10/19/09 (2011)
My grammar has been a proverbial trainwreck the past few days. I swear. I'll try to do better. I promise. No promises on the outcome.
Today feels like one of those days where I have to work extra hard to play nice. The dog felt like a pill. My coworker wreaks of smoke. gah. I want my weekend back. The person in the desk next to mine smokes like a stove pipe. The guy behind me is considering quiting (it's fine, it just makes me wish I quit a long time ago). Lunch was unsatistifying and I need to workout.
Stress.
I did successfully create an ooblec zombie generator using the Girls subwoofer, an o-silly-scope, and a zombie function generator. At frequencies that are mulitpes of about 30-60 hz, ooblec takes on a creepy, messy life of its own. We did some other tests. Most of us are unable to detect a tone above 17khz. Our nieghbors fucking is somewhere between .6 and 1.5 hz... A steady hand gives you good doppler sounds at a few hundreds of hertz. 1-10 khz is what most noises sound like. We're doing it for a magic show.
The kids are going to love it.
Feeding low frequency square waves makes the sub breath like a jet. Very impressive. We have to be careful not to overdrive the amp with the function generator (which can do 24V ptp). Standard audio is what, 3V?
I want a bigger speaker.
I want more power.
I want a bigger mess.
Could we blow out windows? Crack concrete? Cause old people to loose bowel control?
I want more power.
The resonate frequency is the best frequency. Right?
Right.
10/18/09 (2004)
The tomato plants are freezing to death. RIP Jet Stars.
10/18/09 (1920)
The Girly and I have been looking at each other for the past few weeks, and saying the same thing over and over... "I'm tired of hearing about the Republicans and the Democrats".
It's not been lost on us that Rome has been burning for years. The republicans held both houses of congress and the senate and did NOTHING to make it better. They were at the helm with their free-market-this-that-and-the-other when gears that led to the current crisis where at work. They didn't meaningfully cut taxes. My salary didn't go up. My student fees did go up. Intellectual and privacy laws got worse (i'd rather have freedom and terrorists than no freedom and terrorists... it's not like you're going to be able to stop all the terrorists...). Someone idea of god kept finding it's way into the law books. Ick.
Then the country votes the bums out. Now we have a virtual majority of Democrats and we still can't make meaningful progress in solving our problems. We could have severely punished those who used torture in the name of our country. We haven't. We could have severely punished those whose greed has brought the current crisis. We haven't. We could have written laws that ensure that corporate profits are liked to workers profits. We haven't. We could have written laws that take money out of politics. We haven't. Health care reform is being negotiated into a joke.
All we ever hear about is petty mudslinging and nothing like intelligent, respectful discussion. This has been going on for years.
Meanwhile, things have been getting worse.
I'm not some cranky old man saying this... I was borne after Seasame Street was first aired.
We're sick you. All of you.
There was lurking photo explosion on my hard drive:
I haven't seriously taken the time to sort my own photos since May, I think. Wow. Huge backlog. I wish I had taken the time to write scripts to make posting easier. There's only a few thousand. It's easier to delete the bad ones now...
OH! The irony. At the Ben And Jerry's Flavor graveyard. In September
Water in Montreal
Dragonfly in August
Water in August:
The Dog's Birthday treat:
Moving Fog in September:
Tomato Redux:
10/15/09 (1318)
A brief digression.
There is some kind of cruel justice that we get to catch the boomerangs our parents threw.
Yea. the Baby Booomer-angs... I like that... those are the complex, contractidictory policies the baby boomers set up and expect their beleagured children to fix for them.
One of these Boomer-angs is how about to go "bap" to the thrower.
I think it is almost commonly accepted that our nation's method of calculating inflation is nearly bunk. (Start here and work your way down.)
Today the social security administration announced that there won't be any cost of living increase for those on the dole, as social security doesn't see any inflation this year. Our President is going to have to twist congresses arm to cut fatter checks. (I hope that all TEA-party participants on Social Security do the right thing and mail those checks right back to pay down the deficit!)
While prices didn't go as berserk as last year, things that grandma mom and dad will need are probably going up. Little things like drugs and heating oil. Also, the dollar is dropping versus other currencies so the cheap plastic crap at Mal-wart isn't going to get cheaper.
If someone handn't been philandering with the numbers they'd get a pay raise of about 2% this year to help with that.
Is this Karma?
10/14/09 (2114)
Friday was awesome.
The leader of the banana republic I live in won the Nobel prize, our local power company announced that it's local solar power projects were more productive than projected, and I finally figured out a problem in my research that I have been wrestling with for over a year.
That is amazing. Good days like that are rare.
Today was pretty awesome too. The data I made on Tuesday looks amazing. It's fun doing mass spec studies on ion molecule processes because they're so damn fast. I did 50 trials in about 4 hours. I would be faster if I could find some higher level of automation. But it's a one-off test, so it's not worth the trouble. A lot of instrument time was wasted writing things in my notebook.
I finally aliased the commands I use to get the java TightVNC to work in my .cshrc. My brother states some regret for wasting as much time as he does with shell scripting. For me, a little knowledge goes a long way.
I spent three hours this afternoon in a intense discussion about mass spectrometry, ion processes, and vacuum systems with an engineering student. It was amazingly fun. I really like this kid... in 3 months he's drawn half of instrument in CAD and has beaten a site license for Simion out of concerned parties. You can bet I'll be cleaning some space off my hard drive for that. As usual, our strength as a team seems to hinge on my knowledge that was drilled in class as a chemist and my knowledge that I acquired as a geek. I know chemistry but really enjoy fiddling with electronic. I keep hoping I can find a position somewhere that lets me ride that kind of edge.
I have been getting huge numbers of leaf photos, but have been otherwise busy and thus not had time to post them.
Excerpt from The Dog's journal:
"Day #369: I still have no clue at all about what is going on."
10/03/09 (1002)
A story from the other side.
It's that time of year again, when a new crop of adults, having freshly mastered the nuances of living away from home (such as laundry, finding food, and staying sober for more than 6 hours straight). Must face bigger challenges; like the first General Chemistry Exam, which, is also likely for their first exam in college.
Most people are aware of the trials that a student endures in preparing for such events, what it's like to take the actual exam, and the possible outcomes.
I live on the other side of the equation, so to speak.
I get an email from a secretary about a week before the exam, asking the department for volunteer proctors. For those who TA outside of general chemistry or those who are research assistants, there is additional pay involved. If you have half a day, this is a good way to catch up on back bills or whatever you do with money. I'm free enough, so I volunteer.
About 20 minutes before the exam starts, the proctors gather to get room assignments and large boxes filled with exams. There are about ~600 students in general chemistry, and they all take the exam at the same time, so they are spread into 12 classrooms around campus. While these are midsized lecture halls that can seat several hundred, we use half that space so students can spread out to minimize cheating. This time, I was proctoring with a Professor. For me, this is a score: if something goes wild, it is instantly the Prof's problem to make a decision about it, ostensibly because of the wisdom gap. I just have to stand around and look threatening.
We have a classroom in social sciences, with students from the morning section and the tail end of the alphabet.
We get an instruction sheet that tells us what to say and when, and what to put on the board (section, time left, "NO CELLPHONES!", and "good luck"), what kinds of questions we can answer (only clarify terms), and what to do if the fire alarm goes off (halt the test and evacuate. Continue after the all clear, negotiate extra time if needed).
Students are waiting for us when we get there, we spend a lot of time telling people that they're in the wrong room and where to go, and to leave a seat between people. 5 minutes before the test I tell the room to clear their desks of everything except pens, pencils, and calculators (ok, you can have your water bottle...). We hand out exams. "Please read all the instructions and fill out the survey on the back"
We are short exams. There's either been a severe miscount or someone doesn't know how to spell their name. The prof runs off and returns in a few minutes with 10 more copies.
The clock turns to an :40 number.
"You may now begin."
Stragglers come in the door. I give them stern looks and point them to places in the front row where I can pace around in front of them.
I stand on the stage in the front of the room and survey my peons.
The real work has begun.
The main job of a proctor is to prevent or apprehend cheating. It's a job you receive exactly no training in how to do. I asked about this at orientation and there was no methodology given, besides not to leave the room. I have to use my imagination and knowledge of how other people have pulled it off.
To be able to cheat, you need to get information about the questions onto the paper from some source outside of your skull. This can be another student, or it can be something with information stored in it somehow.
Fortunately, this is a chemistry exam and it's very calculation intensive, unless someone cribbed the exam from the prof when she was printing it this morning, they're not going to be able to sneak in much useful. Spreading people out makes it hard to covertly copy answers. (Incidentally, I doubt it existed 48 hours before it was given.... most instructors are not that far ahead).
This is how I do it:
I spend the entire exam watching people. Or, more precisely, one person at a time. Are both hands on the desk? Good. Not playing with a phone or something. I look for notebooks left on top of backpacks, headphones (or people wearing hoods to conceal headphones), writing on hands or legs.
I also watch how people use their calculators. Calculators are a wash because most profs don't know how much you can stick in a programmable calculator. Or that you can program it (or find programs) to answer many complex problems. It's a bit of a gray area. Someone flipping through a text file on a calculator is going to be using different keys and with different intensity than someone who ants to know what -e^(π*i) is.
If I ever teach, my exams will either be take home or no calculators.
There is often someone who is acting suspicious, but not really doing anything outright wrong. A guy could be looking at that girl's test, but he could be looking at that girl... her shirt is so tight you can see her religion... hard to ignore her, or her answers. We remember these people and set their tests aside for special consideration after they leave. They are almost always false positives.
I walk around the room for most of the test.
After 10 minutes, a hand goes up. There's a question about a formula. By inspection, the formula is wrong, but I don't know if the "correct" answer is with the true formula or with the one given. When in doubt, go with the given equation. Most people don't deeply examine the question, only take the information and give an answer without standing back and asking what they just did. The goal is to pass the test, not necessarily think about it... most people would be amazed at the number of fallacies they'd happily crunched through.
A minute later, there is another hand. Same question, same answer. The prof and I whisper about it and decide we'd make a formal announcement if there's further questions. About that time, the course instructor comes in and tells us to tell them that it won't be graded.
Unsurprisingly, there are no further questions about it.
I pass around the room watching hands and eyes.
It's boring. After about 30 minutes people start to hand in tests.
My theory is that these are kids on either side of the bell curve.... the ones who own it and the ones who just wasted an hour writing down poetry. I think about how much it costs for the latter group to be here, and it's gut wrenching. I take their tests and am sure to collect the periodic tables that most ripped off the back. They often get used as scratch paper. I don't want information to leave the room. So I'm polite as a southern bell. "Can I take that for you? Thanks." "Can I please have the periodic table back?". "I'll handle that, don't worry."
It's just a test, I'm not the Gestapo.
After about an hour the prof pulls me aside. We have one of those individuals with idly wandering eyes. I'll later put a small mark on his test so we can examine it.
We start calling out 20, 10, and 5 minutes left. There are a lot of students left in the room. I think most of them are stuck on just one problem. The room needs to be empty promptly at the end of the allotted time, so after the last minute I tell students to put down their pens and turn in the test. If they didn't it after 90 minutes, they won't. We pile the tests into the box and walk out as a class fills in behind us.
There is still 6 hours of work ahead of us. The exams need to be graded in time for them to be handed out at lecture tomorrow. The proctors and TAs meet immediately after the test to do this. We order a lot of pizza and sit at a big table filled with tests and sprinkled with red pens and calculators. Small groups grade a page together as a group so we can be consistent and still move through 600 tests. It's a lot more like a sit-com than you'd imagine. Some of the grading rubric is determined on the spot depending on the zeitgeist of the test responses. If you've ever had a test handed back with a maze of arrows, question marks and "SIG FIGS! -1 See answer key!" scrawled on it, the inspiration was borne in these sessions. There's just too much to be personal, unless someone is very very special. I got an essay question that claimed Rutherford discovered the charge on the electron. Hilarious, to me, because a) he didn't and b) the student clearly didn't read the question. I crossed out Rutherford and wrote in "Millikan-- See answer key!" I could feel fuses blowing across space time.
We of read the poetic and pathetic answers out loud. "I don't know, this is really hard, not like last years test at all!". "Not enough time!!!".
I don't grade often. It take time to get used to the idea of partial credit. Most of the time I think of credit in absolute terms. If I have 12 dollars and spend 6 I still have 6 dollars and am therefore ok. If you have 12 points and loose six points you FAIL. I have to be nice when docking points because otherwise people would fail for simple math errors. It makes me suspect our grading system is flawed.
I grade a test page, turn it to the next page, and make a pile to hand around the table. Hours pass. Tests move from place to place. Trends develop.
We save multiple choice for last, because it's fast and easy to grade. As the short answer questions are graded, people can switch to multiple choice. DACCCCCBA. DACCCCBA. Circle-cross-"-3"-flip. Quick and easy.
Soon, we have a completely graded test. Then they come in waves. Someone is given a calculator and starts to total the scores. Someone without fat-fingers and with spot-on arithmetic.
How do you quickly put 600 test grades into a grade book?
Hard way: flip through the tests, find the line in the grade book, and enter the grade.
Easy way: alphabetize the tests. The grade book is alphabetized. One person reads the name and score, and the other puts it into the grade book.
Alphabetizing 600 tests by hand is done in the hallway. There is a stack for each letter in the alphabet. You wander up and down the hall with an armload of tests putting them in the right category. Then you go through and alphabetize the piles.
It's 1900 now, so the hall is ours for sorting.
For the coupe de gras, I sit with a pile of tests, reading the names to a compatriot who types them in.
Inevitably, there are names that are not in the grade book. The reasons for this are always a little off. Sometimes folks get married. Some forgot to register. Sometimes the registrar screws up. Maybe they were just bored and wanted to know what a chemistry test was like. We leave those tests for the instructor to deal with.
It's 20:15.
I take the 2105 bus home, and find The Girl and The Dog asleep. I take off my clothes, I turn off the light, and curl up beside her and drift off.
Amazing. 16 years ago these things cost hundreds of dollars. Now they're homebrew Mac clock chips. Somewhat ironically, made by a chemistry supply company. Although, the chemist obsession with macs is long known...
09/30/09 (0613)
Irony:
On cnn.com: a quickvote survey showed that 69% of employees rated themselves as hardworking. 26% rated themselves as average. 5% rated themselves as average.
Bits of Montreal:
Jardin Botanique de Montreal:
Atwater Market:
...was a sausagefest....
Save me I'm cute:
Tomatoes? Cherries? Canadian Aphrodisiacs?
Viaduct:
Some woman I ran into:
....10,11,12,14,15...wait.....
Aftermath:
09/27/09 (2026)
Life: It's like being stuck between a dog and a fire hydrant!
I read that somewhere else, but couldn't find an appropriate place to use it. Fortunately, you can just about always blame life for all your problems.
Things that have amazed me this week:
Aerodynamic Drag: Air at normal pressure is pretty viscous stuff when you compare it to nothing at all. You average fan stops spinning in a moment when you un plug it or turn it off. It slows due to friction with the motor and the air that is pushed with it's momentum. A turbopump rotor, by comparison, is cushioned by very low drag bearings and spins at 60,000+ RPM inside of a vacuum chamber. If you do not introduce a source of gas to slow the rotation, they will spin for nearly an hour.
USB 2.0: I used to copy files to a backup hard drive from my instrument control machines directly via USB2.0. They are rather old IBM G40 Laptops. As they are remotely managed most of the time, I decided to try using filezilla FTP server and the hard drive on my stinkpad over the WAN. While it took them nearly an hour to backup to the drive, they both managed to do the same task in 5 minutes over the LAN. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe the USB controller is slow. Maybe filezilla handles files faster than windows copy routine. Which brings me to
Windows Vista: I watched a brand new machine copy files at 130 kilobytes/sec from one place to another on it's hard drive. Apparently PIO is new among the retro crowd or Microsoft is to busy assuring the recording industry that text files aren't MP3s and pretty graphics to realize that some of us use computers to do important things like organize data and perform calculations.
The dog farted this morning: It was a air most foul. I decided we'd go for a walk before he did.
I will, one day, ditch windows. Finding programs that make your life easier seems like an easter egg hunt. I already know how to make my life easier using *nix.
Skipping forward a day...
Teflon Grease: More forever than death. S and S machine tests teflon and 100 other lubes. Asside: they make nifty bike couplers: BTC Couplers. When I feel spry, I put in 30-50 miles per week on my bike, so I care a little, because having to re-grease mid weak makes getting to work just a bit harder.
I have a million beautiful photos to show you, and maybe a few ugly ones. However, I think I'm going to post something to prove I'm alive and then go to bed to prove I'm not.
09/23/09 (1406)
I am officially panicing about getting out of grad school.
Thanks for asking.
You should listen to this:
Why? Because it speaks to me. That's why.
Pour Decisions
by: The Real McKenzies
On: 10,000 shots.
i'm living up in Canada, and i'm Canadian
Scottish Canadian with opportunity
i could have been a manager of a brewery
making beer for everyone but most of all for me
my father was a soda jerk, my mom an office clerk
but neither one of those was good enough for me
i could have moved into the hill, and ran a few stills
and made a fortune selling hooch beyond the law
pour decisions, a punk musician just ain't as cute at 53
i used to be a lumberjack, and i'm ok with that
i wore suspenders, little panties, and a bra
i used to be a socialist, a sort of communist
now i'm a pessimist and i don't care at all
i could have been a minister, a holy predator
a man of faith you really wouldn't want to meet
perhaps a Scientologist, just as a hobbyist
and start a cult that's turning people into sheep
pour decisions, a punk musician just ain't as cute at 53
i have forsaken money makin'
yeah, you still wish you were me
I think we should clone packrat many times and make him an entire college administration.
I wonder who they will contract for the self service guillotines?
I can only imagine them featuring redundant geothermal powersupplies, a backup stake through the heart, and an easy to clean non-stick surface supported by a riggid, all stainless steel construction, except for the blade, which would probably be a very large obsidian blade.
09/17/09 (1836)
ow. Life. ow.
09/15/09 (1211)
We're so bad we need helmets and kneepads to go through our ssh tunnels.
(14:07:02) coolguyrev1: may loose me for a minute...almost home
(14:07:15) holhas: wait, are you walking and typing?
(14:07:18) coolguyrev1: yes
(14:07:27) coolguyrev1: food is at home
(14:07:30) coolguyrev1: hungry
(14:07:42) holhas: i'm glad i'm imprtant enought to you that you'll walk around iming
(14:08:00) coolguyrev1: should tell you alot:0
(14:08:06) holhas: how do you avoid walls?
(14:08:25) coolguyrev1: i walk around them
09/12/09 (2015)
The Girly doesn't believe I spell check. I do these to prove Aspell works.
Apparently, sometimes I don't.
Hmf.
Cheek check same difference.
Right?
Right.
09/12/09 (1204)
By popular demand.
The Dog woke me up early:
Fun with client photos:
Making a afghan.
It was a windy day too. Next time, I'll shoot at f/11 or f/16 so I can make the whole bug in focus.
I did the rear brakes last weekend. I had to push the brake shoes over the lip of the groove in the drum, which was a noisy, hammer-wielding pain.
Brake drum before:
Brake drum after:
Brake springs.
Star wheel before:
Star wheel after:
Art star wheel:
Footprints:
The Dog woke me up early again:
Bells:
I took this after reading the quote:
"Is your computer like a bicycle for your mind?" (Steve Jobs, IIRC)
Flowers for school children:
I opened the stinkpad. There's copper and dust in there. I didn't see any of my files:
More Dover Decay. I had thought that building large tunnels in the woods would mean that people would loiter and make trouble.:
A CD for Chester:
9/11:
We saved a mouse:
Ektar 100:
09/11/09 (1422)
Flainn's livejournal page and website have been down for longer than normal.
I guess that follows the season's trend.... Numerous blogs i've read have either gone stale or been set to private or friends only or something else that makes me questions the point of exposing the material on the internet anyway.
I hope it comes back.
I sent schlake an email asking for The Daily Page to come back after the internet was mean to him.
What did I say? Something about not changing my socks until it came back.
After a while I realized that nasal torture wasn't working and I wasn't getting any dates.
Sorry.
Dates>>Daily Page. The Girly is more interesting than photos of Simon and girlfeet. She's also more warm than my computer.
The anti-web trend is kind of counter intuitive in some regards. The people who claim that if you do what they say, you'll get a job keep hyping twitter and linkedin and all that jazz.
Because, apparently, glitz r0x so much more than having solid skilz
(If you know what I mean, and I know you do.)
I got two rolls of Ektar 100 today. One for me, one for The Girly.
I'm going to go put a sappy note on it.
Packrat thinks we should buy used runway lights at auction and leave them around the NMT campus.
The last time I did something like that I nearly precipitated a bomb scare.
I joke about conditioning The Dog to be afraid of eating so I can save money on dog food.
I think it's psychotic that we've conditioned ourselves to think that things that we don't understand will blow up.
A frequent topic of relatively despondent conversation in the Ladybug/Alchemist household is how little summer we got. Some readers in more New Mexican climes will probably wonder what I'm talking about. Those of us cloistered in New England got a good, solid, 2 months of cold and rain, which was exactly what we needed to pull us out of our unemployed doldrums and get us some good, clean, lighthearted fun: Nothing like an endless string of weeks huddled under blankets, knitting, scanning the paper for work, watching the slugs eat the veggie garden, all the while wondering about the insanity of having the heat on in June. We got a nice, relaxing 2 weeks of baking heat, and now there is no question of September.
It's New England not New Zealand.
I swear.
The dog is getting slightly better on bike rides. I think he's getting the idea that getting the leash and the wheel together is bad. Getting under the wheel is bad. Getting into the chain is bad. Generally, when I'm on the bike the rule is run like hell.
Pretty easy rule to follow really. It works on volcanoes, oppressive governments, McDonald's, loosing battles, and sleazy SOs.
And me too.
Run, dog, run.
09/04/09 (0649)
I'm sure the reason I don't write as much right now has little to do with grad school and lots to do with the fact that every time I sit down to write, a certain individual flies off the rocker and demands to pet or to play tug of war.
Actually, no, I just checked, and it's most likely grad school.
And life.
*sigh*
You know what I hate?
As in.
Hate.
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate Hate
HATE?
I hate Fairpoint Communications.
Deep, burning, loathing, hatred.
Imagine you pay a kid to mow your lawn. He does a good job for a while, but then you move out of town, and he says he won't get on the bus with his lawn mower to mow your new lawn.
Small surprise, really.
So, you tell him, sorry, make sure you're squared away with his pay, and it's splitsville for you and lawnmower kid.
Now, this is where your droll little pedestrian suburban fantasy goes haywire:
A month after you get set up, lawnmower kid calls you and says that he was calculating his costs wrong. Apparently he was taking some of the payment as future payment on gas for the mowing, while some of it was billed backwards for the time he was pushing the grass-cutting-machine. Clever and confusing at the same time. Aren't kids cute? You sigh a deep sigh of those struck by poor second grader math, and send him a little more money. He been a good kid, right?
Well, a month later, the person who bought your old dump of a house calls and asks why there's a kid happily mowing the lawn twice a week when they have a perfectly good herd of goats that do the same job for less and give them fertilizer, milk, and companionship, all gratis. About the same time, mower-boy calls and asks you to catch up on your back bills so he can buy ice cream.
You tell him "no", of course. You explain that you don't live there anymore and that you told him the mowing-for-cash deal has been up for a month and tough cookies if he's missed that message that you so subtly gave him by telling him to stop, squaring away you account, and moving to Turkmenistan where the grass generally isn't worth mowing anyway. Remember that bus conversation?
End of mower boy?
HARDLY!
A month later, your goat bearing replacement reports that the goats are finally getting fat. Good for her! Life is sweet for a few moments until you get a letter from mower boy asking for last months mowing and gas, plus this months mowing and gas, plus itemized expenses for Twinkis and rare chocolate comestibles consumed while presumably cutting grass. You call mower boy, and ask to talk to his mother, because being extorted by a second grader is nothing to take lightly. She is profusely apologetic for everything that has sprung from her loins, and explains that the billing book and the mowing address book are two different books and she simply forgot to erase your name from the billing book. She'll do that now and you'll be square.
Oh, that's silly.
You just thought he was out to get you.
Happy now?
Not hardly.
A month later, you get a bill that is the summation of the previous bills, plus another months worth of lawn pruning, plus another sum of money that seems to be an arbitrary but shockingly large number. If anyone paid mower boy this much he could trade his push mower for a ride on and the go to the drive-in for lunch. Mowerboy has just forked you for some serious mullah after having done absolutely nothing but ask you for money for the past 3 months. Enough of this phone business... you put on your metal studded war sandals and march to mower boys house. You ring the bell, and ask politely to speak to The Mother of Mower Boy. Instead, her unbelievably obese sister comes out, and explains that mower boy and Mom live somewhere else entirely and she has no clue, even though she agrees they sound something like a mafia organization and not childhood business.
So, you call mower boy again. Mower boy and his mom "don't remember" any of the past conversations. Like it's been blown out of their minds by a light breeze or something. You explain again that you don't live in their part of the world anymore. They then make paper shuffling sounds and explain that there's been a terrible mistake and that the lawn mowing notebook and the billing notebook are two separate books and they forgot to remove you from the billing notebook, and she's erasing it now and everything will be fine.
Deja vu?
You have to explain the concept of Deja Vu to Mower boys mom, who then again denies prior interaction and then mumbles about you maybe owing more money because she has problems with her calculator. You explain that the account is cleared (you have all the receipts from all the mowing they've done, you know! It's got their handwriting on it!). She agrees that everything is going to be fine and you'll never here from them again.
A week later, you get a letter in the mail from mower boy.
Thanking you for choosing him to mow your lawn.
It has a listing of dates that he'll be coming.
A new contract in front.
All clean and white.
Except.
The address is your old address.
You know, the one with the goats?
Well, damn.
The brakes on the ChevOldsmoBuiac were sort of in need of work. I hope this doesn't come as a shock to those who have been visiting or who doubt my piloting skills:
Left side:
Right side:
These lead me to wonder if I should have replaced the calipers, too.
Rotor back:
I think I should have just rebuilt the front end. All the rubber is cracking. The CV joints boots are shredding (it's generally better to just replace the whole half-shaft, if you ask me). The power steering is leaking a bit. I have to work pretty hard to remove rust. I put anti-sieze compound on every contact surface that seems reasonable. Otherwise, it will all stick together.
The new parts around the rusty ones intrigue me.
This is for Dad, who's tractor never seems to weigh enough:
The Dog gets taken for many walks. I take the camera with me on these little trips: The nieghborhood is filled with little possibilities:
I also tend to find cell phones on my walks. So far, I have found their owners:
I wish my garden looked like this:
Explosm.
08/29/09 (1327)
A roll of TMax 3200 came back.
Perhaps unlike most other films, TMax3200 is a full resolution scan at standard film CD resolutions.
08/28/09 (0911)
I kept seeing this at the bottom of entries in the instrument log:
"-Fr. Gx. S."
What the hell?
I should know, I wrote that.
Then, I remembered.
Father Guidoux Sarducci.
Vatican Emissary to Rolling Stone Magazine.
Well, Damn.
-Fr. Gx. S.
08/27/09 (2109)
The dog jumped up and walked to his crate, where he flopped, causing a small earthquake for the plant that is perched above it.
The Girly, just as suddenly, yelled his name in anger and put her sweatshirt over her nose.
I looked at her with puzzlement. Then I smelled it.
The dog had farted, then ran for cover in the safest place he could think of.
I laughed and laughed.
I have been plotting to make Apple Bran Muffins for a week.
I was tired and not thinking straight, so I said, "I'm going to make man muffins."
That got a quizzical look.
"I'm not sure I'm going to sit here and watch that", she said.
I call that an ambigous euphamism.
I laughed and laughed.
One of the more stupid purchases I have made is the two Radeon 9200SE boards I bought for my Linux machine in 2004. At the time, they seemed like a better deal than a Radeon 7500. Time has shown that the 7500 was a superior product in most respects. My first hint that they were a bad rap was that they seemed very slow playing homeworld, which was already 6 years old at the time. The second clue was when the Intel i845 chipset graphics on the PIV soundly outperformed the AGP card. I gave it away to someone who desperately needed any video card. My current linux machine is running on the remaining Radeon 9200SE PCI card. I tried running Warzone 2100, originally released 10 years ago on it. It's sluggish with all other machine specs being at least 2x what the best recommended values were when it was published.
I will be on the lookout for a more suitable AGP card. But only a little. AGP is deadend. All my computers are very very old. They work, but they won't last for ever. Better to be saving my money.
08/25/09 (0906)
I drug the PIII out of the closet and stuck the hard drive from the smokey PIV in it. That poor Dell T500 never does get a chance to die, which by rights it should probably do anyway. The drive and ubuntu 9.04 install worked ok, until I tried to play a video. Then it locked up. Then, it wouldn't boot.
Ah. My life.
Oddly, it would boot of a CD. After fiddling with the boot order in the Bios, I decided to take things down to basics. I pulled out everything, put the BIOS jumper in reset position, and turned the power on. I then plugged in just a hard disk and the video card. It booted! I was amazed. I added the CDRW. It booted! I was amazed. I added another hard drive. It booted! I was amazed.
The process of adding components piecewise, booting, and amazement continued until I had all the desired components installed.
Another slight matter was what to do with all 5 hard drives in the system. After some discussion with my brother, I decided I would try using LVM to bundle the mismatched pile into a distinct device.
LVM: rocks the house.
I was initially hoping that it would have a nifty gui to get it going, but it's so simple that I don't think it's necissary. I added my magic pile-of-disks voulume to my fstab. And thus 4 20 gig drives became a single 80 gig drive.
Sweet.
Linux is amazing.
Reason number #503 to get done with grad school: I am running out of computers that are less than 8 years old.
Point of stupid pride. Most if the things I need to get done don't need modern hardware. Only good thinking.
08/24/09 (0636)
From the films:
08/21/09 (2213)
Harrumph. My brothers web page is still down.
I can't help but wonder if the JHU ACM needs a different method for handling their user space... Their page was only down for neigh 3 weeks.
Oh well.
This is my greatest current worry and fear: Post hoc my ass.
My feelings may be a little overblown. I have virtually no desire to stay in the academic world. As a super-tech or at an institute, sure. Prof? Unlikely. I like hanging out with the engineers and trying to help them make cool stuff.
Based on my experiences getting into undergrad and graduate schools, I have no reason to believe that I'd be a valid faculty candidate anyway. At least anywhere except a community college. Especially now that my peers are graduating and/or being laid off into joblessness. I admit that some of them have rather artificial restrictions on where they want to work. Perhaps a desire to be somewhere else will be an enabler.
No, I don't mistake this universe for one that cares.
If you want someone to care, you'd better learn how to make friends.
That's just how it works.
But you'd better care too.
In other news, The Revolution grinds on:
It seems that a lot of the apartments around town that we looked at this spring are still available. I bet there's more negotiation room about dogs now.
This comes as The Girly reports that local hospitals aren't hiring new staff as people leave as their part-time pool is taking all the hours they can.
Similarly, science is not making us money, only rave reviews. This must be what it feels like to be a rock star and have all your fans pirate your music.
We returned a very expensive, but DOA part to the manufacturer several weeks ago. Their web page is alive, sometimes someone answers the phone (after 3 calls we got the return setup), but we have heard nothing about our part since FedEx took it away.
This all seems like a world that is in a holding pattern, waiting for things to change.
While the news proclaims that things are getting better, I sometimes think we just hacked off one of our legs and are enjoying our freedom. The blood loss hasn't caught up to us yet.
I have a different angle on the same tune.
Impending doom is an interesting intellectual exercise when it's not happening to you. It's a gripping topic to sit around and stratagize over while drinking coffee and eating cookies with a close group of friends.
Real doom isn't fun.
The Girly and I (finally) found our way to the same time zone in June. Work has yet to materialize for her, in spite of a going to great lengths to get her licensed and local. This has meant that we've gone through her savings and into mine to stay afloat. While, the point of saving is to muddle through little disasters such as this, there is a uncomfortable feeling of panic everytime we buy something now... we're spending money that won't just pop back next paycheck.
It's depressing.
I don't really know how else to put it.
It feels like I'm borrowing against my dream of taking time off after school to actually do something cool and interesting (which is what I really should have done after undergrad...). It also makes me regret every having gone grad school, because the situation would be very manageable if I had a Real Job™. To boot, It would perhaps be more cheery if grad school didn't regularly make me hate my life.
Of course, we've found some bright sides.
-We've got matching cat litter tubs for going to the grocery store.
-We're finding lots of ways to put our sewing machines to use.
-The Dog isn't lonely.
-No excuse not to foster my love of cooking.
-We have each other.
When I kiss her, she smells like sunscreen and vanilla. The world stops and I wish she would squeeze harder and never stop.
Photos of machines and things:
08/12/09 (0001)
My brother came to town last weekend. We took him drinking at Red Hook and through him off a bridge. Good times.
Remember: keep your legs together when making long drops into water.
It was nice get my mind off itself for a while.
Things are tight right now, as they are for a lot of folks. I certainly have my share of worries that I carefully water and tend and weed when i can, so I have yard full of them to pick and suck on at a given moment. I worry about running out of money. Worry about not getting done with grad school on time or ever. Throw in being overworked due to taking on a ton of photo work... which means a ton of time sitting in front of a computer instead of having fun. I desperately needed to share some dirty jokes over dirty drinks and get away from the computer, lab, and anything that would let me see my bank account balance. Too much work makes Karl a dull boy.
I'm running cans again, which only adds insult to injury on that front. I have long suspected that a major causality of attending grad school would be my never-that-great social skills. I think, as time goes on, that is proving to be more and more true. For a brief while I felt like I fit in here and had a developing social circle, but the winds have blown those folks out of my life more quickly than they arrived. A social circle gave me people to talk to, jog the mind and gave me new experiences. Things seem a bit lonely around these parts right. Even with The Girly. Two introverts can raise a lot of silence now and then.
As a result of spending lots of time focused on a few topics, I'm generally hard up for interesting conversation. Unless by interesting you mean Townsend theory. On top of that, my grasp of the concept of conversation seems to be weakening, so I exude awkwardness. I don't really lead phone conversations well anymore. In general, I think I'm leaving things hanging for people somehow. I always listened to what people said and missed what they meant. I sense awkward silences, but I don't usually know why they're there or how to fix them.
