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Category Archives: Travel
Life around Manhasset Bay
I have been taking pictures around Manhasset Bay for quite some years now. Except for a few that I uploaded to Wikimedia as an Wikipedian a decade ago, most have never seen the light of the day. I dusted off a bunch of these and re-processed them. I hope they capture a glimpse of the life around the bay that fictionally separated Jay Gatsby from Daisy Buchanan.
The truth is that many people around the bay have very little idea how their towns look from the water. And those not addicted to examining satellite pictures are often unaware of expansive waterfront properties.
Most water-fronting mansions are shielded from unwanted street views. But all of them are clearly visible from the bay, for obvious reasons. After all, if you can’t see someone’s bedroom window from a kayak, then they can’t see the water either from their bedroom.
The bay comes alive in summer. Sailboats, kayaks and all sorts of watercraft abound. Yacht clubs hold races that draw sailors from all around the bay, and often beyond.
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, Photography, Travel
Tagged Kayaking, Manhasset Bay
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Hanauma Bay for the chronically overprepared
I enjoy writing about things I can’t find online. Here I wrote a snorkeling guide to Hanauma Bay for those of us that must obsessively research before our trips. I wish someone had written one before my trip. Continue reading
Kayak to Kaneohe Sandbar – sunken at high tide
On a windy and rainy day in November, I rented a kayak from Go Bananas, and drove to He’eia Kea Boat Harbor. I launched off towards where I thought the legendary Kaneohe Sandbar would be.
For the entire trip to the sandbar, I paddled alone in a foreboding ocean. Perhaps “bay” is a more accurate description. But from my low vantage point, it looked as if I were in the middle of the wide wide sea under dark clouds. I aimed for Kapapa Island as told. And that was good advice. Because from my kayak, all I could see were breaking waves in every direction, except for that tiny speck of an island in the distance.
I kept turning my kayak back towards the harbor, second-guessing the sanity of my choice. I saw dark clouds pouring rain over entire towns. I pivoted back towards Kapapa Island and paddled some more, all the while frightened to the core and utterly alone.
I reached the last boat in sight, hoping to find tourists having a great time. But it was empty, silent and moored in deep water. No sandbar to be seen. I swung back facing the harbor. I again turned towards Kapapa. I kept going.
After what seemed like a lifetime, I sensed a change in water color. Shortly the sun poked its head out from behind clouds. And magic happened. The sea all around me turned turquoise as soon as sunlight touched them, revealing that I was merely a foot above the sand now. I got why this place is also known as the Sunken Island. Continue reading
Why does my snorkel mask fog up?
In the year 2025, there are plenty of resources online that answer the question: why does my snorkel mask keep fogging up? Before my 2025 trip to Hawaii, I consulted numerous YouTube videos and Reddit discussions on this topic. Chiefly I wanted to avoid repeating my sub-optimal snorkeling experiences from the 2015 cruise trip and the 2009 trip to Trunk Bay and Caneel Bay. One regrettable aspect of these past trips was that I couldn’t stop my lenses from fogging up when snorkeling, despite having done what I perceived to be adequate preparation.
Not surprisingly, today’s online resources are actually worse than in 2009 and 2015. Blogs with insightful resources have gone dark, long replaced by either inaccessible tribal social media, or exceedingly-short clickbait clips tailored to today’s audience. Chiefly the latter peddles quick fixes showing the “hows”, but not the “whys”. The thing is, lens-defogging, like most things in life, follows Tolstoy’s law – that every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a long list of things that each alone can fog up your lenses. You need to remediate each and every one of them, to get to the “happy path”.
During my 2025 trip, I finally attained defogging nirvana. I experienced crystal-clear views from my mask for two hours of snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, for the first time in my life. Nobody had told me that this was the norm for snorkeling. One shouldn’t have to stand up on shallow reef mid-snorkeling to address fogs, ever. Until I had this experience, like countless new merrymakers all around Waikiki, I did not regard having to deal with fogging every 5 minutes as anything unusual.
