10 Great Movie/TV Opening Titles

They say brevity is the soul of wit, and the 3- to 5-minute running time of your average movie or tv show's opening titles is often a great way to put this saying to the test. These little packages of text, music and visuals are oftentimes my favorite part of a film; like a great appetizer, it not only warms up the audience for the main course, but also introduces some of its own unique flavor into the mix. This collection below lists some of my favorites, as well as links to each video whenever available.

Dawn of the Dead

Zack Snyder, dir. Kyle Cooper, designer.

News footage, creepy photography, bloodied but minimalist typography and quite possibly the most effective use of a Johnny Cash song ever.

Watchmen

Zack Snyder, dir. yu+Co, designer.

Possibly my favorite opening sequence of all-time, this marvelous piece by title-designers extraordinnaire yu+Co chronicles the alternate history of the world of the Watchmen. Again, it's made all the more gripping by the use of a classic Bob Dylan song, "The Time They Are a-Changin'." (Noticing a trend with Snyder's taste in titles ...)

Lord of War

Andrew Niccol, dir. L.E.S.T., designer.

A soul-less recounting of the life of a bullet; a very creative way to kick off a movie about gun runners. The whole sequence is very HDR and feels like you're inside a first-person shooter. Some people thought it was a bit too kitschy for the subject matter, especially when you consider how it ends, but I've always loved it for the strength of concept.

Casino Royale

Martin Campbell, dir. Daniel Kleinman, designer.

From a graphical perspective, the Casino Royale title sequence is probably the most "designed" of any of the sequences on this list. Every frame is loaded with undulating symbols and elements, and is noteworthy for being the only 007 opening that doesn't feature any sexy women in it.

Stranger than Fiction

Marc Forster, dir. MK12, designer.

How can you not love this sequence? The Spoon soundtrack coupled with Emma Thompson's acerbic voiceover are the perfect backdrop for the beautiful faux 3D typography. (I'm not 100% certain, but I think the MK12 guys pioneered this kind of rendering back in the early 2000's; this is simply the most well-known use of it.)

True Blood

Alan Ball, designer.

Considering that I've seen this sequence over a dozen times, I'm astounded by how much I still respond to the visuals and audio. Featuring Jace Everett's "Bad Things" as its theme, these titles brilliantly capture the murky, grimey feel of this great TV show.

Dexter

Digital Kitchen

Magnificent juxtaposition of everyday actions with the show's clinical exploration of serial killing. Rolfe Kent's theme is just a fantastic match.

Se7en

David Fincher, dir. Kyle Cooper, designer.

Kyle Cooper of Imaginary Forces/Prologue is a virtuoso at this sort of thing: small, tightly-framed bits of footage, atmospheric music and chicken-scratch typography. (See also The Incredible Hulk for more of his work.) The theme music is a remix of Nine Inch Nail's "Closer" by Coil.

Panic Room

David Fincher, dir. Arthur Max, designer.

This brilliant little sequence gave birth to a new trend in titling, that of inserting the actual words into the scene that they are describing (most notably on the show Fringe), but it's actually a modernization of a similar technique employed in the classic North by Northwest. Although these titles make it appear as if you're seeing footage with CG titles superimposed on them, there are quite a number of parts where the entire scene is CG, including the buldings themselves. (Way more information about this sequence than you ever needed, here.)

Catch Me If You Can

Steven Spielberg, dir. Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas, designers.

This wonderfully retro animation by French designers Kuntzel and Degas encapsulates the entire movie into about 5 minutes. The music by John Williams is uncharacteristically playful - a simply beautiful combination.

25 First Dates

The following is a small collection of moments and impressions on various first encounters over the past 10 years. It isn't chronological, nor is it ordered by preference. It isn't a definitive list either; if I've gone out with you or someone close to you during the past decade and you can't find any mention of it here, please do not take offense. It doesn't mean I've forgotten, it's more likely that I was simply unable to encapsulate our date into a three-sentence abstract. It's not you, it's me, as the old nugget goes. Please also note that some details have been intentionally modified, to protect the identities of the individuals involved. Coz you know, I'm considerate like that.

1. We're in a jeepney and I can't remember where the restaurant is. We step off, and I realize that I've overshot by nearly 200 meters. The sun is baking and I'm too embarrassed to look at her as we walk briskly to the corner. She pulls out a folding umbrella and says, "Hey, it's ok." At the restaurant, I realize that I underestimated how much the food cost, and am doing nervous math in my head to make sure I brought enough cash. She says, "Would you like me to share the bill with you?"

2. I'm at a pub, staring at my ashtray. When my date arrives she taps the tabletop in front of me to get my attention. She doesn't smile as she sits down. We talk for hours but every subject turns into a debate. She has a contrary opinion about practically everything, including topics that in my mind don't need to be argued over, like Radiohead or the efficacy of keeping prophylactics in your wallet. Months later, I realize that this is actually a pretty annoying characteristic.

3. We're sitting outside on an Ortigas sidewalk. It's past midnight and the call center kids are milling around on their smoke break. She's not a smoker yet at this point, and she watches me drag on my cigarette while we talk about emo bands. She says, "Further Seems Forever." I say, "Mineral."

4. I'm at a Starbucks, facing the sunset. My date walks up to me and the first thing she asks is if I've eaten. As we have croissants together, she talks, and crumbs fly out of her mouth peppering the black metal table between us. I find myself fixated on these for the entire duration of our conversation. I never see her again.

5. I'm in my car, and my date waves from across the drive. She walks up, steps lightly inside and apologizes for being late. She's smiling brilliantly at me, and I find myself developing proverbial butterflies in my stomach for the first time in 5 years. A week later, she leaves forever.

6. She has a little girl's voice and smokes like a chimney, her eyes backlit with what seemed like eternal amusement. When the bill arrives, she wants to pay for it. I consider this briefly until I notice that it's over 5k. I promise her that she can get the next one.

7. She's taller than me, in heels. She knows this, and shows up in flats. We're the only people in the restaurant and when the waiter arrives with a wine menu I confess that I know next to nothing about any of this. I can't tell if she does, but she doesn't correct me as I muddle my way through ordering.

8. The crowded bar is lit with colorful spotlights, and she shows up in body glitter. She walks towards my couch like I'm the only guy in the whole joint, and I instantly love her for it.

9. We're sitting across from each other in a booth at a Shakey's. I have a book I want to show, and I stand up to sit beside her. As I do so, she shifts away imperceptibly so that there's exactly 6 inches of space between us when my butt hits the seat. We don't sleep together until the third date.

10. We're on our second bucket of beer and when she talks she leans forwards like she's about to fall over. Around us waiters are stacking chairs and turning off lights. She tries to negotiate with one of them to let us take away a third bucket.

11. She's in a small black dress and we're dining al fresco. Her skin is almost completely white, and under the dim garden lights the effect is not unlike noir. For the first time in my life, I'm able to raise my hand at a restaurant and have a waiter respond within 2 seconds; they keep hovering around our table.