I can still write rambling treatise that I then post on the internet to confuse people.
It's people like me that make the internet surreal, you know.
My brother seems to be at that a nice early-20's-almost-out-of-college place. Lots of energy, and if it's possible to glow with potential without needing a high voltage transformer, he manages to do it. We don't talk frequently enough, so it's always a bit of a surprise to hear what he's been up to, much less see him. We both blame the pace of life this side of the Mississippi for that.
He brought computer parts, and attempted to fix my xorg.conf file. I have a linux box again. Still no word on the breadmaker.
I learned some fun things tonight. I now know a little about using ssh public/private keys and I know a lot more about cron than i did before. Joy of Joys, Rainbow has cron activated for all users. I see that Ubuntu doesn't, however, so you better be in a big happy Ubuntu with your admin or you're going to be stuck dittling with Screen
My adviser brought his laptop down last night for me to diagnose. It posted with a crazy-warble screen, the tried to start windows, then ultimately BSODed. The screen tended to tare or warp or just spew characters. It wreaked of a bad video card. By squinting, going cross eyed, and holding my nose to the screen, I noticed he had an Nvidia NVS 135 video card. Google that and you'll see a million complains about his laptop model and that card. Sort of a shame, because it's a nice machine on paper. Dell has offered to fix it for him, gratis.
My relief shift is here. Off to snuggle close to The Girly and wait for The Dog to wake me.
08/06/09 (1428)
Too epiphanys in the same morning? Let's go for number 3!
Eternal:
1) Obsession: I have had some discussions about why people are good at the things they do. Sometimes people are naturally skille. Sometimes there not. Today, I realized that it's possible to be obsessed with something but not really like doing it. It's the obsession, the desire to make it perfect, as opposed to the actual desire to be happy. An existencial red herring.
Temporal:
2) The GOP can't get it's act together. After 8 year of polices that failed and ruined the nation, instead of thinking about what is best for the country, they are grabbing for power and trying to do what is best for power. In order for that to happen, they need Obama and the DNC to fail worse. They're painting every attempt at solving problems as wasting money. The DNC's plan is kinda flimsy, but at least it has a snowball's chance in hell. The GOP plan of cutting taxes and ban abortion won't help people get jobs and rebuild american global hegemony.
We need a cultural shift of epic scale. Even though even convincing me to abandon the safety of my keyboard and actually do something is sort of hard. It's all so wrong that fixing it is almost unconsionable.
Some time passes.
We had a liquid lunch meeting, so now i'm drinking coffee and sobering a bit before I fire up the boat and sail home.
About the linux box. I didn't try turning it on since the move. Last weekend I tried to turn it on for some reason, and it didn't boot. I didn't think to really mess with it until tuesday night, when I discovered that the LEDs on the mother board don't even come on. My brother, who is a trove of replacement parts, suggested I narrow it down to the PSU or the MB. When I plugged it in again, the PSU made a scary electrical chattering sound, smoke, and a bad smell. Just to be sure, I plugged it into a surge protector and turned the switch on the surge protector. Sparks and smoke came out the back.
Wee.
I like French Roast.
My research project seems in the shitter again. You'd think that electrons would pretty much go where the field lines lead, but they're leading someplace wierd.
I should have gone into theory.
*sigh*
Out of coffee.
Going home.
08/06/09 (0617)
I stayed up late working, i noticed that the south side of the house had glowing windows. I don't love the Girly for her tripod, but it's a nice perk. Even if I forgot how to use the Mirror lockup setting on the camera.
It's more likely that you are seeing hot pixels than seeing stars.
I want to fly like UPS guy...
I wanted to take more pictures of her, but the camera wouldn't come back on.
Dead duck:
The new tunnel under Silver Street. I can already imagine all of Dover's burgeoning homeless population there on a cold night.
Tiny cylinder hone:
So fresh and so clean!
08/05/09 (1320)
Sometimes I feel like a lazy bum.
You know what I did today?
I spent an hour with a 10mm diameter cylinder hone scrubbing ion burn out of a cylinderical piece of hardware.
I must admit that it works better than my previous technique. I cannot tell the difference between the burned steel and the mother metal now... which is a first in my years of performing the cleaning ritual every few months.
The company has a blog, showing before and after pictures. Most of them involve brake cylinders or piston cylinders.
The world should know about their contribution to the world of plasma science.
The surface of crocus cloth dissolves in water! oops. Who knew?
I measured some stuff with calipers as part of a reverse engineering project. To my surprise, the dimensions were all even metric units. 2 pieces, both 2 cm long with a 1 cm diameter hole through them.
You would not believe how much they cost new.
I called a company to RMA something for the 3rd time in a week. They noted the thing I want isn't available anymore due to exclusive rights agreement. After they replace mine, there may not be anymore.
I ate an apple.
I ate a banana.
I filed paperwork with the secretary.
She gave me a mini snickers bar.
I ate a mini snickers bar.
Now i'm blogging while I wait for the oven to warm up so I can bake contaminates off my parts.
Burn baby burn.
Which is what would happen if you fell asleep in the sun today.
Wear sunscreen.
The Girly and I shared a long kiss before i rode to work this morning.
It was nice.
Still no word on the meaning of life.
These days it seems like survival is a good starting point.
The oven is warm.
Back to work.
08/04/09 (0555)
Don Edwards steps onto the stage of my life:
"....The camera is dead, and the bread maker's dead, and the linux box is dead, and the PTR-MS is d...e...a...d......"
Don Edwards has left the building.
I guess I'll take a film camera with me today.
08/03/09 (0705)
Haha. Very funny.
My stupid ancient blog script thinks ice cream is ice cream AND glass.
I should write smarter code. One day.
This is wierd marks on glass in the yard:
08/03/09 (0703) Design Flaw: I'd put one of the signs on my car. It would give me an excuse to drive even slower.
I heard that people tend to over-rate their capabilities. Something like %80 of college professors rated themselves as "Above average". Without the numbers for professors that rated themselves in other categories, I can't be sure. Armed with the knowledge I going to start recommending that people rate themselves as "average" so they don't skew statistics.
Of course, I know I'm an average driver. My passengers frequently tell me that I am going the wrong way and complain of motion sickness. Instead of going to all the work of watching my (hitherto unworking!) speedometer, I just drive slower than everyone else. I'm sure everytime I fire up the ChevOldsmoBuiac, someone in another car is given inspiration to scream "LEARN HOW TO DRIVE!" (I can find the pedals, what's the big deal?)
Seriously, it is not my fault there are speed limits.
I've noticed a sort of flatness the past few months. I think the most obvious rendition of it is that I suck at conversation more than usual. When I call my friends or family I usually don't have much to say. What have I been doing? Research, photos, and surviving. My usual fodder for discussion, which I think must be based on reading current events and activities, has been curtailed to an extent. I certainly haven't been reading as much I think I should. The photo work should be backing off. I think this is a good thing, really. I need more flexibility with my time to feel balanced. This means I'd like to goof off a little more, and having freedom to spend more time doing science would be good. At the moment I do grad work all day, come home to make dinner and spend time with The Girly and The Dog, then stay up doing photo work. At the same time, there are pressing questions that I would like to stay up trying to answer. All and all, I'm feeling stretched a little thin.
At this point I am beginning to deeply feel that I need to be putting a good deep push to get a thesis and be done with grad school. I will delay advertising my photography.
My first bouts of work for hire has been an interesting experience. Assuming I can remember the finer points, I should be able to handle photos for pay better in the future. Having done a non-zero amount of paid work, I am rather dismayed about how many opinions are available, perhaps most predominately on the internet, that are nearly divorced from reality. In my experience, people pay, in part, for your style and reliability. It's important to have a portfolio and the skill to deliver a product with a similar set of qualities on demand. Whatever is branded on your gear will matter only in passing, at best. If you want photography as a job, develop your techniques and get it so you can do it perfectly under any conditions. Don't take up photography if you want to leave your desk job. If anything, you'll be there more.
Between the macaroni and cheese, thesis defense cookies, and the ice cream in the chemistry department freezer, I may actually put on weight due to fat.
Weird marks on glass in the yard:
Puppy Eyes:
Bolt.
We rode our bikes to pick blueberries:
08/02/09 (1157)
My brother, when he was a child, had the most amazing sneezes. He would secretly, perhaps even hiding it from himself, stow an unspeakably large volume of mucus in his cranial cavities. He would then, at a moment he choose with similar unspoken motives, draw into his little lungs an unspeakably large volume of air, and then apply unspeakably large forces to the air and direct it out of his nostrils via his cranial cavities. Having covered himself and his surroundings with a film of mucus, he would then deliver his characteristic cupe-de-gras; he would start crying. As if it was all some kind of natural disaster and he was just an innocent resident in the villa of his life and an uncontrollable act of god had torn through and left things in gooey tatters.
I can't wait to introduce him to The Dog.
The Dog, you see, seems to have allergies. The Dog also has 3 great loves in life: dinner, tug of war, and belly rubs. When administering the last object on this list, The Dog (cranial cavities and all) must be inverted for proper affect. This causes all the mucus he has been storing to drift into his airways. Inducing sneezing.
You may not have inspected a dog recently, but if you have, you'd notice there is a protruding feature on the front of it's head, referred to as a "nose" in the common vernacular. The dogs nose can be many times larger than a human nose, and is oriented with its holes facing forward. When giving The Dog a belly rub, one must be aware of the face mounted mucus canon.
Ew.
08/01/09 (1400)
I took the dog for a long walk in Pease this morning. There's a retired section of road that's now a bike path. I think The Dog was confused about the big open space and walking in the middle of it. I was sort of delaying. I have a backlog of work to accomplish, but it's such a nice day, and I don't feel like we've had much summer. I'd hate to let it go editing photos. I should be working on my tan, not my belly: life is short, I like to live, a little.
I bought new shoelaces and a longer choke collar for the dog (sad, yes, but would you take a tractor for a walk? At least this one fits over his head without requiring careful ear folding. I should have ignored the size suggestion on the shoelace package and got the larger size. Keens apparently swallow laces, so another 6 inches would have been great. I can just barely tie them right now.
I came home and cleaned up the house a little, spun up my AFP cd, and set to work. The sooner it's done, the sooner it's done, and it will be hot later.
There's a pile of sewer pipes near where the girly is training today. I aim to mount up a zoom lens and go to town before I pick her up.
Then i'm going to put tacos in her.
Notes on future photography-for-money programs: Have a set limit in your mind for what the client materially expects. The cost of materials is nothing compared to the effort I put in and the hardware expenditure. Unless someone wants to cover the Washington memorial with prints, the fee eclipses the actual print costs. That said, there is a limit.
Caught on the spot, I decided that no more than 20% of my fee should be spent on hard product. Now that I think about it, that number should creep lower.
Also: Bouquets are among the more awkward accessories. Nothing like a decoration that hamstrings your mobility.
07/29/09 (0542)
I can get 37 exposures onto a 36 exposure roll of Velvia 400 using my Rebel 2000.
Using it makes me pine, slightly, for a nikon N75 or the ilk. Mostly because it wieghs practically nothing. All my Nikon SLRs are big lumps of magnesium and brass. I think it's all in my mind and I just want to buy something. My lenses are all glass and brass too... it's not like it would be lighter.
Of course, I bet they'll still be around after the Rebel is cracked.
A roll of film:
For a cheap lens, it's sharp enough to give me vertigo by staring at my pants.
This house is next to the one where the roosters live.
07/26/09 (2119)
I have things I want to write.
But i wish to show you photos more, so that's what I'll give you.
You're likely visual people anyway.
I have often wonder why CFLs are made to emit the same amount of light at lower energy consumption when so often I want more light at the same energy consumption. Fortunately, my wishes have been granted! I found, in a box the size of a paint can, a 68 watt CFL. An equivalent incandescent bulb would be 300 watts!
The girly asked for more light. I always try to give a little more than is expected of me.
I call it "Das Bulb" to myself.
Compared to my head:
Compared to my treasured 150 watt equivalent:
Compared to the 60 watt equivalent it replaces:
Blind.
I've been doing lots of walks at the farm as part of instrument calibration. Turn a knob and wait. Yei.
I brought The Dog.
Flowers:
I realize so many of my flower pictures look like this because i don't have much of a macro lens and I rarely have it with me when I'm near flowers. So I take pictures of fields of flowers.
Speaking of which, looking back, I can't believe how much fruit Thompson Farm has yielded. I spend so much time there, and photo after photo come out of the same few acres of land and forest.
We went for a walk to Henry Law Park. There was a lady with a D3 with a 70-300VR waddling around the back row of a concert with a burning hanging out of the same hand she was using to drive the camera. I have to admit, I thought she was doing it all wrong. I should have taken her picture. I happened to have my 70-300 on my camera too. I went to the front row where the amps jiggled your intestines. I was lazy too and only took 80 photos in the next 5 minutes. It just bothered me that someone wouldn't work the scene as hard as they could, if they wanted photos so badly as to show up with a bazooka to do the job.
Lead:
Second:
Bass:
A girl at a wedding. It was pointed out to me by an astute individual that this is not the photo that will be welcome in a wedding alblum. Oops.
The Dog:
Green shoots in my flower pot economy:
My girls cool toy:
07/22/09 (1945)
I was thinking the other day that a Blizzard game would likely inspire me to get a new computer.
But, I just tried Lightroom.
Aperture or Lightroom. Definitely.
Beats the heck out of juggling Xee and shoebox and gimp.
07/21/09 (1947)
I accidentally kicked the dog and it farted.
Note to self: don't kick the dog.
07/21/09 (1122)
I'm sad today.
I'm sad because I know that frogs lungs are orange and feathery. They look something like Salamander gills, but on they are in the inside of the frog.
At least, that's where I think they should be.
Yesterday, I was walking to the field site, and a puddle in the road bubbled and churned. I paused, inspected the slowly swirly mire, and out of the clouds in the water, I could make out a small frog. Every time I walked by, it swam to the other side of the puddle.
It sat very still the morning when the Girly and I went by. It didn't hide very well... it's eyes un-moving in the ripples made by the rain drops. It let her get very close.
When I came back this afternoon, it was floating oddly and still; not limp, but not alive. It's visible eye stared at nothing in particular. Beneath its port-side list, I could see it's inside parts were outside. Another traffic statistic. (The kind that blindsides you on some idle Tuesday afternoon...)
I liked that frog.
07/17/09 (1131)
You would think that a well funded ACM would have a router and a near infinite number of fail safe servers so that their website could survive a raging hoard of half drunk Vogon constructor fleets. Main server fails back to the old server, which back to a Dual PIII that someone donated, which fails back to the PII that normally is trying to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in Smalltalk, which, which fails back to a pentium 90 (for playing Doom), which fails back (due to a floating point error) to a Powerbook 5300, which is eternally busy just trying to turn on and then failing at trying not to crash.
But: No.
Pack a bunch of computer geeks into a room on the second floor in a random building in the middle of Baltimore, pile in a shmorgasmborg of computing machines, give them all cool usernames, and it's not the server that's going to be overly redundant.
So, while you're waiting to see if my brother's webpage is up or that new liquid helium bottling plant in hell is going to turn a profit first, you can read my drivel!
So. Um. Yea. What am I doing?
The Story of the Dog
Ah, The Dog. Somewhat annoying. Particularly at 0630. You'd rather be asleep. He'd rather you not. For no particular reason.
And yet, I worry about him sometimes. It's not like I have high aspirations for him. He's a dog. He's fine with that. I'm fine with that. He does dog things.
I worry about him when stuff starts spraying out both ends. That's a dog thing, but a bad dog thing. It makes the house smell funny and makes him frump on the floor like I hate him or something.
2 weeks ago now, he started spraying from one end, then the other. We came home to find a disturbingly large pile of moist, undigested dog food in front of him in the crate.
ew.
He erupted several times after that (read about dry heaves in prior entries). We took his food away for a day. He moped. But he stopped leaking, so we gave it back. We woke up the next morning to the sound of him ralphing on the bedroom floor.
ew.
We took him to the vet. Who blood tested him. She asked if he ate things he shouldn't. The girly and I looked at each other and laughed. We're happy when he eats what he should. X rays show there's nothing inside but hot air.
We knew that.
We took him to the vet hospital in Portsmouth. They hummed, hawed, shaved his belly, and ultra-sounded him. Then they spent an hour fiddling with his mud pump. We went for a walk in the parking lot, his tail held high. Jokes about prison swirled in my mind. He seemed remarkably oblivious to his new haircut and the fact that moments ago he got his first anal probe. Smelling the bushes and small nervous creatures were the topic of interest.
I remind myself now and then that The Dog doesn't do the existential angst thing well.
After another bout of mining (i was impressed he found anything at all) the Vet pronounced that it might be giardia. The medicine to treat it would be less than the test. We got the pills, loaded up The Dog, and went home.
Most expensive haircut ever.
The girly and I were sitting at breakfast some time later, slogging through a cup of coffee. The Dog sat on the floor tediously shredding something. We watched. We worry about it getting stuck inside him. She sighed. "You know, this is going to happen again? Right?" she said.
A fly.
Corks.
Walmart Sunset.
Lifetime of Dog toy: 30 minutes.
Summer breeze and waiting.
Toys.
The birth of a Dollar Bill elephant at the end of a nice lunch.
Train.
Office Retro.
Cable Toys.
Morse in June.
Remember kids: Hurricanes are god's way of telling you it's time for an Urban Renewal Project.
07/10/09 (1016)
A lot of my research is a long process of rather large tasks:
Move stuff.
Put it together.
Test.
Calibrate.
Measure.
Analyze.
Change.
Measure.
Analyze.
Take stuff apart.
Move stuff.....
With lots of running cans and solving other unrelated problems in the middle.
This morning I stopped at the institute on my way to the field site, and picked up a cable that I've been looking for. I got to the site, plugged it in.
And.
Oh wow. I put something together.
Now I get to figure out what comes next.
So i'm calibrating.
Woo.
Small steps can seem like major victories.
The Escort broke a piston or a connecting rod or something around there that meant no compression and a loud banging noise. The flaming chariot and I got to play with a U-Haul. I knew that hitch would be good for something, one day. Any day. Five years after I got it. RIP Escort.
Goats and Dogs have a lot in common. For instance, they both eat grass.
I pulled over to take pictures of this spider web.
The constant rain has made mushrooms size-comparable to my shoes.
5 years is a long time in dog years.... from the back of a 2004 National Geographic.
Your other car is on fire, apparently.
Common sense?
Flaming Chariot.
The rain reduced most exposed ground to muck. That doesn't stop people from trying to cut the grass though. I guess that's why lawn mowers need big engines.
Chickens squeak if you chew on them right.
Rainy days at The Farm:
07/06/09 (2111)
The dog is new. Or he was NIB we when we got him. Now he's just slightly used.
This means that everything is new, or still slightly new to him.
Like sickness.
Being sick is still new to him.
For being so new, he displays remarkably little surprise when he starts squirting, regardless of which end he is squirting from.
But he doesn't like dry heaves.
In case you didn't know, those make you feel like your spine is trying to suck in your brain while someone is pulling out your stomach with a barbed hook.
He knows what that feels like now.
He curls in the most forlorn pile on the floor afterword.
Me too.
You learn new things everyday.
07/02/09 (1438)
I'm impressed by modern technology. The workstation I'm currently on is installing a large software suite, while simultaniously copying from two very full USB flash drives. The CD drive is making a little more noise that it was before. Otherwise, the machine feels quite unburdened.
On the flip side, I've decided that it's just not possible to open 10 megapixel images on the g4 any faster. Xee and preview are representative of the fastest possible way to render images as far as I can tell.
Fooey.
I told her we should consider working in disaster mitigation. This after she called to report the water heater to be in the state of burst, and herself to be in the state of wishing it to be off.
After everything that has gone wrong in the past month, it seems like a fitting career path.
This morning, after nearly a month of service, my phone finally rang.
"Hello... ahhh... oops... you won't believe this, but it's God, and ahhh... I just dialed the wrong number"
I hear that wired internet access has FINALLY come to Newmarket, New Hampshire, where even a two bit grad student can get laidwork done.
So now I can report that my car smells like a wet dog, because there's a wet dog in the back, because, so the news tells me, it has been raining for weeks.
06/25/09 (0550)
Wow. It takes a l....o....n....g.... time for Emacs to launch on the mac. I seem to do 99.999% of my Emacs work on *gasp* Rainbow. At the moment, and for perhaps the past 2 years, I've been doing the bulk of my coding in Igor... and writing Igor code outside of Igor would be silly.
Though not as silly as writing Labview out of Labview.
Did I mention the DSL is working here?
It is.
A technician came and spent two hours doing everything that I had done. Same fiddling. Same conversations with the networking guys. After a while he through up his hands and gave me a new modem, that, low and behold, worked. Apparently the lengths of the cables to the switch are electrically imbalanced... meaning that one is apparently longer than the other (capacitive imbalance? my memory is foggy). The new modem is an ADSL 2 capable box, while the old modem was a rather plane Jane thing that looked like an echo from the late 90's. I think it was locally made... 603 technologies.
The 603 box was reporting strange SNR (Signal to Noise) ratio values. The manual said that the SNR should be between -32 and +32 db for things to work. It was 39 downstream and 128 upstream.
If you didn't click that link, you should have. Because, to stupid old me, a negative SNR (in db) is something that's very bad because that means that the magnitude of the signal is less than the magnitude of the noise. Conversely, if my DSL modem is reporting signals that high above the noise, you'd think that maybe turning down the volume would be a good idea... every 3 db means that the received power increased by a factor of ~10! Finding something that works well over 7 orders of magnitude is hard. So a "nice" transceiver would be happy with 21 db....
So, something was up with the transceiver.
Now I can email at home again.
Yei.
The New Place
I think the girly and I both wish the new place was a little bit nicer than it is, though we both think it's the best we could find considering all the constraints that a relatively poor young couple has. One of the perks that made it attractive is the windows. Save one or two, they're all new, and they're all huge. There's great Bay windows in both Bedrooms, and (when it's not raining), the sun make the house glow amazingly from sunrise to sunset. I can't stop finding awesome lighting. The house on Washington Street was never photographed this much.
06/24/09 (1234)
We finally got the DSL working. A technician came over and spent two hours doing everything I had already done. He then gave me a new modem. Which worked.
The phone still doesn't ring when I call it.
"If I were making progress, research would be much more interesting."
-Alex
No kidding.
06/20/09 (1153)
The First Sally:
Back in May (do you remember May? there were flowers in May...), I tried to get affordable internet from Fairpoint but they refused to provide DSL to our building. I attempted to get comcast, but they wanted to shovel several hundred dollars in fees on us, so the monthly bill for internet would be something like $80. I started looking into other DSL/Phone providers, and found G4 out of Manchvegas. They provide the phone and internet to UNH.
I had hope to be happily downloading pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar within a few weeks of ordering, but it was not to be. Fairpoint still owns the actual phone lines, so G4 can't do service on little issues like them not existing. So we had to wait for Fairpoint to find it's ass. But it took a few weeks.
G4 sent a tech to check the installation monday, and discovered that Fairpoint had activated the wrong line altogether. We also discovered the wires in the house were shorted somewhere. So, he activated the one jack that wasn't shorted. We thought it was in the kitchen. The signal generator was attached to that jack. In reality, he tied in the jack in the basement.
We hate the basement.
So there's currently a cable snaked through the floorboards. The phone still doesn't ring (thanks, fairpoint), but I can call people on it.
And the DSL modem doesn't work. I've spent hours talking with tech support. I think they're going to have to look at the wiring just a wee bit more.
So I don't hate you. Or blogging. Really.
It's just life.
I'm amazed that it's the little thing that frustrate me the most.
The Second Sally:
I played poker last night.
I don't like poker because people behave in ways that would be considered pathological in other circumstances. I like poker because I can behave in ways that would be considered pathological in other circumstances.
Except now I worry that people act like that all the time.
I wouldn't have gone, accept I wanted to use the internet.
And the connection died.
Foo.
But I came home drunk and tired at 0100.
It's a long walk home.
That's the price one pays to suck a dry interboob.
The Third Sally:
Pretty.
Fun with kids:
Shiney:
Fun at work:
You might have noticed that my Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX G lens finally came. Or maybe not. I noticed. I would say love was more or less instantaneous.
Perhaps by design, this is the first AF lens i've owned that acts like the 50mm f/1.8 series E and 28mm F/2.8 Series E lenses on the FE. I like that a lot. I wish there was an f/1.4.
But i'll make out alright.
The Forth Sally:
I fooled you.
I'm tired and cranky today.
I woke up in a funk.
So now, I'm going home.
06/07/09 (1647)
Lab rat:
Making a planter:
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
Washing machine kludge. Burst hose for scale.
The holes in the top are glued closed. They are supposed to let water out if the pipes get plugged. But the drain is uphill of the washer outlet, so the washer needs to pump the water a few inches higher than this. If I were talking to engineers, I would call this plumbing "design flaw".
Washing machine kludge in action:
Yes. The landlord knows. Yes. I have a bucket to catch the drips.
Pipes behind Adelle's:
My pan is 6 years old:
Looking at the images above, I see a theme.
Do I have a pipe fetish?
06/07/09 (0127)
I have been trying to become just a little more confrontational. Or direct. Or responsive.
Let me explain what I mean.
Whenever someone tells me something I don't agree with, they usually don't hear about it until I have time to think about what they said that I didn't like or agree with. Something has to be very patently wrong or very insulting for me to step up in the moment and question them.
The issue is that my threshold is very high. As a result, people complain that "Oh, I thought that was resolved..." when, in fact, I had taken it home for meditation and I had simply let it go at the time. The other example is when someone says something that's just poor and out of place, i tend to chuckle it off and mention later that something was unacceptable.
There is at least some good reason for why the threshold is so high. I (and several people I'm related to) have tempers that let them stomp holes in sidewalks when angry. ("Why are my genetic such a bitch?") So a certain amount of reservation is a good thing. I need to separate the unwholesome desire for a cathartic tirade from the genuine need to promptly resolve issues.
To this end, I've been practicing saying "I do not agree" and "That is not appropriate."
What brought all this to a level of importance where I wanted change was the later case, when something flatteringly insulting happened. I was at Home Depot, looking for epoxy that was designed for concrete, and an orange bib who was helping me first suggested a debasing professional shift for my girlfriend, then went on to compare his writing tools to his adviser's genitals, before finally drawing my attention to the many similarities between the sexual harassment training video that he had watched and monkey offal.
I, of course, nervously laughed, tried to keep the conversation on the original topic of epoxy, and simultaneously wondered how he could still be employed, how the sexual harassment video could perform so poorly as to have missed this dolt, and if it would be appropriate to conduct an experiment to see just how comprehensive the Home Depot dental plan is.
I think I should have done something a little more grounding than letting it go or and less theatrical than ditch dentistry. I just didn't know what that would be at that moment.
You might say I was taken off guard.
Alex suggested that I cave into my impulses more often. I've tried that, it doesn't work well. If I precreate some impulses, I'll have some tools in my bag to push back with.
I first learned about gardening in planters from the The Rooftop Gardening Project. It has a lot of good information on making planters and managing plants and soils yourself. You build your own planters, find the soil and plants you need at the store, and put it all together.
Last year, For an outlay of ~$50.00, I purchased some Rubbermaid tubs, soil, and tomato plants and managed to create a home for 6 tomato plants. I think I probably produced 25$ worth of tomatoes if I squint really hard and pretend I bought them at farmers market prices.
Yesterday, while purchasing new tomato plants and soil, I saw these: EarthBoxes. They cost $50.00 EACH. And they're half the size. It seems there's a premium on convenience. It would take a long time to recuperate your investment on those.
I decided to be smug, so I bought a pepper plant too, and converted the planter I scavenged from my old house to have a water trough in the bottom using random garbage left laying around the new place. Including the pumpkins, carrots, beans, and cukes I planted, this years total gardening costs are currently ~$23.00.
This years big experiment with the planters isn't so much if I can make things grow, but I can can keep the nutrients in the soil balanced. Tomatoes and pepper tend to deplete Calcium. (I think this was apparent in that last year, one of my housemates tomato plants utterly flopped, the planter soil didn't get any new nutrients.) Following literature suggestions, I mixed in a few shovel fulls of new soil and a recommended dose of Tomato fertilizer.
This year I also have a real garden. At least, I think it's a real garden. The landlord called it a garden when we toured the apartment, but when I went to turn the soil, the things I turned up had a lot in common with a trash pit. Maybe it was a trash pit that someone plant things in, or maybe it was a garden that someone threw trash in. The lines are blurred. There are two bricked in squares, one appears to be an addition to the other, based on the sudden change from neat bricks in a straight line to a rabble of anything bigger than your thumb. I turned the square two days in a row. The first day, I turned up bricks, marbles, dried paint, radiator heater parts, steel pipe, concrete bits, fish tank gravel, and lots of dandy lions. There are several plants that maybe celery, but maybe not. It was a Calvin and Hobbes archaeological dig, run of the mill for New England... I'd expect a patch with aquarium bits in almost any yard here. I decided that I would claim the entire square as mine, and extirpated the celery with the toe cutter, and added what archaeological treasures I could find to the boarder. I'm considering increasing the size to the entire portion of lawn that it sits in, demarcated by rocks and tall grass, because the lawn mower guy doesn't go there.
This year, I will thin the seedlings. Last year I was a hippie and thought that If I watered sprouts enough, they would all grow to be big and happy plants, but instead, I got plants with small red roots and a faint radish taste. This year, inferior seedlings and those who dance to close together will be voted off the kibbutz.
So, I guess we'll see how that goes.
I almost didn't bother gardening at all this year, part of the reason for sparse posting has been that I've been incredibly busy with moving and grad school. However, I'm running cans this week (and last week too), so, gardening is an activity that I can do between 0800 and 1800 that keeps me awake so I can get enough sleep before I work the 0200 to 0800 shift.
Pictures to come, I assure you. Unfortunately lacking Internet access at home, they must be posted from work, but the pictures are generally filled at home. So I have to remember to take them with me.
05/30/09 (1659)
Here I sit, slacking in the lab again.
Lolling in that precious 10 minutes between samples. Oops. There looks like there's 4 minutes left.
This reminds me of my life right now. It's sort of a giant temporal traveling salesman problem.
As in, how do I do everything without going crazy.
Or, as in: I've become a to-do list robot.
At least the rain stopped. I think. Now a shockwave of green is roaring through the window and bleaching the desire to be doing the mondane out of my mind.
Here I sit, running cans.
Because I have to.
That hasn't left me without the drive to make a few photos. What fun is a camera if you don't use it.
I feed the new roomie cookies and biscuits. And we go for long walks in the rain. He yells at the wall and I yell at him. He also pees in the yard. I don't do that anymore because I don't have a garage to hind behind anymore.
I need to change my image creation system in my blog generating engine. If you want to see every image ever posted, go to here. I think I need to create a new folder for every post, as I worry about creating duplicate names. Of course, i have yet to update the engine in years, in spite of my numerous musings that I should. I blame grad school.
I wonder what schlake would write about if he didn't worry about the internet being mean to him. My writing has certainly been somewhat restrained by the knowledge that a potential job might be google-bombed by someone whos mind isn't very open. While that might just disqualify potential employers out of hand, there's something to be said for food on the table.
And then there's the possibility of blog-bombing my own life. People know I blog. Some of them actually read it. I have to tell the the princess and asshats in my own sub rosa way. Loose lips sink things.
Yesterday, day brother sent the traditional newly expat email. "hi i cant find punctuation and my typing is a little off because i cant find the right keys on this wierd keyboard im [doing something you'd rather be doing] in [some part of the world you'll never go.] im going to hop the border to [someplace more exotic that probably has been on cnn this week.] if you dont hear from me, im fine".
Damn, i'm jealous. I'll just run one more can.
That didn't help.
Work is definitely hindering the process of moving in. My plan was mostly move out one weekend then spend the next one getting my stuff situated. The last phase has been delayed while I run samples and perform various little projects on the house. Discovering that the feed hoses to the washer had burst and that the drain hose was lower than the drain was sort of a surprise. As a landlord, that would be very hard to bill as a working washing machine.
Apartment for rent. Some assembly required.
I haven't caught any mother-child screaming matches this week. The husky who lives upstairs gets bored and lonely and rattles around in his crate. I'm still on the steep part of the dog-user learning curve, but from what I know, keeping a pooch pent up all day, especially one like that, isn't good. He leaves husky buns in the backyard. We'll have to have the people who leave him in his crate deal with those. The guy's truck has key scratches and a bumper sticker that says "Will fuck for gas." With his girlfriend pregnant, it's hard to connect the dots on all that.
I think we've figured out internet access. I should start putting my other computers together soon. If only to keep up with all the photos i'm taking. Though, I'll need them for work and such soon.
It's nice to have a place that feels like your own.
I am ever-loving exhausted. Packed everything into the back of the Volvo and moved it across town. Do to the retention of furniture and inefficient packing, it was 5 trips. When it comes time to shake this beat, I'll toss the planters, a stack of books I'll never use, the jack, the jack stands, fridge, office supplies and a pile of rather worthless computer stuff. I bet it would all fit back in the Olds.
My new neighbors are not like the old ones. Maybe more like the very old ones.
There is a child who lives across the street. She and her mother get in shouting matches. The child regularly wins them. Her mother, however, gets tired and starts to tune the pitch of the child by applying pressure. I imagine she is trying to get the child's voice to be in harmony with her own. I fear she is tone deaf, however, as she never achieves resonance.
I talked to the woman who told me about Sue and Ida. I now doubt my original suspicions that she was under the influence. She might always be like that.
i have been trying to figure out what we're going to do for Internet access. Fairpoint does not offer DSL at that address. Not even the low grade cheap slow stuff. Comcast does offer cable, but their specials require you to sign up for so many different things that we'd get broadsided with fees after 6 months. Without the specials, it would be $52 per month, with $100 setup fee and $100 for the modem. Um. Ick? That averages out to $70 per month.
Ow.
I discovered another phone company in the area... G4 Communications. They have unlimited calling for $35 and I can tack on DSL for $10 or $20.
Nothing in life is free, sure, but you'd think there would be something between the $70, 6-12 megabit price point and the 9$ 56 kilobit price point.
