I stayed at Sealand Guesthouse, which was a bit confusing to find because it’s actually just a suite of rooms in a larger apartment building.  My contact for the guesthouse had forgotten to let me know which floor they were on, so I actually rang the doorbell to another, similarly named guesthouse on the wrong floor. I almost checked in to the wrong one, but thankfully, double-checked at the last moment. Turned out my guesthouse was 4 floors up.

The room in the guesthouse itself is definitely Chinese style and not for those who prefer the comfort of a fancy western-style hotel.  The room was barely big enough to hold the bed, a TV mounted in the corner, and a small bathroom. The bathroom contains a toilet, and a shower-head directly over the toilet. To take a shower, one has to put the toilet cover on.

When people say that Hong Kong is a great city for shopping, they’re not kidding. There are tons of multi-floor malls, lots of small shops, and outdoor markets.  Some of the fashion in the city was a bit too out there for me, but I managed to find a few dresses and shirts that were more my style.  I visited the Mongkok Ladies Market one day, which was super touristy.  Each stand had counterfeit brand-name goods at lower than genuine prices, but still at high tourist prices.  I ended up only spending a few minutes there and went to a mall a few blocks away instead.

The mall was insane. Small, crowded shops on each floor, pushing and shoving girls trying to find the latest fashions, and lots of loud bargaining.  Now that felt like China.

The best part of Hong Kong, other than tasty street food (more on that later), is that the public transit system, or more specifically, the subway, is so convenient.  I recommend anyone who visits to get an Octopus card (about 150HKD) or a tourist Octopus card (which includes subway fare to/from the airport for a better value) to easily get on and off subways. Since the card is RFID, you just need to wave it in front of the sensor, so it’s pretty fast. It sure beats fumbling for change at the ticket machine every time I need to get on the subway. Maybe I managed to avoid rush hours, but there wasn’t too much crowding on the subways.

For those who don’t want to shop all day, another Hong Kong attraction is the Tian Tan Giant Buddha (Tian Tan Da Fu).  It’s kind of a far subway ride past Hong Kong Disneyland, but I think it’s worth it.  At the subway stop, there are signs to the cable cars, where you’ll need to buy another ticket to ride the cable cars.  There are also busses that go to the buddha, as well as a long, hiking path, but I choose to ride the cable car to the Buddha.

At the final destination, there’s a touristy looking old-village you have to walk through to actually get to the bottom steps leading to the Buddha.  We veered away from that for a few hours to get lunch at the vegetarian restaurant nearby, which on hindsight, we should have skipped. The food at the sit-down area was a bit overpriced and not that great. We probably would have done fine with the vegetarian offerings at the deli counter.

After lunch, we climbed the 200 steps up to the giant Buddha and it was indeed giant.  There are giftshops all over the inside, bottom floor of the buddha, but if you want to go up the staircase inside (our meal ticket let us go up there free), there’s also an old calligraphy museum in there, which because of my ignorance in calligraphy, I wasn’t that interested in.  But hey, at least the view from the outside was nice.

On one of our last nights in Hong Kong, my friend Eddie who lives there took us to The Peak, which is a tall building on a hill on Hong Kong Island.  It’s a good night-time activity because the view of the buildings and the water are spectacular at night.  Most people seem to take the trolley up there, but there’s usually a crowd or a line, but it’s also possible to take the bus or the taxi up.  I took the trolley and I have to say, it was the steepest, scariest trolly I’ve ever been on.

Because Hong Kong is such an international city almost everyone we talked to on the streets had some understanding of English and when that failed, Mandarin.  It makes the area a great city to visit for anyone who wants an easy introduction to China. It has all the amenities of a western city (if you’re willing to pay the prices) but also feels like China.

(stay tuned for Hong Kong Part 2: The Food)

The first step is to take the picture, which can be done directly through the Project365 app, but I typically take a picture using a separate iPhone app (Camerabag or ShakeIt) and just pick that picture from the library.