12. I'm at a bookstore, watching her legs take her from one pile of sale items to the next. She frees a Sophie Kinsella book from the stack, noncommittally leafing through it like she's waiting for something. I peer at her from across the mountain of books. Finally I lean forward and ask her if it's any good, "coz you've been reading it for like 15 minutes." I berate myself inwardly for the terrible pickup line, and the conversation becomes clumsy. The universe decides to give me a hand, and it begins to pour outside - big palm-slaps of rain against concrete. I start to relax. "Hey, we're trapped!" I complain, and her laughter is like wind chimes. I leave the store with her number in my phone.

13. She orders a Black Russian for me; I'd never tried it before. As I sip it cautiously we stare out into the Fort's unfinished landscape and talk about her lesbian experimentation back in high school. She tells me about a gorgeous ex-girlfriend, and how she'd introduce me when circumstances allowed. I chug, and order another.

14. I'm working while at a Coffee Bean, and she comes up behind me, and hands me a postcard. She's walked off before I can turn around. On the back of it, she's written the lyrics of my favorite Wolf Parade song, and a caricature of me working while at a Coffee Bean. Years later I'll randomly spot her on Facebook, and notice that she looks like a prettier version of the lead singer of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

15. It's 3AM and she hands me a magic brownie. It's moist and it makes popping sounds as the seeds are ground under my teeth. We talk about the businesses we're currently attempting to bootstrap, our growth strategies, and the likelihood of skipping the angel stage and going straight to mezzanine. Then we get the munchies.

16. We're sitting opposite each other, with Thai food between us. I observe that she has a smile that could light up a room, and she gives me an idea for a new webtoy. I release it the following week, right around the time I ask her out again.

17. I'm explaining the difference between ales and lagers, and my hands are grasping furtively at nothing under the table. She won't let me smoke in front of her and it's making me jittery. We have next to nothing in common and I have to stretch considerably to keep the conversation going. She's smarter than I am, which I find mildly disconcerting. Three years from this night, she'll get married and I'll refuse to attend the ceremony.

18. It's a humid summer evening and we're outside sharing my last cigarette. Our glasses of Grey Goose are perspiring into wooden coasters. She's telling me about ex-boyfriends but I'm distracted by her cleavage. She asks me a yes or no question, and I say, "Cool. Cool."

19. There's a row of empty beer bottles in front of us, and we're both talking slower. We're sharing deeply personal stories about previous sexual encounters, and her hand finds its way on to my knee. I look at it and wonder why I hadn't thought to do that. Then I notice my hand is on the small of her back. It had been there for so long that my shoulder had stiffened from holding the position.

20. We're crossing the street together and she has a black bolero jacket on over a tiny white tank. It's warm out, and she shrugs it off. She arches her back and unfusses her hair majestically as we walk. A guy on a motorcycle almost smashes into a car as he rides past us.

21. I'm at a party, working on tomorrow's hangover. She arrives late, better dressed than everyone else there. I swipe a bottle of cheap wine when no one's looking and, sitting together on a glass platform, we polish it off in about half an hour. She pronounces my name wrong each time she says it. It takes me a year to realize that this is perhaps on purpose.

22. We're at a bookstore, after school. She's pointing out which romance novels she's read. She doesn't look at me as she talks, her eyes darting up and down the shelves instead. Everytime our hands graze each other, my palms go sweaty. I am familiar with many of these authors and have actually read some of these books, but all I can do is nod impotently.

23. We're at her apartment and she's handing me a bowl of chocolate ice cream. It has pineapples and cornflakes in it, and I am inexplicably delighted. It's raining outside. We pass the treasured bowl back and forth between us until it's empty, then we turn and stare at the television. I realize 11 months later how appropriate a metaphor this was for our relationship.

24. It's Valentine's Day, and I have flowers. We're in the middle of a crowd, getting jostled by teenagers clamoring for beer. I hand her the bouquet, and she takes it without emotion. I see her, later in the evening, tossing them unceremoniously into the back of her car. Six years pass before I gather the courage to give flowers to anyone on V-Day again.

25. It's the night after her birthday and I hand her a large stuffed kitty. She keeps it on her lap the entire evening and when I lean forwards to kiss her good night, the kitty gets mashed between us. Many years later I will mistakenly buy this same stuffed toy again, and give it to someone else. I will not realize this dating faux pas until I sit down one Saturday morning to write a blog entry about twenty-five memorable first dates.

9 Things I've Learned from 90 Days with a DSLR

It’s now almost exactly 90 days since I bought the Canon 50D along with a bag full of gear, and if you’ve been following me in places other than this blog, you’re probably already be very much aware (possibly to the point of discomfort) of how much photography has interpolated itself into my life. So here I am, listing down a grab-bag of various photographic truisms that I’ve come to understand over these first three months with a DSLR. I’m very new to all this, so many of the things on this list – indeed, likely all of them – will be common-knowledge to more experienced photographers. Please also be aware that I’ll be using my own work as examples throughout this piece, not for any reason other than that I need constant, unswerving affirmation that I'm not a total newb.

Also, I like lists. So should you.

1. Holy shit, Nikon really is better than Canon.

Ok, so let’s get the controversial item out of the way first: the more I improve, the more I wish I had gone with a Nikon body instead of a Canon one. Although this is arguably a consequence of my shooting style (i.e., to light the shit out of everything), in a much larger sense, it’s because Nikon is at the forefront of camera technology right now. I’m talking specifically about the Creative Lighting System here, which is built-in on most of their high-end cameras. Now, I’ve never personally used CLS because I’ve never used a Nikon system, but the fact that there’s no way to mimic it – even on paper, theoretically – with a Canon system says a whole frickin’ lot. Sure you can fire a flash wirelessly with any DSLR, but not without a bunch of external accessories. And there’s no way to manually-set your flashes wirelessly from your camera, which is a big deal when you’re working in a tight space and your flashes aren’t easy to reach. (There’s a longer discussion on this matter here, if you’re interested, and an even longer dissertation by the great Ken Rockwell here. There are specific situations, to be fair, where the Canon rigs shine, but in terms of flexibility and simplicity, it’s no contest.)

2. Av Mode = 95%

Nearly every pro I’ve read about defaults to Aperture-priority mode, and not full manual mode, 95% of the time when shooting. The theory behind it is that you’re generally more interested in controlling depth of field, than stopping motion (which would be the opposite mode, Shutter-priority). Even if you’re one of those guys who shoots nothing but running children all day long, opening up your aperture will have the effect of giving you fast shutter speeds anyway.

Why not manual though? Because it’s silly to spend several thousand dollars on a sophisticated camera system only to make all the menial decisions yourself. If you’re shooting a landscape in the daytime, you probably already know that you’re going to be closing down to F/16, punching in a low ISO and kicking up your shutter speed. Guess what, so does the camera, but you’ll do it slower. (Note that I said 95% of the time. The other 5% is for the scenarios that really require a human’s creative direction, which is when you would go full manual.)

3. Security guards are not your friends

The only place I feel relatively free to take as many images as I want are in small gig venues like Magnet, 6 Underground or Route 196, or on vacation at the beach. In nearly every other place I’ve spent any amount of time shooting at, the sight of a big DSLR (and especially a tripod) is enough to send building security into conniptions. It turns out that they are strangely blind to handheld point-and-shoots and gorillapods though. Because of this, I’ve learned to only whip the camera out when I already know what I'm shooting, as opposed to walking around with my lens against my face.