I filled out my change of address form. Now I'm changing what I can online.
I've lived here so long the idea of moving is a little alien.
There is something fiddling in the trees above me.
It is very dark.
Headcrabs. Must be headcrabs.
This bird crap runs the wrong way.
Back of the Volvo.
"Grandma's going to hell because Mommy said Grandma went to live with Jesus. She didn't marry Jesus, she married grandpa."
What my world looks like right now.
I forgot that the buses stopped running. So I rode my cat-litter wonder to work
. I crashed into a tree when I rode home. I looked at my toes, which hurt quite a bit, but they looked OK. A mile down the road, they started leaking.
Gas pipe stub.
Beer-canning a car is not as fun as egging a car.
The barrel in my driveway.
Old flowers.
Oops, I put a hole there.
Leaves.
Front of the Volvo
My dresser.
A sign.
05/23/09 (1003)
I've been meeting the new nieghbors.
One of them asked what the dinosaur's name was.
I didn't get it. It's not the point of the T-shirt.
Then she asked about the name of the monkey.
Then she went on about how New Hampshire was eating everything.
"Oh dear. You're crazy too," I thought.
None of this was remotely related to the t-shirt. Well. It wasn't very funny. Or terribly creative. To me.
Time flies like an arrow. Flies like dog poo. You know?
But after a while, I managed to wrangle what she was saying out. It goes something like this:
I drew the tail on the monkey to help you out.
05/21/09 (1942)
I'm sitting in the coffe shop.
And a guy walks in with a six pack of Harpoon.
And he says.
"Man! My rash just keeps getting worse and worse."
I couldn't help it.
My eyes bulged.
*pop*
"Poison Ivy," he says, knowingly.
I love my life.
The mac took 13.5 hours to do the first SETI work unit and then 9 hours to the second one. While each work unit requires different amounts of CPU time, I think that at least part of the desparity in times is due to the memory bandwidth bottle neck that the Quicksilvers had. When the first work unit got done, the second CPU didn't have to wait for the memory controller to feed it as much.
I wonder if SETI could somehow cut work units into chunks that would fit into the large L3 and L2 caches that many processors have. A 2 meg work unit would completely save my G4s from having to go to system memory. That wouldn't work as well for some pentiums. However, it would seem that most new pentiums (like a pentium D 930...) have 2 MB per core... I would guess that running 2 workunits on a Core i7 or a Core2 Yorkfield would probably leverage cache access speeds to the fullest. Of course, x86 based chipsets have done a much better job of matching CPU with memory bandwidth, so that is probably not very relevant.
Probably part of why Apple switched to x86.
Nothing like having 80% of cpu usage because your CPUs are waiting for data.
Firewire:
05/19/09 (0537)
I typed "exot" into a terminal window, and paused.
Did I just type a command phonetically? In vernacular pronunciation? I wondered.
I peered down at the grimy and worn key caps beneath my fingertips.
They were there, all in a row: u,i, and o.
Typo.
Thanks to goodness: I was worried I was becoming an idiot.
After reading Matts thoughts on running SETI@Home on CUDA nVidia cards, I idly wondered how well the latest version of SETI would run on my dual 1 ghz G4.
At one point, i think in 2004-2005, someone realized that the SETI team had completely failed to optimize their FFT code for Altivec, the vector units that help make the G4 and G5 so special, and put a bunch of work into generating an optimized PPC codebase. Suddenly, middle aged Macs were cranking out workunits as fast as new Intel boxen. From what I can tell, the code was eventually integrated into the main SETI tree.
That was done for the 4th version of the SETI worker. It's now at version 6...
I updated BOINC, and downloaded the latest PPC worker (Being poor and hippy-ish, I don't usually leave my computer on when I'm not around, so SETI would be more of a parasite than a donation). Version 6 does not seem to be multiprocessor aware... it just starts 2 instances of the worker and works on 2 different work units. So far, set estimates 19 hours to go, and 26% complete after 4:09.
I'll leave the computer on, just this once to see.
Though I think I could say that using an old mac to do BOINC is a waste of electricity.
A small recurring theme of having been in photography for so long is that you get to see slices of things as they move through time... you have a little more than a memory to guide your mind in to knowing what once was.
When I first came to NH, I saw this abandoned train station. I had always figured I'd get around to photographing it. I noticed that it was under renovation when I drove by, so I decided that now was the time, if ever.
April 2, 2006:
May 17, 2009:
Light my way:
Blowing smoke:
Flags:
I found this safe laying in the grass. The back had rusted out, and it was oozing white ash, presumably a fire protection mechanism or to protect it from torches. The door had been cut off.
I went to the bar on friday, and had cheap burgers and beer.
Sara garnished my fries:
You have seen this chair before:
Dust and bricks:
The price of mail went up:
My housemates have not emptied the vacuum cleaner in a long time. I have not used the vacuum cleaner in a long time (because, honestly, who wants to empty it?) (or: "I forgot"). I found it full to the brim. When I pulled the canister off, it started to ooze a column of dust bunny. You can see stratigraphic layers of dirt!
Amazing!
Ever since I discovered the bowls were creeping around the farm on warm days, I have been taking a big camera with me so I can take pictures of the bowls. Last time I tried, I couldn't find any bowls. But I did find a bunch of high quality rubber bath toys floating in the pond. They kept sinking randomly when I got close. Very frustrating.
I tried to cut the rusting bolts holding a bracket on my old exhaust system. I soon discovered the bracket was welded, and thus weren't going to come off in a usable way. "I haven't been there, but the post card seems nice."
05/16/09 (1500)
I find it funny that one of the positions in Alex's new route requires 5 limbs to sucessfully navigate.
I also detect some latent animosity.
I think somebodies developing a complex.
I write this laying on my bed, watching the grey mat drag itself over my head, and contemplating my next maneuver.
I spent the day installing the new exhaust system on the ChevOldsmoBuiac. (Mom has started calling it Das Boat.... gods forbid her making it to Goya). The car being 20 years old, every hangar and faster was rusted to the point of being nearly unusable. It was easier to break the muffler off the exhaust pipe with my bare hands than it was to pull the whole mess out.
Another task all together, one which I have not yet completed to my satisfaction, is the construction of replacement hangars. There's one behind the rear tire that I replaced with a cheap-o generic box hanger... I'll try to salvage the OEM part... it fit better, but it has a rusted out broken bolt stuck in it.
Yea. Everything rusts together here.
I covered all the threaded parts with anti-seize compound, and I replaced steal bolts with stainless where I could. I'm going to paint the unions with grill enamel after the oil has baked off a bit.
I'm frustrated that the replacement parts are slightly different size than the originals... they rub agains the heat shields in a couple of spots... but it can't be helped. I'm thinking about padding them with fiberglass.
Left to their own devices, one will eat through the other.
That's what I get for having an old car.
So now, I'm going to go return stuff at the hardware store and the autoparts store, and buy some food.
I think I'm going to go for a frozen pizza and a case of beer.
That was way more work than I'd hoped.
It was worth it too.
05/14/09 (1839)
Mashed finger.
So much to do. So far to walk. In one piece it all looks huge. In a million pieces it's a big mess. The Gordian knot. Tug here. Pull there. What happens when I do this? It's all connected.
Getting ready to move. Change the electric. Change the phone. Change my address and change the sheets. Working on research. Work on the degree. Run a committee. The car is still smoked. Running out of food. Running out of socks. Too many bills. Too many emails. Books to read. Papers to read. Instruments broken (again). Endless measurements to do.
Feeling useless.
Not enough sleep.
Make myself some tea.
Take a deep breath.
Take a peace.
Call the girl. The rain will stop. The sun will come. We can fix the car. We can fix the instrument. We'll move one load at a time. There are only so many bills to change. No one else will do the research. No one else will get the degree. No one else has ever called the meeting, so it's going to be my committee. I can make more bread. I can take a nap.
05/13/09 (2025)
Yes. Don't steal things.
Well thought out, this.
2005
2006
2007
2008
I got slammed with a bunch of rather un-artistic things. Awards ceremonies, and the ubiquitous group photo. I tried to convince them to pose, but I found them unconvincible.
*sigh* if they only knew the fun they were missing.
Rachel stole one camera, then the other. She took so many photos I had to recompress them so they'd fit on a CD.
The bees are still acting weird.
Shadow Fun
Things around my place:
05/10/09 (1342)
Yea. Learning Aspell was easy, after I decided to climb the Wall of Pain and actually read the documentation.
I had to stand outside and wait for the shuttle from the GM service center to pick me up. The leaves weren't really on the trees yet, but the grass had become a vibrant green. The morning was cool. The line between April and November is hard to see. You have to look at your feet see the different.
In the fall, there is a great scourge of whirly seeds that come off the maples, supported by a barage of acorns from the oaks. You get a taste of the blitz when you stand in the woods... every one time something goes "whack!" it means that was an acorn that didn't hit you.
The seeds take cover in the grass: winter gives comes at them full force.
In the spring, they poke a tiny stalk out and push up with all their might, making, for a few days, ackward wind socks in the yard. Then a breeze comes up the husks blow away with the last of the leaves, and there is a new crop of trees, ready to brave the mower.
Whirly Things.
I took a walk with the girly. I took pictures. That made me feel joy.
A wee walk
I decided I would make the box cake more exciting by using the multi-year old bottle of homemade Kahlua in replacement for much of the water the recipe called for. The reason the Kahlua is well aged because the cap had siezed on the top of the bottle.
I keep a mallet and a crowbar in my kitchen for just such an occation.
Kahlua Birthday Cake
You have seen this sign before. Flashback.
This tree barfed a rag.
I'm getting a new roomie. He's slightly shaggy. A little clumsy, and wants to stay up all night. He also has something of an appatite.
An economical way to replace the cover on your covertible.
For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, i've been spewing typed communication at a breakneck pace for the past few days.
But for the moment. I'm going to work. I really am. It's hard sometimes, to focus.
Someone just walked out the back door, and my bike peaked in, chained to the railing. It definitely wants to go somewhere else.
04/29/09 (0742)
I have been thinking about convergence at the seams of science. Or, more accurately, how we fail at it, and how it's at those points where the action really could be.
One of the major stumbling blocks that has hamstrung scientific and technological advancement is intercommunication. This is enhanced and amplified by the growing issue of problem size. The problems science and engineering are now faceing are almost impossible to deal with single-handedly anymore. Sure, there's a few geniouses out there who can really do everything perfectly, but I think a lot of us can only manage to do a few things passably. The bar is high and so are the stakes. Thus, being able to communicate with people outside your discipline to make something bigger is very important. Too bad we don't speak the same language.
Did you know that physicists and chemists use different symbols for the same constants?
Did you know that chemical engineers and chemists use different nominclature?
(Do you honestly know the difference between the two?)
Atmospheric modelers and atmospheric measurement people often have different ideas of what's important.
(You climate change freaks shouldn't read too much into that last one. Everybody loves climate change measurements/modeling.)
I was talking to a computer science grad student about algorithms. These guys know big beans about making computers doing things very well, but they don't know anything about Quantum Mechanics whatsoever. Physical chemists know big beans about Quantum Mechanics but, ironically, have a reputation for breaking any piece of technology that comes within a meter of them.
There's a terrific opportunity for confluence there.
This comes up in teaching. Engineers come to chemistry courses and have to re-learn new nomenclature for problems that they already know how to solve. While there is something to be said for knowing how to take something you don't understand and transforming into something you do, it seems silly to have multiple versions of the fundamentals.
This is just a thought. A worry. A notion.
Maybe an arguement for broad-base learning schemes.
But then no one specializes that hamstrings you because there's no experts.
Go team.
One of the other grad students is using my data for a paper. I'm really happy about this. I spend so much time and energy and research thinking about and working on ways of making good data that i don't spend much time actually analyzing the finished product. I'm researching how to make a quality dataset. I can tell you why what I'm measure is important, and if push comes to shove, the dataset is definitely backup material for my thesis.
Of course, I would rather have mass spectrometery techniques as my thesis focus.
So that's what I'm doing.
Jews get flaming chariots.
Christians get nailed to crosses.
Hindus get recycled.
Then there was that bit about the cosmic goat...
I'm going to be buddhist because then I get fat.
Then recycled.
Recycle the Whales!
Asinine.
That's about what I thought.
Asinine.
Then I deleted a weeks worth of coding.
That's how it goes sometimes.
04/28/09 (0516)
Views from the Farm:
Bowl Control:
Barn Razing:
Plain Tired:
Smellphone Camera:
04/27/09 (2053)
Just like when things hurt more when it's cold, things seem to take longer when you're tired.
I'm waiting for the windshield to be swapped on the Olds. The dink the hailstorm gave the car has slowly grown over the years to a monstrocity that roughly quad-furicates the are of the windshield and probably means the car wouldn't pass inspection, that is, of course, if anybody had any reason to inspect it. As a grad student, I often feel like I don't work enough. This is in spite of being the first one in everyday, and definitely not the first to leave, and usually grind the whole day. I sit here, waiting for searches to come up (Oh, igor, why doth you lack a 'goto' for thine lazy programmer?), and listen to the people driving the counter here, and suddenly, I don't feel that lazy. In the 90 minutes I have been sitting here, the ladies behind the counter have made about 10 phone calls. Of those, 3 were social and 1 was to make an appointment for her husband at the doctor. The appointment is the result of nearly an hour of continuous discussion about if he has the flu (not The Flu), a cold, or strep. Ah, yes. This new windshield is costing me how much?
For this.
I see.
Hmm.
I did get a personal appology for not ordering the glass for my car last week, causing me to have to spend another morning here today.
+1 for empathy.
Now, the guy in the parking lot trying trying to clean the gravel off with a snow shovel.
Dude.
Dude.
I need to pay attention in talks. They are supposedly an essential skill for a scientist. They are supposely central to science.
I try.
Really.
But I'd rather be doing something.
I can freaking read the literature and learn more in the same hour that I spend listening to yammering and feeling sleepy and confused.
ADIDAS and all, you know?
The fact that I can't pay attention to one for long makes me wonder if i'm really cut out for this.
Whatever this is, of course.
Shouldn't talks be interesting and enlightening?
Maybe the talks are broken.
Maybe I am broken.
How would I know?
Adorama keeps charging me for the lens they won't ship. Then they won't ship it and then they give me my money back. If I was a God poking man, I'd ask god to make them ship me the lens and take my money. A tit-for-tat relationship.
Right god?
Right.
Life's not fair. God's not fair. And niether is Adorama.
At least I get to see my money once in a while.
"Hi George!"
I wonder what they do with it. It doesn't smell funny.
"That's retarted!"
The internet is the death of spelling and coherent thought.
04/27/09 (0522)
Me.
Hard drive magnets make things sticky.
Coal in the bus station parking lot.
Durham Graffiti
Dover Graffiti
Party on the first night of summer:
We set the demon free.
A new lake.
Dry Grass.
The tube at Thompson Farm.
Chromatic aberration makes everything look better....
04/26/09 (2013)
Here it is:
aspell check --mode=sgml input.txt
I'm sure you'll all thank me for that one day. If only because I can use it.
In a fantastic and wonderful turn of events that I knew would someday happen, someone tried to hold a party in my house without asking any of the rent-paying occupants beforehand. Do I live in a party house? I don't think we've had a suare since thanksgiving.
"Hey Karl, guess what?, there was an earthquake today in Franklin, New Hampshire."
orly?
"Yea, but it was weak, so no one felt it."
Just jiggly needles?
"Yea."
Where's Franklin?
"I don't know."
So, basically, nothing happened.
The diagnosis for the ChevOldsmobuiac was that the computer was shorting it's output together. Now the gauges work and the cooling fan doesn't come on at random intervals. That's an improvement. I decided to dittle around under the hood a bit, as I still suspected something wasn't quite right. Getting it to start this winter was like trying to get John Lennon to spin in his grave. It's always been a cranky cold start, but not quite like that. Another funny thing was that the engine would race randomly.... usually if I put it in park just after a long haul up a hill.
The last time my search for vacuum leaks had focused on the tubing going to the MAP sensor, idle air bypass, EGR, and who knows what else on the left side of the engine. This time, I realized I had ignored the right side completely. I wiggled the hose to the break master cylinder. The engine made the usual lawn-mower noise. I grabbed the next hose, and was surpised to discover it was concave on the back side. I gave it a wiggle. "HISSSSSS!" went the hose. *studder* "ROAR!" went the engine.
Oh, it's you!
(The hose that controls the environmental dampers.)
Now the engine doesn't stumble when I turn on the heater.
Not bad for a car older than the undergrads.
It wasn't the best week ever. Bad meetings. Bad karma. Bad Car. Stress. Rain. Bad mojo.
I wanted to leave.
I had a half tank of gas and the weekend in front of me. So I set out on 155, took a turned on a road I have never taken, and pushed my right foot down until the tires found a good harmonic, singing my troubles away.
I realize now, that the bus takes me to work, my bike takes me to the grocery store.
Freedom is where that old car takes me.
I got an LG rumor.
After I got a microSD card, I figured out how to put movies on it.
It is a good medium for my library of time-lapse videos.
The device has so much potential.
It's clearly hamstrung by having a major telephone carrier control the device.
Honestly, shouldn't these things all be VOIP now anyway?
We should figure out how many megabytes 500 minutes per month is and run a data meter instead.
I'll think about that.
It would be so cool if it could be hacked.
I want to post pictures, but you know what?
I found a way to slam the finder.
So i'm going to go read a book.
04/23/09 (1425)
One less thing to check off my list of life goals:
Prank calling Avogadros number.
04/22/09 (0658)
This life in the Ivory Tower moves in fits and starts. I spent a fair portion of last week looking for a stupid bug, and having found it, my current project is charging forward at a pace that is just short of blinding. I can now write code to process my data faster than I can think about the implications of the data in the steps in the middle. Neat.
I can't help to shutter when i think about how painful this all would be without automation. I would be wieghing stripchart cut-outs until the end of time.
It's also exciting because I can now look back and see how one thing has led to another.
In 2007 I discovered that using some speghetti of automotive relays and solder, I could build an interface between flow control modules and my instrument. That led to new data, which needed new code, which is now proceeding into it's second generation. The success of the speghetti spawned interest in development of other new calibration hardware, so the next generation of speghetti is emerging as well... now that I know what I'm doing, I can do it right. The net result is that I'm able to pull much better data out of my instrument that I could before.
The new code tells me lots more than my old code. That's fun. I can generate calibrations 3 different ways. I'm hoping they all come out the same.
Your science is only as good as your measurements. Or something like that.
I've been having Marathon flashbacks again.
I my suborbital transport to the repair station yesterday. After years of dealing with broken velocity vector length and reserve potential energy gauges, I decided to have it repaired once and forall. Expensive, yes, but I'd rather be tinkering with my ion-canon than know how fast i'm going. Besides, i know how fast i'm going. It's other people, particularly those foolish enough to actually attempt to pilot the thing, that I'm worried about. Unfortunately, just because it's 19 years old, doesn't mean that parts are cheap and easily had. In fact, the insturment cluster had to be shipped out of town be repaired. The mechanic verified that the PCB on the back of the cluster was shorting out, and that the dash was falling apart.
That was the true reason it went to the dealer. The dash was disintegrating and I couldn't find all the catch points. NH is not NM... you can't just drive around with an old beater here without getting a ticket.
I severely doubt anyone will ever attempt to google "Cutlass Ciera" and "suborbital transport". If you just did, please email me your life story.
After I watched the overzealously exuberant clerk mistype all my contact information, I was whisked back downtown in the complimentary shuttle.
It will be a week, at least, before I'll be flying again.
I doubt I'll notice more than a gap in the driveway.
You're doing it wrong.
Unrequited love.
Morning sourdough.
My yeast hate me. I've been doing everything right to insight a yeast infection, but alas, it refuses to take off. With all the feeding, warming, and churning, I'd have a pile of the stuff so sour that it would curl my lips. However, that's not the case. It steadfastly refuses to put gas into my bread.
Bad yeast. Bad.
Year old grass.
I was reading Susan Sontag's On Photography this morning. I think I perfer Allan Bloom to Sontag, in terms of pure rhetorical power. I have yet to feel like Sontag is hammering nails with her words. Her writing feels like a string of carefully shaped morsels that almost, but not quite fit together on their own. There are many beautiful sentences there. In of them, she talks about photos as souvenirs of daily life.
I was thinking that concept is very close to what I think about people writing. It's a souvenir of the life experience, especially when there are analytical elements present. To know that something happens to someone, why it happened, and what they think and feel about it provides a piece of that experience to others by proxy. It's interesting to see what others think is important.
I, for one, would never be drawn to write an entire treatise on the social implications of photgraphy on my own.
I just comment on life as it passes by.
Go, life, go.
My brother IMed late last night with Igor questions. It had been lost on me, actually, that I have been using Igor for something like 6 years now. His questions reminded me of the flood of confusion and paranoia that I felt when I first encountered it. Igor imbodies some data manipulation concepts that are between alien and anathema to data analysis at both ends of the data processing spectrum... they're not present in Excel, nor are they present in programming languages like C or Perl... The package already has a bunch of the thinking done for you like perl modules, but also contains ways of manipulating data similiar, but not quite the same as excel. You can't set up arbitrary dependancies like in Excel. The programming language is C-like. Just enough to drive anyone who has written much C completely batty. It's power, is neatly balanced on it's ability to neatly handle substancial datasets and to easily do complex analysis on them. It breaks down for extremely large amounts of data, where keeping everything in memory is obsurd and stupid, or in situations that require frequent transactions.
Anymore, I use Excel for bookkeeping and Igor for math. In part because of the stupendous amount of data real time insturments make. Also, because the computer crashes a lot less often that way. But it's taken quite some time to get to this point, as the proliferation of 50-200 meg excel spreadsheets will attest to. That and my piles of very slow igor code... thank all my time writing C and fortran for that.
I wish they made it for linux. I think that's the major thing keeping me from switching to Ubuntu on the stinkpad.
Well, that, memory, and hard drive space.
I post, without spellcheck. Sorry.
I'll learn Aspell one day.
04/20/09 (1318) Alex has been blogging for just over a year now. I had scarcely noticed. I remember when he started i got enough excitment over his cgi to almost fix the bug my own blog engine.
Almost.
Good job, Alex.
04/19/09 (0751)
If you were expecting wedding photos, this is not the blog entry for you.
This entry is about my world view. Quite literally.
You might say I had a little stitch'n bitch over the course of the week.
I discovered Hugin 0.8.0rc3. Vastly easier to use than 0.6.0, which I had hitherto been using. Mostly less crash-centric. That gives some slack to make it work-centric.
We like that.
I also have a dual g4, with 1.5 gigs of ram. Which is far more than I had last time I gave up on stitching panoramas.
Lack of resources for the job.
I had quite a backlog waiting for a day with a menial state of mind.
I am rarely in a menial state of mind.
Thank the god(s?) of mathematicians and automation. That's what I say.
Note that I'm lazy and don't hunt down bad seams like a good person would.
The Biodome in Montreal, September 2008.
The alley in Dover that inspired me to look for new Hugin.
The New England Center.
The New DeMeritt hall. Which taught me a lot about how not to make a panorama.
2007:
2009:
The NASA DC-8 and SOFIA, February 2008
The major difference between the DC-8 and SOFIA is that SOFIA gets funding and produces no data, even though it flies. The DC-8 has not recieved any funding for the 2009 fiscal year, so it isn't flying (much). Whenever the DC-8 makes measurements, people write papers. (Ger!)
Oh, if you didn't believe me that the hangar is -huge-: here is a picture of it with two 747s, the DC-8, the ER-2, the Gulfstream, and the King Air all inside of it. The photographer probably was smart enough to shoot RAW on this one. Note that the lights in the hangar are really orange sodium vapor.... this is the magic that digital lets you do. I wonder if Kodak made sodium vapor white-balance film?
The Seawall at Odiorne Point. September 2008.
The sidewalk in Dover. March 2009.
September 2008.
Thompson Farm 2. July 2008. (see my bike?)
The Top of the tower. Also, an example of how not to make a panorama.
Wyoming Sky Redux. June 2008.
Ok. There's two more to stitch. One of those ain't worth posting, the other is probably worth the wait to grind through 80-odd individual images. Taking this one is what told me that my measly canon has an interesting buffer system. It will happily grind out the first few shots, but then it is reduced to a sputter. I know that the jpeg algorithm that canon uses tends to be pretty consistent about squeezing the air out of images... I wonder if the sputter in the burst is from the camera taking more time to write the more complex, therefore larger file size images to the SD card.
I wonder if getting a class 6 (or better!) sdhc card would help.
Money down the hole.
April, 2009. Parsons Courtyard. I took a step forward at one point, so there's a nasty seam by a tree on the left, and the building has a couple of extra hood vents. Which, having had an office around there, I am quite certain it really needs.
The last one is one that would be the "oogie" (or some similar spelling) if it was a french fry. It took just a bit too much ram to stitch, and thus took all day as the computer patiently waited on the hard disk to swap-swap-swap. But the computer is 7 years old, and the parts were free-free-free in exchange for its original slow innards. So it goes. There is something beautiful about having to read a book because your computer is busy doing something. Having your mind engaged beats sucking on the interboobs any day.
I was surprised to see schlake's (Warning, not safe for the pregnant men or the infirm, yada, yada...) comment about wishing he could write more. I think I wish most people wrote more. Leanna was saying that she doesn't know what she would blog or twitter about because her life is so normal. There's so many takes on normalcy that the variety of what people do and think is actually very interesting. It's very frustrating when people dismiss themselves and don't share who they are. Of course, the internet would could become flooded with the independent thought and writings of thousands of people. Or it could be that people don't have much of gravity to say. I guess that's for you to find out.
I personally enjoy writing. For me, it's an introspective and creative process. For example, I read schlakes blog. His comment reminded me of a thought that had be circling the drain of my own mind. I plucked it out of the vortex and stared at it, and put it to the keyboard; What do I think about writing? I think it helps you organize your ideas. It bestows intellectual discipline and rigor: YOU! DO QUALITY CONTROL! Have you threshed out your ideas? Concisely? Meaningfully? How about a few references?
It's also a great creative outlet from time to time. Who would have thought that the idea of a sarcasm mark would have so much traction in the world?
It's a wonderful day. Warm and sunny. The bad news is that I have a pile of wedding photos still. I want to run, I want to ride my bike to the grocery store, I want to work towards this infamous degree that I supposedly want. I also want to talk to my brother, packrat, my parents, and my lovely girlfriend.
So, I'll just upload all this and get on with my day.
You only live once, you know.
04/15/09 (1225)
Today refuses to end.
Everybody else gave up and went home.
Missing a step?
04/15/09 (0935)
"By contrast, giving up material thinking... never leaves a void."
-Elizabeth Mata
Last night I played Mario Cart Wii for the first time. It was fun. It's even more fun when I look at the screen of the other player while twisting my remote back and forth. That way I get to feel like i'm actually good at something.
A subtle reminder that no one really reads this came last night when my housemate offered to give me the old tv. Actually, it's another, departed housemates TV, but that person has been in Mississippi for the past 6 months. He hasn't said a thing about it.
So, I guess, in spite of never having watched it, word didn't make it that I don't like nor ever want a TV.
I suggested he craigslist it. Inspite of it's age, it does have stereo speakers that are halfway descent and a working remote. It works just fine.
I found a garbage bag in the garage that easily dates back to last fall. It leaks, even. Yummy. I spread it's contents into a few other bags and took it out to the street.
Yummy.
You know you're tired when it feels like it's yesterday.
That is my life, today.
04/11/09 (0817)
Today I discovered iTunesU. Elementry Hebrew is available from Concordia Seminary under Exegetical Resources.
04/04/09 (1611)
I took 1114 photos today. Depleted 1 EN-EL3e battery and 5 NiMH batteries.
I am now sitting in the parking lot wishing I had brought my USB2 card reader, because moving 6 gigs using the cameras connector is a bit slow.
For those you of you in less temperate climes, the weather is sunny and warm in Virginia.
That is all.
Thank the wireless gods for me when you see them.
04/03/09 (0832)
I was able to wake up exactly at my normal time this morning. I was then able to go through my exact morning rituals, concluding at the point where I hopped into the ChevOldsmoBuiac and started the cat-and-mouse game of rush hour traffic. This is not a game I am exceedingly good at. Anyone who as cohabitated a moving vehicle with me for long knows I prefer to engage in reckless driving without other monkey-guided chariots to confuse me. The 45 thousand lane exchange outside of Man-vegas is not one of those places at 0745 on a Friday morning. At intervals, I had the opportunity to lock up all 4 wheels, zig, zag, and wish I could accellerate. Clearly, my lazy view that going at some random, slow speed so that I can listen to whatever interesting article is on NPR, and whatever interesting articles are on after that, is not in synchronization with views held by my fellow navigators. They are clearly in a mad rush to get somewhere, the possibility of colliding with me, each other, or objects along the road not withstanding. I am in no rush to die. This precipates rushes at certain points, however, like for the brakes. I eventually parked my monstrocity (the pride of colorado: cracked windshield, broken guages (all of them), leaky exhuast, crackly stereo, whimpy heater, gimpy tranny, dryrotted door seals, sticky windows, hail dents and that stale grandma smell) in C12. I ran, duffle in one hand, camera bag in the other, for the shuttle. I watched a FedEx plane dissolve into the morning fog. Then found myself sitting outside Gate 1 of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.
The lady in the fancy blue uniform informed me that I would be randomly patted down. Again. As in, the only time I'm not patted down is when I wear the pants that squeeze my boy parts and give me a wedgy. This time when they started to instruct me on how to stand so they could pat me down I grumbled, "I KNOW, you do this all the time!" I feel a little bad about it now, I suppose. I probably made his day worse. I should have said it with some politeness. Making peoples day worse wasn't where I was going with that.
Getting the camera bag ready is a bit of a chore. A pleasant one, but meticulous. I'm going to be photographing my cousins wedding this weekend. I don't have quite enough junk (unless I shot film, but then I wouldn't have enough money) to run cordless all weekend. I've been swapping my AA NiMH batteries through the charger all week, charge cycling them. I have 3 sets, which should be enough unless I end up super cranking the flash. I hate using flashes most of the time... i think that will be fine. I watched Repo! The Genetic Opera while I got other things ready. I erased all my memory cards, took all my MF lenses, film bodies, my 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 out of my bag, cleaned the camera body, cleaned the lenses I am taking (18-135 (taking it because it's the only wide angle lens I have, I doubt i'll use it), 24-70mm f/2.8 (wedding party workhorse), 70-200mm f/2.8 (wedding ceremony workhorse). I carefully cleaned filters (findinging fingerprints on SMC filters is hard!), and blew out all the dust I could find. I'm mostly worried about the dust (ok, and mud...), because it boogers photos at small apertures... when sometimes happens outside, or with a flash attached. Nothing like having to gimp-out dust specs from the brides dress.
Long live the gimp and screw the gimp. I'd rather be shooting.
Just do it right.
I have one of the new Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lenses on order. I had hoped it would be here in time, but for 200 dead ones, EVERYBODY wants one. I'll probably have it by Christmas at this rate.
I noticed that the SB-800 is vanishing from stores. I hope nikon price drops the SB-900 at some point. It costs way too much for what it is. The SB-800 needed honest-to-goodness switches. Everything else SB-900 is fluff. IMHO.
I took a huge number of photos this past week. But I have also been working quite a bit. My girlfriend is getting them emailed to her and you're not.
Things that have inspired me this week:
Jodi Cobb: "The more I.ve had time to think about my next move, the more I realize how much I love to photograph. I just love taking pictures. While there are other things I could do such as editing, there.s nothing like taking photographs for me, and I.ll be happy as long as I can keep doing that. The final medium doesn.t matter as much anymore."
I have had to explain a million times that I don't really see my photography as a career move, in spite of the seeming cascade of wedding gigs that I suspect will someday conflict with Science™. It seems so self evident and something that anyone could buy themselves into. The shape of the photo industry has been absolutely changed by the arrival of digital. With digital, anybody can shoot as much as they want and mass produce the results. I think that you could probably manage your wedding photos by setting up an email list to harrass your guests to send you the good pictures. That cost: Free-ninety-free. There's probably going to be a few people there that have a clue about lighting and composition. Additionally, the film development cost barrier is gone. To some extent, that's been traded for time at a computer managing your mess, but I feel like people are less affraid of spending 10 grand without an upkeep cost. Point: it's getting easier to learn the skills and easier to get the data around. The downside is that the world has become flooded with media. Musicians complain that music is everywhere, so it's worthless. Photos are everywhere, so they're not precious. Video is almost there. Your email box is stuffed, your IMs overloaded, your phone is SMSing you to death, your TV is blaring, your radio is hissing, you've got stacks of books, and on top of that, you're reading this. Media overload. So, where is a professional photographer going to fit into this mess? I don't know. I just like taking photos. I feel like if I show what I do to people, share my love of the medium, the directions it should and should not be going will be self apparent. My Science™ hobby supports my photo addiction.
Or something like that.
Amanda Palmer:
"i think i realized something profound. i only watch about 6 hours of television in a year. when people start asking me advice about ANYTHING, from .how can i be a good artist. to .how do you manage to do so many projects. i think my new stock answer will be: simple. i never watch any television, ever."
Dad asked me how I manage to juggle my insanity. I eventually figured that I avoid sleep probably to the point of being detrimental to my health, and that I don't watch TV. I periodically go on a binge and watch an entire season of a show from DVD. I think I average 2 movies per month. Maybe 3. My brother has been recommending things faster than i can watch them. But, for 8 years, I've been TV free.
So, I have no clue about a lot of popular culture. I'm not even very up on the news anymore. Just a bit. Whatever I can glean from the links to the generic news sites on my browser are. That's where I get my time. If you want to do something, you need time. That time has to come from somewhere. If you want to watch TV, you'll spend your time watching TV. If you want to be a good runner, you'll spend your time training to be a good runner. If you want to blog, you'll spend your time blogging. I prefer my brain in the "on" position. Not that it does anything when I put it that way.
My advisor:
"This guy's a pinhead..."