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, Hawaii, Travel
Tagged anti-fog, defog, defogger, diving mask, snorkel mask, snorkeling
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Waikiki & Honolulu landmarks seen from departing flight DL650
Delta 650 took off from runway 8R at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport due East at 5:15pm local time. Our pilot seemed to have made a point of banking the aircraft to trace the southern coast in the first 4 minutes of the flight to afford those seating on the left side a great aerial view of Sand Island, Honolulu downtown, Ala Moana, Waikiki, Kaimana, Diamond Head, Kahala, Hawaii Kai, Hanauma Bay, and Koko Head. Then the plane turned East again and flew towards the mainland.
Unlike the JFK arrival video I recorded, I was able to recognize all landmarks as I looked out of my window seat. This is largely due to my month-long research into Oahu before our trip to the island. But still, I figured I would write a post showing these famous Hawaiian landmarks. Here is the recorded video. Continue reading
Posted in Flight Simulations, Hawaii, Photography, Planes, Real Planes, Travel
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Actual landing flight path of Delta 650 at JFK runway 22L
I’ve always chosen window seats on flights whenever I could. And I never grew tired of watching my plane take off and land. Possibly I am just fascinated with flying, whether it involves model airplanes, computer simulations, or actual planes. But with only a few exceptional landmarks, I could almost never identify in realtime what the plane was flying over. It amazes me that I can’t recognize locations that should be familiar to me where I’ve driven by countless number of times.
The truth is that aerial views often looks quite different from ground views. Even though I kept thinking that I could mentally reconstruct a god’s eye view of my neighborhood, every landing proved me wrong. And my last trip was no exception. As I the plane readied itself for landing, I looked out of the window and couldn’t tell where the plane was. I put my phone against the window pane for the first time, and recorded the entire landing path.
I played the clip backward at home, and fired up Google Maps with Globe View to rotate its map to match the window view of the terrain. Painstakingly I retraced the flight path backward from runway 22L. This turned out to be the quickest way to reconstruct the landing path. In doing so, I’ve joined a bunch of nerds like Joseph Gunn who document, among other thing, flight paths. In fact, I consulted one of his blog posts on flight patterns to confirm landing paths at runway 22L. Continue reading
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Flight Simulations, Hawaii, Planes, Real Planes, Travel
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Wesley-Anny Wedding: Making of a Photo Shoot
This page hosts pictures taken a few weeks prior to the wedding, documenting the photo shoot session Aaron ran. Most of these are my pictures. Some where I make an appearance are taken by Elisha. I suppose you could call those pictures “Making of the Making of a Photo Shoot”. Most of these pictures will be turned into slideshows for use on wedding day. See previous location recon pictures. Continue reading
2018 XiSheng RC Extravaganza 西盛遙控飛行嘉年華
New Taipei RC Flying Extravaganza (西盛遙控飛行嘉年華會慶) organized by NTAMA (新北市航空模型協會) took place on Sunday, Nov 4th, 2018. It was joined by flying enthusiasts from all over Taiwan. I went with friends from the RC club from Kaohsiung 高雄市遙控運動協會, courtesy of 陳振國.
