I'm always schemin' up somethin' fierce. The next stop motion short. Need to come up with some other ideas and more patient volunteers.

Tu's New Ride. from Andrew Nguyen on Vimeo.

Anyone who knows me (you do know me, right?) knows how much I love TEDtalks. When I would have to travel for months for work, I would sit in my hotel rooms at night and watch TEDtalks to kill time. Well, this year, the baby branch of TED, TEDx, had its first Houston event. I snapped up a ticket and on an early Saturday morning in June, drove out to UH campus for a full day's worth of speakers.

On the path to the event, there was a "demonstration" going on, with signs and protesters fighting against apathy. Very TED-like and it did not seem out of place as one of the event organizers/protesters wrapped a black armband around my arm protesting apathy.

They had a goodie bag for all attendees. I went solo (none of my friends is really into TEDtalks, but ah well, to each their own) and navigated the crowd for some breakfast. The crowd was kind and inviting, and pretty nerdy. I walked past and overheard snippets of a conversation regarding pancreatic enzymes and the like. The water container was filled with slices of cucumber while coffee was being handed out to attendees. The crowd seemed to be definitely a lot of INTJs, but I suppose when INTJs mass, that I turns into an E.

The program for the day's speakers and events.

Two Star Symphony about to perform after the break.

TEDx turned out to be a lot better than I thought it would be. I had seem some TEDx events at other cities on youtube and wasn't very impressed, but the one in Houston was pretty good. Not all the speakers were exceptional, but many were entertaining, humorous, and brought about a different viewpoint regarding cultures and backgrounds and ways of thinking. The list of topics covered by speakers was diverse and the opening and closing speakers were the best of the day. It started off with a discussion on the feeling of shame (gotta love behavioral psychology) to renewable housing to the role of teaching beekeeping to women in Pakistan to creative writing to neurosciences, religion, and uncertainty. There was an amazing symphony that performed to The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and there was Dominic Walsh's piece on the creative thought process that goes into ballet and dance.

Houston's "celebrity chef" Monica Pope had a somewhat entertaining discussion not on cooking, but of the importance of families and meals. She quoted Robert Zemeckis's famous line, "But the continuum is man's desire to tell stories around the campfire. The only thing that keeps changing is the campfire." and stressed the importance of eating around the dinner table.

There was a discussion on the effect of poverty on education (I had once argued with a friend why schools should not be privatized, that kids who went to private schools did not necessarily "want" it more). During each break between speakers, (the schedule went from 10 AM-6 PM with a break for lunch), the MC (the voice of the classical music station in Houston 88.7 KUHF) would read out quotes from attendees that they had included on their application. There was one good one that I liked that stuck out, but I could only remember this much: "People are the same everywhere, they just have different circumstances. And these strengths go untapped because society doesn't value people enough."

Towards the end, I was approached and chatted up a group of random guys who had apparently all come from reddit (I didn't realize reddit houston was meeting up) and they were a nice bunch of fellows. The last speaker, Dr. David Eagleman, spoke about the virtues and embracing doubt and uncertainty- the idea of the Possibilian.

In all, it was a pretty worthwhile day. All the speakers were local, so that was nice to know that there are people in the community with passion and great ideas and the willingness to share them.

Completely unrelated. Just on the stop sign in the parking lot at UH.

Oh yeah, and I got this bag at the event, so now I am eco-friendly (well, when I remember to bring it to the grocery store).

I have a sneaking suspicion that people who hate songs the more popular it gets also believe that the color of a car affects how fast it goes.

A modified old recipe. Just a first attempt- I will make it a lot better if I ever make it again.

Just a few simple ingredients: two eggs, a pear, gruyere, bacon, and bread.

Cook the bacon in the pan and leave a little bit of the bacon oil to toast the bread. Plop an egg into the first bread slice.

Let the egg white on the first slice turn just barely white, plop on the slice of gruyere, then lay down the next slice of bread and put that second egg into there and cover the pan so the top layer cooks

Flip it, cook it just a little longer, and put on the plate

Open that baby up, slab on thinly cut pear slices and the now-crispy bacon.