4. Noise < Shake

Trying to take a picture in lowlight will usually result in one of two things: excessive amounts of noise in your picture, or a blurry image due to camera shake. The noisiness would be due to the high-sensitivity ISO you picked to capture as much of the scene as possible, while the camera shake would be due to you forcing a low ISO and thus being forced to handhold your camera at un-handholdable shutter speeds. Traditionally, 1/60 is about the lowest shutter speed you can go without the aid of a strobe (see #6). However, advances in lens technology (Image Stabilization in Canon, and Vibration Reduction in Nikon) has allowed us to bend this rule slightly and still get great results at 1/40.

Now, if you happen to find yourself in a lowlight situation and you have a choice between kicking your ISO up to 3200 or throwing your shutter speed down to 1/10, choose the former. Allow your image to noise it up. It won't look pretty on your LCD, but as per renowned local photographer Jo Avila, “There are plenty of ways to reduce digital noise in Photoshop, but there’s no way to fix camera shake.”

5. Photography is not about showing what was there …

It’s about showing what you saw there. It’s a small difference, and I’ll make the effort not to wax too poetic here. People sometimes think that photography should be honest; in other words, it should capture a scene as it was, with little grooming or primping. This is because they confuse photography (in general) with photojournalism (specifically). In the words of the legendary natural-light photographer Jay Maisel, “The very nature of photography has always been to resemble something, but not to be identical to it.”

Part of the reason why I’m starting to really get into lighting is because it lets me emphasize the stuff I’m interested in within a scene while diminishing everything else. Here’s an example, featuring Mica Cabildo of one of my favorite local bands, Sleepwalk Circus.

Mica has played bass for Sleepwalk with a distinctly stoic expression on her face every single time I’ve seen her, and I wanted to capture her doing something, anything else just once. In this frame, her mouth opened slightly. OH. MY. GOD.

Jokes aside though, throwing the strobe at just her face forces everything else in the image to become secondary. You can still see the bass, and you can tell that you’re seeing a 105.9 event, but the point of the image is clearly to highlight her facial expression. Or in this case, the lack thereof.

This brings me rather conveniently to my next point, which is largely a technical one:

6. Get that strobe off your camera!

The whole emphasizing/de-emphasizing strategy is really hard to pull off if your strobe is attached to your camera. If your light is always going to be coming from 4 inches above your lens, the chances that you’re going to be able to do anything fancy is going to be pretty limited. This is why I feel so strongly about #1, because Nikon’s CLS would let me do this, with no additional commander unit and no extra batteries. With Canon, we’re talking about an additional US$200 device, at the minimum, or a whole new bag of radio triggers, cables and battery packs if you want to go all-out.

Here’s a fun image from last night to illustrate, featuring Gelo Lagasca of The Lowtechs:

If you’ve ever been to Sa Guijo in Makati, you’ll know that there’s no spotlight in that bar from that angle. In fact, there are no lights at all coming from that side; the lead singer’s left is almost completely in darkness. The “spotlight” is actually a single strobe that I’m holding in my left hand while shooting with my right.

Here’s another strobe trick, featuring Edong Bareng, also from the Lowtechs:

Strobe coming from high above, my camera at eye-level. As he swoops downwards, you release your shutter, and everything that the flash hits is frozen in sharp focus. Everything else will blur or be visually diminished. This is because the speed of your flash is so much faster (1/1000th of a second or more) than your shutter that it can usually only illuminate the subject either at the beginning of the exposure or at the end. It’s this quirk that allows you to handhold your camera at speeds less than 1/40 without experiencing excessive camera shake. (I believe my shutter was at 1/4 for this image.)

7. Gear makes a big difference

That title, btw, is cribbed from Scott Kelby’s The Digital Photography book. Many people argue that equipment is secondary to photographer skill, citing examples of photographers with five-dollar cameras winning awards and all sorts of accolades. While I don’t disagree that that’s possible, I will point out that for every one photographer who takes award-winning, one-of-a-kind photos with 5-dollar cameras, there are 99,999 photographers who take them with 5,000-dollar camera systems. If you consider yourself to be an auteur of that level (one in a hundred thousand), then by all means, take your 5-dollar camera out and kick everyone’s ass with it. Scott Kelby puts this another way:

Give Jay Maisel a point-and-shoot, and he’ll take point-and-shoot shots that could hang in a gallery, but the problem is, we’re not as good as Jay Maisel.

Now, I don’t mean that you should buy every piece of equipment you can get your hands on. There’s a deliberate, cognizant path to accumulating the proper camera system over time, and it really depends on where your various photographic interests lie. Unfortunately, I didn’t take that path myself and instead bought as much stuff as I could get my greedy little paws on early on. Apart from the fact that it took a good long while before I learned how to use all that crap, I also ended up amassing things I didn’t need. I’ve taken steps to fix this now though, selling some lens and consolidating my gear as much as I can. But I digress.

I should mention though that nowhere is the aforementioned difference felt more than in the glass. I’ve had the good fortune to play with a couple of Canon L lenses these past weeks and it’s startling how huge the difference in visual acuity is between these and the regular line. Depending on which ones you buy, you could spend anywhere between $700 to a few thousand, but the sharpness, speed of operation and solid build quality is just awe-inspiring.

And as a corollary to this:

8. There are only two types of tripods …

... Those that are easy to carry, and the good ones (as per renowned travel photographer and author Bill Fortney). Advances in high-end tripod technology (carbon fiber bodies, for example) have allowed us to create tripods that you could travel to outer space with, but they haven’t gotten any lighter. This is by design, because you need something that can support your 2- or 3-kilo DSLR/lens package even in the most precarious of positions. Lighter tripods get knocked over by the wind, topple over in uneven terrain, and experience camera shake when you press the shutter.

The other thing about tripods is that they’re the kind of purchase where you absolutely must buy the most expensive one you can afford. The reason is that tripods don’t go through the same cycle of forced obsolence that cameras do. You could buy that US$400 tripod today and still be using it 10 years from now, so if you look at it that way, you’re only really paying $0.10/day for it.

Last one, and then let’s call it a day:

9. Don’t take the obvious shot

Whenever possible: Don’t shoot down at flowers. Don’t shoot up at buildings. Don’t shoot people from eye-level. This is already how 99% of your viewers see the world, and showing them the same thing isn’t photography, it’s reportage. Choosing a different angle can make a normal subject look kinda cool (if I do say so myself :P) :

One of the most magical things about photography is that it freezes time around these small visual miracles that are occurring right under our very noses, and that we would otherwise miss because we just don’t bother to look down:

Or look up:

The way we look at the world is what separates “photographers” from “guys with cameras,” and though I consider myself still more of the latter than the former, I am certainly working hard at the transition.

If you liked this post, check out my Flickr photostream here, and follow me on Twitter here.