Then, I send it to my flickr upload-by-email address. There’s more information on it here on flickr’s site. Anything I send to that email address will get uploaded to my flickr account.

Finally, I created a set for Project365 in Flickr to organize all my pictures. It’s the most manual part of it because I need to move individual pictures into there, but really, it’s not so hard to do it in batch every week or so.

As a bonus, I also have flickr2twitter activated on my flickr account, which gives me a second email address that I can email pictures to. Any pictures I send there will not only be uploaded to my flickr, but a tweet will also be created out of my subject line with a link to the picture. That way, I can tweet pictures but still have it hosted on my flickr account instead of it being lost somewhere in twitpic or some other server.

If, like me, you have tons of pictures on your Flickr.com account which you use on your blog, you probably want more integration between the two pages. More specifically, I wanted a trackback to my flickr page every time I linked to a picture from my blog.

Enter Trackback2Flickr.

What is it?
Trackback2Flickr will post a description to each flickr photo page which gets mentioned in your WordPress blog entries. The post will include a link back to the blog entry.

What do I need?
A wordpress blog, a flickr account with a flickr username, and photos.

(installation instructions after the jump)

Installation:

1. unzip the file
2. open trackback2flickr.php
3. locate this line (should be line 30) and replace it with your own username in quotes:
   $flickr_username = 'YOUR_USERNAME';
4. save the file
5. upload the trackback2flickr directory (includes trackback2flickr.php and the phpFlickr directory) to your Wordpress plugins directory (typically under wp-content/plugins/)
6. activate the plugin your wordpress plugin manager

Usage:

(The first time you publish an entry with flickr photo links, you’ll be taken to an authentication page which will ask to allow this plugin to post updates to flickr for you.  Give it permission to.)

Each time you publish an entry with image links to your flickr photos (ie: http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOURUSERNAME/1234123434), the plugin will change that photo’s description into a link back to the corresponding blog entry.

Extra:

This plugin was made possible by phpFlickr. Without it, I would have had to write an ugly method to authenticate to flickr myself. That would have been ugly.

Question/Comments/Suggestions? Leave me a comment here.

The sea otter exhibit was one of my favorite ones in the aquarium because they looked like they were having so much fun swimming around.  What’s especially cool is that at designated times, the trainers come out to feed and train the otters in front of all the aquarium-goers.

I also saw a bunch of jellyfish.  They really did a good job with the lighting in the jellyfish exhibit because they looked so alien! Jellyfish weird me out because they’re animals and they move, but when you look at them and look through their translucent bodies, it’s like there’s nothing in them that looks animal-like at all. I can’t believe there’s such weird stuff in the sea!

There was also a “Secret Lives of Seahorses” exhibit and I joked that it must not be much of a secret if there’s hundreds of people looking at them every day.  The seahorses looked so strange and cool, but they were kind of boring because they just perched on stuff in the ocean.  Some of them were pretty damn good at concealing themselves in their surroundings though.

I also spotted a fresh water otter all tuckered out and taking a nap on dry land. Awww it looked so fuzzy I wanted to touch it! The Monterey Bay Aquarium is definitely worth the $30-$40 ticket price just to see the otters frolic.  I’d recommend going on a weekday if possible though because the crowds are insane on the weekends — especially people with children running around all over the place.

[Flickr Set of the Aquarium]

I’m back from a whirlwind three-day weekend in Monterey. I flew up to the bay area and then drove down to Monterey, which I suppose is the central coast?  I’ve never been there, but I’m glad I went.  I’m especially glad I checked out the aquarium even though there were hoards of people and snotty-nosed kids all over the place.

I took tons of photos, but too tired to upload them all, so stay tuned in the following week for more posts about it.

I don’t know what got into me. Maybe the rushing “oh crap, gotta finish this up before I leave” half hour before leaving work revitalized me because I got a lot more done when I got home than I expected.