VOILA! DOUBLE SANDWICH ALL THE WAY

I over cooked it so the egg was not runny

Next time, I won't cook it as long so you get nice runny yolk. But still, the pear slices were a bit refreshing, the gruyere was nice and stringy, the bacon added a nice textural crunch- next attempt I'm hoping the egg will add a nice runny consistency.

This is the last set of photos that I've had in mind to take for years now. I never sat down and planned out how to shoot these until this past week. I have one last photo idea that I haven't gotten around to yet, then I'll have to find new ones.

For the dye photos, all you need is a glass surface, a clear container, and light up the photo from below with an off-camera flash unit. You may want someone to drop in the dye for you- it spreads pretty quickly.

Kind of neat when it separates into two without leaving a trace of connection.

Fave shot of the series.

Oh, and this is Tu's Seiko watch, with a ridiculously bright dial with my camera set to bulb mode.

Next up- water drop photos. All you need is a bit of a zoom lens (zoom in at 100mm or so- should do the trick), but you can probably just zoom out your stock 18-55mm to the 55mm setting and you should be okay. You can use on-camera flash, or you can light from the side with a flash like I did.

Oh yeah, get down low to maybe 10 degrees above eye level with the container to get the best effect. You can shoot from higher up, but the drop won't be as pronounced in the air. I used a black food takeout container to shoot these photos and pre-focused before taking the shot. I actually used a disposable shaving razor dipped into the water as the "dropper". This allowed me to control the frequency of the individual drops hitting the water and I could time it better. Use what you have laying around the house- I did.

When a drop hits the water and breaks the surface, smaller drops will form in a kind of "equal but opposite" reaction.

This one kind of looks like a frog

I kind of like these photos better than the drop flying into the air after breaking the surface tension photos. They look like molten metal to me.

Here's the surface of the black container full of water. When the drops hit the water and smaller droplets form from the impact, they have to hit the water and merge with it too- here they are prior to breaking the surface tension. It looks like they're floating on top of the water.

And if you shoot enough (I shot maybe 150, 200 photos for this set), you can get some dramatic 'splosions.

The final set was trying to duplicate the water being poured into a container shot that you see in ads and magazines. This took a bunch of attempts, trying to time the photo just as the water hit the water in the jar.

Not bad. Nothing professional, but I know I can do this now with a simple setup.

What a 10-year-old strobe unit from college used for parties can do. The concept: cameras can capture a sequence of motion by having the shutter go off multiple times in constant light, resulting in many pictures. Strobes work by having the light go off multiple times while the shutter remains open the entire time, resulting in many exposures for the same photo. This is the same effect to get "ghosts" to appear in photos in olden times. SCIENCE.

Unfortunately, a cheap strobe unit doesn't generate enough light over a distance so these photos ain't coming out that awesome. During the day, ambient outside light gives the effect of a faint trail of the ball's arc.

The rest of these attempts are at night. If I had a professional strobe and a black non-reflective backdrop, you'd get a similar look like you see in science textbooks.

It takes a lot of experimenting and patience to try to get anything to come out.

Make sure you light from the side- if you point the strobe from the front, too much light reflects back from the backdrop and the ball's path appears more faint if you do.

Tossing the ball at the right angle parallel to the strobe is important too. Most of the times, I only got half the tennis ball to appear because I was slightly off.

Not the best exposure, but the most bounces.

And don't use a white backdrop (well, possibly if you had a really dark object, but I don't recommend it)- white's reflective properties will blow out the object due to the background bouncing the light off the strobe.

Tu modeling Da Vinci with strobe on max.

In the end, I turned off the strobe and just used my camera flash manually to get this image. Try it yourself! All these photos are basic and easy!

I shot these last week after watching Ninja Assassin for the THIRD TIME. That's one of those movies that is so terrible that you love it. It is also totally a guy movie- I don't think any girls I know liked it. But hey, man, martial arts is like an intricately choreographed dance, so it's totally like watching America's Best Dance Crew or So You Think You Can Dance, eh, ladies? What? No? I hate you all.

RAIN! But not at all.