[UPDATE] Check out the comments for some important bits of info from other (more experienced) photographers who happened to stumble on this entry. For the sake of fidelity, I'm not going to change anything I wrote in the above piece, so please see the handful of mistakes or misconceptions pointed out by commenters.

On Being Lone.ly

I kicked off my birth-week yesterday, and though I’m tempted to dole out the usual whine-and-cheese about inching closer to my success deadline (age 30) without being any closer to the actual success, I’ve decided to focus on the positive stuff instead.

I’m referring here to being lonely, of course, and how I’m using my current state of emotional unrest to make the world a better place for you, dear Reader.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll probably have noticed quite a bit of chatter over the past 10 days regarding a new web toy called Everyone.isLone.ly. The idea was borne out of an essay I wrote earlier in the year about finding your soul mate online, developed further by a talk I gave during a PWDO mini-conference last month, and finally solidified as an actual product concept over lunch at a small Thai resto in the heart of the Ortigas CBD.

From the home page blurb:

Are you really compatible with your friends? Jot down your criteria on IsLone.ly and either rate your friends, or have them rate themselves against your list. Then ask them to create their own personal lists of criteria and compare your ratings!

I’m the kind of person who tends to analyze situations to the point of excess. When it comes to people and relationships, I make lists, elaborate plans and conduct lengthy post-game introspections when things go awry. It’s not due to an aversion to spontaneity that I do this though; I just find that I get more enjoyment out of life when I take the time to appreciate and think about every single detail of it.

What I’ve noticed though, is that not a lot of people are like that. I’m not certain whether it’s primarily a matter of time or inclination. When asked the question, “What do you look for in a partner?” the usual responses are vague and indeterminate. “Someone who’s smart” or “rich” or “has a nice ass” are pretty common answers, but without any real qualifiers as to what constitutes “smart” or “rich”. (A “nice” ass is a pretty relative condition as well, but at least it’s localized to a small, oft-viewed area.) When pressed, a lot of people will often admit that they hadn’t really thought about it too much. To this, I will haughtily reply, “You mean, you didn’t think about it enough.”

Everyone.isLone.ly is a toy for making these lists. Everyone maintains a unique set of criteria for potential partners, and on isLone.ly this list is made public. Each criterion is weighted, since not all requirements are as important or mandatory as others. For example, “personal hygiene” is probably at least 4 or 5 times more important than say, “a decent DVD collection.”

People then come in and rate themselves according to the criteria you defined, and if you like, you can rate yourselves according to their criteria as well. We thin-slice the concept of “compatibility” by looking at how high two people’s mutual ratings are.

This system isn’t perfect of course, and as of this writing, I’m still working out a number of conceptual as well as technical issues. From the brief 10 days people have been using the app, feedback has been very positive though. We’ve managed to pump out over 20,000 pageviews in under 2 weeks of operations, with nothing but mentions from a handful of friends buoying us along.

There’s an entertainment angle to this whole idea as well: a few days ago we started putting together fictitious accounts based on pop culture characters, and the response has been very encouraging. Even people like Edward Cullen, Dr. Manhattan, Chuck Norris and Greg House, M.D. can be lonely apparently, and for a lot of fans, there’s a fairly pronounced interest in finding out how compatible they are with their favorite celebrities.

So check us out and let me know what you all think. I’m at Luis.isLone.ly if you want to find out how compatible we are ;)

Pitching Sex: Erotic Club Economics

I found myself rather unexpectedly at an erotic club in Makati last night – my first time in a long time. It was a weird feeling, like visiting a home you had vacated years ago, and finding it now alive, with strangely-lit furniture. I’d never been to this particular place before, but all erotic clubs in Metro Manila are essentially the same. The elevated stage, the poles, the shaped lighting, the faux leather upholstery, the smell of airconditioned perspiration and cheap cologne … I could write a haiku if it wasn’t so easy.

As always I found myself thinking about the economics of the place, and wondering how things had changed since I had last bothered to look. For the uninitiated: your average night club’s profits revolve around ladies’ drinks, which male guests buy for them in exchange for a chunk of their time, usually an hour’s worth. This 60-minute window will usually include just enough fondling and titillating conversation to guarantee another drink, and a third after that. The girls are paid by the number of drinks their guests buy for them, you see. Their cut is usually around 25% of gross, which in real terms means they make about Php100 per hour in a mid-range club like the one we were in. On a really good night (i.e., if they work a full 8 or 9 hours), they make a little under a grand for their trouble, excluding tips. On average though, it’s more like PhP400 to PhP500.

What complicates things is that the girls need to convince their guest to buy them a drink first. The sales pitch itself takes time, and usually includes some pre-payment groping to expedite matters. I was pleasantly surprised last night to find that the standard spiel was still there, even after all this time.

It goes thusly (and I swear to god this is probably in some training manual somewhere):

1. 1. Shake hand of guest, or kiss guest on cheek.


2. 2. Ask guest’s name, then introduce yourself.
   
   “Anong name mo?”


3. 3. If it looks like it’s the guest’s first time, confirm it.
   
   “First time nyo ba dito?”


4. 4. The guest will answer in the affirmative, usually followed by some explanation. The most common is:
   
   “Gusto lang namin itry.” (We just wanted to try it.)
   
   My answer: “Hindi ko nga alam na dito kami pupunta e.” (I didn’t even know we were going here.)


5. 5. The next two questions are interchangeable. Either they ask your age, or where you work.
   
   “Ilang taon ka na?” or “San ka nagwowork?”
   
   I’ve seen a few guys use the age question as an opportunity to pull off a quasi-icebreaker, and answer “Hulaan mo.” (“Guess.”) The girls have probably heard this trick so many times that they’ve got canned responses ready for this as well. Usually they’ll make a playful game out of alternately guessing, or teasing the answer out of you. I got the work question instead, to which I replied, “Sa Ortigas.” (In Ortigas.)

The initial script usually ends there. If the guest isn’t into her, the girl needs to either get creative, or move on. These exchanges require some measure of mutual interest, after all. That said, there are also a handful of straplines that they throw around in the middle of the conversation, exempli gratia:

“Wala pa nga akong isang araw/linggo/buwan dito” (I’ve been working here less than a day/week/month)

I’ve heard this one so many times that I wonder if there are any veterans in this industry at all. (There are, but they usually turn into floor managers or mama sans.) I imagine they use this line to make it appear as if they are new and therefore, innocent, and therefore, gullible, and therefore, worth exploring further.

“Pinapaaral ko lang sarili ko” (I’m just putting myself through college)

I love this one, because it pulls on your heartstrings and it’s inspiring. Who wouldn’t want to buy a girl a drink, after all, if she was channeling that money into her education? The sex would almost be secondary.

I got an earful of these and other standard lines of dialogue from the first girl who sat beside me. After about 15 minutes of fairly neutral responses from her audience, she gave up and walked off, leaving me to my beer and my cigarettes.

What I like about this particular club (at least, if I were in that kind of mood) is how the floor managers were orchestrating things behind the scenes. It’s the FM’s job to move the inventory in the most efficient manner possible, so they’ll generally throw the unpopular girls at you first. Kinda like old fish at the wet market.