My job is very close to the deck in the science world. My research is heavily focused on measurements, and the interpration is always rather light. My name shows up on papers because I either ran the intruments, converted the data to usable form, or wrote the analytical technique section. It's my job to turn very small quantities of matter into electrons that can then be counted. I was sitting in my advisors office, playing mop-up from the last emergency, when I was handed a new one, just before he took a 30 minute long phone call. The new emergency is a review from an article we wrote. It was extremely critical of our measurement technique. The reviewer clearly was up on every caveat of making measurements with my instrument. I had to comb through my library of papers to figure out what (s)he was talking about at points. I spent the 30 minutes careful drafting in my mind well referenced, carefully worded responses to the reviews comments, and wondering how every other paper in the field ever got out the door with the level of doubt this person was raising.
My advisor got off the phone, having seen the worry and work happening on the opposite side of his desk, and i was handed the above remark.
I hadn't realized that the entire review was a carefully crafted kill-the-messenger logical fallicy. At no point does the review paper say anything like "there is this eccentricity in your data, could your measurements be bad?" or "You conclusions could be drastically altered by this...". No he just asks how we know. We don't, exactly. It's the nature of the measurement. We call that "uncertainty", something that is always present. That said, we're pretty fucking sure, because the results make logical sense. We still have to respond, of course.
The more I know, the more I know I don't know. My niavity was certainly showing. I spend a lot of time hidden in the lab, and I have trouble understanding why people kick each other instead of trying to prop each other up. Even when I'm the one kicking (dang TSA...ger....).
I'll stop typeing now, my plane is here.
04/01/09 (0640)
It's morning again.
I shared this sentament with the Russian who picked me up at the bus stop and drove me to work.
The life of the party is the one with the lampshade on his head.
Castors: down.
I ain't got no body.
No post.
Post.
My sourdough starter. So far, the results have been dissapointing. It smells sour enough, and survived the first period I let it raise, but not the second. I ended up with a loaf that smelled great, tasted ok (but not sour), and wasn't levened. It was a brick by morning.
There was a fire in the elevator in Stoke. It was this that really forced me to concider the nature of buses in the scheme of things. A bus is sort of like the whale of the transit universe. The require some special consideration by emergency personel because the bus is unlikely to be able to manuever to give them a wide berth. They also get rather anxious when they're himmed in, and the bus-firetruck law-of-tonnage arguement is a wash, unless someone has an internet connected cellphone handy to do some research before holding an opinion about whos bigger. At the same time, a bus isn't terribly special, and is definitely way in the way. The people on the bus will not like it if you blow it up, so you can't treat it as a whale.
Wierd light.
I found this in the chemistry department office. I thought about taking it, taking the bus home, then driving the ChevOldsmoBuiac around campus pushing the panic button. When I found the correct Audi, I would put the ChevOldsmoBuiac where the Audi was, leave a note explaining the keys where in the chemistry department, then leave a seperate note with the keys explaining that a)After being couped up in that tiny Audi, space and plush ride of an american car must certainly be welcome. b)Finders, Keepers (See also, Law of Briney Deep) c)Olds is cheaper to insure d)Olds has way more personality e)Easier to pick locks on Olds.
At the library.
Beth and Leanna borrowed a science thing from down the street. The science thing has wheels on it. They're tiny, so everytime the science thing hit a bump or a crack it would stick. Of course, it was a little top heavy, so it would attempt to fall over and crush Leanna everytime it hit a bump. "OMyGod!", said Leanna. " ", said the science thing.
It's April. I guess I should get on my wintertime project.
03/27/09 (0845)
I have been thinking about shortcuts a bit recently.
I realized that I take many pictures that are for my own personal edification and will never be printed. I put them on the internet or email them or something. They are never printed. Having them in bajillion megapixel glory with low compression serves no point. Taking a moment to tell the camera to make a low resolution image that's compressed more saves space and time. It takes several mouse clicks and a trip to the commandline that I can snip out by 4 button presses on the camera. Grab from memory card, drop in email. Send.
Oh, yea. That card reader I bought helps a spell too. Canon's choice to not support USB mass storage on their cameras was a mistake.
-Also-
I have felt like a half-wit for a long time because when I do an experiment, I usually have to do a sequence of doomed experiments before I get usable results. The doomed experiments tend to be foiled by hardware failures, sudden shifts in baselines, and human error (oops, configured it all wrong). A lot of experiments could continue after a flaw is found, but I really hate dealing with data that has eccentricies that have to be dealt with. There have been a lot of reboots that might have been avoided assuming I had been willing to spend the time to do the math or seperately analyze the data. I have felt like I've wasted weeks of time waiting for the perfect situation to develop. At the same time, there is a peculiar value in having things be absolutely pristine. It makes it a little more infallable. If it was right, it was all right. If it was wrong, it was all wrong. There is something to consistency.
I inhereted a bit of data this week that's a bit from the other end of the spectrum. It makes me feel a little redeamed in my "fickle" ways. The project probably should be done over, but now it can't, and working on it feels like sifting through ashes. There's a lot of simple questions that will never have the answers they deserve. It's interesting, but sort of annoying. Certainly demeaning for those I got it from. Having your work given to someone else is not glorious at all. Life is teaching me lessons again.
Have I said this before?
The price of quality is eternal vigilence.
I have been wondering about our dear old friend, the English language.
It seems incredibly redundant to capitalize at the beginning of a sentence and punctuate at the end. things are certainly readable if a sentence is terminated with a ".". sentence capitalization seems to be a stylistic excercise. Further, why are there so few terminating marks?
The English universe is dominated by the Big Three: periods, question marks, and exclamation points. There are other players, but you'll have to shop around to find them. How many times today have you seen a colon, semicolon, or ellipses? Right there, of course, is another question mark. This entry has yet to grace the colon key, which they have to share. Inspecting my keyboard, I would deduce all kinds of strange things about the language; Only periods and semicolons can be produced without the aide of a shift key. This would indicate that people like to state things often, and tend to like to put related statements side by side. They rarely feel the need to enumerate things, express urgency or surprise. Questions should be used only slightly more frequently than one starts a sentence with word that starts with a capital Z. If you want a thought to trail off, you must pound the period key three times in a row to make sure that everybody knows that you absolutely want ambiguity.
Worse, you'll probably have to dig through menus, html tags, or other character identies to get your computer to put the right symbol on screen.
Even after you've carefully selected the correct grammatical tool, you'll still be left to your stylistic devices to put meaning into your statements. The emotional context of a sentence can still be highly vague... the tools at your disposal are more than a little blunt.
Chimera, I say.
Chimera.
We need a grammarian revoltion and revolution.
Given that anyone who had a say in this fetid mass we call a language is probably dead, there should be little arguement that a coup d'etat might clean up the mess, and finally end a few other contentions we've created along the way. Like the exitence of that blasted letter C, when K and S work just fine, thanks.
Among the things that I'm sure other fine thinkers will propose, we need to break the period's monopoly on meaning. Statements, sarcasm, orders, passionate love, eternal wars, and a million other things all end in a little round black dot. That's a lot of work for a dot, and endless confusion is the result.
For example, every joke that ends in "...your mother" would be well served by a sarcasm mark, so one would know whether you should be planning another trip to Planned Parenthood or laughing at your immature friend. There could be a perfunctory mark, so when one is was asked how one is doing, one would know that the inquisitor doesn't really want to know. A disgust mark to terminate that eloquent description of the yellow snow outside your igloo. It could even be used twice everytime the huskies are mentioned. Why, oh, why, are we stuck with the vague jurisprudence of a little black dot? It could be so much more.
I'm a chemist, I swear.
Chemist. Chemyst. Same dif.
03/15/09 (1943)
Thinking of her:
Wires at the farm
A very funny place for a sunny spot.
An extremely social week:
Rachel falls asleep whenever she watches movies.
INTPeter:
Jeremy explains how to make wonderful chemicals. We need an iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm.
My coke.
My doorbell. My grandfather spinning in his grave. Again.
If I press the doorbell at the right frequency, it rings the tune to "Driedel, Driedel, Driedel".
I get on the plane to meet her tomorrow. It's been a long six months. It will be good to have her back.
03/10/09 (2058)
Sanyo Eneloop: 1
Delkin Power NiMH:0
Why?
Simply because I've taken several hundred photos with the Eneloop batteries I put in the camera 3 weeks ago, and they still register 60% power left.
It's never lasted this long.
It feels -useful-.
Wow.
So I'm slowly feeling compelled to try to take pictures again. Which is good.
I finely cleared out the 1000 photo-editing backlog I've had since December.
An old science thing comes to life. Heated by a 60 Watt blub.
Leanna, after burger night.
Peter keeps the Joy of Cooking in the lab beside his many synthetic chemistry books.
A baby elephant.
I pulled the drives from the 8100, having abandoned my romantic thoughts of ever setting it up and using it again. In fine Haase family tradition, we used it to death, having received it after it was used to death. It saw quite a bit of StarCraft and Marathon. We might have even used it for homework at time or two. Dad talked of "Putting it out to stud." Which gave me an idea. It's not the only one I have, you see.
I guess there are more hard drive magnets in my future. This idea brings me joy.
I've thought about epoxying handles to the tops of the magnets on the fridge so that they're easier to handle. I'm going to bend a finger nail back if I'm not careful. If i didn't mindlessly fiddle with them when I am in the kitchen, that wouldn't be an issue, would it?
"We cook all our meals here." -Me, to Leanna, about the kitchen
"No, I don't want to go to girls night. I'm not a girl." -Me
The Ides of March is practically upon us. In a break with my usual anti-social self, I'm going to be co-hosting Italian dinner and Julius Caesar as the movie.
Et tu, Brute?
Oh yes.
Science trudges on much as it has for the past 9 months. I'm beginning to finally feel like I'm doing something and getting actual results. Of course, with the burning nature of things, I am moving about as fast as my sanity will carry me. As the money runs out, so does time. I am always, always, always creating data somewhere. Faster than i can look at it, faster than I can write it up. I could be doing mop up for a year. I hope I'm doing it right. I can watch the checksums, take notes, and hope to any gods that might be hanging around that I'm doing it all right.
It seems trivial at some level to be doing things that are at the same level as undergrad courses. Then, I realize, the difference is that this is real, as in, I fail at this, and I get a big F on my report card for life. Virginia, this isn't a drill. Pardon me while I look at these formulas just one more time.
03/09/09 (2106)
Fucking mail. Love it or hate it.
A science thing.
Kiss me.
Bite me!
Don't bite me!
Pretend Friends....
Dover Sunset:
There is a liquid that sometimes makes an appearance between the first and second floors, and leaves tracks on the ceiling and into the kitchen. I don't know what that liquid is, exactly. I never can catch it at work.
These screws have been fucking with my life. Screw screws!
Someone asked why I had not "Friended" Potato on facebook. The reason is that I have Potato as a friend in real life, so having her as a friend on the internet is a little redundant. I even live in her house (or she lives in mine, if seniority counts for squat). This means that I can post actual notes on her actual wall. However, it's far easier to befriend someone on the internet than in real life, where obvious things like religion, personal habits, and deadly weapons can play an important role in social interaction, so I Friended her anyway. Just to be safe.
03/09/09 (0852)
a: Chartwells is not free lunch because it will cost money to have that tapeworm removed or to have that e coli treated.
b: I saw two women wired to a box that displayed numbers taking a test. I asked if it was a pulse oximeter. No, it was a stress thermometer. I asked if there were stressing themselves out. They weren't. They were trying to achieve homeostasis and I was stressing them out.
"Have fun with that," I said, smiled, and went somewhere else to stress someone else out.
03/08/09 (1600)
"Chartwells is not free lunch."-Me
03/05/09 (0723)
Shoebox crashed on me, not for the first time, and I browsed the error report, and discovered that system profiler charactarized my one stick of nice CL2 PC133 SDRAM as PC100 ram.
I was worried I had somehow obtained a bad stick, but just not noticed.
Apparently, the quicksilver G4s don't get along perfectly with the system profiler in OS X, so PC133 CL2 2-2-2 Latency ram doesn't get identified correctly, instead listed as PC100 3-2-2.
It doesn't matter, really... I only have one stick that I bought years ago when I had delusions of spending the money to buy a complete set, which buys a few percent performance boost.
At this point, it's a 7 year old machine, and i'm really just waiting for the magic smoke to finally leave.
-Also-
lookupd -flushcache is a useful hack if your mac keeps sending you to the wrong webpage. e.g. I keep putting in this page and getting This horrible place.
I thought Fairpoint was being a bunch of tommy-knockers, but no, it was just the mac being stupid.
My photo backlog is down to 400.
I have found ways of doing calibrations over VNC, so I don't have to dance between work, the bus, and the field site as much.
The sanyo Eneloop batteries are an amazing invention. So far I have been completely amazed at their performance. I don't think I've ever been able to put more than 100 photos out per set of batteries in the Canon, and I just uploaded 100 photos and the battery reports 75% charge. Not bad, Virginia, not bad at all.
There's other insanity afoot.
But more on that later.
-Also-
I found a letter in the street. Frozen, actually, to the ground, protected by a layer of glare ice. Something that I don't think people grasp anymore is how rare a thing a letter is these days. The purpose has been nearly completly swept away by cellphones, cheap long distance, SMS, IM, twitter, blogs, facebook, and email. Letters are so alien that they have become practically luxury items. It was so odd to find a piece of paper in the form of a letter frozen to the ground. I even vaguely suspected that it might be one of my own.
Something one discovers when writing letters is that when they go missing, it's slightly like having lost a child. An hour or two of ones life has vanished on a distance mailroom floor, or tossed in the rubbish for displeasing some heartless censor, or used as toilet paper because they were short that day.
Haveing felt all this to the core of my being, i knelt, quite intrigued, brushed the salt and grime away, and read; Until I realized that a car very much wanted to be where I was.
I wonder if my letters read like this.
02/23/09 (1937)
Beth and Leanna are making a science thing. It goes "whrrrrrrrrr". I wish it went "boink".
It snowed last night.
I have little of substance to say today. I figured out that storing 64 bit floats in 32 bit floats results in funny numbers.
Duh.
02/22/09 (1958)
Note to self: Torx are not invincible. I used the Dremel to install slots.
I went to Portsmouth because it was bright and sunny and wonderful. I neglected the simple fact that the city is regulated by a million bobble headed parking meters, and that I had exhausted the boat's (formerly) sizable cache of coins. I decided I would nab a fathead and rock the boat in search of salvation. In the glove box there was a red pen, a large sticky note pad, two AAA batteries, several pennies, 4 dimes and a quarter. 65 cents? That's enough time to do something. I plugged the meter, then strode off with the afternoon sun pushing me down the street.
02/20/09 (1104)
OOOH! ~New~ Drinking game!
Get sloshed everytime the dow crosses a multiple of 1000. Blame the Republicans for your sorry mess, because I'm sure you did nothing to deserve it.
You can blame the Russians too. They're putting flourine in your water. You know what that does to your precious bodily fluids, right?
Right.
Gotta balance that out with ethanol. Because F- and ethanol react strongly.
I'm sure you heard that in school somewhere, right?
Right.
Attend AA meetings.
Do not. DO NOT. I repeat: DO NOT blame your favorite prognosticator.
He just lives here.
02/19/09 (0643)
Oh, batteries, the little power-banes of my existence.
I realize that it was perhaps 2 years ago that I bought NiMH AA batteries. None of the Duracells (2650 mAh variety) will start the Canon anymore. My charger still says that they have ~2400 mAh of capacity. For some reason, they can't keep above critical voltage for long. This is annoying because it interferes with taking photos. You get frustrated if everytime you want to shoot you get a message that says "Change the Batteries."
After some research, I concluded that I'd get some low discharge 2100 mAh batteries (Sanyo Eneloop) and some ultra-high capacity batteries (2900 mAh) (Delkin). The theory being that the Low Discharge batteries might work well because they have a higher voltage throughout their discharge than normal NiMH. The high capacity might last longer simply because they have more charge carriers to start with. Either way, they're ~new~ NiMH.
I wish there were more selection of nice digital cameras that ran on AAs. My Canon A570IS was choosen because it has manual controls and runs on AAs, which also work in my flashlights, GPS, Camera Flash, FE drive motor, and in any future SLR battery packs I obtain.
I have, to date, killed 1 pair of NiMH batteries. This was in the Sony's charger. It didn't have any way of knowing if the batteries you put in where already charged, and a poweroutage or clumbsiness on my part led it to try and charge them twice, and thus electromotively pushing the magic gas out.
The batteries that won't start the canon seem to work fine everywhere else. They'll run the GPS for weeks.
Still no answers on the meaning of life.
Today's whittisism on that point: If you have to ask, you're doing it wrong.
02/18/09 (1308)
The version of the stimulus bill President Obama signed into law has $1x109 for the NSF, $1x109) for NASA, and $1x109 for NOAA. That's hope.
Of course, the NIH got $9x109
A $1x109 here, a $1x109 there. After a while you have a $1x1012!
02/16/09 (1727)
Let me gently note something: you shoot with the lens you have, not the lens you wish you had.
I think i'm going to start calling the 28-70mm f/2.8 Molly. So I can then say I was flogging Molly, which is damn close to the truth.
Also, schlake has one of the psycho Canon 65mm macro lenses. Getting the light right with one of those has to be a PITA.
I'll just ship him anything small enough to need to photographed like that. It would easily fit in an envelope.
I think that girlfeet would be best done with this lens, yarded out to 5x mag.
Ew?
ew.
02/15/09 (2014)
I shot the Hepcats Valentines dance again.
Of course, I stupidly thought that the camera was ready to go.
10 minutes before time to leave, I found that I didn't have enough charged AA batteries for the flash. I thought i would be fine with the 28-70 f/2.8 zooom, so I mounted it, through it all in the little bag and left. Hoping the AA batteries I found would work.
Of course, I never used the flash, and I really needed the 80-200 f/2.8.
(Actually, something f/1.8 or f/1.4 would have been better, but that's not what I have.)
Fortunately, there was a spotlight on the dance floor this time. A welcome change from the last few dances. I was able to work the high contrast of the spot fairly well as people dodged in and out. Imagine being able to see your dance partner!
Pick wall flowers:
Other Valentines Dance Photos:
An ideal place to leave a poison apple:
The moon has been quite nice the past few weeks:
My Sewing Machine:
I was thinking the other day that I write impulsively. As easily as other people pick up the phone to call a friend, I write something somewhere. Even if I don't know where to put the commas. I have a pile of scrawled paper by the trash, I have countless filled journals, I blog, I write email, I instant message, there are a million stickies with a million forgotten things that litter my tiny life. My fingers fly across the keyboard hammering out thoughts nearly as fast as I can think them. Impulsively.
This makes me wonder, in a manner that is quite recursive, why I don't take a stronger interest in the art. My writing act is like a clumsy swordsman. I swoop and dive and lunge at ideas, but never can quite seem to spear them in a good clean thrust. If I took myself and my method seriously, wouldn't I have perfected my handwriting, hammered every nuance of spelling and grammar, and launched into the vague outer orbits of style? Alas, I do what I do and that's what I do.
Damnit.
There I go again, prevaricating around the shrubbery.
My parents used to say that I existed to talk. Maybe in adulthood this has turned into a drive to transliterate my mental verbage. Niter-nattering into the aether.
Speaking of which, the girly said it was funny that I think I should make a point of interacting with people so I can remember how to hold a conversation. It's hard to explain what it is like to sit, and listen, and see someone desperately interested in what I have to say, but be able to offer nothing. Or too open my mouth and let something roll out and get back nothing but a good, hard, blank stare.
Yes. I bet if I thought about it, it wouldn't make any sense to me either.
The funny thing is that I so rarely write about anything solid. Isn't what happens here all in my head. But my life happens in my head.
I just upgraded my Quicksilver to Dual 1ghz and 1.5 gigs of ram. I have trouble believing that it is 7 years old.
Most of the time, it just works.
That's nice.
Obama isn't really going to save science.
At least, not without help from congress. The research distaster continues unabated. Meaning should keep trying to graduate ASAP. Or, exactly on time to run out of money.
Today I discovered there are 127 steps to the last landing before the top of the tower. There is an i-beam at the base that makes an excellent pullup bar.
I now can workout while I wait for the numbers.
5 years difference:
Then:
Now:
Then:
Now:
Squeak. Just because.
02/05/09 (1028)
"I was stupid yesterday. It's not like that gets better overnight."
-Me
02/04/09 (1334)
I have concluded that there is a phrase I'm going to retire from repetoire.
"What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
Is not true. At best, it's only half true.
What doesn't kill you now will eventually kill you if you keep doing it. What doesn't kill you might make you wiser, but also angry, bitter, tired, exhausted, and unhappy. What doesn't kill only makes you stronger until it finally kills you.
If you want to be stronger, you should challange yourself. You should practice. You should train. You should learn. You should find new ways to grow.
Trying to kill yourself will not make you stronger.
You will just end up hanging from the rafters, slumped in a chair, and laying in a puddle of cold blood on the floor.
02/03/09 (0743)
Weddings and other events not kept in normal archives excluded:
2004: 2,328 photos kept
2005: 2,465 photos kept
2006: 5,869 photos kept
2007: 3,503 photos kept
2008: 3,772 photos kept thus far. Probably not too far from the mark
2009: ??
This follows my thought train that I didn't take photos for artistic sake until 2006. It was about then that I got the 2 512 meg MS cards for my Sony DSC-p73 (which I later wore out). Before that I had a 16 meg and 64 meg card. Not enough to afford easy experimentation (the sony had such a tiny screen).
I had thought I spent the first year after I discoved photos could be art pushing the camera in all ways on practically anything that had photons coming off it. I was actually thinking I have been taking fewer photos, but the statistics seem to be invalidating that idea. There is a question about hit rate. I'm not counting how many photos I'm actually taking, only the keepers.
For instance, I have taken over 3300 photos on the latest Canon, and it's less than a year old. The D200 has spun over 9999 several times now. I've used my 18-135mm AFS particularly hard... it's growing internal dust problem is leading me to suspect it will be the first piece of Nikon hardware I will "wear out", given that it is worth less than what it costs to clean.
Horses near Gunnison, Colorado. Yes, Viriginia, this is a color photo.
This time of year, snow and ice are piled high everywhere, making driving fun. I was backing The Boat out of the driveway this morning, and hooked one. "oops" I want a jeep.
Ice cicles at Thompson Farm.
I went snowshoeing whilst I waited for one of my endless calibrations. The last storm brought a foot of snow, then an night of freezing rain, so it's like snowshoeing on drywall. Deafening. Of course, if you step out of your shoe, you drop up to your thieghs.
I left on a jet plane, and I knew damn well when I was going to come back again.
Every now and then, someone challenges me to a Facebook/MySpace/Blog entry thinger that actually intrigues me.
25 Things about everyones favorite prognosticator
I own a sewing machine. It's loaded with rainbow thread and i'm not affraid to use it.
For the last time: I'm not gay. Just because my BMI is 19 and I can use a sewing machine and cook does not confer anything about my sexuality. I also enjoy driving vehicles at unsafe speeds, drinking beer, shooting things with guns, and sci-fi movies. I went for years without having a girlfriend simply because there were no interesting women around for one reason or another.
The most annoying noise I know is the lapping sound that my tea kettle makes when pouring water into a cup. Given the choice between that and a fire alarm, I take the fire alarm.
I can roll my tongue.
I like writing, because it makes my ideas look more organized and intellegent than they really are.
I have no idea why I like photography. Probably because it's the only art form anybody has ever complimented me on.
I have not bought new glasses in 4 years.
People keep saying I look like John Lennon. Which is funny. I don't feel like John Lennon. Of course, he's dead, so I doubt he feel much at all. Maybe a little dusty. Someone once warned me that I might get shot because of it.
I'd rather do something myself, just because that way I can say I did it myself.
I think it's really cool when people use words I don't know, or find new ways of generating meaning from words. The English language, in spite of it's insanity, spends it's days woefully untapped and under appreciated. Karen Elizabeth Gordon, James Howard KunstlerM=, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Ellie, and Phlegmy, all receive my praise an adolation because they can say something, and say it well. Oftentimes sending the unwearried reader scurrying for the dictionary.
I own 4 cameras. Not three, like you thought I did. Ok, 5 if you count the webcams. Four still cameras. I'm more multidimensional than you are.
I have trouble finding 25 things about myself worth talking about. There are 29 fruit label stickers on the bezel of my monitor and 14 tea bag tabs on my desk. I also have 10 Post-It pads of different sizes and colors.
I have an office supply fetish. I take certain glee in nice mechanical pencils, pens, fountain pens, parchments, sharpies, label tape, and Post-Its. This goes several pegs down from my more obvious mountaineering gear obsession and photography equipment "issue". It still raises it's head from time to time. I don't think most people know that my decision to not use a Bic Classic is a conscious and well thought out decision.
I used to have a life. Maybe I'm delusional on this point. I used to think I had deep thoughts, but that stopped too.
I own eight nalgene bottles, only two of them are the same color, and they're not the same size as the other six.
I have strange and awkward conversations and interactions in the checkout line. Frequently. I've had clerks go wide eyed when they discover I'm a Ph.D. student. Whenever I buy anything that is remotely taboo *cough*condoms*cough*, I always get teenagers who are mildly creeped out by them, so they stare and the items are always the last to be bagged. This entertains me. I have visions about a poorly framed, over-saturated photo from one of my bad angles posted behind the register. I'm not capable of normal conversation, except under abnormal conditions, which amplifies things. Last week I was behind a guy who was sure the world was ending due to all the volcanic activity out west.
I'm having trouble swallowing for reasons I don't understand. I tried to choke on a hot dog sunday, my own spit yesterday, and a cheerio this morning.
The gauges in my car haven't worked for years. I use my gps to know my speed and total distance traveled. The turn signals don't turn off after a turn anymore either. The exhaust pipe is riddled with holes, so steam squirts out from under it on cold days.
I like reading about Buddhism.
I do not have any jobs on this weeks chore list.
I like writing, though I don't have the time to do it as much as I'd like. I particularly enjoy typing, as my handwriting is indecipherable. Unlike Packrat, I have not yet made it a priority to fix the problem.
My new housemate's nickname is Potato. So is her sister's. I think this is terrific and this sort of behavior should be encouraged.
I like snowshoeing. I once took 4th in a snowshoe race. This is the highest rank I have ever gotten in any competition. I don't really care much for competition, but it's nice to know i'm not average all the time.
I write an old fashioned, snail-mail letter every few days.
I know how to build an igloo, but I have yet to sleep in one. I blame Packrat.
I'm sure there's a way to do this in emacs, but to find the number of <li> tags, I used TextEdit to find and replace all of the <li> tags with <li>, which causes it to report how many it found.
Packrat thinks this is a way to get out of academia. I have thought about that, but after my frequent run-ins with bus drivers, and my impending book, to be entitled Wildcat Confessions, I would more seriously think about this. I'm sure my father would recommend this as a viable alternative. There's always this.
It's taken 3 days to get this post ready, so I think i'll post it, while the posting is good.
01/29/09 (1215)
-bash-3.2$ ls -l .plan
-rw-r--r-- 1 holstien 3902 183 2005-06-22 20:44 .plan
-bash-3.2$ finger holstien
Login: holstien Name: Karl B. Haase
Directory: /u/holstien Shell: /bin/bash
On since Thu Jan 29 12:10 (MST) on pts/25 from faculty1-cis211.unh.edu
No mail.
Plan:
To reach a point in my life where I will no longer be enrolled in an acedemic instution. If you want to know how I plan to accomplish this.... let's just say I'm open to suggestions.
-bash-3.2$
01/26/09 (1258)
Children, children, children. Listen to me. I'm not kidding about this now.
Listen!
If you have to leave the room to find yourself, you're doing something horribly wrong.
01/25/09 (1833)
"No one is going to call themselves a feminazi, so it's not like I'm going to offend anybody." -Alex
01/24/09 (1631)
That was fast.
I promise I'll stop gushing about this soon. It's really shallow.
I knew that i'd get used to el ginormagantamous display fast. I knew this meant that I'd compare all my other displays to it when I used them. I bought the Stinkpad, in part, due to its 1400x1050 resolution. I was just using it thinking "wow, this is tiny...."
I think we should just go to neral links while the gettings good.
01/23/09 (2227)
I got a Dell SP2039W. It's so frighteningly huge that I cannot convince compiz to run on it at full resolution for the life of me.
It makes editing photos fun. I can see the chroma noise an normal zoom levels.
Phil commented that he thought the Proview was laughably small for photo editing. This thing is so big that window management is a joke. Statistically speaking, there's probably nothing where that window wants to be.
Today is the 1 month I-broke-the-mac anniversary. I'm still waiting for parts for it. Those boxes shipped weeks ago. They've averaged less that a few hundred miles per day. What is this, Turkmenistan?
I need to make a more concerted effort to have a backup ready should the mac fail. My backups are currently on firewire hard drives.
My dell linux box lacks the necissary anatomy to talk to them.
Oops.
Images, in no particular order:
I found a bug wondering the wilds of the spider plant at work
Ice over the kitchen sink
The bus was covered with mud. We could barely see out of the windows.
I made a cruton. Put the sugar in at the wrong time.
Ice melting on the banister
Ice at sunrise
I made a cruton. Too much corn flour.
Rachels mom made me a vaise. She knows I like blue, and cracked enamel.
Ice on my kitchen windows. Again.
Even more ice.
The snow is deep here.
The snowblower ground to a halt during the last storm. We were worried it was broken. It would spin a bit, but fail to stay lit. After some careful annalysis this evening, I determined that just because gas is sloshing around the tank, it does not mean gas is getting to the carb. Filling the fuel tank instantly solved the problem.
That was easy.
I have spent the last 2 weeks determining all kinds of interesting things about the way that ions move in quadrupole fields. You'll forgive me if I lack anything of substance to say at the moment.
01/23/09 (0726)
"I don't want to try it, because as long as I don't do it, there's still hope that it might work."
-Leanna
I got another one of those "Be a team player and help save our eternally foundering organization!" emails this morning.
There's no 'me' in team. Which is why no one ever listens to my ideas.
Oh here, I'll just give it to you:
"So, put your cynicism in you pockets, jump on the "yes we can" wagon,
and contribute to the discussion, even though you're busy."
01/21/09 (1225)
"The price of performance is eternal vigilance."
-John Siracusa, ars
01/20/09 (2029)
It's been freaking cold.
In the morning.
In the evening.
01/20/09 (1939)
One of the hardest things to know in life is when to quit and when to push on.
I have always pushed on, rather stupidly at times. It's just what I do.
The theme of the day is those who quit while the quitings good.
Hats of to you, for having the wisdom to see the horse was dead, the night was over, and that your hearts weren't really in it.
Oh, and we got a new president. I'm happy about that. It's taken long enough.
01/13/09 (1157)
After spending so much time on the backup computer doing single minded tasks like writing email and surfing the web, I had forgotten how anemic it is. In spite of it's 3.2 ghz P4, it still only has 512 megs of ram and a 30 gig, ata33 drive. I shouldn't have been surprised when it had a brain hemorage when I tried to do real work on it.
The definition of "real work" was also pretty milquetoast... Media player, Openoffice, Pidgeon, F-Spot, and Firefox aren't really what I would call "heavy lifting". The G4 handle(s/d) Handbrake, surfing the web, IM, iTunes, and shoebox with solemn determination and ever increasing apathy to my input. The linux box however, just panics and ignores me and about have the things I want it to be doing when it gets tied up. It even tunes up its fans, blow hot air, glows its drive activity light and rattles the drive heads with angst. "Go away, I'm doing some rad computer shit!"
This is it's way of reminding me that it's normal job is gathering dust and not doing real work.
So, I ended up typing my letter without the aiding and abetting of the google, the undemonic strings of Diablo Rojo, and with the curiosly militant feeling pauses introduced by pulling photos from my camera.
You can only do so much. Even if you're just an over-anthropromorphized Dell pizza box.
There is some simply beauty to doing things without mechanization sometimes. I just wanted to write my letter.
01/09/09 (1809)
The trick to getting the Radeon 9200 to work with Ubuntu 8.10 was to add the option "DisplayPriority" "BIOS" to the xorg.conf file. The problem I had was tearing and flickering. The clue that it was this instead of any other problem was that the cursor rendered correctly as long as cursor acceleration was turned on.
It only took 6 hours to figure this out.
The two Radeon 9200 cards I have (1 PCI and one AGP) have been nothing but trouble. They work, but each computer they have been in has required a huge effort to make them work. Not worth the 40$ I payed for them.
The glxgears score on my PIV 3.2Ghz is about 620 fps. Not much different than the integrated graphics. It does play games much better though...
01/09/09 (1032)
Instead of working on perl. Or the pile of papers I have to read. Or the letters I have to write. Or cleaning my room (since when do i do THAT? Be honest now...) I decided to try to install the AGP radeon 9200 in my linux box. Boy was that fun. After 3 or 4 hours of wrestling, still running on integrated graphics.
Satisifaction with time spent: 0
I could have been listening to Captain Future, Wizard of Science.
Or any of my other obscure music obsessions.
Or doing pushups. Or situps.
I guess I was baking bread on the side.
And wondering about the meaning of life.
I do that still.
01/07/09 (2018)
It was sleeping in the garage. It's bright orange body streaked with brown. It was clearly the source of the smell in the room. It was clearly sick. I returned to the lair with a flashlight and my rusty insturments.
In surgery I purged those liquids most foul.
We gave it pyronic tonics as a salve, and touched its heart with lightning.
It awoke with a breath of black smoke. It came to, and it was hungry.
Clawing at the ground.
Desperate for anything.
A maneater.
Doug grabbed its back with glee, and followed it and the spray of snow down the driveway.
The gods have given us a snowblower, and we have brought it to life.
I finally got a copy of the Captain Future, Wizard of Science concert.
Too bad it was a one time gig.
I would have a new favorite band.
It was religious.
01/06/09 (1049)
I decided that $300 worth of travel vouchers was worth delaying my departure from Colorado Springs for a few hours. There are power outlets and free wireless at COS, and besides, I'm all about those mountains and that awesome big blue sky. I still have two hours until I need to ~think~ about boarding the plane. So, here's some photos. Due to my love affair with word processing and text editors, those appear at the end, even though your eyes are at the beginning.
