Many shots, little time
· Thursday February 14, 2008
Well, my time in Taiwan is slowly coming to a close… On Monday, I’ll hop on an airplane (hopefully an A380 out of Singapore!!) and find myself back in England on Tuesday. My friends back in Southampton tell me the weather has been “like summer,” which would be a welcome change from the cold and rain in Taipei, haha. Somewhat ironic that this trip was supposed to be a respite from English weather :)
I’ve been taking lots of pics lately, and also doing some shopping. Just opposite Taipei’s Main (Rail/HSR/MRT) Station is an amazing ‘store’ (it’s actually a 4-level collection of various retailers) called Nova, which is packed with electronics shops selling everything computer-related. How come I never know about this place before??? I’m a bit sad I didn’t bring my camera that day, but I decided that shopping without a big SLR around my neck might get me some better deals.
Well, I didn’t buy anything, but I do have my eyes set on a replacement external hard drive. A shop on the second level was the only one that was carrying an external hard drive enclosure that supports a single SATA drive and includes a Firewire (only 400Mb/s) output. Why would I want to use Firewire (aka IEEE 1394), as opposed to the cheaper USB 2.0 that is everywhere and has a higher (burst) speed rating?
USB 2.0 is great because it’s quick and dirty, but Firewire wins in a couple important respects. First of all, USB transfers are managed in a master-slave configuration. This means that when you connect your computer to an external drive, for instance, it’s your computer that’s doing all the hard ‘thinking’ work. With Firewire, transfers are mutually coordinated, which frees up the CPU for more important things (like image processing).
So the plan is to head back to Nova on Sunday to pick up the external drive enclosure and a 500GB Seagate drive, while helping my dad pick out a new laptop (he’s coming up to Taipei for the day).
In the meanwhile, I’ve been shooting lots, but haven’t really gone through and done much organizing. Yesterday, my aunt took me to Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, which was packed with really amazing artifacts that date back 8000 years. This picture was taken in a garden adjacent to the museum itself:
Fa1 Dai1 (发呆)
Fa1 Dai1 means ‘to do nothing’, and a Fa1 Dai1 Ting2 (发呆亭) is a gazebo where one does nothing :)
— Emery Ku
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