Girl #2 appeared next to me within a minute of Girl #1 leaving. This one was only mildly more interesting than the first, and since I honestly had no intention of having more than a few beers at this place, she didn’t make much headway either. After No. 2 gave up, a top-tier girl took her place. This one apparently decided the couch wasn’t comfortable enough for her and decided to sit on my lap instead. No more boring dialogue, just lots of vigorous gyration and heavy breathing. Like an erotic elevator pitch, this girl had distilled her craft down to its most pure form, and from a technical perspective, I don’t think a more compelling way exists to sell a guy on something.

I suppose I should’ve bought her a drink on pure principle: I don’t believe honest effort should go unrewarded, after all. But we were leaving and thankfully I never had to cross that particular line. Another thing I like about this place: all of the girls say goodbye to you as you leave. I mean, I knew they were all cursing under the breath for having wasted their time with me, but hell, you can’t win every pitch.

True Crime: Confessions of a Criminal Mastermind

Sometimes, after enough rounds of alcohol with friends, someone will ask the inevitable question, "What's the worst crime you've ever committed?" I know from experience that this is usually followed by a sex-related question, as if talking about some homicide I perpetrated last month would open me up to an intimate conversation on lovemaking do's and dont's.

The most common answers to the crime question are generally harmless: "I shoplifted once because I hated my parents" or "I ran over a small animal, and just kept going" or "I stole a bag of marijuana from a passed-out friend." Theft and cruelty to animals figure pretty highly on these lists, it turns out.

I always give the same answer, and it's a real doozy: "I stole parking for 3 months."

I then embark on a circuitous retelling of how this came to happen, and why it is that I no longer park in Greenbelt 1, Makati City. This same story is what I will now relate to you, dear reader, so that the next time we have a drink, you won't need to ask me this. You can skip straight to the juicier followup question.

The whole affair began in early 2008, around the time that I was going to Makati 5 days a week, sometimes for 14 hours at a stretch. Syndeo was in a rough spot and I was under the impression that spending more time in the office was going to pull us out of it. (It didn't, but that's another story.)

As you're probably all aware, parking in Makati is expensive, and staying for inordinately long periods would often cost upwards of PhP300/day. So I decided to rent a parking slot from Greenbelt 1, which they were selling at the relative bargain price of PhP3,000 per month. I signed a one-month lease agreement in a small office under the stairs and forked over my PhP3,000. In exchange, they gave me a Greenbelt 1 car pass with my name and the date handwritten on the back with a ballpoint pen.

The next day, I drove up to the entrance and handed my car pass proudly to the lady in the booth. She had never seen one of these before, and had to radio the admin office for instructions. Eventually, she just waved me through, as it turns out that there was no real protocol for parking leases yet. Likewise, when I left the lot late that evening, the lady at the exit looked at my pass dumbly for a few seconds before raising the gate and thanking me for my patronage. A small bird chirped quietly in the back of my mind, but I paid it no heed. Not yet, anyway.

That first week, I spent a total of 70 hours in Makati, which would have cost about PhP1500 if I had been parking ala carte instead of all-you-can-eat. In the mornings, I'd arrive, and the lady in the booth would smile at me and I would smile back. In the evenings, I'd leave, and receive a similar smile, and a mouthed "Bye, sir."

I was clearly getting my money's worth here.

This continued for the remainder of that month, and as I approached the last day of my lease, I was certain that I'd renew it. Then, a funny thing happened. The last day of my lease turned out to be a Sunday, which was the only day of the week that I wasn't in Makati. Had I been in the CBD on that day, the rest of this story would've turned out differently, but as it happened, I wasn't. The next day was Monday, and I was in a big rush. I drove up to the lot, flashed my car pass (she didn't even bother to look at it anymore, she was so used to seeing it and my car) and made my way to my assigned space. It was only later at work that I remembered that my car pass had expired and I wasn't supposed to be using it any longer. I made a mental note to renew it the following day. Today was just too busy.

But Tuesday was even busier, and to top things off, I had neglected to fill my wallet with anything but old receipts and a random neoprint. The lady at the entrance was barely even looking at my car pass as I held it up to my windshield. She smiled and nodded at me though as always, and pressed her little button to raise the boom gate. I promised myself that I'd renew my pass before the end of the week, tops.

That didn't happen either, it turned out. By the following week, the little bird in the back of my head was chirping quite loudly. In its sing-song way it was itemizing the various reasons why I could - and should - get away with this for as long as possible.

1. 1. Greenbelt had been gouging me for parking for years. It was time to get even.


2. 2. If I ever got caught, all I'd need to do was feign ignorance, apologize and pay for my parking that day.


3. 3. This was really Greenbelt's fault. There was no mechanism in place to remind their customers about their expiring leases. I was highlighting a flaw in their system by exploiting it thusly.


4. 4. I had more important things to do than to sign another agreement in that dingy little office under the stairs. (This last one occurred to me while I was sipping an Americano at the Coffee Bean garden area, my feet propped up and my laptop displaying an exciting screensaver.)

Armed with this air-tight reasoning, I pushed courageously onwards. My smiles to the ladies at the entrance booth were now intricate disguises; overly jovial displays meant to conceal the fact that I was perpetrating a grievous crime right under their very noses.

A crime that I continued to commit for the next 3 months.

I had actually gone to the trouble of writing over the date on the back of my car pass so it'd look like I had just renewed it. I had also rehearsed a number of possible responses when confronted, mostly involving pointing at invisible three-headed monkeys and then making a run for it.

But nobody ever checked my pass, and nobody ever called me out.

Then one day, the boom gate remained lowered and I hit the brakes. The lady was smiling apologetically and waited for me to open my window. "Sir, may I see your car pass for just one moment?" she said. I nodded slowly. "Sure." My palms began to sweat.

She turned it over and pulled out her walkie, mouthing what was probably my name. Her eyes darted towards me as she spoke, and I smiled innocently back at her. Finally, she put the radio away and leaned as far out as her booth window would allow.

"Sir," she said, almost conspiratorially, "This is ok." And then she handed me back my car pass, and raised the gate.

I thought long and hard about what had just transpired for the whole day afterwards, wondering what would happen when I tried to leave. Would they stop me? Fine me? Did they even know that I was committing grand theft parking, or was I just being paranoid?

That night, as I made my way to the exit, I knew my number was up. The lady at the booth was the very first one I came into contact with, on my first day there. When I pulled up, we nodded to each other in a familiar way. She asked to see my car pass, and said something into her walkie, just as the earlier girl had.

She looked at it for a long time, as my engine idled and my eyeball twitched. "Sir, this is fine," she said finally, handing it back. I couldn't believe my luck.

"Thank you," I said, as meaningfully as I could. My smile was sheepish this time. I couldn't hide the guilt any longer. But hers was genuine. Reassuring.

I didn't return to that parking lot for a week after that. My work schedule was changing and I was spending less time in Makati. When I finally did, I noticed a small sign had been tacked on to the outside of the ticket booth. "NOTICE TO ALL CUSTOMERS WITH MONTHLY CAR PASS," it bellowed. And then below that, in smaller print (and obviously I'm not quoting this verbatim): "Due to non-payment from several customers, we will be instituting strict checking policy for all car passes. To avoid inconvenience, please settle your bill at the administration office immediately."

