Shabbir's Diary

No access to e-mail or web.

see you in two weeks.

The gear manifest.

"Moishe's going to miss you.  He's going to ask for you constantly", said Sarah in the car on the way to the airport.

"Tell him daddy's on safari to get him pictures of buses and trucks", was my response.

As you probably know my last trip to Pakistan two years ago was a photo bonanza.  I took almost a thousand photos and really learned a lot about my camera.  I learned a couple of great lessons, including:

1. At my skill level you don't always know when there's an amazing photo in front of you, just shoot a lot and sort it out later.  One of the very best photos I've ever taken was taken on a whim when I happened to wander into the back hallways of the Great Mosque in Lahore.
2. Always shoot, even when the subject isn't really right, especially when shooting people candidly.  I took this photo at a protest at Jinnah's tomb.  Though my subject wasn't entirely in the frame, I really liked how it turned out and have come to love it for the combination of flags and protester.

My gear for this trip is as follows:

Canon Digital Rebel
My Canon Digital Rebel, which is a 6.3 megapixel digital Single Lens Reflex.  I use the stock lens because it's pretty good, but occasionally drop in the telephoto.  A big difference this year is that I'm going to shoot exclusively in RAW mode instead of JPGs.  I've picked up the BreezeBrowser tool for downloading and manipulating my images before cutting them to JPGs.  I'm very excited about the potential for really improving my photos.  It uses Compact Flash cards, and I've got two 2GB cards on me, and a laptop to back them up to.  For lighting situations I have a Speedlite 550.  I'm still learning how to use it.

(As an aside, isn't that awesome?  I love learning how to use my gear.  I'll probably be on my deathbed at the age of 80 admiring the functions on my new cellphone...)

There's actually a newer version of this camera out, but honestly, I haven't hit the edges of performance for this camera yet, so it would be stupid to upgrade.

 

Sanyo Digital Camcorder C40

This is a new addition to my arsenel.  I really wanted a small camcorder because I feel that I'm missing opportunities for some things that can only be captured via video.  In addition because of YouTube, hosting video won't cost me a dime.  I picked this up at RadioShack for $200, which is the way low end for a camcorder.  The device is tiny, about the size of a deck of cards and uses SD cards for storage.  I have three 1GB SD cards, and I am able to store 40 minutes of video on each.

iGO Juice

I'm also carrying an iGO Juice.  This is one of those Universal Power supplies that has interchangeable parts for charging everything I carry including cellphones, camcorders, laptops, iPods and a bunch of things I'm not carrying.  It's really well designed.  On one end of the device you have an appropriate power cord.  I'm carrying the cords for American outlets, European outlets, cigarette lighters, and inflight Empower plugs.  On the other end I've got these little interchangable tips that you buy for every new device you get.  When I bought the Sanyo camcorder abvoe, I immediately tossed the power brick that came with it into a drawer, found the right iGo tip to charge it up, and saved myself a pound of weight in my pack.  It's awesome.

Brookstone Noise Cancelling Headphones with iPod Shuffle Dock
I've got the headphones I purchased on the last trip with a Shuffle stuck in it with Tom Waits' new three disc set loaded up.  I love the fact that these are cordless.  It really makes it easier to deal with.  Sadly they don't appear to make them anymore.

The one great flaw in my packing has been my decision to not include my camera case.  I felt it was bulky, and that my gear would be just fine wrapped in clothes in my backpack.  That has since proven false as my telephoto lens and flash are bouncing around my backpack.  Nothing will get broken because I'll be extra gentle, but it's still a pretty idiotic oversight.

Ah, this is the life.

26 hours.  From start to finish, I'll be traveling 26 hours.  It was this thinking, among others, that led me to buy a first tier ticket from PIA (Pakistan International Airlines). 

