I just finished a late lunch of brick oven pizza at the bar at Matchbox, where I repeatedly reloaded the funny live blog commentary at Gizmodo on Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote speech. The iPod Shuffle and Mac mini are HOT.

- mike lee - washington, dc

1) I took the commuter train into work this morning, and picked up the new February 2005 Special Star Wars Collector's Edition of Vanity Fair at Union Station. Most of the principal actors and characters from the entire trilogy are pictured on the four panel fold-out cover. It's amazing to think back to the time I was in line as a little kid to see the first movie in '77, and now on May 19th, 28 years later, the arrival of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, finally completes the saga. The article, which is illustrated with large behind-the-scenes photos showing tired-looking Lucasfilm employees, doesn't give anything away of the plot. I was rudely yanked back from the Galaxy Far, Far Away because the article right after is about new accounts of prisoner abuse in Iraq.

2) On my way to grab a coffee from the office cafeteria before our director's meeting, I spotted the news on our lobby screen that our building is closed for the Inauguration on January 20th. It'll be nice to have a day off, but I know some people who won't be celebrating. Counting the Martin Luther King Holiday on Monday, and two days in Boston, I'm in the office one day next week. Of course I'm awash in wireless options everywhere I go, so I can't hide.

3) We catered in lunch for our staff meeting today in one of the boardrooms. I was leading the agenda today, and this is what 90% turnout of our staff looks like. It's quite a mob now with the arrival of a bunch of new hires, and even one person was patched in from Chicago on speaker phone.

4) Liz started a new thing called "First Five" today, where at the beginning of staff meetings, someone from the team will give an interesting talk or demo on anything loosely related to our work. Her topic was a capsule review of the book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.

5) Cianna took a long nap this afternoon with my mom after her exciting trip with mommy to visit to the doc for a routine check-up. There was poking and prodding, two needles and lots of screaming. But she got a clean bill of health. The doc assured us that the small lump above her right temple is not one of a pair of horns about to pop out.

6) I close with this photo of not the inside of my scratchy throat, but the orange goop inside of a DayQuill bottle. I will be chugging this stuff tomorrow because I now have my wife and daughter's cold.

- and so, a day in the life of mike lee - langley park, md

Came across a Crablogs.com sticker on a trashcan at the corner of E. 31st and N. Calvert. The tag line is "voices from baltimore, md." Itls probably been up for months--I don't walk around the Charles Village neighborhood much anymore. Crablogs is a portal to local blogs.

- mike lee -

Spoons are the photographic theme of today's family lunch at Cafe Zen.

- mike lee - baltimore

We're walking with the Carters in the valley along the Patapsco River near Relay, MD.

- mike lee -

Laughing and playing with my daughter up high can result in a blob of drool falling in my mouth.

Pfffftp!

But it's all about the love...

- mike lee - baltimore

For a while now, I've been experimenting with using a high quality 15x magifier loupe to make macro shots with the Sidekick camera. I've focused on a variety of objects including PixelBlocks, LEGO bricks and condensation inside a plastic water bottle.

The loupe, which has worked very well, is constructed with coated glass optics encased in a steel cylinder, making the cost high at $30 (or more). Also, the diameter of the eyepiece is only 21mm, so it's somewhat tricky to position in front of the Sidekick camera lens. Interestingly, the commercially available phonecam auxilliary lenses are even smaller in diameter and I can't imagine any normal person fiddling with them while on the move.

I recently stumbled onto a new Radio Shack 3-Lens Magnifier (Cat. #63-1311, photo 1), which only costs $7.99 and is more useful than the $30 loupe. The Shack's magnifier has three lenses that in combination offer 5x, 10x or 15x magnification. Using a single lens (2) does 5x on an area a little smaller than the size of the Sidekick's LCD screen. Two lenses gives 10x (3) and all three gives 15x. The 30mm diameter lenses are more easily positioned over Sidekick lens aperture (4). And it's not necessary to keep the lens perfectly centered.

The two no-lens/with-lens examples here show macro shots made with the single 5x lens, which most interests me. Jackson's face from $20 bill (5 & 6) shows how lineart detail looks. The illustration by Fafi from the book Vinyl Will Kill (7 & 8) represents halftone printing of a color pencil drawing.

These two examples show how, with a simple flip of the magnifier lens, you can get much clearer shots of ephemera such as concert tickets, product labels, small LCD screens on electronic gadgets, a significant other's nose or anything else that fits in roughly a 1 1/2 x 2" area.

But what excites me most about the 5x lens is what it can do with oblique views of small objects. Unlike the 15x magnification of these loupes where you have to be right on top of a small object (making lighting difficult), the 5x lets you back off to about 1" away so you can allow light onto your object and show some out-of-focus background for visual interest.

Here's an example of tiny LEGO community worker figures (9) showing dramatically shallow depth of field that is not possible in any fixed focus phonecams. Think of the possibilities...

If you are going to try this magnifier yourself (an $8 gamble at any of 6000+ stores!), remember that the same general rules of phonecam photography apply: keep your lenses clean, hold the camera steady through the action of carefully pressing the shutter button and wait 5-15 seconds (if possible) for the Sidekick camera app to stabilize to proper exposure and color balance before clicking.

Next, I'll try the new lens on my wife's Nokia since it should work with virtually any phonecam.

- mike lee - baltimore, md

...have lunch in Chinatown. I'm showing off my Sidekick II and catching up with my friend Jeff Gates, who designs the Smithsonian's American Art Museum web site. Jeff works two blocks away from my office, but we haven't been able to hook up for lunch in the last year.

- mike lee - washington, dc

After crapping around off and on for the last three weeks with Verizon tech support, exchanging a defective modem and even an onsite visit, I finally have DSL running at my mom's house. Now we'll have more than just Sidekick and Blackberry access to the internet on weeknights. Next: Get the WiFi router going.

- mike lee - langley, park, md