I've said it a million times this week, I'm only homesick when I'm home. My life in New Hampshire is a sick facade that hangs in front of what I'd really like to be as a person. Graduate school has definitely taken a turn for the better: last semester was definitely the best I.ve had since my arrival in 2005. Imagine: being a Science PhD candidate and actually being allowed to do my own research with trivial amounts of interruption. I had begun to wonder if my time there would be a complete loss, but now I can say that have something besides hard lessons to take into the future. I think and hope that I'm at a point where I'll ride this happy wave until the fun stops or the money drains, then I.ll wrap things up and defend. Then I.ll be on to something else a little more wild, I hope.
I'm not sure when the winds will blow me back Colorado, to be honest. It could be another good long while.
I still haven't fixed the archive function of the perl ball that makes this webpage. I meant to do that, but I spent my time reading and drinking coffee. I'd ask you to forgive me, except that I am not writing that with the slightest bit of contrition in my heart. I like reading and drinking coffee.
Satan brought me a little notebook for Christmas. Those who follow me know that a notebook (unlined, composition or hard bound), a camera (likely a Nikon), and Nalgene (numbers warn off, tab busted, duct tape) are my constant companions. I'm the Inane County Clerk and Recorder. I think I will use this little (purple!) notebook to record the endless litany of Haase wisdoms. We joked about number Dads lectures, but they are often back or represented by some aphorism, either discovered or contrived. These should probably be documented and numbered instead.
You can't save people from themselves (but you can probably die trying).
A theme that seems to be entwined in the family yarn is how much help, advice, work, and sacrifice to give something or someone before the cause is definitely lost.
There is a special kind of frustration that I find when I help, or try to help someone, and my efforts are squandered. It's not that I expect to be recognized, but to see my sacrifice squandered unwisely is frustrating. If I give time food to a food bank, and they let it rot, no one benefited. I lost food I could have eaten, and the less-well-off lost food they could have eaten. It rings when hard won advice is ignored, and then Moses claps his hands and the armies are kissing the fishes. (Thanks for the gay gezunter hayt!, I.ll put it on the shelf beside my Chain of Command.)
I have been wrestling with how to deal with these situations. Do I just not help? That seems uncharitable. Do I point-blank put conditions on aid so that it works like I intended? I worry that's too controlling, and wisdom to prevent further problems won't be learned.
Another point, although we hold giving without expectation of thanks or reciprocity in high regard, the reality is that most people expect reciprocity in some dimension. Recognizing contributions people make is important. If you can, keeping tabs on their needs to give back is important. Almost everyone has a weaknesses and could use a little more of something, be it material or immaterial. Learn to say thank you and mean it. (I'm working on this...)
I think the further I walk my road, the less wise and more cautious I am.
Interesting.
I'm just typing here for my own narcissistic pleasure.
I think it takes a certain amount of narcissism and introspection to blog (and to maintain long distance relationships, for that matter). You.ve got to at least pretend you want people to see what is under your skirt, what comes out when you crack open your skull, and what the bits of what make you the little monkey you are. This is my life and my mind, typed and posted for you.
Sometimes I wonder why I write here at all. It's not like a regularly squeeze out a lump of juicy wisdom that splats out and changes the world. I've been watching you all, and this world is about 200 hits per month big. It used to be more, but then I got busy.
So, if you were looking for a prophet, you've come to the wrong place.
I found an old receipt from the ophthalmologist yesterday.
Do you know what it said?
"Myopia"
So there you go.
Trust an M.D. to give you humility.
Everybody needs something to believe in. I believe I'll have another beer.
What, still here?
One of us should be amazed.
I'm most guilty of meta-blogging and meta-writing. When I write letters, I waste vast amounts of innocent trees trying to explain why I wrote what I just wrote.
It's been fun not-really-working for two weeks. Fun enough that I sort of forgot what I was doing, I'll have to check my notebooks....
Hanging out with the folks:
Alex in the morning sun, Christmas Day.
My Uncle.
Don't worry, he's standing on the sidewalk, the truck is under control. Go telephoto compression.
Mom and Dad on Pearl Street in Boulder
My Uncle and My Father, after benieghs, coffee, and breakfast, at Lucilles.
Packrat and I built an Igloo on top of Monarch pass, after a great deal of screwing around, camping, and not-igloo buildling. Sooner or later, we will build and sleep in an igloo.
The moonset after a late arrival to the truck.
Sunset on the trees
More mountain sunset
Packrat enjoys something other than Socorro
Motorcycles are likely buried.
Trees at sunset
An abnormally luminous tent.
Another photo of the inside of an igloo. This time I have a slightly wider angle lens.
Trees and Sky
Our Igloo
The view in Woodland Park:
Windblown snow on Pikes Peak.
There are lots of Deer if you don't have dogs.
And a little abstraction thrown in for giggles:
Locks on the newspaper kiosks in Boulder.
The wagon at the Hornbeck Homestead in Florrisant Colorado.
01/03/09 (1919)
My handwriting does not seem to have changed or improved since 1992.
To anyone who knows me, or has ever known me:
I am so fucking sorry.
I will probably never be better.
Near the Caves at the Florrisant Fossil beds.
12/20/08 (1328)
I bought myself another christmas present.
It's somewhere between a prybar, a chisel, and a shovel. It's for hacking at things on the ground from a standing position. Like the ice sheets that form after a snow storm.
It's cheaper than snow blower, solves the same problem, vents pent up agression, and may be useful in the Long Emergency.
Now I'll be a snow peasant. *hack* *hack* *hack*
12/18/08 (1629)
Today was another successful failure.
I spent my day trying to reverse engineer some parameters the vacuum system on my instrument. I learned a lot about vacuum system modeling and made very little headway.
I also learned how my ion source worked. This is something that has eluded me for years. The journals that describe the process are buried in storage. Out of sight, out of mind. My conceptions about it turned out to be close to reality. I used to think the ions were generated by the strength of the electric field alone. Goes to show my poor understanding of fields at the time. They are actually created by free electron emission. I had that figured out over a year ago when I realize that it used a power-supply that had both constant voltage and constant current. Electrons where definitely going somewhere. Poof! Water becomes plasma. Freaking dense plasma too. I pull H3O+ ions out and make magic.
Tomorrow is a snow day already. It's not snowing yet, but they have decided that since it's the last day of finals, all non-essential personnel should just stay home. The storm doesn't show until mid day, so I am plotting a Big Bean run.
I'm trying to figure out if I have warn out another keyboard, or if my fingers are cold and my pinkies are thus having trouble hitting ; and a. Maybe I should drink more tea and less beer.
Another nightmare for the memory of my grandfather.
Variations on a theme...
My brother had kittens. These photos were particularly fascinating to me.
12/17/08 (0742)
The problem with working at home is that it's far too easy to slack and blog.
Thoughts on being a bum:
If I am ever homeless, I will pander for money and help as follows.
-I will work hard to maintain a veneer as a college student. I will always be lost or late for class, and happy to show my student ID. I may even have to shave once in a while.
-I will go on about how much school is changing my life and how expensive it is.
-I will curse all the polluting earth hating people on the planet who want nothing but profit. I want to do social work and save animals and stuff. You know, it's not about the money. Right? Right.
-I will NOT issue blatantly contradictory statements, like claiming that I have a 4.5 GPA, then saying I suck at math, then that I got a 1700 on the SAT, then saying that polar bears are extinct because they all choked on soda pop bottles, then pointing right and saying "Go left at the light?".
-I will talk about my proud Native American heritage. ("Oh! Indian left!")
This I have learned from interacting with people who are trying to pull off the same schtick.
This morning I was sorely tempted to grab one by the collar and say "Look! I know you're from the shelter and you want money for coffee!". Instead I played along and walked her to the stoplight. ("The bus station is THAT way. Just walk THAT WAY.")
This just in. The down-and-out population of the Seacoast region is growing. Did I mention that there is a line outside of the food pantry? People actually bother to sleep on benches now. At this rate we ought to catch up with the rest of the nation in a few years. Just imagine what it will be like in places that don't have the "luxury" of Old Money.
It's snowing. I have coffee. I filled the tank in the boat for $17.00. I call my sweetheart in 2 hours.
Life is fine for the moment.
12/15/08 (1145)
For 12 years I have been running. Who knew that something so simple would be so much a part of me? I'm a grungy runner. No stupid stylish nylon, no singlet, no gels, no headband, no wristband, nor watch, velcrobottles, tyvek jacket, hip pack, gps, or pedometer. Just me, a pair of shoes, and the wind blowing my soul.
12/13/08 (1935)
Of course, I took more pictures with a different camera.
Why I can't find anything:
12/12/08 (1506)
I use my cellphone as an alarm clock. This is because I'm sort of a retreaded hippy. I like things that do as much as possible as efficiently as possible. Simple exterior, complex interior. My cellphone shares a power strip with all my other battery recharging devices. Night time is battery charge time at 284 Washington street.
Because of this, there are no easy visual cues that there is or is not electricity in my room. The only clue is that the LED on the cordless phone is on. Small hint to a 4 eyed curmudgeon in training (CIT) like myself. Without my glasses I'm will to write of all kinds of imperfections.
So, it took me a while to realize that the massive ice storm we had last night had caused a tree limb somwhere to feel more attracted to the ground than it had under more fair weather conditions. Between the limb and the ground is the electricaly cable that supplies the CIT-hole with AC charge differential. The limb and the ground met with a thundering kiss, undoubtably sparks flew, and my house became more quiet than normal.
So, I awoke to discover my world glazed, my room chilled and dark, an the freeze slowly defrosting itself. Taking the heat out of the house and using it to defrost the freezer.... why don't New Englanders put the fridge in the garage? It would cost nothing to run all winter long.
I finished off the milk in my bowl of cereal, and clumped downstairs to where I stash my overloved and underused gear. I fished out my whisperlite, all my nalgene bottles (1.75 gallons worth now), and a few liters of fuel. I wasn't sure if the water would stay on, so I filled the bottles, and filled a pot, and set up camp on the front porch. My Wasabi wondermug at the ready. I lit the stove, boiled some water, then lit myself off. Whee.
I called my coworkers on the cell phone. I've become stupidly dependant on the internet for basic things like UNH contact numbers, so I had no idea what the storm hotline number was. Fortunately, UNH now SMSes anybody who wants to know that information. I either missed the memo or opted out of that. Fortunately, my friends have more forsight, or less desire to go to work. I didn't care so much if it was closed or not, I wanted to know if the busses were running. They weren't.
My coffee and I went to my room. 0630. Still dark. It's a wonder that no one called Dover FD about the fireball on my porch. Long live backpacking stoves.
I wrote a long letter to my more attractive half, the She-CIT. I do this a lot, but having the power out really gives me focus. Modern science needs 120V A/C. Plain and simple. I hope the postwoman comes today.
0730 still too dark to write without my headlamp.
I took a nap. Why not?
My friend Rachel called. she was tired of playing with her boy-toy. We were going to go out for lunch, but there being no power, our plan was kiboshed. I put my stove to work making vegitarian chillimac and tea. We had chilli mac burritos, and talked of love, science, and hasidic judiaism.. I'd put even money she went back to the boy-toy. That man should learn to cook.
I feel like i've really hit adulthood in the chin because I regularly ask for hot beverages instead of soda. Now if I could be responsible.
I'm sitting at work now, everything has been powered down. There's going to be a lot of work come monday. I'm adding charge differential to the stinkpads battery. I hope the power is back on when I get home. If not, everything in the freeze is getting grilled and sauted.
I now kick myself for not keeping more AA NiMH batteries charged. The camera will soon deplete my last charged set, save the ones in the GPS. The GPS keeps me from paying for the privedge of having a broken speedometer.
I also need to think about getting a crank coffee grinder and making sure that I have a battery powered radio. I'd have to sit in the car and listen to the AM/FM and the HT to see what's going on in the world, otherwise.
I'm glad I keep as much dehydrated and canned food around as I do. Just for this occation. I should store more water, I think.
So that's what life is like today.
I noticed a new verion of Picassa is out. Picassa 3! I'll start playing with it as soon as this model is done running. Only 14% left!
12/04/08 (1855)
I spent the weekend in Baltimore. While I was gone, I left the Thinkpad in hibernation. It's nearly 4 years old now, and it's battery has been giving signs of age... mostly in that I can only operate remotely for perhaps 45 minutes before it is depleted. When I returned home, I found it completely discharged, and it refused to recharge for nearly a day, long enough that I wrote it off for dead. It has exactly 500 discharge cycles on it... I use laptop batteries mercilessly so I feel like I get my money's worth out of them.
I bought a new old stock battery on ebay. This time I got a 7200 mAh model to replace the 4200 mAh battery that came with the computer. It's big and fat and sticks out the back of the computer.
I can hang out in coffee shops again and surf the web in the morning until my bladder bursts.
11/25/08 (0638)
I held it in my hand. It was gold, with a little window on the front to protect its tender innards from prying fingers. A small black dot for an eye, with tiny gold viens reaching behind it to the green silicon flesh below. It had a crown made from a black aluminum heat sink. Contacts protruded from the rear. Another magic object that average capita of an average nation would not be able to afford if he or she worked very hard for several years. There it was, in my hand: Dead as a doornail.
The tender innards in question were quite marked by the black streak burnt accross them.
"We were having trouble getting signal." the engineer explained.
They had taken all of the obstructions out of the laser's path. The filters. The beam splitters. The multipath cell. Then they put a culmination lens in front of the detector to collect and concentrate the beam on to it.
And thus, they burnt a hole straight through it.
I suggested, "Maybe you should have checked your wiring?"
11/23/08 (0945)
It occurs to me that I've been gleefully working 2 weeks straight. Gleefully might not be the right adjective. Exhaustion, in some form, is creeping in: I declined to shoot Diwali this year. I don't normally give up cool jobs like that.
No, no one asked me to work this hard. I could have taken the weekend. But I want it done.
That's how this work goes. On good days, I can say things like I do the hard stuff because I can. On bad days, it feels like I'm wasting my life on a million stupid projects that in 100 years, no one will care about. Which is probably true.
I just cought myself shooting the cursor on my laptops screen with the aiming laser of an IR remote thermometer while saying "Die! Die! Die! WHY WON'T THE MOUSE DIE?!!" There's no on in the lab but me.
Ah, well. That's what it's like to be me.
11/23/08 (0420)
Lazy sunday apparently means waking at 0530, then surfing the web in bed until the battery in the laptop dies, or my bladder reaches critical mass.
11/21/08 (0823)
It sure does take Turkies a long time to bleed out.
11/18/08 (1434)
I was thinking that it's so typical that we pass a 700 billion dollar bailout for wallstreet.
Why didn't we bail out schools? Why don't we bail out malnutrition? Why don't we bail out medical care? Green energy? The environment?
Oh, get this, they're winding up to bail out the big 3 so we can keep driving big cars that we don't have the money to buy much less afford to put the gas in anyway.
11/17/08 (0445)
Actually, as a thumbnail, it looks exactly like what it is. Oh well. If you're female and have non-descript pieces of flesh, you might consider keeping your distance from me if I'm wandering around with a safety pin and jewelry.
Question of the morning: Can I be ~more~ creepy?
11/17/08 (0442)
Sunnippi in the Fall
Madame Sherri Forrest
Schlake had attempted to portray a bit of non-descript pierced female flesh on his Daily page some years ago. It was not as non-descript as one would hope. I'm pretty sure it was an ear. This, however, is just a bit more anomalous.
11/14/08 (0925)
For the first time in a while, I'm weeding through what I've been taking pictures of. Listening to Lords of Acid and editing photos. I am very much in my element at the moment.
Getting photos sorted makes me want to take more pictures. I need to get photos printed too. I haven't done that in forever. Not need. Want. There's a differences. I know.
More Acadia:
The depth of field in this one, combined with the bokeh, facinates me. 300mm in "macro" mode... focused about 36 inches from my subject. It's like it's getting sucked into another dimension.
I was worried that this autumn would be a disappointment. The leaves started turning in August. I suspected that they would, perhaps, all leap off the trees in one great mass exodus. Things turned out quite the opposite. The leaves turned and hung on until the end of October. There was gentle transition from autumn to winter. It was like a 2 month long fireworks show without all the noise.
My electrical bill tells me October was, on average, 5 degrees warmer than last year. I'm not sure that's too important. It also tells me I need to pay PSNH $173.99. Fun things come in the mail.
Autumn bits:
It is now very much winter. The leaves are gone. Or, more correctly, they're everywhere: on the lawn, the kitchen floor, the air intake of the ChevOldsmoBuiac, the porch, the grill, and the garage. I even put one in a letter and posted it into to the great unknown, just to see what would happen. They're everywhere except in the trees. They blow around like the trite thoughts of my small mind.
These two are madly in love. They're infectious to watch. They've been at it for months. When the bus is packed, they make sad puppy faces at each other from afar.
If an uninitiated person was to inspect my phone, I'm sure they'd be quite mystified about its face. If I only told them that I was upset that I couldn't get it to show the time in Islamabad, or any other time zone that's +4 hr UTC, I wonder if that would help? If you've been reading my typed piddlings for long enough you can guess the connection between GSMBUSAR and other organizations by similar acronyms. There is no connection at all between Islamabad and GSMBUSAR, inspite of what might be suspected. Or Kabul, for that matter.
Someone forgot their tender loving bits holders.
11/13/08 (1347)
Theme of post: Reverse Psychosis.
Let's see if you can follow along.
The grant that funds me is running dry. I nominally have until August until the hardware/opperations portion withers. If the money runs out before then, then it's sooner.
So. My friends are loosing their jobs. The grad students who are funded by this grant are being ushered out stage left. Pronto.
I was worried that this would make more work for me... but less money also means less new projects and less new research. As far as I can tell, I can get more done. Just at the moment, the rate limiting step appears to be my own blundering incompetence. Every serious hang up I've had in the past few weeks is my own damn fault.
I like that.
Also, I'm running cans this week. I work 0200 to 0800. We're in a sweet spot between the equinox and winter parking ban, so I can park the car in the street, and be in bed before 1630, and the sun is down at 1630. Meaning I can get 8 hours of sleep before my shift. Then I have a full day of sunshine to offgoof with. Everyone hates this shift, but I think november is the month to have it.
Also, I'm not a partier, so the 2000 to 0200 shift is a drag... I'm always exhausted. My good lutheran roots (tm) encourage be up at the crack of dawn, so it's actually easier for me to start my day with cans instead of finish. I like this. Imagine that.
I haven't been posting many pictures for a variety of reasons. It doesn't mean that i'm not out shooting, it just means that I'm a little too busy to review the results and post.
11/09/08 (0851)
They say that when the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails. One can only imagine the implications of a snail infestation.
I've been reading a lot about Buddhism the past year. I think it's probably been one of the better things that I've found to improve myself.
So now I have this hammer.
I was thinking about how I have all these vague ideas about stuff I want to do with my ever shortening life. How I started grad school mostly because it was there and I knew that if I didn't go, I'd never go. (And, tangentially, I think about, how I didn't, or at least, have not yet, found what I came to get). I was at a party tonight for a friend who's leaving for a dream job. Someone asked me where I was going when I'm done here.
I honestly don't know.
Part of the issue is that I don't define myself by my job, or it's title. I shirk saying that I'm a grad student. It doesn't tell people what I do. Or who I am, really. It just gives them a box to put me in. Long hours, poor social skills and lots of Ramen is what is guessed. I have a science degree, and am working on another one, but so much of what I do is really engineering.
I do have some vagaries about what I do want to be though. I want to be outside more. I want to be around people who are excited about what they do. I want more wild west and less stuffy New England. I want interesting work. I don't care much about money, as long as there is some. I do care about free time. There should be lots. I'm willing to trade these things around. There has been discussion in the past about joining the real world at some point. The more I hear about it, the less I like it.
I was thinking about Yaweh. I am. And I was thinking about how the Torah says that God created man in god's image.
And then I thought about nails.
For the moment, at least, I am, because I am not sure about the alternatives.
******
I'm typing this on the fastest computer I own. My brother saved it from salvage. It's 3.2 ghz PIV. The next fastest computer I own is 1.7ghz Centrino Thinkpad. Followed by the g4. Closely followed by a frankenstien 800 mhz PIII.
Wow. It's fast.
I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it this morning. (The Superdrive in the Mac, ever the flake, pumped out a few coasters before making a working disc.)
Next time I shoot a project, I'll try editing the images here, instead of on the mac.
I name my computers after females who have some association with Magic(k).
I dub thee Luna. The moon goddess.
11/07/08 (0743)
There must be something about this shirt.
It's a beat up old tie-dye. Long sleaves. 2 shades of green. Big peace symbol on the front. I like to wear it with my camoflauge pants.
I was thoughtfully rocking in my chair, and I realized the IRDa link light on my printer was turning on and off.
Who even uses IRDa anymore? USB and 802.11x for the masses!
There is an IRDa window on the front of my laptop.
I had found the perfect place to bounce IR off my belly and onto the printer.
Cool.
11/05/08 (0917)
I stopped racing towards old age somewhere between 22 and 24. Dad kept crooning that youth is wasted on the young. I decided to follow him down that road. Just that once.
Be that as it may, age kind of finds you.
The wrinkles in my forehead don't vanish anymore.
My beard would grow out too be full, and there's already wisps of grey.
I either overhydrate or underhydrate before bed most of the time. The margin of error is very slim.
I noticed this week that I now know that lunch time is coming an hour or so before hand because my blood sugar drops and I feel cold, though I'm not yet hungry.
11/05/08 (0625)
It doesn't matter how good you are with regular expressions.
If you're feeding your program the wrong input, you're not going to get the right output.
11/03/08 (0514)
Dr. DiChotomy
AXE-o-Lantern
Birds on a wire
Pencils by the lake.
Trees at Thompson Farm. 4th year in a row I've been shooting down this powerline right-of-way. I should do a series.
My shoes, by the lake.
I haven't been posting as many pictures because life is crazy. I still take a ton or two. There's only 1,200 in the backlog to be edited/deleted as I type this.
Life goes on and on and on.
10/28/08 (1109)
I finally did something that I've wanted to do for a long time.
It's simple and stupid, but I finally made it happen. I installed LabVIEW. I've wanted to learn LabVIEW for years.
Knowledge+Skills+Desire= Get things done.
10/28/08 (0636)
I had a Socorro moment Saturday.
A Socorro moment is one of those time where something happens in a place that is not Socorro, but is something that happened to me all the time in Socorro.
In this case: chickens.
On Eaton Street, you could hear the roosters crowing from the yards and coups at the edge of town. I frequently ran into little heards of chickens in the Catholic Cemetery. Once or twice I think I spotted one in my yard. They leaked onto the streets at the edge of town as well. This is at the same place where I took the habit of picking up a good sized rock when I ran by, because the dog had more hutzpah than the fence.
I was driving to UNH saturday morning, on 108, a fairly busy throughfare.
And there they were!
Chickens.
Chickens, wandering in the street.
I considered doing something very genteel and very new england. I concidered calling the police. Afterall all, this is New Hampshire. Do we really need any freaking chickens in the road?
My lingering westerness soon brought me back: people here need their reality checks to bounce every now and then. It's good for the soul.
10/27/08 (1925)
Oops. I voted again.
10/25/08 (0557)
I would like to interupt this busy day to say the following:
The tampon shaped blood stain on my bathroom floor is a new record.
Thank you very much.
You may now return to your normal lives.
10/25/08 (0555)
10/23/08 (0650)
I was thinking today that one of the implications of our entertainment culture is that I think that people, by and large, are less interested in creating content themselves.
I realized today that a few members of my family put quite a bit of work into creating literary, prosaic emails so that the others get a an entertaining clue about their life, but it never spawns any kind of resonances. There's just the few of us racking our brains and pecking away at our keyboards like some halfwitted Hemmmingways. The others just read. Everynow and then, there is a "that's nice" reply.
Do others think their lives and point of views are less interesting?
This is life, kids. It's not a story. You are your own protagonist and antagonist. Everything is an equal player in the game.
Why don't you write you story, paint you picture?
If you don't create anything, no one will ever know.
Sure, it might be forgotten in a few hours/days/months/years.
You know what?
One day everything will be forgotten.
10/15/08 (0951)
I used to think that making bread was an exact science, and that if one didn't carefully follow the recipe, you would get a flat cruton.
I now officially change my position.
If you put yeast, sugar, water, and flour together, you will likely get a loaf to raise. It is unusual to have a loaf go flat. You have to try.
Last night, to prove my point, I eyeballed the addition of all ingredients. I didn't even use sugar, I used molasses. I then discovered that I had less yeast than I wanted, so I threw what I had in. I put in the breadmaker and hit start.
It's more like magic when it fails. I have only made 1 cruton in my 2 years of making bread.
10/14/08 (1056)
There are 6 billion of you out there.
This often means that I can save you the trouble of reading my drivel because someone has already written it.
I think about these things quite often. Over the past 2 years, it's become increasingly clear that my place is likely not in the Ivory tower. I can't see myself running the tenure track rat-race. I'm very good at mastering information, but I'm not into politics. And that's what acedemia is ruled by. Very few people seem themselves as public servants, much less act like it.
I'm not sure where I should go, because things are slowly rolling over. It's like being on a sinking ship without a life boat... stay as high as you can and hope something big and floating can be found before you're shark bait.
I'm slightly worried I've been here so long I've forgotten what it means to be me. Having everything in flux doesn't help... it's hard to try on the idea of a job or any other next step when everyday there is new and exciting bad news.
A big thing floated by last October, what would be the equivolent of a mercy ship crossbred with a carnival cruise. And I let it go, because I was egocentric, niave, and didn't see it for the opportunity it was. Now it's gone over the horizon, and I wake with a thousand regrets each morning.
So now I have to pretend I care about my research because it's job security, and it would be foolish to not complete the program at the same time. I'm tutoring now, because it's needed and because it's a chance to try teaching as a job.
The bright side is that I have nothing. Everything I own is beatup and worn out. It would all fit in my car. I wouldn't miss it much if it burned. Everything that I value most is my head or is walking around somewhere on its own.
10/13/08 (1430)
Yes. The same day as i got official notification that I have advanced to PhD candidacy.
10/13/08 (1412)
Some days it is incredably hard to be a nice person. I work very hard at solving problems through consensus and to produce things that are top notch. I try to anticipate problems before the start and put energy into providing solutions before they are needed.
I suppose my foible is I expect reciprocity... if you give openly to someone so their needs are met, I expect that that after a while if I need something my needs will be met.
When I started at UNH, I had an entire unused lab to use for office space. Too much space, really. I shared it with several graduate students over time. It was nice. I had to move when the appearance of 70 dB of pumps made it aurally unlivable. I moved to a corral with 2 other students, but they were in a different group. I had a large desk, a bookshelf, and small filing cabnet. Just enough space for my cruft. Now that group has burgeoned to something like 6 students, i've been handed the boot. I found an empty closet down the hall that I think would make a fine office, but it is apparently "swing" space, so they're going to stick booms in it at some point. I doubt this. It's been empty since the last person who used it as an office left, and it is not like they are going to sudddenly need so many brooms that existing janitorial space will be inadequate.
Instead, I got moved to another corral. Due to funding issues, 9 students have to share 3 network ports. The department won't swing for more. Or a router.
My desk is now 1/4 the size of the previous one. My printer and monitor are on the table (communal space) behind me. A mixture of labwear, coffee mugs, papers, wire and logs is spewed around me. Upshot: it has windows, at least.
It seems so thankless sometimes. How many times have I helped on projects that will never be on my thesis? How many times have I said "no" when asked for help?
I know, it's just a desk. It's just a network port. It's pathetic and stupid. I should be happy I have an occupation to fill.
It just doesn't seem right to work hard, be dedicated (even if you only half care) and loose out in cruel deepening recursion.
The universe owes you nothing, old boy, not a wit.
10/09/08 (1330)
Fujita! It's not over 9000......
10/02/08 (0758)
Oh, there we go.
Find someone with dual cores and an unused copy of igor so they won't notice their machine being slammed.
hehehe
10/02/08 (0704)
Igor tries very very very hard to make sure only one Igor binary is running at one time.
This is quite annoying.
What If I want to do 2 things at once?
*sips coffee*
I read papers and watch my calculations scroll by, I guess.
Oh, oh, oh!
I rant about Ken Rockwell far to often, not because I'm a dreaded measurebator, but because we are such different photographers that he calls things useless that I think rock. What a great country, right?
We both have glowing reviews of the Nikon FE, though.
I've got a long term project that has my FE cooped up with roll of Neopan SS 100 and a notecard, waiting for certain people to drift by so I can photograph them. It's cool to have such a focused project, but I miss shooting film.
The theme of the project is thus: take a 36 photo roll of a favorite portrait film. Take one shot of 36 unique individuals. Make sure that composition is perfect, and pay attention to exposure, because I only get one shot per person. Better make it count, right?
Challange: finding 36 people who I want to photograph.
At least the FE is retrocool, non-assuming camera. That helps alot. Pull out the D200 with an 80-200 and people squirm... alienation and intimidation, fear of a real photographer. People squirm with my canon a570IS too... they feel objectified and don't take it seriously. Your camera matters more than you think, but not so much for image quality.
Have I said this before?
I should fix my blog history code so I can look things up more easily.
09/30/08 (1413)
There are three skills that my parents and teachers were only barely successful at convincing me that they were of any importance:
1) Mental Math
2) Writing
3) Spelling
The first and last were unimportant to me because they required the memorization of a massive number of mondane facts. There is little significance in having the multiplication table memorize to 12x12 or 15x15 (or any other delimiter). My child mind seemly could not concieve a situation where I would find it useful to know the how to spell insolent correctly the first time.
Ironic, because I put a great deal of importance on knowing the exact meaning of words. I get accused being grandeloquent, but hitting exactly is important: people should have no room to guess my meaning, unless I want them to squirm on the hook, of course.
The second was unimportant because it was frustrating to perfect. It required a huge amount of work to perfect. It wasn't fun to do. No one really cared what I wrote anyway. (No, check that, anytime I documented my fantasies of my brothers demise, adults eyebrows rose along suggestions for good councilors. All the better to write Karlglyphics).
In adulthood, a career in science and a joy of numerical manipulation fixed 1#. #3 is slowly fixing itself... but #2 has been a steadfast embarrassment.
I bought a handwriting manual.
My sweetheart gave me a fountain pen.
I am mastering the dark arts.
There is something to be said for having the skill and knowledge, the schema, to manage any situation. The more that can be brought to bare, and the more grace that it can be borne with, the more it will impress. There is power in delivery.
Here is an axiom for you take back to your cell tonight:
People are stupid. They don't recognize things for what they are. They want to be impressed by them. They want to be amused, charmed, amazed, and taken aback
Asthetics is all that remains when technology and skill are perfect.
Beware the people who know the difference, my dear monk.
And know the difference.
09/26/08 (1429)
It's Fire Extinguisher Friday, if you are a bus driver.
I keep little black books for the self discovery process. I used to write lots in them. Now I just write to-do lists (no, scratch that, "Things To Be Accomplished" lists. [seriously]), and crude drawings of boobs.
Maybe i'm through with self-recon and am now merrily on my way with the self-arclight.
Meta nuke and pave.
I'm going to be a parking lot when I grow up, with lots of oil leaking SUVs and stinky piles of melted pink milkshake.
Visiting tourist traps imbues me with a special fatalism I normally reserve forclimbing disasters, drunk chemists, and bored supermarket clerks.
We need terrorist traps, you idiots. Terrorists not tchotchkes.
Also, well on my way to a higher degree, I've noticed that I've probably forgotten more emacs than i'll ever relearn.
This should make packrat very happy.
I may have forgotten more chemistry than I'll ever relearn.
This is the definition of irony.
Which is also funny. If something was irony, I'd think it would be very, very, ferrous.
But it's just funny.
09/25/08 (1205)
Indian summer.
Donuts at the Monkey Business Bakery
Painting the town of Portsmouth
A UFO hovering over Kingman Farm, sucking up cows with a proboscus.
Gone to seed.
Love with coffee
Adelle's record keeping stratagy
Knifes and booze
Organic solar panels
Cool water
Copper hair in the airport.
Mom's kitch
Seashells in Illinois
It was pointed out to me that it looks like I'm taking fewer pictures, but I have well over 1000 that I have yet to look at. I read Ken Rockwells note about never using his point and shoot because it's too frustrating compared to his SLR.
I think this is also the case for me. I itch to take pictures with my SLRs, but the point and shoot requires a lot of fiddling to get good photos... It sucks having something get in the way of what you want to do. I want the creative process to be seamless.
I randomly wondered how many other people were trying to push their point and shoots to do nice work. I came across a wonderful pBase portfolio from Afganistan, mostly made using the same point and shoot I have. DKFenn: Afganistan
09/21/08 (1954)
Sitting here.
Behind the laptop.
Slightly drunk.
Not so slightly in love.
She can't read this.
(yet)
Our feet are touching.
She's finally here.
(Been here for over a week, good gods).
Then she'll be gone for a good while.
(months and years)
But for the moment, she is here.
And I am here.
We are here.
Love is here.
And that is what matters.
09/16/08 (1204)
They're sharks.
I hooked up the landline. Within 12 hours, there have been 6 telemarketers. Do these people have dignity? I just added myself to the do-not-call list.
Jerks.
I only have a phone so that people I want to call me can call me.
Never underestimate the power of a bozo with a war dialer.
09/13/08 (0746)
I wanna know who the hell taught my brother to say "How's your thesis coming?"
Whoever you are, I think you're a real peckerwood.
That's right.
Peckerwood.
09/12/08 (0932)
With friends like me.
*--------*
(11:19:33) holhas: you! i lost my password to comment on your blog
(11:23:49) coolguyrev1: !!!!
(11:23:55) coolguyrev1: make up a new one
(11:24:07) coolguyrev1: your old one is md5ed now
(11:25:27) holhas: md5er!
(11:27:00) coolguyrev1: its secure
(11:27:07) coolguyrev1: sort of
(11:27:41) holhas: -bash-3.2$ echo "your ass" >yourass.txt
-bash-3.2$ md5sum yourass.txt
482d2721589499e5ad0c2e24bc6e7534 yourass.txt
-bash-3.2$
(11:28:08) holhas: don't make me md5 your mom
*---------*
Believe it or not, one of my lesser life goals has been to watch The Big Lebows
ki. This goal started in highschool, where a lot of us started with half braine
d ideas with what to do with our soon-to-be-found freedom.