I had to smirk at that. It had taken them three whole months to disentangle the web of deceit I had woven. I was proud. I had played them all, and with a enthusiasm that I frankly found surprising. I imagined the interviews later, after I had been hunted down by a task force with dogs and searchlights, and carted off in heavy chains for my crimes. Surrounded by flashing red and the whoop of sirens, the ticket ladies would tell the camera, "He was such a nice-looking man. He always smiled as he drove past."

"You'd never have guessed he was a serial parker."

The Mechanics of Kissing: Thoughts on Sucking, Nuzzling, Frenching and other forms of Osculation

The topic of kissing has been coming up a lot over the past week or so, and seeing as it’s going to be V-Day soon, I thought now would be a good time to compile some thoughts on the matter. Let me preface the rest of this piece by saying that this is all highly opinionated, and thus should not be construed to be the end-all, be-all on this subject. (Because I’m sure some of you have a tendency to read obscure blogs on the Internet and assume that they’re gospel.)

Kissing can be a heavily subjective act, and what may be great for one person may be really dull for another. On the other hand, adhering to some rough guidelines never hurts, even if it is from some complete stranger online. Also please note that this article is going to be raunchier than most of my usual stuff. If you cringe at words like “lick,” “suck,” “swallow” or “masticate,” you may want to steer clear.

**PERSONAL OPINION STARTS HERE**

The main secret to kissing is understanding the fundamental difference between men and women. I don’t profess to understand all of our myriad gender differences, but I think I get it when it comes to osculation (the scientific term for kissing, in case you didn’t pick up on that earlier). For guys, kissing is generally the first step towards sex, hence the use of “bases” to denote how far you’ve gone with a girl. (We’d lose track otherwise.) Droll sports analogies aside, this is an important consideration if you’re a female because it’s usually rare that a guy will just sit there and kiss you for hours without expecting to hit a home run at some point.

It’s different for girls though. Instead of being merely a stepping stone, kissing is symbolic of the act of sex itself. If you’re kissing a girl and the only thing going through your mind is, “Can I put my hand on her boob yet” then it’s possible that you’re disconnecting with your partner a little bit. Generally speaking, although a guy will still sleep a girl who happens to really suck at kissing, the reverse is not true.

So what does it actually mean, to be symbolic of sex? Well, a couple of things. Firstly, it usually means “Don’t lead with your tongue.” Or your open mouth, either. Starting off small and slow allows you to gauge your partner’s movements without committing the epic blunder of sticking your tongue up her nostril. Just doing a couple of evaluative kisses where your mouths are both mostly closed can be really helpful in the long run. Unfortunately, there’s no “conventional wisdom” as to how long these initial, exploratory kisses are supposed to last. My own rule of thumb is usually about 3-5 seconds, or about the length of time it takes to figure out whether her bra unclasps on the front or the back. (I kid, I kid.)

Seriously though, 5 seconds should be enough, unless you’re both really new at this. Any longer and you’ll end up slowing down instead of speeding up. So after the first 5 seconds, you’re usually faced with a great deal of possible strategies. If this is your first time to kiss this person, and they haven’t broken it off after 5-10 seconds, you’re usually good for the next 30-60 at least. It’d be smart to have a general idea of how to fill all that airtime.

A lot of guys forget that kissing isn’t just about what’s going on between your respective mouths; it’s your entire bodies. And by bodies, I really mean hair. Girls seem to love having their hair stroked while kissing, something that I will never totally get. (I personally don’t prefer it, coz my hair gets tangled up easily.) Of course, don’t stroke her hair the entire time you’re kissing; you’re not her stylist. Also, don’t mess it up too much either.

Unfortunately, there’s no guy-version of the above advice for the ladies. I suppose that if you were a girl, and you wanted to signal the transition to a more serious kiss after the 5-second mark, you could mash your boobs against the guy’s chest. Or you could throw your arms around his neck. Or you could squeeze his ass. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you don’t stop. Guys are simple that way.

Moving your hands or shifting your weight is usually a good way to signal that the kiss is about to get deeper. You want to maneuver both yourself and your partner into a position where you can do some serious liplocking. The most common strategy is to shift both your faces and your bodies slightly to your right so you don’t knock each other’s noses out of alignment with your coupling.

• *SMALL SIDE RANT*
  
  One of the reasons I am opposed to left-hand-drive cars is because of the shifting-to-the-right kissing strategy. This is a lot more difficult to do when you’re seated to the left of your partner. You have to contend with seatbelts and headrests and the fact that your right arm is encumbered by your own weight, and it’s all very inconvenient. For some reason, shifting to the left while kissing just isn’t natural, as observed in this Nature article. Couple that with the fact that the first kiss very commonly occurs on the drive home, and you can see how this little engineering goof can present problems.
  
  *END SIDE RANT*

The most ideal scenario is when you can accomplish three things either simultaneously or in quick succession. Shift your respective head/body positions, stroke her hair/neck, then move in for a deeper kiss. (Obviously, it has to happen smoothly in order for this transition to have any kind of impact. Also, perhaps not as obviously, if you have to think first before doing this, it’s going to appear a little weird.) Either partner can take control of the situation in order to accomplish this; usually, the hornier one often does.

Now that you’ve got your noses out of the way, the question of whether to french will inevitably pop up. I guess it’s self-evident why guys are naturally fans of frenching, but hell I’ll spell it out anyway: it’s coz they’re imagining their penises in their partners’ vaginas.

With that in mind, my answer to the frenching question is usually, “No, not until you feel the girl’s tongue moving first.” This isn’t just to be polite either; it signals that you’ve got some measure of self-control, and are thus, cool. Of course, if your partner isn’t budging then you might want to take a stab, in case they’re shy. An alternative strategy to frenching, if you’re wondering what to do while you wait for that female member (haha), is to do a lower-lip nibble. That is, you nibble on their lower lip. I’m not sure why lots of girls turn out to be fans of this kind of kiss. My theory is that it feels like you’re trying to eat them up, them being so delicious and all. (Again, don’t spend all your time doing just this; you’ll look hungry.)

Now when you finally get to the french (or the “soul kiss,” in some circles), it’s important to remember that what makes it hot is the reciprocity. The idea is to take turns exploring each other’s cavities. Think bi-directional, not uni-. Also, don’t just leave your mouth open like you’re going to the dentist. When your partner’s tongue is in there, you should be working it. Precisely how you work it depends on a variety of factors, the primary one being how long her tongue is. You could suck a long tongue, nibble a medium one, or touch a really short tongue with the tip of yours.

Another thing that you might consider doing is opening your eyes while you kiss. I usually do this out of necessity anyway (to make sure our stuff hasn’t been stolen, to spot cops or gawkers, or to check the status of my downloads), but I think you will find that it makes for a more intimate experience when you can stare into each others’ eyes as you connect. (Granted, a lot of people find this weird, so YMMV.)

