The Past Year: An Overdrive of Happiness

picnik is awesome

Random Observation/Comment #183: In some sense, I feel like I’ve been on vacation for the past year.  I’ve exceeded my set-goals and began aspiring for so much more than just a few degrees.  I really have been taking life in every word, and it makes me extremely happy.  This year has been the best year of my life, and I felt the same way the year before.  It’s like I finally put everything to use and seriously considered a right career for myself.  Everything looks so colorful, and I’m trying to pinpoint its source so I could maintain it for my entire life.  This blog was devoted to finding these little nuances about myself, but I wound up discovering something so much more meaningful.  I walked through a tunnel which inspired me to live a little differently.  I think I finally understand the liberal arts degree (although, it is still quite useless) – it is okay to not know what you’re going to do with your life, although I highly suggest finding a useful degree before finding the answer to this question.  There’s nothing wrong with taking that year off before starting a career and I’m actually not sure why I rushed everything (besides being anal about efficiency).  There will be plenty of time to make money and we will always be in debt in one form or another, so why not make some incredible memories?  Life is short and selfishness is a great temporary solution.  I may later find that devoting my life towards the love of my future wife and children would be an even greater reward, but why can’t we aspire for Tony Stark’s life right now?  “So you’re a man with everything, yet nothing.”

In lieu of the 100 days of presidency (which was quite some time ago, but whatever), I began thinking about the different phases in my life.  I started ranking the top 5 experiences in every topic possible and then evaluated the hobbies that I hold dear.  My personal projects keep me sane and really give this world some color.  How else would I define myself?  Am I just a Frankenstein of all those who have influence me in my life?  The dynamics of this personality growth is actually quite fascinating, but I don’t have enough time to even begin looking into quantifying, or even qualifying, the data in personalities.  It would probably be similar to a person having a hundred different types of “tags” and then comparing them four-dimensionally to the complex society hierarchy.  I think I just blew my mind.

Anyway, the past year has been amazing, but I wanted to statistically see the amount of fun I was having with each of my activities in everyday life.  I’m curious at how everything breaks down in graphs and charts, so I started my own little side project that basically shows my own evolution.  I don’t want it to be simply setup pictures of myself as the days pass – that’s been over-done.  Instead, I’m imagining a full time chart evaluating my favorite hobbies with their impacts on my lives.  I’m sure someone is already building something like this with the twitter api (globally comparing tags of real-time aggregated data), so I’ll just keep it specific.

The presentation of this material still needs to be refined, but I’ll give a sneak preview with a few facts about my photography in the last year:

• In the 3 months I was in Japan (6/3/08 – 9/1/08), I took 12,511 pictures (24.9GB), averaging 139 pictures a day
• During my Master’s thesis (9/2/08 – 2/22/09), I took 1,942 pictures (1.78GB), averaging 11 pictures a day
• Since I’ve arrived in Europe (2/23/09 – 5/5/09), I took 13,930 pictures (28.6GB), averaging 196 pictures a day
• Of the total 28,383 pictures (55.28GB) I’ve taken since Japan, 2,172 have been of food (3.64 GB), which is close to 1 out of 15 pictures.
• Assuming it takes approximately 1 second to take a picture, I’ve spent 28,383 seconds/ 473 minutes/ 7.88 hours of my past 9 months holding down that button.

I started with this photography obsession because it’s been the main source of my travels.  The graph for this data is shown below.  (Yes, I just went there.)

I simply designated the dates for the different trips with the above statistics.  It was not difficult to write a program to search through a directory and save the dates, size, and counts of these dates in a database (I would have been shunned by my computer if I didn’t).

I’m oddly proud of this photography accomplishment (even though it should be embarrassingly nerdy).  It just makes me happy that I’ve looked at this project with a full perspective.  Since I have all this data, I’m going to brainstorm different ways of presenting it.  I’m planning on generalizing this to other activities, but it’s difficult to quantify every aspect of improvement.  The next step is definitely writing.

~See Lemons Statistize

A Photographer’s Paradise

 

 

I wish I could have this guy's view.

Random Observation/Comment #176: Fuji-san was such a remarkable experience that I compare every hiking scene to the rollercoaster of hardships and appreciation for nature throughout the entire journey.  From the exhaustion and freezing cold to the final reward of watching that Heaven above all clouds, I had truly stretched my boundaries of emotions.  Every short-breath I took and lactic acid build-up I ignored was for that payoff; however, at the end of the day, it was the full experience that made that one of my most memorable 24 hours.  Schiltorn was a little different.  We walked for 30 minutes and then took a series of gondolas to the top where we proceeded to drink a beer in a revolving 360 restaurant on a clear day.  This was nothing short of mind-numbingly beautiful, but I missed the hardships of the climb.  I undoubtedly loved every moment, but now that I analyze the day, my tiredness was not because of this mix of sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and frozen limbs, but rather due to an over-exertion of my eyes as to not blink and possibly shaft myself from an extra millisecond.  This makes me wonder if I rather be lazy to see the reward or truly badass to follow the road with potholes, killer hitch hikers, and all.  For now, let’s remember that I’m on vacation.