This article hosts pictures I took and edited of this event. Perhaps I’ll come back and finish it with additional descriptions. Perhaps I won’t. It exists for now as a place for enthusiasts to browse and download pictures I took of them, or their planes. I compiled two YouTube videos: a shorter one comprising video clips I took that day, as well as a longer slideshow highlighting some of the many exciting moments I captured in still pictures. As usual, some of the best pictures will eventually end up on Wikimedia. Continue reading
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, RC Planes, Travel
Tagged 3D Model Airplane, Boeing 747, Booth Babes, Bronze Tiger, Carf Eurosport, Change Fei, ChangFei, Dassault Rafale, Eagle ornithopter, Eurofighter Typhoon, Eva Air, 西盛遙控飛行嘉年華, 西盛遙控飛行機場, 西盛飛場, 高雄市遙控運動協會, F16 Fighting Falcon, F4U Corsair, F8F-2 Bearcat, Firecrackers, Flight Simulators, Fokker Triplane, Freewing Mirage 2000, Gee Bee, Kaohsiung, model airplane, New Taipei, NTAMA, ornithopter, P-47G Thunderbolt, P-51D Mustang, RC Flying Field, RC Flying Site, RC Turbine Jet, Reb Baron, sailplane, SBD-5 Dauntless, T-One Models, T1 Sport Jet, Tamsui, V2 Tiger Meet, XiSheng, XiSheng RC Extravaganza, Zero Fighter, 張菲, 新北市航空模型協會, 三重西盛環保公園
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NorCal for the model aeronautically-inclined
This is a guide and a preview to upcoming articles I’ll be publishing, on Northern California through the eyes of a New Yorker, with an inclination to see things from a model aeronautic perspective. It is similar to my model-aeronautic take on Ogunquit and its bipolar beach. Here I’ll examine various Napa Valley and Sonoma vineyards on their applicability to flying, while accompanied by my brother’s family. I’ll show you where to find legitimate flying fields manned by AMA chartered clubs, as well as secret flying places that fanatics frequent. We toured San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Half Moon Bay, Point Lobos, Fort Ord Dunes State Park and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Continue reading
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Photography, RC Planes, Travel
Tagged 360° panoramic photos, AMA Chartered Clubs, Artesa Vineyards & Winery, Bay Area, beaches, Bigfin reef squid, birds, Black-crowned Night Heron, Blue Wing Inn, Castello di Amorosa, Common starling, Conservatory of Flowers, Daiso Clay, Din Tai Fung, drone, Flying Fields, Fort Ord Dunes State Park, Foster City, Fundemonium, Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park, Gondola lift, Half Moon Bay, Inner Parkside, Kennedy Park, Lollipot, Metal Sculptures, mimetoliths, Mission San Francisco, Model airplanes, Monterey Bay, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Napa Valley, Nightfall, NorCal, Northern California, oceanside bluffs, Peninsula Channel Commanders, Point Lobos, radio-controlled, sailplane, San Francisco, Sardine tank, Shells Dirt Jumps, Sonoma, St. Francis Winery & Vineyards, Sterling Vineyards, Sunset, T. rex, Tyrannosaurus rex, UMX Radian, Vineyards, West Coast RC Flyers, Western gull, Wine Country, Wine Tasting, Wineries
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3D selfies made in Fantasitron at Madurodam
Writing a computer program to map 2-dimensional drawings to 3-dimensional models had once been my obsession. This stemmed from the endless hours I spent drawing, by hand, orthographic projections of 3D models, and vice versa. While this was condemned as a chore universally by my classmates at Escuela Técnica No. 28 in Buenos Aires, I quite enjoyed it. After my family moved to New York, I no longer had to make these homework drawings. Instead I wrote a C program to generate 3D polyhedrons from 2D polygonal views. The long paper I wrote alongside this program won the gold medal at the New York Math Fair.
That seemed like a lifetime ago. In between then and now, algorithms had been invented to generate 3D models of people in color and with great details, all from simple 2D photos. But it is only in recent years that such technologies started to become commoditized. Just a month ago, Elisha and I stepped into, for a few seconds, a photo booth the size of a restroom, at the miniature park Madurodam. Three weeks later we received an exquisite 3D selfie printed by Shapeways.
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Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Drawings and Paintings, Photography, Travel
Tagged 1:20 scale model, 1:25 scale model, 3D Figurine, 3D photo booth, 3D Portraits, 3D printing, 3D Selfie, acrylic varnish, Amsterdam, Anne Frank Museum, Corsair, Fantasitron, Full Color Sandstone, Gypsum, Kasteel Nijenrode, Madurodam, Mini-me, Miniature Park, Miniature world, Muiden Castle, National Maritime Museum, Neverlands, Prinsengracht canal, Rijksmuseum, Shapeways, The Hague, Varnish
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Xinhai Dude 