the league of Hipstamatic, Camera+, VSCO Cam, Infinicam, Noir, TiltShift Generator, and many others I have happily paid for on iOS. The best ones are the ones that are also available on iOS: Pixlr-o-matic, Instagram, AfterFocus). The screen feels cramped, and it’s a little heavier and thicker than I’d like. I miss having the glanceability of Twitter/Facebook widgets on my homescreen alongside app shortcut icons (something that Windows Phone 7 gets a lot of praise for too). But other aspects of the iPhone user experience are beyond comparison. I don’t want to mess with battery settings and tweaks. I don’t want the ‘freedom’ to spend hours scouring the web for ways to make my phone better. I want a phone made by a solid company that I trust, optimized to the best of their ability in a combination of software and hardware design, so that I cannot possibly believe that I could do better myself. Because that frees me to do everything else. But I also want that phone to have a larger screen.

    Essentially, I’ve been paying to relearn a lesson I already did back in 2007 with the first iPhone. I’ll keep using it for now and see what else I can learn about Android (it’s beneficial for my work, anyway), but I’m crossing my fingers that whatever iPhone comes next will give me every reason to sell this off, and restore my sanity. When someone asks me if they should buy an iPhone or an Android phone, my new answer is “If an Android phone is right for you, you’d already know it.” It’s the right choice for those people, but not most, not the way it is now.

     

     

  • Two instances of graffiti in Melbourne that cracked me up

  • From the archives: An on-set photo of Jessica Cambensy, 2007

    Img_2885

    I’ve been receiving emails from Memolane, which looks into my Flickr and reminds me of what happened each day five, sometimes two, years ago to the day.

    Five years ago, I took this photo of Jessica Cambensy on the set of my first TV commercial shoot. She was a young model, nowhere as famous/infamous as she is now (http://singaporedaily.net/2010/04/16/daily-chiobu-jessica-cambensy/) in Hong Kong and Asia; I was a young copywriter, about to learn how little power writers have on a director’s turf — eventually I figured out that I was there as a formality, and to eat the catered food.
    There was lots of time between set ups for me to wander around taking photos. The shoot dragged on for over 8 hours, which she spent standing and getting her hair restyled (we went through at least 5 very different overall looks for her over the day/night), and I remember being amazed by her energy and professionalism. I would have fallen asleep or thrown a tantrum by then. She was incredibly chipper for someone who barely ate at lunch.

  • Everpix, The Rise of Centralized Cloud Photos, and The Decline of Flickr

    Everpix-web

    I signed up for Everpix last night and have been thinking about it all morning, even as I’ve yet to get my photo collection uploaded to it.

    In essence, Everpix is an online repository of every digital photo you’ve ever taken, supported by a background Mac utility that keeps it in sync with your iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom, and an iPhone app that syncs your Camera Roll, and allows you to view your library in the cloud. Crucially, it also syncs with your online photos on Flickr, Instagram, Google+/Picasa, and Facebook.

    Every photo is private by default, and making an album (called a Moment), or part of it, public, gives you an obfuscated URL that can be shared with others. You can also publish photos ‘offshore’ to Facebook Albums, Twitter, and possibly other destinations.

    Philosophically, this is almost everything I want my Flickr account to be right now, but that they are so, so far away from achieving. I signed up for Flickr Pro to have an online backup of all my photos, with the ones I want to share set to ‘Public’ visibility. In the past few years, the internet has moved on, and we now share photos on other stickier social networks. There’s been a fair bit written in the past week about Flickr’s decline as a destination, and it’s because photographers at all levels are getting more views and feedback through Facebook, G+, and even other photo sites like 500px and Smugmug.

    Adobe had a go at cloud photos with a product called Carousel that was recently renamed to Revel (why?), but that effort tried to be an entire workflow, with a desktop photo management app that had half-baked Lightroom editing tools built in. Adopting a product like that involves a complete change of tools. Good for beginners, but bad for anyone comfortable with what they have.

    Everpix promises to meet us halfway. Use whatever you’re used to, and have all those photos in the cloud, with easy publishing to any and all online destinations through beautiful web and mobile apps. All publishing actions take place between Everpix’s servers and the other web service, so the user experience is simply that of instantaneous uploads. It’s the best of both worlds: backup and effective sharing.