 

Schilthorn is not the Top of Europe, but it was recommended over Jungfrau due to its 360 view of over 200 peaks on a clear day, the rotating 360 restaurant, and the chance of having better weather.  The entire week I was in Interlaken, Jungfrau was always cloudy (or at least not as clear as Schilthorn).  I think there is an ice museum of some sort at Jungfrau, but I bet spending an hour in that spinning restaurant is much better than any pictures of ice sculptures.  I have never been to the Top of Europe so I won’t pass too much judgment, but I can’t imagine how it’s better than what I saw at Schilthorn.

The journey to Schilthorn from the bottom of the mountain was as follows: 7CHF train ride to Lauterbrunnen, 14CHF tram ride to Grutschlap, walk to Gimmelwald across the snowed-in village, 36CHF for the tram to Birg and then Schilthorn.  This is expensive, but it’s totally worth it.  I decided to take it to the next level and spend 15EUR at the restaurant – I mean, you just have to.  The prices at the top weren’t even that expensive.  It was basically the normal price of $4 a beer, which is standard pricing from NYC.

Each tram ride to the intermediate stops made me think that this place could not be any more beautiful; every single time, I was proven wrong by the next station.  There are only a few things that follow this trend and they should all be cherished for following that exponential curve (graphed love of life vs time).  I hope everyone has the opportunity to walk around this platform and actually try to choose the direction with the better view.  It took some time after walking in circles a few times, but there was one side that just whispered serenity.  To make sure I covered my bases, I took a million (like, a million) pictures and a 6-part video series of walking around.  The camera does not begin to capture my happiness, but it does its job of reminding my senses to rush me back to that moment.

The 360 restaurant takes about 45 minutes for a full revolution. After being to quite a few fancy places around the world, this was – hands-down – the best view I’ve ever seen from a restaurant.   The beer even tasted better when complimented with this view.  Apparently, a James Bond movie was filmed here, but that’s just one of those details that can be stored as a small nugget of information after looking outside.  It’s difficult to find a seat on the outer edge, but I would suggest waiting for one.  A good technique would be to sit next to a couple that looks like they’ve done this a million times, but happened to land a good spot.  If you can’t spot this type of couple, you should at least avoid sitting next to foreigners with cameras – they’re definitely not leaving anytime soon.  With that said, we stayed for 1.25 hours and had an extremely enjoyable meal.  The cheese platter was not as large as we expected, but the thinly sliced Swiss cheese basically transformed into milk after touching your tongue and lips.  I jizzed in my pants.  This would be one out of many times for this day.  Dare I say, this was deemed a day long jizz extravaganza.  I think you get the point; this place was incredible.

Even without this experience, my week in Interlaken would have been worth every second, but by adding this day of just being immersed in a blanket of peaks, I could not have been happier with my choices and life in general.  It was that moment that I fell in love with mountains.  They remind me of boobies (I know that was completely uncalled for, but whatever).

~See Lemons Happy with Life

 

This was my favorite side of the 360 view

And the pictures begin…

 

 

 

A picture of a guy taking a picture of St. Paul's

Random Observation/Comment #148: If there is one advice for the obsessive photographer, it would be to bring an external hard drive for prolonged visits.  Without mine, I would definitely not make it through this 6-month journey, let alone 2 months.  The 320GB Western Digital Passport has been ideal in every respect.  I don’t use it without plugging-in my laptop, so I’m not sure how the lack-of-a-power-supply feature drains the laptop’s batteries, but I must say that the size is incredible/convenient/incredibly convenient (It’s only a few cm in each dimension larger than my iPhone).  It might be a little slow for transferring large amounts of legal music (ehem), but I have not seen a significantly noticeable slow-down for streaming movies stored externally.  For $90, it was a great buy*.

 

 

The pictures on my Facebook profile will have some… descriptive (for the lack of a better word)… descriptions and tell a bit of the story.  Unfortunately, the 1600 photos that I’ve taken so far (I’ve only been here 5 days) will take quite some time to upload onto albums (I need to upload 20 albums [60 photos each]).  After this remark, I expect some surprised faces and “daayuumm’s”, but I know that my parents and brother read this news and react with a slightly dismissive headshake.  In fact, it’s incorrect to even label this as news – it’s more like a given variable; nay, it’s as well accepted as π or ε₀ (permittivity of free space, in case you were wondering).  If I do not meet the quota of pictures, they would probably be concerned that I had fallen ill for the day.  They couldn’t even imagine uncharged batteries or accidentally leaving the camera at home because they know I wear the wrist strap (with the camera attached to it) as a fashion accessory.  This camera effectively replaces my cell phone.  Maybe now that I’ve revealed this nugget of information, this obsession is more understandable, or at least, less weird – okay, it’s still weird. 

The picture-taking-bit is not my purpose for traveling, but it does give me something to do while I’m making my observations.  It’s become more than a habit – it’s an addiction.  I remember everything I do without the photography, but it really does take less effort to press a button than write the thousands of words required to describe the photo.  Given the number of photos I’ve taken, I’d be writing forever – I’m not describing pictures and I already feel like I’ll be writing forever. 

What if I didn’t have a camera? *Shudders* I’ve had nightmares with this exact same theme.  Well, it’s not as bad as the one about the giant camera chasing me with his flash replaced by laser beams, but it’s up there.  Now that I actually consider the situation of leaving the camera at home, I would probably use my notebook a little more frequently and I’d definitely become a better sketch artist.  In general, this obsession does not control me.  I CAN fight it – well, sort of.

~See Lemons Addicted

 

*I was not paid to do this as an advertisement.  

I'm a bit addicted...