I made pasta from scratch: 1 part unbleached white flour, 1 part semolina flour, a pinch of salt, and enough water to form a dough. I re-potted my newest basil plant into my bigger basil planter. I got 1 hour of SFIV ‘training’ in. Oh yeah, did I mention I’m going to be in a Street Fighter tournament? I’m kind of scared. Maybe it’s not good that I picked such a low HP character, Chun Li.

Then I made corn salad with fresh corn on the cob. And then I swept the floor.

Ridiculous how much I managed to pack into a few hours. It makes me feel better about those nights where I’m just lollygagging the time away.

We spent most of the afternoon hiking today. I had meant to get an early start on hiking, but overslept, oops. But I don’t feel too guilty for it because Sundays are for oversleeping and I actually did more today than I usually do on Sundays.

We went up to the Santa Anita range and hiked for a few miles to Sturtevant Falls. It was an overcast and cool day, which for me is the perfect time for hiking. Not too hot, and not too sunny. Other people thought so too because we met tons of people on the trail. We also so a lot of dogs. People are so friendly on the trails. Almost everyone we passed said hi. I was happy to see so many families with small kids walking around; it made me think of when I was younger and my dad used to take my cousins and me hiking in the same mountains.

I hate little yappy dogs, but I’m glad that I did see some yappy dogs walking on a leash on the trail. Even though they’re small and some people get them as accessories, they still deserve to do dog-like things like run around dirt, pee on trees, and go on hikes.

This was the first time I’ve taken my dog on a real hike. He seemed to like it, but he was pooped afterward; he’s not used to so much exercise in one day.

On the way back, we saw several forest ranger trucks drive by as well as a medical helicopter flying above. A hiker got stranded somewhere, so they had to come get him out. I wonder how he got stranded. I assumed that if you were hiking alone and you get stranded, you’re SOL because cell-phone reception is so bad in the mountains, but I guess there are call-boxes scattered everywhere that has a line to 911. That’s what one of the forest rangers said when I asked how they were contacted.

Even though I took my film camera, I didn’t take that many pictures with it. I did snap a couple shots with my d40 though. (pics here)

My parents haven’t had time to play with the family dog (which stays with them) lately, so the BF and I decided to take him to the playground of my elementary school. When I close the fence, he can’t escape but he can run to his heart’s content all over the the playground — on the grass, on the dirt, on the foamy stuff, by the swings, etc.

While we waited for my dog to tire himself out, we played on the swing for a bit. Maybe my butt got bigger or something, but the swings were really starting to hurt it. When I used to go to school here, instead of the weird foamy stuff on the ground, we had an actual sandbox. But I guess that was too dangerous, so they remodeled the playground and replaced all the sandboxes with the weird foamy things.

Why is it that I can’t keep myself from throwing out the UAV whenever a camera points my way?

I dropped my first roll of film off at CVS. It was mostly a test roll to make sure my 35mm camera was working. It is. I also learned that I don’t ever want to go to CVS to get prints again. Why?

• They didn’t know what dpi their machine scanned in negatives as.
• Even though they charged me for 1 hour service, when I came back 4 hours after, they had JUST gotten the prints out of the machine.
• The photo center employees know nothing about what they’re doing.
• I guess they scan the negatives into a machine at a super low dpi, post-process it for you, and then print it out of the machine at a crappy resolution.

The last point really discourages me from returning to CVS. If they’re going to develop the negatives, scan it into a machine, alter it digitally, and then print it out of the machine at a crappy resolution, I might as well just do that at home.

I think I’m going to have to find somewhere local to get my film developed, and then eventually buy a negatives scanner so I can scan the negatives in myself. It sucks that I’ll need to get a new scanner though. I wanted to use my all-in-one printer/scanner, but the above picture was what came out of a scan and as you can see, the quality of the scanner part of this all-in-one is not so good.