The Big Lebowski was one of those highly quoted things... along with South Park
, Full Metal Jacket, Fight Club, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction, and Train Spotting. Films that later on went to influence my world outlook in innumerable ways. It's either a great comedy or a tragedy... I'm not sure weather to laugh or cry.
Now, the curious point is that the Big Lebowski is actually the only film I of the bunch I had never actually watched. I downloaded the script from the internet (back when you could do that...) and happily stayed up until ungodly hours of the morning reading it.
But, I've finally watched it.
I was mostly impressed. I think most major life philosophies were somehow represented, though Nihilism and existentialism were, by far, the most strongly represented. I found it interesting that, essentially, the existentialists won. The nihilists weren't for real (they were, ironically, alcoholic porn stars...), the materialists were fake (that didn't have money!), the cynic failed ("Have you ever heard of a little thing called Vietnam?"), non-actors fails (what did Donney represent? My brain still spins on this.).
But the Dude was fine. He just was.
I tried nihilism on for a while, but it didn't fit. I can't avoid getting wrapped up in things. It's my nature to find some concept an mentally become it. Besides, the like the german nihilists in the movie, you spend all your time trying to be something that is not in your nature.
I think that was the message in the movie.
There are some questions you should be asking yourself now:
What is my nature?
Is it possible to change my nature?
What does my nature imply for the world around me.
"The problem is, what am I supposed to do? Join a culture-buster group and spend all my time altering billboards and writing letters to CEOs? Shop at thrift stores, watch only community access televeision and ride the bus everywhere? Refuse any music anyone has ever heard of, brew my own beer and finally learn Linux? All in the name of sticking it to "the man"? "
Oh dear. I seem to have become one of those people. I gave up on my f'n TV years ago. I've fantasized about the demise of a bridge or two... but I can see applying the same logic to billboards.
Yes. We should be applying logic to billboards. That would 100% make this country a better place.
Yes. We should be applying logic to this country. That would 100% make this country a better place.
Yes. I should be applying logic to my life. That would 100% make this life a better place.
Oh wait... Somehow that seems like a contradictory goal.
My deep thought of the day comes from Native American philosophy: Always be sure to check what your definitions of good and bad are. Many, if not all of these definitions are culturally based. In nature, there is no good or bad. The Souix claim that before they met the Europeans, nothing was ever considered interms of good or evil.
08/26/08 (1104)
I'm not dead. I've just been resting.
The Girly and I spent a week trekking the wilds of the west, enjoying the fine comfort of rural northern New Mexico, basking in the heat of the Mount Princeton Hot Springs, examining the deep inner workings of Pikes Peak in Cave of the Winds, and cruising I-80 from Laramie to Sacramento. Salt Flats, Salt lakes, high prairie and desert.
Best of all: big sky.
I've heard stories of folk from tree-y places being agasp at having a huge blue dome with clouds and sun from horizon to horizon. To me it's not crushing. It's freedom... it's wind in my lungs. It's something for mountains to reach for. It's home.
No, being with Her was best of all. The best gift you can ever give someone is your time. Distance keeps you from doing that, and suddenly being together is like Christmas, except better. Christmas only comes once a year and is all about stuff. Love is all about people, and you can do it anywhere. It.s sweetest when you can do it together.
After a year, she finally met my parents. I was fairly anxious about this. I had several friends in the past who, point blank, told me that they hated my family and would never ever come to my house again. One Haase at a time, please.
I have concluded that we are all different versions of each other. Both my parents are highly intense, intelligent people. Their children are idiots who are very intense people who pretend to be smart to satisfy their parents hopes that their children are smart (ok, maybe just me... brother may have his own opinions). We have a family resonance that I think may be like standing in an echo chamber with Metalica, the Boston Pops, and maybe a few train engines. We don.t do small talk, and conversations will range from the philosophy of Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy to the Economics of Foix Gras in a post-oil society in seconds. It is the only environment where I have been able to actively discuss the implications of quantum mechanics on religion. We move a mile and minute and we all think bystanders are keeping up.
Oh, we can just be plain obnoxious sometimes too.
But I digress..
I had some worry that dragging my girlfriend, a wonderful woman, into my family environment could end up being like dragging her into a den of rabbid wolves. She.s a tough, flexible, patient person (Wonderful! Remember?). I was sure she.d survive but was also worried that it would not go well on the relationship side. Family is important to us, though. It had to be done.
(For the record, my family accidentally reduced my ex to tears on at least one occasion. She needed a rich cowboy who didn.t actually wrangle anything, not a geek with a support clone-squad. We.re probably worse now: a chemist, a physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer with a paralegal/child psychology/grant writing background. if this group walked into a bar, the punchline would cause people to die laughing, assuming they understood the joke.)
My parents seemed to like her off the bat, and she warmed up to the dynamic after an expected adjustment period.
Things went well. My girlfriend rocks.
There will, of course, be pictures.
I jumped off the plane and started running cans, and there.s new bumps in the road on the grad school side, so I haven't been posting.
But I'm still alive. I was just resting.
My trite deep thought of the day is that disaster can be defined as when no one knows what is really going on.
Photos to come.
Left over Daily Zen:
"Those who wear the patched robe of a Zen wayfarer should be completely serious about taking death and birth as their business. You should work to melt away the obstructions caused by conditioned knowledge and views and interpretive understanding, and penetrate through to a realization of the great causal condition communicated and bequeathed by the buddhas and ancestral teachers. Don't covet name and fame. Step back and turn to reality, until your practical understanding and virtue are fully actualized."
- Yuanwu (1063-1135)
Step back and turn to reality...
07/29/08 (0725)
As a photographer, National Geographic has only become more interesting because I now enjoy the challange of reverse engineering the photos. I ask myself what did the photographer see and how did they get it.
This months presents an interesting technical flora. The stonehinge photos are actually discussed online, but the photos of the monkeys wreak of pure, unadulterated gear horsepower.
There are several photos of monkeys sitting in trees that have a fantasticly shallow depth of field... then entire background is one amorphous blob. But the monkey is only part of the frame... suggesting that the photographer was far away.
Possible explanations.
Wide angle lens and up close -> not likely. No distortion and the monkey seems unpreturbed
Freaking long tele or normal tele with a f/2.8 aperture. -> Do you know how much these cost?
I guess if your shooting for NG, cost is not an issue.
07/26/08 (1152)
Completely inefficient way to get to work. But also completely fun. Completely free of paint and traffic. Rolling hills, farms, and mist. 16 miles of fun every day (without rain, natch).
07/24/08 (0814)
I wrote a blog entry. I saved it as the wrong file name. So it posted nothing.
Lacking mindfulness, I happily deleted all the files in the input directory I di didn't recognize.
Nuke and pave. Right?
Right.
Nuked new entry.
Good work, Robin! We've successfully screwed this project beyond recognition.
Beware of the monkey who types "rm".
I'll try again.
We have more success killing things than keeping them alive. In spite of ourselves, some success.
A new start for an avacado tree.
The electrical box opened to reveal a slightly complex mess. A relay, an actuator, a breaker. Wires.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify, says White.
So I do.
My maternal grandfather is no doubt spinning in his grave.
Tuesday was a slightly above average day. Until I went to put my bike away. Then it became an average day.
This morning, my computer decided to remind me that it is 6 years old.
Foozy. You might even say "unstable".
I keep recycling the same cultural references I picked up when I was much younger. No one know what I am talking about because they are so vague now. The wisdom of Durandal lives within me forever. For better, or for worse.
Worse, most likely. You'll end up in a far away place sorrounded by a biligerent population and too little ammo for the proposterously inaccurate assult rifle i sent you with.
Do what comes naturally.
"We ran out of orange spray paint."
Do I detect a hint of red?
I think there will only be a single batch of tomatos this year. I think whatever is causing the bottom leaves to yellow is stressing the plants and causing the newest flowers to abort instead of produce tomatolets. The flowers are turning brown.
I thought the yellow was due to salt poisoning, but closer inspection reveals a few, tiny, slow moving bugs. Without other evidence, I would think this is a parasitic behavoir. Tape worms don't move fast either. I will investigate and exterminate, if necissary.
Tomato daleks. Exterminate.
Providence has saved me from the drudgery of having to make blueberry pie. More specifically, the drudgery of making pie crust. Enough blueberries have been ingested that there are no longer enough to make filling. I made a batch of blueberry pancakes this morning. I added vanilla, cinnamon, and cardamom in my favorite units (the splash, the dash, and the pinch). The recipe noted that blueberry pancakes we required 1 cup of blueberries. 50% through the pan cooking process, it became apparent that those at Pillsbury (who wrote the cookbook) have very paltry ideas about what a blueberry pancake is. I added a second cup, and put a vituperate note in the cookbook about the subject.
Good american recipe. Conservative in the best parts just incase someone weak in will, intestinal fortitude, or composure is at the table. Heaven forbid we enjoy the food we are blessed with.
I noticed the D700 is shipping.
I am dissapointed that the x-sync speed is ~still~ 1/250s. This prevents really good flash work. You can't turn of the sun at 1/250s. At 1/1000th, the sun would go dim and you could have awesome depth of field control.
Maybe this is just technologically impossible.
Maybe nikon wants us to buy tons of SB-800s/900s (you loose a stop of light every step of FP-sync you use...).
Either way, it's financially and creatively crippling as is.
07/24/08 (0743)
07/21/08 (1957)
Squirt.
07/21/08 (1104)
My housemate produced 2 gallons of blueberrys yesterday. It's blueberry season. This is not a terribly exceptional event. I'd rather have access to 2 gallons than zero gallons.
But there is the lingering question of what to do with them all. Having them go bad would be a shame.
I ate several handfuls yesterday, and made blueberry muffins.
So now were at 2 gallons minus 2 or 3 cups.
I think I'm going to be making blueberry π tonight.
"Remember, the blueberries are a blessing, not a curse."
-Andy
"Too much of anything can kill you."
-Mike Haase
07/21/08 (0414)
I do not seem to be able to complete the simple task of sorting which band is which today.
Murkadee features Tommy and Dulane(sp), who are sporting the striped hat and the strapless dress.
The Dramadies are led by the young woman in the pink ribon.
I will, one day, give them seperate pages.
07/21/08 (0411)
Anti-materialist rhetoric typically focuses on simplifying ones existence and avoiding the accumulation of excess and/or gaudy material. (e.g. why drive a car if you don't have to, why drive a BMW if you do?)
A central tenant of this philosophy is that whatever luxury item you have will ultimately decrease in perceived value over time, until it is reduced to the same utilitarian value as the basic, simple item one could have obtained before.
I have found there are a couple of exceptions to this. Things like
Winter clothes (Numerous examples)
Certain camera equipment (My 80-200 f/2.8)
Certain food items (Beers, White Knight Flour, Ben and Jerry's)
Certain computer equipment (Macs, Thinkpads)
Maintain an internal quality all their own.
Why?
Purchasing more quality provides an aesthetic and performance experience vastly improved over the base, utilitarian model. My 400$ down jacket, 700 goosedown fill jacket is nearly too warm. The 80-200 punches through crowd in the dark and snags a sharp picture. Fat Tire beats PBR flat (pun). The mac has been booting religiously for five years. The thinkpad has withstood my slam-jam mobile scientist hijinks for three, though the windows install is a little foozy.
I think simplicity is important, but there is something to be said for having the tools it takes to get the job done. I could, I suppose, slog through New England winters with not but a couple of sweatshirts and my shell, but it would not be warm at all.
Where do I draw the line? Utility, of course. If the quality of the tool correlates with improved function, niceness should be considered.
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
Due to proposal, I was taking more pictures than I was able to sort. I developed a backlog of several thousand photos. Over the past few weeks, i've been slowing weeding shmucks from mutersheyd. Yesterday, i discovered that, aside from an un-ending wedding project. I was finished.
I tried to put these on a separate page, but fat-fingered a mogrify command and batch rotated then scaled things in the wrong manner, destroying the the photos I wished to post. Surfed the web. Hoovered up more useless information. Decided to do it the old fashioned way.
May 2008:
Murkadee Photos:
The Dramadies Photos:
I should, like alex, spend some time polishing the 'ol webpage. There is so much to do in this short life, however, and this old ball of perl and html holds together well enough, so onward I soldier.
"Using red ink makes people feel bad."
-Emily Taff
"That's why I use broad point, felt tip, red pens."
-Me
07/15/08 (2047)
The logical falacicy was so insulting that I breifly lost control and pounded the dash.
"When the housing market rebounds, the federal government will have first call on profits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae." Said the NPR reporter.
"When....."? "WHEN......"?!?!
This implies there will be a rebound.
Lets a try a little "if".
Does no one grasp how scary this is?
1: Taxpayers are holding the bag
2: The money mills at the Treasury are not just printing money to fund this stuff... the correct verb is probably hemorageing. As in, it soon might be more economical to burn money to heat your house than oil. Just like in the Republic of germany ca. 1930.
3: Let's just pretend one or both of these kids goes under. Will ARMs adjust up again? What will this do to all the people who just lost their jobs? With already upside down mortages? What, exactly, will happen?
4: No one will want a house if they can't afford to commute to their jobs. The value of the suburbs is forever destroyed.
Also: as predicted, I think the great purging of dollars may be starting. It's been hypothesized that as the dollar devalues, foriegn entities will come to the US and buy anything that's not bolted down with their money.
Inbev buys Busch... UAE is buying shares of banks...
In happy news, I put an 800 mhz coppermine PIII in my old dell (replacing the PIII 500). I'm pleased to report that it's much, much faster.
07/14/08 (0644)
Strange.
The last time I tried to ssh into rainbow, ssh complained that the RSA key had changed. I was to lazy to change the .ssh file, so I just connected to corvette instead... inhabited only by twopir.
The last post was made to rainbow from the same computer, and the RSA keys matched.
In samsara, which is like a dream and illusion,
Sentient beings roam like blind lunatics.
Not realizing the truth that confused
Appearances have no essence,
Those who cling to the false as true get so exhausted.
To the serum of youth, which is like a flower,
The young are attached like witless bees.
Not recognizing this is impermanent and fading,
Those who wander in endless lower
Realms get so exhausted.
After word knowledge, which is like a mirage,
Teachers wander like smart wild beasts.
Not recognizing that there's no connection
Between term and meaning,
Those who wander in endless jargon get so exhausted.
To the pleasure of experience, which is like a rainbow,
Meditators are attached like faithful children.
Not recognizing that it.s an enticing dead end,
Those who hope for a result of spiritual warmth
And signs get so exhausted.
-Godrakpa (1170-1249)
I am the puzzle that puts you together. Why don't you open my box so we can see what you look like?
07/14/08 (0454)
I milked the last few drops from the cardboard cow into the ink of my coffee.
Stirred it into a swirl.
I haven't had an original thought in weeks. Things like that don't matter, though.
I ate my cereal, reciting in my mind everything I know about gas phase chemistry.
Years of work condensed into a minute.
The thought of the coming rain makes me happy.
07/11/08 (2007)
I am running cans again. If I am careful, I can use this time to reflect on many things.
One of the things that struck me as a younger man, leaving home and entering the world on my own was that I immediately found myself in a culture gap. By both accident and design, I spent my formative years in an environment that sponsored both critical thinking and a code of ethics. I had blithly assumed that most people had at least been touched by these things, even if they later turned away.
My father is ex-military, well educated, having learned the value of knowledge, experience, and training the hard way. Grandmother's wish to god was that he make it to 18 alive. Mother had not dwelt so long in school due to having accumulated a vast cadre of hard experience, through no wrong doing of her own. She has spent much of her life trying to be a saint. Her wish to god is probably that people would at least recognize how much she has given them.
They were unusually proactive parents. Everything was codified. Forks on the left, knives and spoons on the right. "Please" and "Thank you". Don't play on/in/under furniture. Don't terrorize the dog. Bedtime at 8:00. If you get lost, have an adult call 634-1205. You live on Collier Avenue (and if this happens, you'll be in trouble because you broke the rule about which lines in the sidewalk you were not supposed to cross). Don't play with the controls of the car. Eat all your dinner. Respect adults. Think before you act. The list goes on. This was all memorized, supported by governing statements in a bound green book that (even now) sits beside the telephone, and enforced by a redwood plank paddle that (even now) sits in the linen drawer.
We went to church (ELCA Lutheran, if you're into such trivial vices), we were very active in scouting, we helped organize summer day camps for cub scouts and worked in the troop. We were active in the community, there were two years where we devoted ourselves to helping build an enormous community playground. We worked at the community cupboard. In highschool, we had to do hundreds of hours of service to graduate, so there was everything from carolling at the nursing home to baby food drives. There was an Eagle project (or two). Service to others was a major theme. Illustration of the importance of doing good.
This was codified too, if by a different set of systems. Scouts are given an oath and law that they must memorize and recite regularly. They are coached to fall back on this at any point of moral uncertainty. In church there was extensive discussion of applying faith to life, how to walk the talk. Similiarly in Catholic school, we spent weeks discussing moral discernment.
The failures and foibles of others were lessons in why the code was there. If you dance with the devil, guess who gets your number?
I walked off this cloud with ideas like duty, honor, and character ringing in my head, and landed in a world where most people will think you are a Klingon impersonator if you use words like that.
So the fun began.
I am actually quite suprised I've lugged it all this far, and have no intent on dropping it. Tich Naht Han wrote that a Buddhist who leaves the Sangha (spiritual community) for the larger world is like forest animal in the plains, and their practice will end, like the animals life will end as soon as a predator finds it. Maybe moralism is a different sort of practice. Something that becomes inprinted and follows one into adulthood. I hope it even grows and changes over time.
It also creates discord in places, because my justifications for what I do are often not what people expect. I try to be sure that I'm driven by a genuine desire to do good in the world. I have a duty to help those around me. I have a duty to protect my country. I have a duty to be a good steward of the planet. I have a duty to be constantly trying to be a better person to fulfill these goals.
I should note I am not perfect to be sure, egotism is not the point here, I may even be dead wrong about everything.
I have been quitely watching the world fall apart for sometime. Good things that I value are slowly being ground to dust. Egoism, idealism, money, and a general lack of logic and humanity has driven our government crazy. Our economy is crumbling under the wieght of the largest orchestrated excerise in greed the human race has ever seen. Our environment is practically melting beneith our feet, crushed by the sheer number of us.
I have been honing my lifestyle to minimize my impact on all of this, hoping to be one less drop in the flood. Hoping that things will somehow shake out and be fine.
My doubts of a happy, laissez faire outcome are growing.
I still go to work everyday, but I look at what I do and seriously question it's relevance. There are bigger problems to solve than the ones I am solving. I have this nagging feeling that I'm doing the wrong thing. I am doing nothing in so many ways. Absolutely nothing.
The question is what should I be doing? If there was an foriegn army at our doorstep, i'd march in a minute. This is like going out to the dyke and watching the water slowly rise. Who can stop the rain?
I wonder too. How many others are out there like me? Good men and women, sitting in their home, in their lab, in their cube, on the line, thinking, "If we do something, we can turn this around." A silent few? A silent army? A silent majority? Where have all the good people gone? Where they ever there?
Noah would have built his ark, Mao would be marching, Ghandi would be making his clothes, Jesus would be visiting John, MLK would be preaching, Tubman would be walking south again, Lovelock would be filling his wifes barn with CFC-12, Clair Patterson would be scratching his head at all the lead, Caesar would be camping at the rubicon.
There is tension in the air.
I stare at my sandals, and hope I am doing the right thing. Maybe the best that can be done is to merely survive. This feels like the easy way out, however.
The last thing we need is another Thermopylae.
07/09/08 (1655)
In my quest to find even fewer ways to use my car, i have been attempting to find more ways to haul my knicknacks and dudads on my bike. This quest is complicated by the fact that I rarely use the boat to start with, so the cost of purchasing the most rudamentry panniers or a trailer would equal many utililtarian trips I could make with with my big, roomy, NPR cranking, bumpersticker wielding bucket of bolts. While there is something to be said for simply spending the money and enjoying the ego burst, I'm also a bit of a tightwad.
I have pined after (and attempted to ebay several) Large Jandd paniers, but always been foiled in my attempts to aquire such.
I also take a certain amount of joy in making things for myself, because it lets me save money to buy things I can't make for myself (lenses, computers, plane tickets, and of course, heating oil).
About a year ago, I found Cobbworks Tubs. Almost completely recycled, and nearly cheap. Also, something I could attempt to make for myself. If only I could find tubs.
For those of you South and West of New York. There is not a bulk of bulk distributors in New England, so I couldn't just sashay down to my local Spam's Club and get 10 gallons of flour, eat nothing but homemade tortillas, pancakes, and bread, and have 10 lbs on my waste and 2 new tubs. However, we recycle practically everything.
Two weeks ago, I was walking home lost in my usual fog of thought, when I noticed a large plastic Tidy Cats tub perched in a recycle bin. SCORE! I meakly snatched it, and I happily walked home with my newfound prize.
For the past few weeks I have been scouring the nieghborhood on trash/recycle day looking for a partner.
This morning was my lucky morning. I found an similiar (identical in shape) tub in the same bin. Someones cat(s) must crap through a bunch of litter. About 2 lbs per week, by my reconning.
I will now scour the house to see what other supplies can be had.
My housemate from Mississippi also has a similiar make-do attitude about these things, so there's sort of a rush on odds and ends that could be used as building supplies.
We'll see what I come up with.
If they don't find me handsome, they should at least find me handy.
Bad Clown
I paid $60 for this. This is a vehicle speed sensor for the ChevOldsmobuiac. It's just a machined piece of cast aluminum with a pickup coil (similiar to a pickup line, but more highly charged). Simple. Sixty dollars. For this. The one in the car had better be broken.
Geese are, by far, the most culinarily desirable thing on this list. So desirable that if I had a goose "problem", my oven would be part of the "solution". Auchwitz for geese.
*HONK*
"Jaaaaa... Indt to zee oven you go!"
*HONK!*
"VONDERBAR!"
-Also-
"Hello, exterminator please? Thank you. I was wondering if you could help me. It seems a flock of geese have landed in my bath tub... ooohhh dear... they shitting on the bed. Could you all be dears and send some one down? Thank you!"
07/03/08 (0506)
The alarm went off before I did, having slept really well for the first time in more than a week.
I was up late on the phone with her again, like we've done neigh weekly for nearly a year.
There had been a rough patch for us both, for ourselves and for us as a pair.
When she picked up the phone, and I heard her voice, I knew things would be fine.
We put back some beers, spoke of times old and new, our past, our future, our present,
and talked and laughed into the night.
When we finally got done (the sound of her giggle, then silence), I took a deep breath, and crawled happily into bed.
I have never been so in love.
07/01/08 (2034)
The last time i went to a conference was in 2002 or 2003. I think it was the regional ACS meeting in Albuquerque. Chris Fletcher was still working on her Ph.D., and was still somehow chemistry club president. I remember trying to explain to the confused organizers that a single USB printer isn't easily switched between devices without some gerry-mandering. I may have shown a poster. I don't remember much else. It's gone.
This weekend I went to the New England Regional acs Meeting, affectionately known as NERM. The word reminds me of a stuffed animal or favorite pet. "Common Nerm! It's time for you bath!"
I dread all sorts of social events that involve more than about 3 people. Having ~800 chemists converge on Burlington Vermont for a powerpoint driven, caffeine fueled, alcohol laced orgy of graphs, reactions, equations buzzwords, unabrashed ego flaunting, and thermodynamic double entendres is not exactly my idea of fun. Except for the double entendres. Things turned out to be not-that-bad.
After catnapping through an array of people with big names who gave presentations that were clearly designed to put their name in lights without actually informing the audience, a scientist from Harvard gave a clear, concise, well organized talk on using my instrument to make gas emission measurements. Her data is right on the heals of a paper we've got in press. This was majorly cool... some of the numbers we've had are a little unreal. But so where hers. Meaning: It's more likely real.
We then cornered her piece wise. My work on calibrations caught her interest, and the long term measurements are up her ally. There's talk of collaboration.
I think this is the first time I've actually managed to "network" without having an advisor grab me by the tender bits and introduce me.
Awesome? Awesome.
The rooms were 300$/night. But there wasn't free internet in the rooms (you could get it in the lobby, it was discovered, much later.). We took all the shampoo we could find. HAH!
A strange event: the first night, I had extremely vivid, and very bad dreams. I didn't think anything of it... it happens, except talking with other people in the room, they all had bad dreams that night too. One even had a similiar dream that I had. (I dreamt the ChevOldsmobuiac started falling apart when I put it on the jack and started working on it. My coworker took his car into get inspected and it needed a new everything.)
Fascinating.
I once spent the night at Packrats brothers house, and Packrat and I both slept on the floor. That night I had vivid nightmares that I still find a bit disturbing. Packrat mentioned in the morning he had bad dreams.
Odd, no?
06/27/08 (1306)
"He's been silent all day! DON'T RILE HIM UP!"
-Alexis, to Peter, about me.
"I've been good... speaking softly, no sudden movements..."
-Peter, in response
"RATTLE MY CAGE! RATTLE MY CAGE!"
-Me
"Your eyebrows go all crazy when you talk like that."
-Peter, to me
"Not just my eyebrows..."
-Me
Despite what it may seem, alex and I are not in an intellectual egoflation blog war.
I decided i was loosing myself in stupid minutia and took a different course.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
06/25/08 (2006)
Calculations may yet be the death of me.
I have, for the longest time, had trouble getting the right number out a figuring process. I can do symbolic manipulation and dimensional analysis (e.g. unit conversion) fine, but at the end of the day I keep finding strange things: bond lengths that are 50 angstroms long, or the speed of light is 2. Additionally, the cultural difference between chemists and everybody else is increasingly apparent. It's not that we're better &em;we're not&em;, it's that we've been trained to be so anal-rentive about dimensionality and unit conversion that when someone starts throwing empirical fits into the mix (putting in (m/s)2 and getting out cm/hr), with not but a fudge factor to connect two very dissimilar properties, my head spins. "What does it mean?" I ask myself.
So, now i'm in this perfect storm of calculation hell. Mysterious empirical fits that involve long tedious calculations. My excel sheet and my calculations by hand (pages) look right, but they don't match the literature values at all. Somewhere, there is too much fudge. But where?
Does this sound too vague?
I'm using 2 empirical fits to calculate the diffusivity of HCN in air and water so that I can, in turn, use the diffusivities to calculate the schmidt numbers in air and water so I can then apply the schmidt numbers to a empirical fit of gas transfer velocity to the ocean as a function of windspeed and schmidt numbers, so I can the estimate the flux of HCN to the ocean from the atmosphere.
As far as I can tell, the diffusivity fit is really just a perturbation of the Stokes-Einstien relation. That would help, except the authors never explicitly state what the input units should be. I messed around until I could replace literature values. I could be right, or I could have found a convergence (like that nasty place where °C meets °F right near -40°F/C).
The transfer velocity fits could be made up and I wouldn't know.
I keep getting ridiculously tiny schmidt numbers, which means that I get ridiculously slow transfer velocities. HCN is 1/2 as soluble in water as methanol is (and 1000x greater than ethane...). That means that the transfer velocity should rip right along, not drag (no pun intended)(good for you if caught that to start with! Maybe you should have my job).
See? Aren't you glad you didn't ask?
I told Pallavi today that if she went to Appledore Island and roundhouse kicked seagulls, I would pay her 1$ per seagull kicked. I offered to pay 10$ up front if she went after the chicks.
I over heard the secretary saying that Xerox would give us 100$ worth of staples. I have approximately 14790 staples in my desk here at home. They cost about 2/3*0.0001$ each (~0.0006666666666666666666....$, for you home readers). That means that they have on the order of 1,500,000 staples. I asked if this was a gross over-abundance... and she replied that they "...rip through them pretty quickly." I had visions of people staggering out of the copy room oozing blood.
06/21/08 (0620)
My longtime obsession with sticking things in the blender has finely found a useful and environmentally friendly outlet: stealth composting.
In other news, some of the tomato plants are 2 feet tall and flowering well. This makes me happy.
06/20/08 (0915)
After I finished proposal, I found myself in NoCal, where I followed the cute one around in a glorious week of hiking, camping, and South Park.
The glass bridge in Redding has a single, off center support that doubles as a sundial.
A turtle blocked me in at Thompson Farm. I guess I could have poked it out of my way, but I wasn't in any hurry.
I explained that waiting for windows to install does not qualify as work, unless one is using a switchboard to manually load the binary code out of the Windows XP sourcebook. When my officemates doubted such a thing, I found the Altair wiki.
Peter then explained that I'm on the far Geeky side of the Peter Christy geeky-funny spectrum.
Rachel, the arboreal match maker carefully selects flowers to pollenate with her 25 cent paint brush and film can of pollen.
It occurred to me that I have been here for 3 years, and only accomplished a depressingly miniscule amount of what I had hoped. A large part of this is due to a lack of forethought and a lack of knowledge of the system on my part. I have started to sort through the mess of things that have been impacted in the giant rolling snowball that is my life to see what should be saved, salvaged, or abandoned.
Mechanistically, boots on the ground, this means several things: I had hoped that graduate school would be an opportunity to take my technical skills and expertise to new level. The current environment has a several ceilings imposed that I have been fighting to get around. There is a basket of skills that I had hoped I would obtain here that I think I will have to wait on.
In exchange, I'll have to do more atmospheric data analysis, something that is of moderate interest, that i'm not sure I want as a career. That is what this environment is geared for, however. It is not unlike an asylum. If you calmly walk around and tell all the nurses, doctors, and orderlies that you are sane, you will never leave.
I will be pushing harder for thesis related work and taking on fewer side projects. This is hard for me, because often side projects are really interesting, but they have a nasty habit of ballooning from a 6 hour job to 3 weeks work.
I'm trying to slow things down and focus more. In spite of multi-tasking being "the way modern science gets done", it is stressful and inefficient. Life has been a whirlwind since November, and I have reached my capacity for unabated madness. To that end, i've been trying to prioritize more, take up less work, focus on quality, let the small stuff slide.
There is another upside in the picture, things have improved lifestyle wise What started as a haphazard, accidental idea to build a social circle has turned out to work astonishingly well in the much-maligned New England, where people are quite closed in. The idea was that as people move here from other places, they'd quickly find things closed in as well, and I've been attempting to be a friendly face for them. After doing this for 2 years, it seems to have worked wonderfully. It doesn't seem lonely-in-the crowd here anymore, really. It is still overcrowded. There is no silence here.
I really miss easy access to hiking and climbing, the mountains and the desert, and one day I'll go back. Last year I discovered that I live someplace where I can ride my bike anywhere I need to be, something that I really treasure, and something I hope to find in a warmer climate.
Oh, and I've found the most wonderful woman, while I don't see her quite as often as I'd like, has been quite complicit in warming my life and building hope for the future.
Maximum oil untapped in the Gulf: 18,000,000,000 bbl US Daily oil use: 21,000,000 bbl
I get 857 days worth. That's 2 years and 4 months worth of the black stuff. Not bad, really, assuming it's correct.
What's the worse case senario?
What, I wonder, are we going to do with it?
How much will it cost?
What will happen when it's gone?
06/13/08 (2124)
I'm not dead. I'm just resting.
Sheesh..... of all the nerve...
05/27/08 (1122)
In April, I found a book on standardized shorthand from the turn of the last century. It occured to me that acronyms like ttyl, IMHO, AFIAK, :), and (my personal favorite) OMGWTFBBQ are possibly best considered digital shorthand. We should consider standardization.
One of the problems I run up against is, like other languages, it has eccentricies.
For instance, I know several people who try to put hearts in the signatures of their emails using:
<3
However, being used to reading left to right, top to bottom, this would be an upside down heart. I think that <3 has more in common with a plasticy country singer from '80s than a heart. Maybe I just need to hold my head the other way?
05/27/08 (0912)
I was restless on sunday, but didn't really have a plan in mind as I was trying to get work done instead of play this weekend. The weather was perfect, and I already regret being in a position that causes me to sacrifice good days to be outside by sitting inside working.
I took off on an evening ride in no particular direction... just a wander around town. I noticed an access road took off beside the river, so I followed it for a bit, and ended up hiding my bike in the bushes, and spent a few hours walking around, wading, and poking things with sticks.
I should jump off as many bridges as possible this summer. That's a good solid goal.
My brain feels filled with mud. I feel incapable of generating coherent thoughts. I think i have multitasked myself into oblivion.
I have been thinking about quantifying how much it costs to turn on each light switch and every other electrical device in the house. I should probably couple that with a $/hr(Watts) chart on the fridge. I don't think this is going to have a real difference for my house, as we already average the same energy consumption as a household of 2 people. The major places we could skimp are unplugging one of the beer fridge when there's no beer in it, and taking shorter showers.
I found another plastic tub in the basement that I may scavenge and use to grow carrots and squash. We'll see if it vanishes as tenants move out. I need to more carefully choose the drainhole size for the planters... the small ones I put in are small enough that water can be held in by surface tension. I enlarged them a bit, but i may need to apply a real drill to the problem. I also read that the tomatoes i chose, Early Girls, will start to fruit by the end of July.
Next year, I'll be sure to start them and peppers in April. Regrettably, there will be no peppers this year.
There are covered bridges in Madison county, and highway bridges in Stratford county.
I found a disembowled change machine in the river.
Pedals, slime.
Flowers on the island.
A song i've been singing to myself in many variations all morning:
"I see a white Subaru,
I want to paint it red!
No rust spots anymore,
I want it painted red!
I want all wheel drive and low ground clearance,
I want a car that looks like a cow.
I see a white Subaru,
and I want it painted red..."
05/26/08 (0838)
Last night I dreamt that I went to visit my girlfriend. We were walking around her town, and she got tired, so she went somewhere to take a nap. I went to an ice cream shop. Someone had taped one of the pages that I had doodled on during some meeting or presentation to the door. I thought it was odd, and that maybe I had left it there last time I visited. A woman came out wearing those big bug eye sunglasses, and started to look me over. Litterally. It was a religious experience for her. She called her friends over and they started looking too. I sat on a bench and watched them watch me. It was a little creepy because they loomed over me, I had to look up at them. They were all wearing glasses... the women were wearing big sunglasses while the men were wearing oversized Groucho Marx glasses. They were trying to sound eurodite as they talked about me to each other, but to me it was religious nut-barism at its finest: auras and crystals and such.