After a few minutes of this, one of you should be ready to either make a move or wind it down. I’m not going to cover “making a move” in this piece because it’s outside of scope, but I will share some thoughts on winding it down.

The tricky thing about ending a kiss is that it usually means disappointing someone. If you’ve made it to the french, then chances are this will happen again, and the idea is to convey to the disappointed party that there will be a next time. (If you’re sure there won’t be, then you can skip the rest of this paragraph.) A decent way to do this would be to first loosen your stranglehold around the other person’s neck or waist, retract your tongue, and just slow down the whole pace of the kiss. Now here’s the tricky part: you want to speed it up again, but not so much that you’re back in the french. Just enough to impart that you enjoyed yourself, and would love to do it again sometime. Then ratchet it down, and break it off the same way you started, with some slow, small, closed-mouth kisses.

If you do it right, you’ll be frenching again in no time. (And ideally, more, but that’s a subject for another day. Or a different blog altogether.)

Although I’m analyzing osculation rather clinically in this piece, the most important thing you need to take away is that it needs to come off as natural. I’ve broken or done the opposite of every bit of advice on this page, and barring inexperience, it was usually during times when I was so into it that I forgot myself. This is a good thing, like being In The Zone. More often than not though, keeping some rough guidelines in mind allow you to avoid becoming an embarrassing aside on someone’s private LJ.

So that’s it. Good luck with your V-Day dates everyone!

I’m single, btw.

Finding Your Soul Mate: A Statistical Analysis

I’ve been thinking recently about soul mates and the chances of finding that soul mate. Why have I been thinking about this? Because I drink too much every night and wake up every morning with a dry throat and a dull headache, and thus cannot bring myself to start working until after several hours of staring blankly into space. But I digress. This piece is an attempt at quantifying the odds of finding that special somone, and contains some thoughts regarding how to increase those odds further.

Now, the first step is of course believing that your soul mate exists. I know a lot of people don’t believe that everyone has a soul mate, but for the purposes of this article, let’s just ignore them.

The tricky thing about this whole discussion is that the cosmos never bothered to lay down any ground rules regarding soul mates, so we’re unfortunately stuck making a bunch of assumptions. Here are the ones that I’m basing my calculations on:

1. Your soul mate exists, and is currently alive somewhere in the world. I’m not going to waste time calculating the odds of meeting a soul mate who was alive B.C., or will be born around the time the flying car goes mainstream. We’re going to assume that the cosmos was considerate enough to give you a fighting chance after all.

2. Your soul mate is of the preferred sexual orientation. This whole discussion would be pointless otherwise.

3. Your soul mate speaks at least one of the languages that you do. Again, it would be otherwise impossible to connect with your soul mate if you can’t speak a common language.

(Nota Bene: If you disagree with any of the items above, tough luck. I’m not doing your math for you.)

Given those three assumptions, you can compute the maximum number of potential soul mate candidates simply by multiplying the population of your chosen language by the percentage of your preferred sexual orientation. Let’s call this your Personal Soul Mate Index.

For example, my chosen language is English (1.5 billion native and non-native speakers) and my preferred sexual orientation is straight female. The global gender ratio is about 51:49 in favor of men, so I multiply 1.5 billion by 0.49, which would be roughly 735,000,000. I would then reduce that number further by 2% to get my PSMI (which is the alleged gay ratio), leaving me with 720,300,000 straight English-speaking females. If you were a gay male, you would multiply 1.5 billion by 0.51 and then again by 0.02, giving you a much smaller PSMI, at only 15.3 million.

(Note that you could also choose to totally ignore the language part of the equation and simply multiply your sexual orientation by the total global population, which is at 6.7 billion at the time of this writing.)

I’ll give you a moment to compute your own PSMIs.

All good? Great, let’s move on to the fun stuff.

So, the likelihood of me meeting my soulmate is roughly 1 in 720,000,000, and what we’re going to do over the next few paragraphs is work out just how “likely” that is. I’m a 27-year-old Filipino, and have a life expectancy of 71 years. That means I’ve got a potential for 44 more years of searching for that darned soul mate of mine. Let’s be more granular, and calculate how many days that is:

(365 days * 33 common years) + (366 days * 11 leap years) = 16,071 days to go

Let’s tack on the past 9 years of my life as well, or since I turned 18, i.e., legally capable of having sex with my soul mate should I meet her. (And if that sounds a little crass, I apologize. I’m sure you would simply lose yourself in your soul mate’s eyes forever.)

16071 + ((365 * 7) + (366 * 2)) = 19,358 days in total

We can express all of this very simply by saying that if I want to meet my soul mate and I am unlucky enough to have had to meet every single person in my entire PSMI before I finally meet her, I would have to see 720,300,000 people over 19,358 days starting when I turned 18. (37,209 people per day, or about half of the people who went to the Eraserheads concert last year.)

Does that sound discouraging? Let’s do some quick math to work out the problem.

I’m sitting at a Starbucks as I write this, and there are easily 30 other people in and around this place with me. I’ll walk back to the office and there are another 60 people there. Later tonight I’ll have dinner at the Fort, and will come into indirect contact with about 100 or so different people. If I were commuting, I’d get on to a train car with 50 other people all mashed up against each other.

Depending on how much you move around, you come in to indirect contact with about 150-200 unique people every day. Possibly even more than that if you really pound the pavement. That means that without drastically changing my lifestyle, I will see about 3,871,600 people over the course of my life or about 0.5% of my PSMI. Expressed in more practical terms, my chances of finding my soul mate at any point in my post-18 life is about 1 in 200. If you play Texas Hold ‘Em, this is roughly the same odds as being dealt pocket aces (220:1). (Interestingly enough, I’ve been dealt pocket aces about half a dozen times at Hold ‘Em that I can remember.)

Is that depressing? Yeah, a little bit. 20 years ago, that would be pretty much all she wrote too. But these days we’re fortunate enough to have a way to connect with thousands more at any given moment, i.e., the internets. I’ve got about 670 people following me on Twitter, about 250 friends on Facebook and have built a handful of little web toys that thousands of people use every day. Your own numbers will be drastically different of course, but the point is that we’re able to cheat the odds by making ourselves really visible online. In fact, if I assume that my soul mate is a straight female who speaks English and has Internet access, my PSMI is reduced even further. There are 1.4 billion people on the Internet, 430.8 million of which speak English, and 206.8 million of which are probably straight females. Now my chances are about 58:1, which in Hold ‘Em terms is roughly the odds that you would get a pair of aces, kings, queens or jacks in your pocket (54.3:1). If all that sounds a little fanciful, it’s really not. I mean seriously, what kind of cosmos would give me a soul mate that didn’t use the Internet? That would just be cruel. (Or for that matter, didn’t subscribe to poker hand probabilities.)

One way to look at the 58:1 ratio is thusly: if I had 58 times to relive my life, I would cross paths with my soul mate once. That sounds incredibly sad, so here’s another way to look at it: if you took 58 other guys with similar soul-mate indices as me, only one of us would find our soul mate. I like the sound of that a little bit more, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the right way to look at the numbers. Anyway.