Traveling business class (there is no first class on PIA) is like hanging around a lot of people with disposable income who aren't rich enough to allow anyone to forget the price of the ticket.  If you're super rich, you never see an airport lounge.  Instead your limo rolls up on the tarmac to your jet and you get in.  If you're merely rich instead of super-rich, to your NetJet, which is sort of like a FlexCar for private planes.

Sarah agreed though to allow me to spend a little extra money and not fly coach, and when I roll into JFK and am given the business class lounge entry card, I see where that money went.  Flat screen tvs everywhere, a conference room, and special Internet kiosks are everywhere.  There's an extremely fast wifi network (SSID: "SwissLounge", password "a1a1a1a1a1") and newspapers from every conceivable place on the planet. 

Oh, did I mention a full bar, an espresso machine, and a buffet meal being served?  How could I forget... Sarah calls me and I tell her I'm spending the next weeks here, this place is stocked better than our house. 

I'm almost gone.

I love you, but I think I need to see other people.

Brown people, specifically.  In just about 6 hours I'll be sitting on a plane beginning my 26 hour journey to Karachi, Pakistan.  Don't feel too sorry for me though, I'm not flying coach.  And I'm flying alone for the trip there.  Upon arrival I'll be with my sisters, her three kids under 10, an armed guard, my dad, his wife, and a coach driver for 14 days.  I will most certainly not be getting any alone time, and I'm not in the habit of wandering alone on the streets of a country where Daniel Pearl got kidnapped.  So I'm looking forward to some time by myself.

I've been packing all week, and making lists in my head of what I want to bring back for a month.  I'm not going to be back in Pakistan for a long time, so I'm pretty conscious of my last opportunity to see people and places on this trip.  Prime on the list is the Khyber Pass, which has long been the only way to get between Pakistan and Afghanistan unless you happen to have a friendly Pashto guide.  When I come home, I'll be one of the few people you've ever met who's ever been to Afghanistan, even if it's only for an hour.

I'm going to a Muslim country, so in my last 12 hours I hung out with friends, watched some lascivious television, drank a bottle of wine, ate some bacon.  I wanted to smoke a cigar but never really got the chance.   I could smoke one in Pakistan, but my father's an oncologist, and I don't really need to push his buttons.

If I get wifi anytime soon, I'll post my diaries here and my photos to flickr.  Otherwise you'll have to wait for my return.

And this is why I don't run my own blog server...

..the maintenance is a killer.  Every piece of technology I own requires some amount of sysadmin time.  It's not that I'm not a competent sysadmin, it's that there isn't time to deal with it all and do it well.

Case in point: My Chef'n pepper grinder and Pakistani diaries entries.  The photo links for those have been broken for months, and the diary entries haven't even linked to each other correctly for as long as well.  I just spent an hour fixing it.  (In case you haven't read the diaries, it's worth a bit of your time).

If, on top of this, I also had to admin the server, that would suck.  Right now I'm just using TypePad's hosting, and frankly, that's all I can handle.

A new personal best!

Although December is almost over, I think I played my last live poker in DC this past Friday night.  After the company holiday party at Local16, one of the company's directors had us over to his house and we played a $.25/$.50 game of no limit hold'em.  The maximum stack you could buy was $50, so everyone was guaranteed not to lose much.

I decided to play the Drunken Master style for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that I really was already quite on my way being drunken.  At the party I had been drinking a few sips of white wine, losing my glass to the attentive busboys, and then ordering another.  Though I had an appetizer-dinner, I don't think I had quite enough food in my stomach.  Once I ordered the shots of cold sipping tequila, which I sipped, I realized it was appropriate that I was not driving anywhere.

When we rolled into Matt's place the wine opened and I never looked back.  I immediately announced I would raise every hand to $2, which everyone laughed about.  And then I did.

I managed to get trapped really good by a couple of players but made a couple of great reads.  In one I was bluffing at a pot without the nuts when my opponent (Chad) pushed all in.  I knew that he had trapped me, and I knew I was beat.  Though I was 75% of my stack into the pot, the odds were good that I had been caught and his body language and tone of voice reaffirmed it.  I laid my weak hand down and he showed me the nuts.  Good read, Safdar.