I asked about the glasses, and one of the guys stopped talking nut-barish and in the most plain, embarrised way, said, "Um, yea... don't ask about that." Like they were just part of the shpiel and not actually important. Then the group started to seem disappointed. They never explained what they were looking at or for, but they were having trouble seeing it. They told me to wait for a bit while they went to read their manuals so they could try again.
I never did get my ice cream.
05/25/08 (0652)
After staring peak oil and all it's implications in the face for some time, I had concluded that at some point, learning to grow my own food would be an important skill. It's hard to get more locally grown than ones backyard, or roof top as the case maybe.
After seeing the demo site for The Rooftop Gardening Project at McGill last september, I thought it would be worth a try in my rented suburban cell, where I am forbidden to till up the grass to grow corn and other useful vittles.
I used the lids of the containers to make the false bottoms of the planters
Cans and bottles from the recycling bin are used to support the false bottom. The space between the false bottom and the real floor of the bin is going to be filled with water. Before filling, soil is packed through holes in the corners of the false bottom so that water can be drawn into the rest of the bin through wicking action. It really takes 5 cans, with one in the middle to support the flexible plastic I used for the false bottom.
Bins ready to go. I bought two and scavenged one. The PVC pipe was scrap I had laying around, and the black "pipe" in the last one is realy a section from a broken snow shovel handle. The pipe is used to fill the bottom of the planter with water. There are small overflow holes in the sides that prevent overfilling.
Soil in the planter, with two cavities for tomato plants. It takes around 50-60 pounds of soil per planter. I put boring old local dirt and old potting soil in the bottom, then put new potting soil on top.
That funnel sees more usage than I would have given it credit for when I first got it. Almost any time I'm pouring from a big mouth to a small I use it now, because it almost completely reduces mess and waste. Now I use it to water my plants.
It took about 4-6 gallons of water per planter to saturate the soil and fill the resevoir in the bottom... much more than I had imagined. perhaps the soil was really dry. They're going to be a real chore to schlep off the roof this fall.
One thing that's apparent is that it is going to take a much larger effort on the part of urban dwellers to grow food than just a few bins on a roof. We'll have a total of 9 or so tomato plants going by the end of the week. That's not going to supply enough tomatos to feed someone for a year. I have beats, radishes, potatoes and cukes going in the borders... but I have doubts about the yields there. If urban gardening is going to be useful, the scale and organization would have to be emence.
In other news I converted 2 broken snow shovels into one working snow shovel.
"If I'm going to be miserable, I might as well enjoy it."
-Rachel, on why she is either sober, or completely wasted
05/25/08 (0612)
It was not the best way to start a presentation.
Much less a defense.
The raft of email and conversations that I had going in suggested that everyone had decided to pack more meetings into their day after my 13:30 defense.
I got to my meeting room. The one I had signed up for on or abouts April 10th. On a calander. On a wall, where everyone and God can see it. On a day that had no one else using it. I got to the room to discover a professor in highwaters and beaten New Balance shoes dutifully flogging his TAs (or was it his chemical seperations class?). I orbited outside. The presentation started in 10 minutes. He noticed me, came to the door, smiled weakly through the window, then pushed it shut. I stared. Lord Dork-Wad, that's ~my~ room.....
The department managers solution was to give me to keys to the cave. A windowless classroom that was bightly lit, lined with year-old, hand drawn, graphs of bad ionization energy data. My committee got to sit in student desks several rows back. They had a wide walkway, a table, and a row of desks between me and them. Plenty of room to wind up to throw a brick or two. The room echos a bit when the door slams.
I staredt to setup the laptop to demonstrate my groovy idea for measureing a worthless gas that no one really has any reason to care about. No matter what I say, it really doesn't matter. I'm the now the worlds expert on something stupid and useless.
I first found out that I left the powersupply to the laptop in my office. The computer is nearly 4 years old, the battery along with it, and thus only has the intestinal fortitude to withstand a short amount of unattached activity. It should last until the end of an hour presentation if I pull the second hard drive and set the screen dim. I then go to plug in the projector and discover that it does not have a D-Sub VGA cable. Whoever used it last didn't put the cable in the bag. They did give me their laptops powersupply (worthless to me) and 2 component cables. Nuts... No biggie, there's another one in the closet, just for this room.
My commitee started to actually read the document I have been slaving over for the past two months. Maybe they read it before and were studying.
I pulled out the other projector. It uses a fancy DVI-ish looking plug to interface with VGA, DVI, and USB. The cable won't go into the projector though. Odd....
I push harder.
It doesn't go.
I examine the plug. The outer metal shell is deformed. Someone has dropped it or slammed it in the door or committed some other ape-like attrocity to it. There is another D-Sub cable in the clothset, however. Yei! I try to plug it into the laptop.
It doesn't go.
I examine this plug. Some bright little light has bent the pins. Great... the only people who have keys to the project closet are faculty.... My advisor goes to raid the office. I go to my office and retrieve my plier tool and the laptop power supply.
By the time I got back, another cable had been produced.
I presented.
It was about here that things went from downhill to head-over-heals.
Since I didn't do well the last time I stood in front of the committee, they wrote me a letter with an explicit set of things that I should address on this, round two, of my proposal.
Given that I have many other disasters that I am constantly coping with, I worked the list to the letter. I re-worked the data aquisition process for the instrument, thus increasing it's projected sensitivity by a factor of 2. I hardened the data quality by adding redundancy, I studied spectroscopy more. I explicitly stated my hypothesis, and i found even more reasons why my worthless compound is important. Everything on the list was there.
So, things felt like they dropped out from under me when most of the questions, which i considered boardering on inconsquential, were merely re-runs from the last round, and not on the list of deficiencies. (Mia culpa, I should have writen them down, but I didn't know I was going to fail.) Then, to make things even more fun, I got the Big Question of DoomTM, and when I answered it, it was like my comittee didn't believe me. Great. They started to excuse themselves to go to other meetings. Self actualize now: I am a valued and important person...
I passed, but I now have to provide writen responses to an inconsequential question and the Big Question of DoomTM. I almost don't mind the inconsequential question because the answer is trivial to arrive at. I really don't see how the Big Question of DoomTM will be any more acceptable if I write down a response. If my calculations and conclusion are rejected ab initio, without comparison or checking with other results, my position will always be indefensible. Didn't someone warn me about this?.
The entire situation has been a frustrating cycle of poorly defined requirements that are then met with inexact solutions. I could defend at the end of the summer, then I had to defend in april (6 months planning to 6 weeks of planning). The proposal was supposed to cover one set of objectives, but then ended up being pared down to cover a smaller set of objectives (60+ pages to 30 pages to 15), and the criticism was pointed, but not inclusive. All for a project that I should carefully plan, but will never do. I kept getting caught in the friction between the two. I wouldn't mind if I felt like I was falling short due to inattention or incapability, but i feel like the requirements keep changing. As a goal-oriented person, this whole process has been extremely frustrating.
I don't view this as an evil-doctoral program out-to-get-me problem. That's what happens when students are scheduled to TA three sections, take three classes, and are expected to make a significant daily contribution to research. This situation is more of a systemic failure... what happens when people make things up as they go along. Everyone involved was friendly enough, but I was caught in the clovehitch because the expectations were not clearly layed out.
Frustrating.
I passed, though, that is important, so I should move on.
Here ends the rant, we rise and get a cup of coffee.
"We had certainly identified the potential of these active faults. But that information was effectively locked in an academic journal."
-Michael Ellis, on how the Chinese 7.9 earthquake was predicted last year
05/17/08 (0906)
I bought another Canon A570 IS. In spite of Canons arguements to the contrary, they are available for $100 refurbished. Now I have an IR active and normal point and shoot.
I was quite frustrated with the image quality from the IR camera, really. If I didn't want IR colors, pushing the white balance around is a chore. It is, in fact, exceptionally good at low-light work. I had thought that without the filter, it was 1-3 stops faster. Now that I have the 2 cameras side-by-side, it looks to be the case. Under normal conditions, it's 1 stop, while warm dark rooms with incandescent lights can get up to 3... That means an effective ISO 6400... not bad at all.
New camera, with an IR filter:
Old camera, no IR filter.
Inspecting the old cameras photos from before I removed the filter, it seems like it was broken almost from day one. I bought it in september, and by october there are photos with the tell tale horizontal line from the crack in the filter glass. It may have come broken. The new camera seems to be a tad sharper than the old one was, leading me to wonder if the filter was put in incorrectly so the image was refracted a bit before it arrived at the CCD.
The new camera is a refurb. It came with a little gold sticker on the side to tell me this. It also didn't come with a memory card. If the counter has not been reset, someone had take 32 photos with it, then returned it. I wonder what it's history is. If this one breaks, I'll probably get a different manufactures camera.
I've really been to busy to catch up on my outside interests with any degree of regularity. Here's a favorite from April. Nothing says true love like being open with your feelings.
I found this bee on the floor in the Chemistry building. I was chasing one like this around the yard, and it suddenly dove to the ground and crawled into a little hole in the dirt. I sat and watched the hole for some time, and it did not emerge. I now wonder if these are really wasps or something. It doesn't seem natural for a bee to live in the ground.
I found a tick. This is its final moment of vitriolic display. After I found a tick in my inner thigh last May, and the painful bruise, itching, scar, and Lyme Disease worries that followed, my inner animal rights activist has little sympathy for them. Neither did my pliers.
We're going to add 70,000 to a 21,000,000 barrel market.
70,000/21,000,000=0.003. That's a 0.3% increase in available oil.
A 0.3% drop $126.00 dollar oil is $125.58. That's a smaller change than the daily variation in oil price.
A 0.3% drop in $3.75 gas is $3.74 per gallon.
That's right! It will now cost $0.50 less to fill up your 50 gallon tank on your SUV. After you burn two or three tanks, you can get a 'free' cup off coffee (Chai if you do yoga more than once a day)!
Thats right! Your leadership is so inept that they cannot do basic math to determine that their stop-gap measures are impotent. Our governments lack of attention to our educational system has now come full circle: The governement is now run by the idiots it created.
I'm so excited! We're so freaking doomed!
05/12/08 (2045)
Although most of the time, the IR active camera is useless, every now and then, it's shockingly nice.
05/12/08 (0415) I'm in your creamery, probing your cheese!
05/12/08 (0413)
This is not blog spam. This is a catagorical response to Shlake.
Cream Cheese is a bastardization of the cheese making process. The fine line between requireing love and attention, and requiring a pH probe is far transgressed. Also, cheese has to be predominantly protein, regardless of how many lipids it picks up along the way. In fact, unless the lipids were significantly smaller than the proteins, approximately 50% of the cheese would have to be protein, otherwise you would have lumps of protein in an oil/fat matrix. Fat free cream cheese is really just a soft cheese that you get by attempting to make cream cheese with skim milk. Look ma! No lipids!
05/09/08 (0639)
Hepcats Salse/Swing dance:
A relatively quiet even compared to the last one. More intimate, not to put to fine a point on it.
Kiss me, kiss me....
Yesterday, I studied spectroscopy after dinner. I can now connect lifetimes of excited states and natural absorption linewidths using the Heisenburg uncertainty principle. I also watched Murkadee and the Dramadies.
The concert was sponsored by a group that was hoping to get the environment at the forefront of national politics. I have been trying, as of late, to try and get people clued in to the fact that the Environment, Energy (Peak Oil), food costs, and the economy are all deeply interconnected in a synergistic way. In other words, we can't solve one problem without solving the others. Explaining this to people is next to impossible. This reinforces my conclusion that we are all freaking doomed. No one knows how fucked we really are, and —frankly— they all seem afraid to find out.
When I explained that gas prices are never going to come down, and that it takes lots of gas to get food, so things are going to be tight. The janitor countered that some great invention will save us, using Google earth as a prime example of human adaptively. I tried to explain that all the computer magic is traceable to 2 basic concepts: binary math and the transistor. Everything that astounds you on screen is due to clever combinations of the two. A simple concept compounded ad-inititem. Most other areas of human knowledge and skill have move at a much slower pace. We've been doing fundamental research on energy for much longer, and the easiest sources of energy have already been tapped, or are so wrapped up in politics that they are not (yet?) worth the trouble.
The concert organizers want carbon emission slashed 80% by 2050, and a bajillion "green" jobs. They mentioned local farming and manufacturing as possible jobs. I brought up the notion that for those of us only a generation or two off the farm, our forefathers job does not seem very appealing. Especially if it involves weeding by hand. I know they weren't looking for a debate, but I'm getting tired of goals without plans to achieve them. Rome is burning. Shouldn't we be getting some buckets or hot dogs or something?
I sure would love a weenie roast.
"The problem with models is that you always get a result."
-Dr. Walter Shortle, on why experimental validation is important.
"I'm sorry, you can't be their spokeswoman. You're a bitch."
-Rachel, on club politics
04/23/08 (0657)
Known bugs are:
The history does not work correctly. Period. Click old news. You'll find a mess unless you view it all on one page. Which is now a huge download.
I can't like to off site images. The number of jokes that I have thought of that use Google Charts is beyond number. My stupid script attempts to stuff all image tags through ImageMagik. Fine if all I'm doing is posting photos, but every now and then, we need some comic relief.
Just discovered: Bad hyperlink parsing in some cases.
04/23/08 (0639)
Herm. I found yet another bug in the web-page production script. I wish I had a life so I could track it down and squish it.
04/23/08 (0636)
"I suspect that if Shawn Fanning had pioneered a safe, socially acceptable way to electronically shoplift from Target in 1997, people would have jumped on that bandwagon instead." -Chuck Klosterman
This just in: free stuff helps you not spend money.
I save a significant amount of money helping my housemates with left overs they don't want.
04/22/08 (0728)
"Due to mandatory scheduled maintenance, the appropriate chamber for this testing sequence is currently unavailable. It has been replaced with a live fire course designed for military androids. The Enrichment Center appologizes for the inconvenience and wishes you the best of luck."
04/22/08 (0722)
"Rememeber when we pretended we were going to murder you? That was great."
"Assume the party escort position or you will miss the party."
-GLaDOS
04/21/08 (0414)
Last night I dreamt that I found a device that was shaped like a dentist mirror, except that the disk part was 90 degrees to the body/handle, and the handle was large enough of a battery and some electronics. The device was silent when active, but had a tangible vibration. When applied to the skin, it caused all the zits within 1/4 inch to rupture.
I think the next time I write a large document, i'm going to do it in LaTeX. The ongoing problems I have with Word are not worth the frustration.
There is sort of a grey area when dealing with datasets in excel where recalculation is still fast inspite of the dataset size. In the future, when things get that large, I should take it as given that it will become ponderous and export the project to Igor.
Windows crashes, Word sufferes from an archaic DIY layout, weak referencing, and weak version system, and is incompatible with itself, and Excel can only deal with 16 million entries on a spreadsheet, and then only slowly. This is not conducive to getting things done.
04/19/08 (2154)
Most of the work on the proposal has been done on my Windows XP booting Thinkpad T42. It's roughly twice as fast computationally as my g4 933, but has always seemed more sluggish. Mostly due to the poor windows architecture, and really slow disk access. The few times I've ran the ~100 meg spreadsheet through the mac, it's open and save times are markedly better than the Thinkpad. It's disklight glows when writing to a flash drive.
I periodically mess with the idea of upgradeing both machines, but in reality, they do fine as long as I'm willing to be patient. Getting by with what I have appears to be a lifetime project.
I discovered that a patch of rust is creeping up from the underside of the rear passenger-side door on the ChevOldsmBuiac. Depressing and about damn time. There was something abnormal about a 18 year old car without a spot of rust on it. Especially one that has only spent about 2 nights of its entire life in a garage.
As soon as the proposal business is done, I'm going to change the oil and check the brakes once again. They still periodically sieze instead of feather. I think I'm going to buy a can of anti-sieze compound because the wheels keep rusting to the hubs. I also need to take the dash apart to figure out why the gauges don't work.
This is all trite tripe. I'm sure you could be reading about J-Lo or linux or something. You really don't have to be reading this.
I only found out I had gray hair when my girlfriend pointed it out to me. The utilitarian aspect of relationships can never be understated.
I started stuffing panoramas through the cue again. I've noticed that the lens distortion in the Canon is more complex than the lenses I use on the Nikon.... the nikons images easily align and stitch well. The canons always seem to find ways to leave little bits out of place.
04/16/08 (0826)
My deep, pithy thought of the day:
Visual Basic and Thai garbage dumps are compeling sign of God's apathy toward creation.
VBA seems like such a good idea: Let users write their own functions to make upfor the lack of vision on the part of Macro$uck engineers. It's usefulness is hobbled by it's extreme sloth. I'm fitting 45,000 elements to gaussian functions, then convoluting their contributions to each other. That's 2,250,000 fit operations. My processor is supposedly doing billions of transactions per second. How come it takes minutes to calculate this?
I thought that Runge-Kutta was slow in perl, but this takes the freaking cake.
Desert with that?
Pie?
Ice Cream?
Chocolate Cake?
Cheese Cake?
Freaking Cake?
Yes. I'll have a slice of that last one.
Had my life not devolved into a mild cascading failure, i'd be doing this in Igor or perl.
Note to self: do not fail proposal.
Oh, right....
*ding*
Your spreadsheet's done!
Finally.
Back to work.
04/10/08 (1047)
After having spent some portion of my day doing damage control on my bombed proposal, it is becoming apparent that part of the reason for my lack of success is that I confused the hell out of everyone.
In retrospect, choosing a topic that easily spans 3 fields and probably trickles into a few more, had disaster written all over it.
Ever wonder why our nation is led by a bunch of folk who think that tax breaks, god, ethanol and gun control is going to solve all our problems? Maybe the rest got shot down by a comitee somewhere.
Thank you, E.B.,
I will simplify, simplify, simplify....
04/09/08 (2031)
No, I'm not dead. Thanks for asking.
My camera started having weird artifacts. I took it apart and discovered that the hot filter was neatly cleaved in two. I took it out, so now my point and shoot is IR-active. The color balance is now eternally hosed, but it does produce interesting effects now and then.
The CCD
The hot filter.
I'm not sure I'd wish my job on anyone. I spent the last 6 weeks working roughly 16 hours per day on a proposal that didn't fly through my comittee (i get to fix it and do it again... lovely). I do, periodically, get to do something really extraordinary. I've been working on a backburner project to improve data analysis of an instrument that is flying on the NASA DC-8 as part of the ARCTAS project. I ended up getting to spend a week helping tune it in.
The NASA DC-8
The DC-8, head on.
Hangar, tail of NASA SOFIA 747 for scale.
Portside inlets, DC-8.
Unknown Plane, no tail.
03/03/08 (1602)
I was able to get 3 panos completed to my satisfaction before Adorama stopped their 1.79 12x19 deal. (all posted below) (I didn't get the wedding one done... that one needs to go to ezprints because adorama does not have much flexibility printing panoramas)
I hoped to have one more, but there is just enough paralax in it that it is throwing autopano for a loop, and thus requires hand tweaking that I don't have time for at the moment. I think it will go to ezprints regardless, due to it's 2π nature.
I deeply dislike science meetings in all their forms. It is very rare to have a presentation that I walk away from feeling informed and enlightened. Today I had to sit through a particularly bad one... a grad student with a poor mastery of english and a poor mastery of powerpoint was presenting on a topic that she may or may not have had mastery of. 30 minutes into the talk, half the audience was asleep, including all the professors, and it was revealed that we had only then completely the first half of the talk.
It was then and there that I concluded we need to bring elements of The Gong show, and other reality TV devices into science for the betterment of humanity.
All members of the audience will have to wear brain wave monitoring headbands, as they "vote" presentations good or bad by falling asleep. The audience brain waves are monitored. When some fraction of the audience falls unconcious (α or δ waves start to spew forth from thier unsuspecting noggins), the monitoring system triggers tasers strapped to the bottom of the audience chairs and automatically moves the presentation to the conclusion slide. The audience is then saved from wasting time sleeping in a presentation no one cares about, and leaves feeling energized as a bonus.
Things will get interesting after the first few tasings. I think people will start to pay more attention to their peers than the presenter. This would have the affect of keeping people awake, though not paying attention to the presenter, allowing bad presentations to happen once again. To solve this problem, people should be allowed to leave if they fear tasing, or be shot with a mild tranquelizer dart to induce δ waves if they refuse to pay attention. I think the department manager should be charged with this sacred task, as their job could probably use some kind of built-in stress relief anyway.
02/29/08 (2253)
A tree in autumn:
My driveway, at about the same time:
I haven't yet caught up with Existential Angst, but I'm working on it.
The backlog of unstitched panos is quite large... I think I have at least 8 more.
The information protruding from the front of the newspaper kiosk says that this is the 8th most snowy year on record, something like 102 inches so far. I was susipicous that this was abnormal... It's been snowing about twice a week since November. We gave up shoveling the driveway a month ago when someone forgot, resulting in huge lumps of ice that make shoveling niegh impossible. Someone carved "I hate snow" into the snow bank infront of my house. I will try and get a digital photo of it, but it's going to snow again tonight.
02/29/08 (1303)
Panorama stitching goes on in earnest. autopano-sift finds enough control points so that PTStitcher (maybe others) can correct for lens distortion, but the transformations take far longer. I attempted to scale and upload a second pano this morning, but the computer was too slammed stitching a third to give any time to mogrify, which managed to stay hung throughout coffee and a 5 pages on diode lasers.
This is sunset after a wedding, after the storm that happened after the wedding.
The Canon came back today. I broke my mini screw driver trying to take the screws out. I'll have to find another.
Today is leap day. All children born today will age fairly slowly. I would name such a child Bruster. As in FeBrusterary.
02/28/08 (0537)
2 weeks ago, I figured out how to get autopano-sift to work in OS X with Hugin 0.6.1. I wrote it all down to put on the internet, but that didn't actually happen until now. I'll put up a seperate how-to page one day.
This has been highly complicit in helping me clear the panorama backlog... they take up a huge amount of space for what they are... I tend to only keep a low-res jpg version of each handy in my HD image library, and burn each one and it's parent images to DVD or CDROM.
-------
Installing autopano-sift in Hugin on Mac OS X:
If you try to run autopano-sift from the command line, it will whine about not having gtk# installed.
When I try to fink GTK#, it tries to update g95, which won't compile for some reason.
Drat.
But I figured it out:
How-to:
Download and install hugin
Install Mono
Download autopano-sift
Unzip autopano-sift
Copy the contents of the ~/autopano-sift/bin folder to ~/HuginOSX/Resources/autopano-sift
It should work
The script autopano-sift-mac.sh seems to know how to NOT use gtk#. Why it even needs gtk# from the commandline is a mystery to me, actually.
-------
In other photonews:
I sent the Canon A570 IS to Indiana the CCD cleaned since it was starting to look spotty. This was supposedly warrantee work. BUT Canon mailed (not emailed, mailed...) me back a service quote of $97.00 to replace the slighly dented lens and scratched case. The reason for these "damages" is a carry the thing in my pocket and use it all the time. I'm not going to pay to repair something cosmetic that's going to get hosed up again.
Unfortunately, they refuse to let a camera leave without it looking brand new. After some wheedling, I eventually asked them to just send the camera back. I don't want the camera to be new, just not taking spotty pictures.
I'll just take it apart and clean it myself.
Dust spots on the bottom.
The annoying thing is that it has ~3000 photos taken with it. The Sony (DCS-P73, iirc) took nearly 40,000 photos with no dust problems at all until the gears in the lens finally wore out. The D200 is nearly a year old (versus the Canons 5 months) has 1,500+ shutter drops, and is easily cleaned and no other problem. My 30 year old Nikon FE was last professionally cleaned in 1992, and has since spent 2 summers backpacking and dealt with all my other Stupid Karl Antics (SKAs).
Wee.(?)[!]{...}
02/12/08 (2025)
What is probably the only roll of Tungsten balanced film I'll ever shoot.
Mysterious holes in Konica 200 film:
The Canons sensor got too dusty to use on a daily basis. Fortunately, I was wise enough to save the reciept when I bought it, so I have shipped it off to Canon under warrantee. Until then, I'm shooting film in the FE. I had a little pile of C41 film that I had either fished from the expired/discontinued bin at the photo store, or had been given by people shooting digital exclusively.
Using the FE again after months of just digital is incredibly grounding. All those buttons and computer time can get in the way sometimes. This way, it's just shoot and print. Simple.
In not-photo news, I got word back that I need to completely re-write my last cume answers. Apparently the expurgated version of my answers is preferred. No handwriting allowed either.
The word I learned today is Arbitrage. It's a noun. It is the simultaneous buying and selling of a resource in different markets to leverage the price differences between the two.
As in: The arbitrage of our nations resources will be our undoing.
02/12/08 (1940)
I'm catching up on back work... pictures left to languish on my hard drive while other projects got done, but I'm back to them, finally, by application of an psuedo-first-in-first-out todo list that is part of larger attempts to give my life some similance of order, or at least to stem the rate at which the mess is growing.
The project is old enough for life to have caught up with it... a man in the pictures, a prominent figure in the event, having since found a melodramatic way to pass beyond the veil: there will be no more photos of him now. In his final throws he has managed to reach backwards to taint the memory of the event with his non-presence and forwards to trouble me with its portrail.
I find myself standing in the light of a burnt out son, holding the knife of memories. He is often standing front and center, behind his mother and her beau, in these, I can do nothing, but as often he is on the sides. I could crop him out, and the casual observer would never know he was there. The casual observer would never know he is gone. Would it make a difference to those left holding the memories?
02/07/08 (0753)
I took photos at the UNH Hepcats Swing dance this weekend.
This was my first attempt at using strobes as the predominant source of light for most of the event, particularly in surrealistic ways.
I tried a couple of things:
Stop motion: this is challanging in the studio where conditions are controlled, and thus becomes challanging squeared when trying to do it on-site. I took countless exposures... probably 40 or 50, varying the ISO, shutter speed( 1/4->1 second), and flash frequency (2-4 hertz). The lighting in the room was too variable for a hard and fast rule, but 1/4 second and 1 second are very strong contrasts... small differences in position versus large... 1 second is most poignant. It was interesting to note that since the flash was mostly governing the exposure, camera shake was almost a non-issue.... and gave the backgound light a groovy dynamic.
Unfiltered off camera: About like I thought... a bit harsh, but contrasty. Some times it worked really well... it draws long shadows and makes nice starbursts. Other times, the subjects came out a tad fried. Also, due to the distance from the flash, the subjects tended to backscatter the light so there wasn't the solid black background I was hoping for. Backlight was nice, front light: so-so. I should try balancing using the on-camera flash a bit and see if more character details can be tastefully drawn out.
Filtered off camera: Wow.
Wow.
Sticking on a dark colored gel turns photos into a surreal, over hyped, hormone riddled, and generally fantastic bundle of photonic joy. Bad news: Yellow+Blue does not exactly equal green in gel-land. I'm shoping for some loose gels so I can complete my color pallette.
Dang that was fun.
It occured to me that Bibble runs on linux. When the G4 croaks, or drives me mad with it's slowness, there is no longer any reason to get another mac, as far as I can tell. The only heart burn would be transitioning my photo archive out of Shoebox.
Leave it to an artist to gather up all ones feelings and chunk it down in pen and ink as if it water balloon found lolling about in the grass. Splort!
01/30/08 (0538)
I spent a fair portion of last week in California, spending time with my fair Maiden in a place that was pretty warm and fair.
USPS tells me that my Hoya SMC lens filters and colored gels will get here today. Death to lens flare. Long live creative lighting.
I thought I was the only one worried that giving the american people $600 checks was a bad idea. It's bad because the country will have to borrow that money, it's bad because that 160 billion dollars could be used to do important things like fix a bridge or two, and it's bad because if americans spend it, it will most likely leave the country because almost everything for sale is an import. None the less, commentary in Time, on CNN, and on Yahoo! (sorry, no links....) also agree with me. That solution is just adding to the trade deficit.
A real solution would be to find a way to get people in other countries to buy American goods, so that american wages will go up. This means that we need to make our work force more skilled and more productive. To me, this means we need to decrease the cost of College and Trade education and inact trade laws that level the playing field so that countries that do not respect the environment or human rights cannot use their moral foibles to a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
We also need to tag our currency to something solid. It doesn't have to be gold. It could be people. For every person born, we could put some number of dollars into the economy. For every person who dies, remove that same number. This would curb inflation due to baseless currency. It would then be tagged solely to the quality and quantity of goods produced.
I went for a walk at Odiorne point on Saturday, and discovered that it was so cold and clear that Appledore Island was quite visible.
Someone sleeping in the sunset.
The Maiden and I went to the zoo. There were monkeys there. I like Monkeys.
01/14/08 (2114)
I have, just now, invented a new game. It's called, Identify That SubstanceWashington Street Edition. That's right, you too will soon be able to grapple with the deep moral questions that plague my life, like what's in this/drain/tupperware/bag/drawer/bottle/spot on the floor/towel/toothbrush/shoe/couch? How did it get there? Is it the source of the smell?
I think Alex and I are discovering that we're both far to idealistic for our own good. Otherwise, I'd think this is normal.
The Ultrabay Hard disk adapter I ebayed arrived today. While I have misgivings about it's rather limited ability to connected to things other than Thinkpads, it sure is fast. The WD scorpio I put in clocks 61 mb/second bursts. Nice.
01/11/08 (0831)
Sometimes I think that photography was not exactly the best art form to take interest in because it's so technical that most photographers become obsessed the the gear and completely loose sight of vision. This means that I keep getting in discussions that are nothing but observations of technical parameters. Rarely does anyone start with "I got the most awesome picture!". Instead it's more mondane "Did you see that (manufacturer) is making (dudad)?!"
The focus on the material makes these conversations feel prentious to me, because they are completely devoid of attention to the product... the focus on potential completely eclipses what is actually rendered.
If I take another artistic hobby up, I think it will be something with pen and ink. Caligraphy, perhaps. I have never heard a discussion about how cool and awesome some new nib is, and beautiful writing is nearly lost art with a poignant synthesis of style and substance.
01/11/08 (0455)
It was cold, but now it's raining.
Bad UV/Haze filter examples:
Alex before Levels
Alex after
Alex before
Alex after
Folks before
Folks after
The hazing has been remarkably common, in retrospect. I spent a lot of time trying to reduce it in the low light wedding photos, for instance. Dang... I wish I had the presence of mind to figure it out sooner.
01/09/08 (0709)
I've been galavanting in Virginia with the parental units. But I'm back now.
At this moment, I can draw on numerous cartoons to charactarize different aspects of my work life.
My problem de jour:
Our data processing package makes folders labeled with the data and time of analysis and then puts files within containing data that are all named the same thing, and there are hundreds of folders, OH NOES!
Everybody stand back... I know regular expressions. xkcd
On another note, though I lack and example just now, (dang UNH busses running on reduced schedule, forcing long days in the office...). I discovered the source of the periodically hazy pictures I was getting. I realized that they were all coming from the 35-70mm lens, which had a dinged up old Tiffen UV/Haze filter on it. Upon inspection it was a bit oily on the inside, and appears to be uncoated. Also, Tiffens are the sandwiched plastic variety, meaning 4 reflective surfaces (they call this a feature in their literature! Removing the filter removed the glare, and cleaning it helped some. So many bad photos due to that thing.... dang. I feel another Hoya Super Multi-Coat in my future.
Someone actually linked to my webpage.... though from a site I've never heard of. Welcome Portalofevil. Maybe I should spell check more.
This morning was really foggy
We got a huge pile of free samples last week. I had assumed it was all fliers. So had my housemates, apparently, as the bags languished on the table untouched for days. The type of stuff spam messages say you'll get if you give them all your identifying information. I must admit, I had doubted such things existed. But, low and behold, I got everything from free toothpaste to free coffee. Coupons too. Too bad i'll only be a repeat customer as long as their product is viewed as cheapest or best performing per $$... most of the stuff I got is usually niether.
I squeeze the little shampoo packets into an old sample bottle, then topped it off with the fruity shampoo someone left here long ago. Red, white and blue!
I am currently debating whether I am merely frugal or merely poor or merely cheap to find so much happiness in such a tiny windfall.
Some days, I think complete understanding of myself is niegh impossible.
12/18/07 (0648)
Outside my window.
I actually had to open the inner window and the storm window to get this... the glass is so warbled that it distorts photos taken though it, especially at close range. So it was a bit cold.
I like the repetition of the boughs in the trees both in and out of focus, and how some of them creep into and out of focus.
Another 14 inches of snow, followed by rain. Winter is surely here.
12/14/07 (2328)
A follow up on the lens comment:
Here is what the page used to say. A complete about-face. Internet archive, woo!
I should be doing other things....
12/14/07 (1002)
Some images from where I work. These are various scenes from The Instrument, the 6 channel GC-FID/ECD/EIMS/NCIMS system that we use for VOC analysis.
I'm considering calling it The Instrument as a proper noun, though I've toyed with Die Maschine, though it is too flakey to be german.
Microactuated switching valves.
A union.
The pump-out line, with cans.
The trap.
A helium plasma in a Helium Discharge Detector.
It snowed 1 foot in about 6 hours here yesterday. After work (0200 these days) I wondered around the campus a bit, until it got too cold. Janitors are suspicious of gangly people taking pictures with bright flashes.
Baring something better to do, I think i will go snow shoeing at kingman farm today.
There is a school of thought that disparages weak (2x or 3x), midrange zoom lenses... things that go somewhere between 25mm to 85mm. The arguement is always something along the lines of, "a prime at that focal length can make about the same exposure at higher shutterspeed and less wieght... the photographer just has to get closer or further from the subject."
For me, this arguement in technically correct, but completely eschews the human element of photography. Shooting a wedding party with a 28mm prime would be intrusive for the party and stressful for the photographer.... all portraits would have to be shot with the camera a foot or two from the subject. An 85mm lens would make working in small rooms difficult, because one could not get far enough away from the subject. I prefer to work as far from the bride and groom as possible; weddings are not for photos, they're for people. This also goes for other social gatherings.... any event where people are mingling.... it's a lot less obtrusive to zoom a lens than it is to move around.
Also, inside, having f/2.8 or larger aperture is more useful than VR because getting photos without people-moving blurs is nice (sometimes... look at national geographic magazine from the 80s and early 90s... our obsession with freeze frame can be a little overboard, i think). This kicks the f/3.5-5.6 super-zooms that seem so proflic these days out the door for that work. (unless you really want to use that flash.... but nothing screams obtrusive like a cobra firing lightning bolts in a dark room.)
