i woke up at 8am this morning for a conference call with a client down on western avenue in allston. i thought it was close enough that i could walk, and figured it'd take no more than 30 minutes. fortunately i left my house early, because it ended up taking 45 minutes to walk there...a rather painful walk, as my body ached all over from yesterday's long-awaited run. the call was to go over some hardware specifications. afterwards it was early enough that i had breakfast at the breakfast club diner, an old-fashion joint that's actually a fairly recent establishment (from what i later read online). they had booths but at sat at the counter facing the banks of brewing coffee makers. i got the criminal (as opposed to the princess, or the jock, etc. get it?) - scrambled eggs, sausages, home fries, and toast - along with a glass of orange juice ($9 including tip). while i was eating, i saw a baby cockroach crawl across a laminated menu cover; i didn't even bat an eyelash. after breakfast, i walked the 45 minutes back home, cutting across harvard campus, where there was a used textbook sale. i took a brief look but didn't see anything worth buying.

i had to harvest one of the mushrooms today; once they get about a few inches wide and start looking like their caps might be folding upwards, it's time to pick them. unfortunately, because oyster mushrooms grow in clumps, i ended up pulling a few other smaller mushrooms as well. one clump isn't enough to eat yet, so i put this one away safetly in the refrigerator underneath a wet paper towel (which should keep for a few days at least, hopefully enough time for some of the other mushrooms to ripen).

today was a low productivity day since i had already checked my motivation to work coming into this thursday. once i finished my requisite number of hours sitting in front of my computer so i can get vericose veins on my ass, it was time to relax in the cold living room, underneath a blanket, watching an appetizer of news, followed by the main course of primetime programming. i made some ramen for dinner, nothing fancy. smallville (is every episode a tearjerker now?), then beauty and the geek (check out this episode again next wednesday, one of the geeks get a makeover and he is HAWT), followed by an episode of frontline explaining why terrorism is even more prevalent now than ever before.

here i am demonstrating how i shoot a macro shot with the new canon setup. it still feels weird taking close-ups with a telephoto lens - it doesn't seem to make sense, that the closer i want an image the farther away i should be moving back. without the close-up lens (which is just a filter), i could only get as close as 5 feet to what i want to shoot; with the lens however, i can get as close as 2 feet (which includes some magnification as well). 70mm is the position where the lens is fully drawn inwards, and 300mm is with the lens fully extended. there's a sweet spot, which is the distance i have to be using the close-up lens in order for the image to be in focus; that's not so different from my nikon coolpix 4500, which has a similar sweet spot setup.

70mm macro

300mm macro

nikon macro

you can see that my nikon coolpix 4500 can still get a closer macro, so i'm not 100% satisfied with the macro capability on the canon, although when i cropped the 8 megapixel canon image down to the same size as the nikon image, it's roughly the same coverage. canon makes a special lens (the MP-E 65mm) that can get 5x macro but that thing costs $800, too rich for me (maybe i can get one cheaper the next time i go to tokyo).