Now I was sitting down with my second $50 buyin when I snagged Matt, the host.  I got Aces in middle position and raised to somewhere north of $2.  Matt called and the flop came Jack-Seven-Seven.  Matt had a Jack and when I raised his initial bet all-in he called.  I said, "I hope you have a Seven".  I doubled up and then entered the Long Dark Phase of the night.

Bring more wine, garcon!

Somewhere between midnight and 2am I started to fall asleep at the table.  The immense quantity of wine and lack of sleep hit me and people were poking me to wake up to play.  Matt's Roku Soundbridge started acting up and there was a great deal of getting up, searching for music, messing with the Roku, etc.  With the four of us that remained it became almost seriously aggravating to try and get through a hand.

Finally I got a glass of water and woke up with Six-Seven.  The flop came Four-Five-Two and then the turn came a Three.  Matt and Tim and I were in the hand and on the turn I pushed all in.  Tim immediately folded (good fold) and Matt thought a long time.  I was sure the fact that I was awake for the first time in two hours would give me a away, but he actually called, unable to fold the second nuts with his Ace-Six.  I raked the chips and looked down at a total stack of about $230.  I concluded that I was done, and went through the motions of playing hands the rest of the night, but just folded most of them until the game broke.

What's funny about this is that I never drink when I play cards.  I think of it as an anathema to my analytical skills.  Occasionally I have come over to a table with a prop beer and acted all goofy to try and make people think I'm drunk, but I don't actually like to drink while I'm playing.  I had planned on playing and blowing through that $50 for fun, but it turned out great, and so that's a new personal best: Most Money Won While Tanked.  I don't think I'll need to repeat that record, though.

 

I did some preliminary numbers for my poker results for the year and it appears that I will have a net loss of $100-$200.  The summary of my year is this: I make lots of money live, and I lose money online.  Final numbers won't be in until I pull some more saved hands from my tablet and put in a few hours at the $6/$12 at Lucky Chances in San Francisco, but that's how it looks.

Seeing as I lost over $2,000 last year, I really think this is a huge improvement, and I'm very proud of myself for two things:

1. That I don't have gambler denial and that I continue to analytically play poker and develop my game; and
2. The tremendous no limit skills I have developed this year, which is also where I've made most of my money.

Final numbers in early January.

Peking Roast Duck

Over Thanksgiving I really wanted to roast a duck, so I dug up a recipe and did it.  The result was pretty good, and not greasy at all like you'd expect a duck to be.

I've placed the photos up on flickr, please take a look.

Peking Roast Duck, by Chef Shabbir

Don't provoke the civilization, it bites.

I actually read my spam.

No, that's not exactly right.  Because of my past life, I get a sizable percentage of e-mail from people who would otherwise be putting up fliers at the local monthly UFO watchers Meet Up.

I have a kindred spirit with these people who range in lucidity from giving me a call periodically to see if I'll help get attention for their injustice to just sending me crazy e-mail about their ongoing litigation with the US gov't.  There are a surprising number of veterans among them, which I find very sad.  At the end of the day they are so much like me, with a cause they champion and the megaphone of the Internet.  They just seem to be missing that internal compass that tells the rest of us that we're really overlooking a key point.  Or that perhaps we aren't right.

Perhaps I possess a modicum of self-doubt that they lack, or perhaps the chemicals in my brain are in better proportion.  Either way, I feel that if Alzheimer's ever hits me, I'll be on the other end of this transaction.

Today's is a first for me.  I've never had an Asian crazy spam before.  So here it is for all you're viewing pleasure.  Here's my favorite quote, by the way:

"If everyone can tramp down on law and publicly provoke the civilization of the world, like Du Pon and its CEO Holliday have done, what the world will be? "