    You can tell this is an important facet of the service because one of their core features is “Auto Curation”. Click a button, and the service picks what it thinks are your best photos, with clear faces, even exposure, and other secret sauce traits. Another click, and those are shared online.

    More than just disrupting Flickr, it also shows us what Apple’s iCloud Photo Stream could be, but understandably isn’t just yet. Rolling out free, unlimited storage and access to millions of iOS users would test their billion dollar war chest; the inevitable failures, their invaluable credibility. Everpix is a small startup in beta that I’ve decided to entrust with access to all my photos; I’m hoping their pricing structure, when revealed, will be reasonable enough to pay for.

  • Shadow Cities: The moment a location-based game surprised me

    Seth Schiesel’s effusive review for the New York Times:

    If you have an iPhone, you simply must try this game. Shadow Cities isn’t just the future of mobile gaming. It may actually be the most interesting, innovative, provocative and far-reaching video game in the world right now, on any system.

    I looked up at the sole approaching man, and he looked back at me. I couldn’t believe the first thought in my head: “Could he be one of them?”

    I was walking up the street to my home, and had just been playing Shadow Cities when that moment, an experience of virtual world crossover that no other game had ever produced before, hit me. There are few truly new sensations in gaming each year, and that was a whopper. Giving another person in real life a nervous glance, wondering if they’re a player too, sounds like the kind of crap you might put in an ad (sure enough, it’s in Shadow Cities’ trailer), but there it was, happening to me. Sure, the Nintendo 3DS has its StreetPass feature, but the mechanics there are like a coin toss, and largely irrelevant to the games you play on it.

    Shadow Cities is a freemium, competitive, GPS-based game of global warfare on a local scale. Essentially, all players are divided into two factions. After picking a side in this MMORPG-style game, you see your surroundings in the form of a glowing map; a parallel world of magic. Your goal is to work, with others if possible, to gain control of territory and harvest energy to put your faction over the top. You’re not limited to where you actually are, either. Creating a beacon will allow friends from around the world to temporarily visit your area.

    The side that I picked, the science-based Architects, are total underdogs right now, forced into playing guerilla tactics against a more powerful enemy. All day, my similarly low-ranked colleague (@jeanfinds) and I had been running away from hopeless battles, trying to eke out small victories.

    At the aforemention moment when I was walking home, I’d just placed two towers in the neighborhood that would help generate energy as long as no one disrupted them. I needed to protect them. When I looked up at the other man, I could feel my lizard brain actually priming itself with a fight-or-flight cocktail of apprehension and aggression.

    But I won’t lie: the game has a steep but short learning curve. I installed it last night at a company dinner party at Jean’s suggestion, and only managed to fully understand its menus, unique vocabulary, and mechanics sometime this afternoon with her help. But it’s worth it. Every gamer and designer remotely interested in multiplayer experiences should try it for at least a couple of days. Level up past 5, and play it with a friend or two (I’m going to convince my office to get together and dominate the central business district), and see where the bar is for location-based games on any platform, free or paid.

    There’s a lot of polish in this Finnish game. Unlike other freemium MMO titles, there aren’t long load times between views. It renders its smooth 3D graphics quickly while loading network data secondarily, much like how the iPhone appears to launch apps instantly by going straight to static screens that look like running apps. It’s all quite impressive, and I look forward to getting further with it.

    Visit www.shadowcities.com

  • In mobile photography, "Instant takes precedence over Perfect"

    1:24:36 PM Ci’en Xu: Was up last night posting Berlin photos.

    1:24:51 PM Ci’en Xu: Sometimes it feels like in this day and age, editing is more redundant.

    1:25:03 PM Brandon Lee: How do you mean?

    1:25:56 PM Ci’en Xu: I remember the days when Flickr was kinda like a big social network, and people were more obsessed about the rules of photography and how you edited them, etc.

    1:26:17 PM Ci’en Xu: I guess now with mobile, instant takes precedence over “perfect”.

    1:27:06 PM Brandon Lee: Yeah you’re right.

    1:27:31 PM Brandon Lee: Which is why I like Mattebox… it kinda makes you feel like getting it right in-camera is important again, and maybe even enough.

    1:28:02 PM Brandon Lee: When you leave everything to the phone to do automatically, there’s always the sense that you must insert yourself into the process, and that can only happen in post.

    1:28:19 PM Ci’en Xu: But I still like editing, even if just to let you linger on your photos for a little while longer.