The trick here really is to make yourself as visible as possible online so as to reach as many people as possible. Joining social networks and generating online content is the new-school equivalent of taking yoga classes or joining photography clubs in order to meet new people, and it’s a lot more cost-effective too. The idea of course is not to stop looking. Just because the odds seem stacked against you, doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. After all, according to the Drake equation, the number of other currently-existing civilizations in our entire galaxy could be as little as 2, and yet we still train our telescopes at the sky every night, waiting.

January Tweets and Pics

Quick update post, because it's midnight and I've got a long week ahead of me:

2009's kick-off month has seen me spending every moment of free time on exactly two things 1) Flickr and 2) Twitter. The amount of work I've put in to the latter has doubled my follower count since late December, and I hope to hit the big 1k before the end of the first quarter. Why, exactly? Coz it's good to have goals, that's why.

The other social media site I've been fussing about, Flickr, has proven to be a lot more involved. I've bought two cameras in the past 3 weeks -- the compact, consumer-friendly Canon PowerShot G10 and the semi-professional Canon EOS 50D -- in a kind of psychotic shopping frenzy that had many a friend asking me if I had some kind of aversion to having cash in the bank.

Let's backtrack a little: The original plan (hatched roundabouts New Year's Eve) was really to just have a good compact, and the G10 was a great playmate for the first three weeks of use. I joined Project365, faithfully uploading one photo a day to document my year. Additionally, I've been writing a haiku to go with each picture, which gives me something to tweet regularly about. The plan for that it is to collect everything into a book when I have all 365 photo and haikus, and publish it via Lulu. (Just so I have something physical to park coffee mugs and sticky notes on.)

** My favorite haiku, written during the Sinulog festival in Cebu goes like this: **

A painted bald man

Cackles at the human sea.

"No more room!" he says.

The problem with the G10 I suppose was that it turned out that I wanted to do a whole bunch of things that it just couldn't pull off. That's not to say it's a bad camera; it's Canon's current flagship compact after all and I still heartily recommend it to anyone who needs a point-and-shoot that takes strong photos and has a decent set of manual controls. That said, it just wasn't really meant to do creative photography, which is what I was most interested in. And so I got the 50D, which was to be very honest sitting at the upper limits of what I was willing to spend to be "creative," but what the hell, we only live once. (Also, given the asking price of its more serious sibling, it's not as if I could really go any higher.)

At the time of this writing, I've spent less than 72 hours with the 50, and I can very honestly say that I'm a ways away from mastering it. I've taken about 5 gbs worth of photos already (about 90% of them were utter crap), and have uploaded the halfway-decent ones here. Forty-six reasonable photos out of about a thousand is not really what one would refer to a "tremendously encouraging," but one has to start somewhere. I can feel that I'm really just scratching the surface of what this camera is capable of, and I'm excited about the fact that I will one day be able to take a photo and not have to look at the display to reassure myself that I got the exposure right. (Because Kin says the real pros don't.)

Of the two to three thousand photos I've taken over the past 22 days, these are my favorites:

Everything I Need to Know About Bootstrapping, I Learned from My Waveboard

I bought a Wave board on a whim yesterday (also known as Swingboards or Shockwave D-boards or Ripstick in other countries), after seeing some very excited looking children using them at one of our parks. (If you don’t know what a waveboard is, any of the video links above should give you an idea of how it works. Suffice to say that it is to skateboards as inline skates are to rollerskates.)

After purchasing the board, my friends and I brought it to a relatively empty space in the middle of Eastwood, where I proceeded to stumble, stagger and curse loudly for the rest of the afternoon. (Minor disclaimer: my past experiences relating to skating of any kind are as follows: one afternoon in the late 90s at a skating park, and 45 minutes at an ice skating rink two years ago. In other words: none.) It occurred to me afterwards – or more accurately, after I had taken my umpteenth tumble – how the whole experience was roughly analogous to bootstrapping a business, something which I’ve been in the process of doing for 4 years now. Specifically:

1. Theoreticals are overrated. There is only so much you can learn from following Guy Kawasaki, or subscribing to Seth Godin, or watching RailsConf videos, or reading a badly translated scrap of paper explaining how to “launch forward with new board.” At most, these veterans and experts are making broad generalizations that will hopefully make sense to the largest section of their respective audiences as possible. The specifics though are completely up to you, and from what I’ve learned thus far, it’s these minute details that can really kill you. The other danger in relying on your references is that you may delude yourself into believing that you actually know this stuff just because you’ve read every single book and blog entry on the subject. Brother, unless you’ve actually tried it, you don’t.

2. Embarrassing yourself thoroughly is part of the process. The only people who don’t make mistakes on their first ventures are those that lied on their resumes. A lot of key business decisions are counter-intuitive, just as trying to learn how to balance while standing still is the worst way to learn how to waveboard. Office space, external funding and picking your team are all areas I’ve totally screwed up on in the past, and it’s only now that I realize how silly those early, amusingly naive judgement calls really were. You will make mistakes, and people will make fun of you for it. You may as well accept that now. Too many people are so paralyzingly afraid of being laughed at or ridiculed that it prevents them from even giving it a try, and this goes for both waveboarding and bootstrapping.

3. Sometimes you just have to let go and hope. There is a veritable boatload of things that you cannot control. These include imperfections on the road surface, presence of small children and animals, lack of railings separating solid and liquid sections of the park, and (later) partial insobriety. These things threaten your progress but there is very little you can do to mitigate them, except perhaps for the last example. Either that or you leave the park and go somewhere else. You can do as many SWOT analyses as you want – those external factors will still be outside of your sphere of influence at close of business. Accept that they’re there, and just move on.

4. Not everything can be evaluated and analyzed. Some things work even when we don’t understand how they work, and indeed had nothing to do with making them happen. To properly ride a waveboard, you get your left foot on the front platform, push off hard with your right foot and somehow, the skater gods imbue the board with enough stability for you to balance for a second or two with only one foot on it. Then you rest your right foot on the back platform, and start making twisting motions with your feet to keep the momentum up. If you do this properly, you can keep going forever. Similar things happen in the business realm, and the example I like most has to do with the people you work with. You don’t necessarily know what their motivations (beyond the economic) are, and your visibility into their lives outside of the office is limited at best. And yet even with shitty startup pay and crappy working conditions, sometimes you get real superstars working with you. People who work their asses off for you, just because. There’s an intangibility there that you’re not supposed to measure, just acknowledge.

5. Keep at it. I woke up this morning and noticed the parking lot at my building was unusually quiet. So I took the board out and rode around the lot a few times without taking a spill. (A first!) By the end of my second round I was getting pretty happy with myself, so I decided to up the ante a little and pick up speed. Knees bent, arms at my sides, I was gonna break some barriers today. Turns out though I didn’t really know how to do that properly yet. The board flew out from under me and I ended up sprawled on the pavement. No broken bones, but I don’t think my right knee really enjoyed the impact. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and proceeded to do one more (slightly more cautious) round before putting the board away.

There’s no trick to bootstrapping a business, just as there’s no trick to learning to waveboard. If you keep at it long enough, you’ll just get it.

(Photo by Marco The Site Guy)