So, my 35-70 f/2.8 lens is usually mounted on one camera or the the other so I can get corny pictures of my housemates being strange.
Imagine my suprise when someone does an about face on their position and gives a raving review of my second favorite lens.
I bought it after I got fed up with the "close" (read: 1.2 meters at closest!) focusing of the Series E 35-72mm f/3.5.
Enough gear talk... i should be working on a degree or making photos or doing something to help the world. Heck, I already cleaned the bathroom today.
12/12/07 (1024)
A department email I recieved this morning:
Letting you know that the English Department offers English as a Second Language for Graduate Students which may benefit those of you who do not have English (aka. American) as their primary language.
It burns my eyes.
12/08/07 (0944)
Every now and then, some poor parent misperceives my life as a blazing, astounding success and requests that I provided advice to their own misguided urchin. As to prevent my ever-increaseing penchant for ranting to stand in the way of good, wholesome chastization, i must remember to threateningly wave three fingers at the offending hoodlum and say the following:
1: Stay in school and work hard.
2: Don't get yourself or anybody else pregnant.
3: Don't get addicted to anything.
Do the above until you can say to yourself: "If I stay in school any longer, I will make less money and be more miserable for the rest of my life than if I leave now."
-And- "If I (get/get this person) pregnant, I will really enjoy being a parent with them."
-And- "Why is everyone smoking this stuff? Don't they have responsibilities?"
They won't listen to me, of course, but if you want real, hard, insurmountable existential angst, drop out of school, get knocked up, and take up a crack addiction.
There are something that can never be taken back.
End of rant.
Thompson Farm in November:
Thompson Farm in April:
At the request of the organizers, I took pictures at the UNH Indian Student Diwali Festival. That's a little understatement... I took 1500 photos... roughly 6 gigabytes. Of which 393 were considered unique and quality, of which 51 were considered unique and remarkable (by the photographer). This constitutes a 26% hit rate, with 3% that I consider to be my "best work", or photos that I would print and show someone else, because I feel they make a statement and are imbued with my personal style and point of view. If I were shooting film, this would correspond to 9 good photos per roll and 1 photo per roll that I would bother to give to show anyone other than the client. I also would have shot 42 rolls of film (~300$) at this particular event, costing roughly 500$ in processing fees. This would have also gone through nearly 40$ worth of AA batteries for the autowinder(s).
11/27/07 (0742)
Oh, I invented a new MIME type: .wtf.
This lets me send attachments like:
foobar.wtf
and
snafu.wtf
not to mention
All_your_base_are_belong_to-us.wtf
and the hometown favorite,
ImInYour_,_Your_.wtf
11/27/07 (0735)
" If you can't read or see this email, Click Here:
This is an advertisement"
Thanks for telling me!
DELETED!
11/26/07 (0503)
Linden used to be on the baton brigade.
My celluloid phone has been acting poorly for some time. The battery life has dwindled to nearly nothing, and now the charger will only work when positioned just so.
I thought this meant it was time for a new phone. With adverts on Sprints webpage for a Palm Centro for $99 with a 2 year contract, i thought that surely it would be worth the extra cost over a new charger and battery to upgrade. BUT as soon as sprint finds out you're already a costumer, the prices go up... to like $300. I wish that there was a big freaking sign somewhere that said "If you're already a costumer, this doesn't apply to you!" It feels like indian giving when the price suddenly changes.
So, given that, it seems that a new charger and battery seem to be the most cost effective solution.
11/20/07 (1308)
Today, WinAmp happily played Rage Against The Machine's Wakeup, followed by U2's Bloody Sunday, followed by Bad Religion's Dream of Unity
Compare and contrast.
11/19/07 (1350)
"New Mexico is already the new Mexico"
-osbjmg, digg.com
11/18/07 (1646)
"Bachelor Advice, #15: When space bowling, where there are lots of blacklights, don't wear dirty pants."
-Andy
Wednesday night I went downstairs to return a tea mug. I got distracted in the dining room, though I noticed that my housemate and her friend were laughing hysterically (Laughing like womb? Words are so wierd. They are both women though, so it's completely correct in a misgynistic sense.). When I finally decided that this had to be pretty good to laugh for a few minutes, I peaked into the kitchen to discover her friend, laying on top of a cooler, which was on top of a chair, with one leg clamped in the cuff for the inversion bar. Apparently she had sucessfully gotten herself upside down, but was unable to right herself. My housemate was unable to remove the other cuff. After I stopped laughing, I helped her down.
11/18/07 (1632)
"What is absolutely certain is that the people of the world do not want war, regardless of their religion, race, or nationality. The people of the world want economic fairness. The people of the world want to live by honest labor, not bank credit. And the people of the world want an environment that is clean and safe for future generations. The only people who do not appear to want these things have been those who are currently in charge of the U.S. government." [Link]
Food for thought. This wreaks of tin-hat fear mongering. I would agree that the Shrub administration seems to be incable of doing things right. I don't see Hillary or anyone else being part of a large plot for government control.
I think that the real issue in the break between public opinion and goverment is routed in the amount of money corporations can spend to push thier points of view as special interests. This has reduced politics to mudslinging, soundbites, and spin. Instead of negotiation and unity on issues of importance, the imparitive to have the One True Way™.
We, as Americans, need to be focused on working together as a team of brothers and sisters to solve the problems that affect us all. The politicians can't save us, your parents can't save us, your insurance won't save us, the corps won't save us, your iPod can't save us. Only we can save us.
11/09/07 (0453)
"Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon."
-Message, nominally from the Dhali Lama, but most likely not (See: Harry Potter Fan-fic)
11/06/07 (0731)
The last picture is a freshly electrified pickle.
I hope i have added to you existencial reparte.
Or whatever it is you call it.
11/06/07 (0728)
Today I woke up.
Brushed teeth.
Bought gold.
Ate toast.
(no coffee)
Ate apple.
Put on coat
Got in car
Rode to work.
(carpool!)
Gas is $3.25/gallon.
Got to work.
Put in parts.
Pushed some buttons.
Now I sit wondering what to do with myself.
Pictures I meant to post last week, but have since forgotten what they are.
10/26/07 (0524)
I need to quit fiddling around and figure out how to get cwrsync to work happily, then write the code to get the instrument to produce data that cwrsync can handle. While that's going on, I really should look at putting finalized data into a (postgre)sql database, and build a dirty little web app to view it. The new code for the instrument should also include some more controls on hardware opperating parameters, so it will need to work with Labview because the instrument control environment only speaks RS-232, and then through a middle man that expects a certain part of the instrument to be on the port. It would be ideal to do this while the instrument is down for service, at the same time it would be ideal to write the paper for which I am collecting data now, and to analyze that data I collected on another insturment over the summer. Of course, comparing the output of the two instruments reveals that one is drastically different than the other, and that the difference needs to be accounted for as the difference is causing intellectual and financial heartache. After that, I need to start designing the next generation insturment as the current generation is continually plagued be design flaws pertaining to them not being intended for long term, always on, high reliability use. Future software development would ideally take this into account, being architected for current hardware and hardware that has not been so much as spec'ed out. Hopefully while this is all going on, I can do some fundamental calculations looking at the molecular dynamics within the instrument, as that is poorly quantified, and therefore ripe for publication.
This is why you never hear from me.
"A this rate, I will never die."
-Calvin
10/22/07 (1919)
Fun with Babel Fish:
"Goat Tiller Fuck Street Twitch Rope Handcuff Box Exit Expectorate."
"La Corde De Mouvement convulsif De Rue De Baise De Laboreur De Chèvre Menottent La Sortie Expectorate De Boîte."
"The Cord Of convulsif Movement Of Street Of Kisses De Laboreur De Chèvre Menottent the Exit Expectorate De Boîte."
"Great balls of fire"
"Grandes boules du feu"
"Large balls of fire"
"Religious Right"
"Droite Religieuse"
"Religious Right-hand side"
"Côté droit religieux"
"On the right-hand side religious"
"Shiver me timbers"
"Tremble je des bois de construction"
"I of the structural timber tremble"
"Oops, I did the hampster again."
"Oops, j'ai fait le hampster encore."
"Oops, I made the hampster still."
"Oops, je faisais toujours le hampster."
"Oops, I always made the hampster."
Merger of Classical and Modern. Better this way, me thinks.
The good old days.
My window, from the outside.
The incubation chambers
Jesus saves with Gieco.
Some leaves stay dry.
I went Applepicking
"Pop!"
A numbing day of a monday. A day that somehow just wasn't.
10/13/07 (1935)
Licentious (adj.):
1: Lacking legal or moral restraints.
2: Marked by disregard for strict rules.
10/12/07 (1556)
Yei Ubuntu! Death to Ubuntu!
I was happy to discover that I could boot the ubuntu livecd and use dd to image the corrupted internal hard disk of the laptop to an external drive. I was equally upset when it froze copying the information to the replacement drive, which resulted in the destruction of all the other backups on the external drive. While testdisk could see the data, "recovery" removed it. So much for hard disks as backup media. Of course, I think had I been using an ext3 volume for backup, things would be better, but i don't have much of a choice, given that i'm stuck in microsoft land.
My plan to deal with that is to move all the data capture software to virtual machines, and run the VMs in Linux.
We've determined we should start using cwrsync and perl to move data off the field site in real time, and then store/process the data in real time. Neat stuff.
I'm a chemist I swear.
One of the God Fearing (tm) grad students left a stack of Jesus Pr0n in the copy room.... a pleasant little multipage diatribe on how thinking about sex is a sin. Good to know our money isn't being wasted on frivolous things like butt photocopies or bootlegging the Anarchists Cookbook. Things like that bother me, in that it makes me question the work of the person who left it there. If they are willing to try to deny part of what they are, what in their work are the willing to deny?
Don't get me wrong, I think that God and science and skeptisism can happily coexist. One created the other, after all. It's religion that is the issue. Assumptions about the nature of God that don't match reality need to be re-examined, not reiterated. We should be opening our minds, not barring them closed.
Andy installed, then demonstrated, his favorite torture device. He then promptly removed it and installed it in the kitchen. Then he started inviting his female friends over to admire it. Some of them got tortured too. Then I made them milkshakes. The blender smoked a bit.
Curious combination of ink and paper.
Summer Dream
I ran out of film before I found this angle.... forever incrusted in grainy jpg. *sigh*
While I have had bad experiences with unshielded, ungrounded cables resting near equally well shielded computer powersupplies, I must admit that I have trouble believing that it is possible to "hear" the difference between two cables, especially given all the garbage noise that sorrounds your average monkey.
Most of the time I'm listening to music, I'm tuning out computer fans, traffic, housemates in the bathroom, a forced air heater, birds, wind, usually a washer and dryer, and occationally the neighbors yelling at each other.
I would venture that most people are in the same boat.
I'll leave the arguement about "true" sound to the people who sit around looking at photos wondering if the colors are "true".
*sigh*
10/03/07 (0745)
Woke up Sunday morning and felt like death, but faked ok-ness for the rest of the day.
Yesterday my coworkers all reported the same feeling.
We can feel it working.
Ughh.
This post has been baking for a week. Work has been keeping me busy.
I am frustrated that in spite of all the PhDs hanging around there are still vociferous debates about how to handle noise in data. I had assumed that 60+ years of statistics and electronic instrumentation would have eventually bequeathed a generation or two of scientists who could discuss the issue in extreme depth, as it is everywhere in the data sets. Alas, I found myself attempting to explain that random noise isn't additive, and why, with extremely low measurement counts values tend to clump. I felt like locking people in a room with a penny and a piece of paper. I know they'll figure it out... again.
Rivers is going out of business. I bagged a motordrive, and i'm thinking of getting a couple of light stands and umbrellas. I said that a week ago, but haven't actually bought anything, however. If I finish my roll of Velvia 50 today, maybe I'll drop in again. Not like I need it, given the workflow backlog.
Gods filing in this lawsuit is troublesome because it casts serious doubt on the function of God in our universe, or at least on the nature of the relationship that humans have with God that has been drilled/hammered/beaten into the heads of WASPs for the past umpteen generations.
Traditionally christianity preaches that if you scratch Gods back, God will scratch yours. Thus, you should be able to avert disaster by rubbing a little harder and to the left. However, if free will is guaranteed, this nullifies any tit-for-tat relationship because God is (by God's own admonition) unable to modify the earthly order because doing so would naturally violate the principle of free will and several touchy postulates of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.
On the bright side, this probably makes God immune from lawsuits, as God as now taken on the same amount of culpability for an individuals problems that your cat has. (Small caveat for God: Assuming infalibility of the scriptures, the Pope could handily open you for litigation: see Matthew 16:15-19)
This also brings into question what Gods role in things really is. If God is not happily dabbling in world affairs, what is God doing? Why bother create the mess in the first place? It may be possible to accuse God of negligence. Certainly, had God not been playing with mud, 9/11, global warming, Iraq, and John Tesh could have been averted.
For those of you who were worried, you can put the shovel away. You can be thankful that your 5-year-olds prayers for a pony will never be answered.
09/18/07 (2100)
The difference between ED glass, non ED glass, Tiffen Filter, and Hoya Filter.
Last night, when I was wandering around the garage taking the upteenth photo of the day, my housemate asked why I was a chemist and not a photographer. This is a surprisingly common question, given the absurd amount of time and energy I devote to the topic. For which there are many good reasons. A curious dovetail comes from this: (stolen from Kael)
1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the top fifteen results.
Another interesting point is the next 25 results had 19 instances of Engineering, Technician, or Repairer. Remaining were Millwright, Physicist, Astronomer, Camera Operator, multimedia developer, and Geologist.
The current situation is sort of funny because everyone looks at me funny when I remind them that the last paragraph (or was it next to last?) of my grad school app specifically listed instrument design as a goal.
I spent a significant amount of time today musing on the differences between discrete and continuous dynode electron multipliers. The first electron multipliers were continuous dynodes. They consist of a funnel or tube that coated with an low-electron affinity material (lead silicate, for instance) that is highly charged (~2kV). Ions strike the side and emit a spray of electrons that then knock more free in a cascade that is eventual received by a collector. (One of these)
Discrete dynodes use coated metal plates that direct the cascade between each other.
If memory serves, I was taught that continuous dynodes were old and busted... low gain, limited dynamic range, long rise times, and black outs. Discrete were the way of the future. However, from product literature and testimonials, it seems that new material technology has allowed both discrete and continuous dynodes to be more sensitive and responsive than before.
However, no one actually bothers to publish critical information to make an informed descision. Knowing electron yield vs ion kE, and failure rate at a given ion flux would really drive away the FUD and let me know if one manufacturer was really making uberawesome detector, but alas, all words. It is like a miniature version of our government.
Maybe I'm doing this wrong and I should go to PITTCON and listen to manufacturers talk about these.
There is more FUD that supports that discrete dynodes are the way to go. Given that we've been very happy with the ones we have, I bought more.
So it goes.
A clear sunset
The key line was "Damnit I need a real camera." The Canon's wierd AF got in the way. Cameras should not make you angry.
Smoking is no longer allowed in NH bars and Restaurants
Trying to blind myself.
A cold morning. I asked if she was an art major. She wasn't. She asked if I was a photography major. I wasn't. She was happy about reading trashy novel, and she was happy about her Camels.
Careful application of light.
09/06/07 (2019)
My sony DSC-P73, my first digital camera, died a sudden and un-expected death last week. For the past few months, it has been unusually labored in opening and zooming the lens, and things came to a head last week, and the gearbox now sounds stripped. Considering that it it shot on the order of 40,000 exposures, that is a respectably long life. I think I'll attempt to convince the lens to be stuck open, and (if I'm successful) remove the UV/IR filter and replace it with a visible filter.
I had hoped to find a cheap replacement camera that had manual controls and ran on AA batteries to replace it. However, it seems most of the compact AA point and shoot market is aimed at people who are looking to photograph their drunk wino friends squirting vomit out all exposed orifi. Thus, manual focus/aperture/shutter is absent from all the really inexpensive cameras I could find (including the Sonys, surprisingly...). After a ton of time on the interwebs, it became clear that I would have to either ebay a camera of older vintage or pay more. I decided that trying the camera in the store and paying more was best... the Sony just happened to be really nice to use, other cameras i've had the chance to use have had enormously frustrating behaviors.... I didn't want to buy one like that.
I ended up with a Canon a570, which cost as much as the P73 did in 2004. The image stabilization and aperture with real shutter blades is pleasant. It's mostly easier to use and faster than the Sony. Hopefully we'll have a long, productive relationship together.
An upshot is a 4 gig SD card costs as much now as a 64 meg memory stick did in 2004.
I really wanted to buy it from a local retailer. I had an epiphany that the American ideal of strong community is being trampled to death by the American ideal of thriftyness, which is driven buy the ideal of self sufficiency and pushed buy the American ideal of persuit of happiness (and camera equipment). (That's right folks, our dogma finally got our karma...) Thus, I resolved to get the camera from the local store, even if it would cost more. When I got there, I told them what features I was looking for a dropped a model number or two to bait them. I was suprised to receive a response that was along the lines of: "We don't carry anything like that, unless you want an SLR." No offer to order one in, not even a half hearted attempt to sell me a piece of junk that did nothing that I asked for. Not a smart way to run a business. Next stop was at some big-box store. Dang.
The sunrise this morning was extremely blue and purple. Even if I had the color balance set funny.
I've been ratcheting up for a second wedding. On monday, we went to the Seacoast Science Center and scoped out the area. It will be an afternoon wedding, with lovely warm frontlight.
The officiating persona:
The Bride:
The Groom:
I'm excited about this wedding. The discovery that the last one was in the basement of a dance hall with no less than 4 (5, with flash) colors (sunlight, tungsten spot, fluorescent, christmas light) of flat, dim light was a huge let down. This one could be a lot of fun.
On the topic of love, the nieghbors had a fight while I was in my room. (of the "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU! YOU RUINED THE ENTIRE EVENING!!" fame)
Hell hath no furry...
A post on my deck
Andy uses the force to incorrectly predict that his car will not be robbed Wednesday night.
"It's like finding hay in a needle stack."
-Me
I have found that nutella, peanut butter, malt, and chocolate chips meake a wicked milkshake.
08/31/07 (1422)
I just emailed my exam back to the examiner. Now to do nothing while I wait for the bus. The next thing I really want to do is in the field, and before that I want to go home and see the UPS person brought me.
Gahg. The worst thing about the cume process is that each exam slams my brain into a monotonic non-functioning state.
So far, the questions haven't been exceedingly hard, but the desire to not screwup makes them more challangeing, as each one boils down to maximizing the brainyness without emitting the dreaded fluff that "lesser" students fill their projects with. I end up spending the majority of my time taking the exam either dreading doing it (it's not procrastination if it's sitting in your lap...) or grinding over insanely minute details that contribute nearly nothing to the overall picture. Should I use ACS or AGU style?Is it overkill to discuss droplet chemistry?Is it really safe to say that methane is well mixed in remote areas?.
It's all oh-so-pointless and frustrating somehow. I'd really rather have the quality of my real work and my ability to solve actual problems that pertain to things that I actually care about carry more wieght than the ad nausium brain blending reutines A B C D F A B C D F.... enough already.... that accomplish naught but paper work and wasted time and angst and headaches.
I smell ozone.
Sigh.
There's half a pizza in one fridge, and beer in the other.
There's a plate in the sink. The microwave's over there.
Go get'em kid.
Just ten minutes before the bus.
08/30/07 (0624)
My bread making experiments continue... I have been working on making a better sandwich bread by modifying the white bread recipe. I've been iteratively reducing the yeast and adding salt in an effort to make the bread more dense and give it a more refined flavor. I think that the salt is nearly there and that a tad less yeast will bring things in line with what I'm looking for. After that, I'll need to play with water and oil some to figure out the consistency. I should also figure out which type of oil I'm using... I keep vasilating between grapeseed, olive, and vegitable oils.... this is probably having some affect, at least on flavor.
I had noticed that the breadmaker was making unhappy noises during the bread birthing process. I found that the driveshaft for the paddle was pretty much siezed. I took it appart and discovered that the interstitial space between the top gasket and the bearings was filled with surprise! bread. I chiseled it off and it sounds better now than it ever did before.
This week has managed to be a bit of a roller coaster. A missing (uber expensive!) part for the PTRMS was found on a shelf that was supposedly not-our-stuff, thus saving the time and money of designing or purchasing a new one. The same day, the Sony camera that I've had since 2004 croaked. It now makes the most delightful clicking noise when turned on. I asked for and recieved another cumulative exam. Chaos.
At least I didn't loose my EOS-1D MkIII. I think my brain would implode and squirt out my nose if I did something like that.
Since the sun is getting up later, I can now wake up early (5) and get sunrise photos. This is good. Dover is more east facing than west, so it's better illuminated by the morning sun.
Jumper:
"That was a qi (chi) torpedo!"
"I hit you with a load of funky qi (chi)!"
-P.K.
"A chai torpedo is an entirely different story. +2 when used on lactose intolerant."
-Alex
"Piercings are great, but they're hard on the carpets"
-Me, metasynthisizing a Che geek card
Back to the cume.
08/26/07 (2014)
I'm back.
You may have guessed that by the time you hit the first character, or even before then. When you saw the image had changed perhaps? Before then? When, exactly did you know?
Funny how connections form in the mind like plants on a barren slope. Epiphanies, realizations, ideas, and maybe memories. Its entrancing somehow. How does it all come together?
How did I think to write that?
How do I think?
Do I think?
Confused?
Me too.... Me too....
Some days, I think that science makes me stupid. There's something in stress and monotony that dulls the mind. I had more interesting thought in the past weeks than I've had since christmas. I wonder if I read more books and less papers if things would keep coming. Then I would suck more as a grad student.
The Pecos was gorgeous. My brother didn't particularly enjoy mish-mashing around in the mud for some 18 miles. There were moments that I thought he blamed me for the mess, though the possibility that he was blaming me for making fun of him is always there. I'll post Pecos pictures later, hopefully in panoramic form.
The Lost Coast was an experience unto itself.
A lonely, barren tree.
Curiously ergonomic rock.
Ice-9 starfish.
Daystar is coming to get me.
After some meditation on my experiences shooting my first wedding, and those of other wedding photographers, i've ordered glassy new toys for my arsenal so I can get that much closer, and ginormous photon thrower so I can, if need be, put some light on the subject. I am also not going to wear a kilt.
The latter feels like it goes against my preference for natural lighting, however, it seems like giving people cheap and artificial looking flash made pictures is better than being stuck in a situation where the available light leads to little in the way of useful results.
I should hunt down some more AA batteries so I can practice using it to death before the wedding.
I wonder who I can get to model for me...
08/06/07 (2228)
It's not that I hate the world, just that I'm on vacation and blogging it is not a high priority.
To that end I'll be backpacking for the next few weeks.
My silence shall be an affirmation of things.
Photographing weddings and doing a good job is not easy at all. I no longer think that $1000+ for a good wedding photographer is unreasonable.
Vows and promises
Sunburst
A male ruby throat hummingbird
Another hummer.
Have you noticed I love a good silhouette?
07/31/07 (1557)
I had a small epiphany today when I was attempting to get my checked baggage to way less than 22.5 kilos. I wieghed each item in my baggage and asked myself if I wanted it or not. When it came time to weigh the Astraplane I discovered that it alone weighs nearly 4 kilos. Durability and weight seem to have a nasty habit of following each other around.
On the bright side, I would note that my other work in shrinking my gear means that the pack will weigh in at ~40lbs for a 5 day trip. Not bad at all.
I also, at some pain, elected to leave the film SLR at home. But only a little. If photography was the basis of my trip, things would be different... which leads to the next thought: I should start taking more expeditions with photography in mind.
I should also travel to see people more. Maybe put the two together.
Leaving on a jet plane.... don't know when... don't know when...
Nice hats.
Take THAT Daddy!
-or-
You get to drink from the fire hose!
Learning from the mistakes of others.
A Vespa
07/27/07 (0628)
Oh look! I might have something exciting to do when I get home! I have a can of chilli to inspect! The joy!
This list of brands is also curious.... it suggests that several apparent choices between chilli types are really just choosing the label color.
Unrelated. The alarm in the lab next door has been beeping forever. I usued to be so pleased that my computer could making burping and farting noises to celibrate every action that did not result in a crash. In my old algea, I now hold distaste for every designer who thinks that loud or high pitch or resonant noises are acceptable in anything other than a dire emergency.
I wonder if this is simply because I live in New England, where silence and solitude are hard to come by.
Balance. Balance. Balance.
07/25/07 (1322)
"Congratulations on... moving to a place where the weather and the people are nice."
-Misha, to a recent graduate going to UC Riverside for a PhD.
07/25/07 (0750)
Midmorning update:
Was any other *nix weenie suprised to find that Staind is a band and not a daemon?
Just what staind would do is a bit of a mystery. What would be in staind.log? The imagination runs wild.
I have the urge to make my blog ISO 8601 compliant.
07/25/07 (0629)
I thought it was funny that Flainn was reading up on Buddhist philosophy at essentially the same time I was reading Being Peace.
The connections that we see are interesting, even if they lack the depth we'd like them to.
I read that quantum things span not only space, but time as well.
There are no observers. So here I am asking, "What the hell?"
I really liked Being Peace. Alinksky pointed out that things are often done with weak initial justification: they are simply the road that seemed good at the time, and the moral justifications are drawn up after the fact. I have been trying, for some time, to pick through what I do (and not do) and actively fit things into the same moral/ethic/social frame work. This is probably a life long project. I was pleased to discover that I many of the recommendations on how to live and interact with the world I had adopted for my own reasons, which closely matched those that Hanh layed out. It is reassuring that I am not generating pure chimera.
His thoughts on how to deal with anger, and relationships linger in my mind... there are things that I do quite poorly.
It all reminds me of high school theology.
A rotten sunflower.
Andy demonstrates his super fast backhand disc throwing technique that has been handed down through his family for generations.
This was waiting for me when i got off the bus.
Cliche.
Cliche.
Among the key points for using a flash is are that a) intensity varies with distance squared b) exposure is controlled by the flash intensity and the aperture. Since the flash is pulsing at >~1/5000 seconds, it is barely possible for the shutter to do anything to mitigate flash light output (besides being in the way to start with, see: x-sync speed). Thus, by determining the correct aperture and flash intensity for a given subject, it is possible to then use the shutter speed to correctly expose the surroundings. This is what your camera does automatically when you turn on fill-flash.
Why I care about this is that every now and then I see a photo of a reflection in a window that is really well exposed: one can see the contents of the window and the reflected object.
Normally, a photo of a reflection is either over exposed with respect to the contents of the window or under exposed with respect to the reflection. This is because >80% of the light hitting the window is going through it. Thus, to get both exposed correctly, more light is needed on the reflected object (like, 5 times as much.) So, if a flash/apperture combination can be set to expose the object, the shutter speed can be selected to expose the rest of the window.
The result:
A flash with manually variable output would make this much easier, of course.
07/17/07 (1933)
"Many famous artists were crazy, lived tortured lives and killed themselves, but at least their work lives on forever." -Ken Rockwell
07/17/07 (0519)
Long, blithering pointless massive post that ostensibly wreaks of doom but is probably survivable:
(Link kindly found by Flainn...) Bush admits administration leaked CIA name
When Bush won the election in '04, he said that the american people had given him a broad mandate for change. However, by doing nothing to reign in his illegal and immoral actions, the congress (and, ultimately us...) are really giving him mandate.
I am deeply frustrated that Rome appears to be burning, and the leaders of our country are doing nothing. If congress was serious about it's job it would spend some time working out major issues facing the way government is run and the needs of the american people: in other words, important issues.
Why are we seeing no motion on:
-Campaign Finance reform
-Curtailing signing statements
-Earmarks
-Ethics policies
-Tax reform (just try filling out a 1040 in an afternoon....)
-Immigration
-Health Care
-Education
-The Drug question (The failed war on drugs...)
-The China question
The problem, as I see it, is that the politicians are too worried about being career politicians and not worried about actually representing the people who elected them.
Sure, we could have an impeachment. That would be fun and feel good, sort of like in First they Killed my Father when Cambodian refugees convince the Vietnamese to turn over a Khmer Rouge prisoner. But the problems will all still be there, and I doubt anyone will do anything to fix them.
And here we all sit playing with our Wii.
These clouds remind me of the Simpsons...
The 3 questions I get a lot:
Q: Why don't you have a girlfriend?
A: I haven't found the right woman, and I'm lazy, stupid, and introverted, so I don't put the effort into looking.
Q: What is your thesis topic?
A: Sometimes I ask myself the same question. My thesis research is like the occupation of Iraq. I'm there, things are bloody, but we don't have defined benchmarks yet. Think ion chemistry-fu.
Q: Have you considered photography as a career?
A: I have. However, a) I'm not good enough b) choosing a career that everyone wants and requires a miniscule amount of training and experience to become good is a bad idea. c) I'm not sure it would be as fun having to work toward deadlines.
Keychain to the house with the plants that I sprayed with Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Natural Vingette, surprise.
Having fired off %fink update-all
To find over 100 packages needed updating, I think the computer will have to spend the day compiling.
Yei fink.
"I need to be sure of where I'm going before I move there."
-Packrat
"I advice against replacing the muffler with a coconut, even though they are cheap."
-Packrat
The tip of the new muffer is an inch or so too long, and thus smack into the frame hitch when the engine bucks. I will have to put it in a vice and smack it with a hammer until it stops.
07/08/07 (1833)
I took cumes last weekend... which sort of meant that I had a non-weekend carefully deriving simple collision theory, a process which consumed many pages of a legal pad. There was (of course) quite a bit more prognostication involved, but SCT was the worst, by far.
The rest of the week was somewhat blah, as I'm in a pseudo-holding pattern while we move labs... the bright side is that holding pattern work involves writing code in perl, which is like big freaking ray of sunshine in my Igor/Balzaars infested world.
I weighed my spare change.
I have trouble believing that people spend money on pictures like this. But they do. They're much more fun to make. Trust me. (When where you last inspired by a day lily?)
I have long had a fascination with using power tools to solve problems that are not related to their design intent.
July 3rd Fireworks in Portsmouth NH.
July 4th trying not to burn ourselves.
Another insightful message brought to you by the Garrison Hill Tower.
Jumpers:
(When shooting at 5 frames per second, it takes 8 frames for each to get to the water.)
If you remember from freshman physics, you can start from Newtons laws and get x=1/2a*t2. a is 9.8 m-s-2, t is 8/5 second. Did you get 7.8 meters? That's really close to 26 feet.
06/25/07 (0643)
It's been a goshdarntooten long time sense I've hefted a pack. (That is, of course, if you discount this weekend)
I had volunteered to be support for a 32 mile race around the Pemigewassett. But, my partner in support-crew-criminality decided that recovering weeklong exposure to pure, unadulturated Canuckery was a better idea than than hauling large backpacks over large rocks at wierd hours.
Thus, I decided to attempt the feat myself.
In my mind, it was not the Best Day EverTM for hiking. While the temperature was nice, The wind, particularly above treeline, was in the vicinity of 100km/h. Winds of that sort attempt to lift you off the rock that you are clinging to an thrust you out over the cliff that you are trying to avoid. Fate must like Warner Brothers cartoons.
My friend, who frequently hauls large piles of stuff up Mt. Washington in the winter, thought it was fun.
I was a bit downhill of indifferent about it. I try to play toward the safe end of the game, particularly when alone or in small groups, because things can go really bad in a hurry. In that particular enivronment the margin of error was precariously slim.
I decided to play it safe at the 2/3 point and bail down the valley, trimming the walk to 25 or 26 miles; the downhill was gorking my knees and slowing me down conciderably (especially since my trekking poles were happily doing nothing in Dover), and I was unsure if I could safely traverse the remaining terrain, especially if the wind and visibility stayed miserable.
The bailout trail turned out to be a gorgious, wonderful hike. The weather also broke in the high country, so those who continued on were treated with some nice views. So it goes. I ended up having a lot of fun, particularly after I got to stop worrying about blowing away. It was a fun weekend.
But now I have to bike to work. That will be "fun" too.
100% humidity!
5 miles running cairn to cairn.
I am smiling!
My bailout route:
Early Evening
Collateral Damage 1:
Collateral Damage 2:
Shoes are toast:
Morning after(glow) in Mizpah Hut
06/22/07 (1422)
I look like hell in the morning. Without a beard, my goose bumps from the morning chill are plainly visible. I now know the origin of the term .goose pimples.. It is frustrating that by the time I get the camera, they have vanished. Then I look like angryhell.
My tubes and wires spaghetti project is nearing completion. Many expensive objects get warm and make clicking noises, which translate into pretty graphs. Soon it will be back to writing software in languages that allow you to use named variables.
My housemates hinted last night that they see some aspect of me as crazy and unpredictable. I suppose this has been noted before, as I.ve been caught screaming .Die! Die! Die!. at my coffee beans as they multiply in the coffee grinder, but all these things seem very rational in my head; why not celebrate the process of things? It.s not like they going to take offense. I have trouble seeing why superglue printer parts together while eating pazzelles (sp) and drinking homemade chai is anything other than the best way to do it. Is coffee or beer a better selection? Enquiring minds want to know.
I wonder if people think i'm inscrutible too. I have wondered if it's a good thing or a bad thing that my personality has been listed among other things as "Hermetically Sealed". But that's a subject for future prognostication....
Off to a bajillion mile hike/camp-a-thon this weekend. It should be "fun".
06/15/07 (0602)
One of the things I like about Ken Rockwell is that he's interested in the entire visual experience: How we see
Speaking of which:Kodak intros new high sensitivity ccd
The question, to me, is the new CCD less noisy than the current models, or is it just work at higher amplifications? We can already get tiny 8MP CCDs that work at ISO 1600 and they make images that look something awful.... Tiny 8MP CCDs that make ISO 6400 images that looks something aweful is not an improvement, unless the ISO 1600 looks great, of course.
There is some debate as to how much people who use their cameras only for snapshots care. I think the industry consensus is that most people would prefer non-blurred images that print OK at 5x8 inches. This is why Kodak has been pushing its ISO 800 film... they are betting that the extra speed will off set the loss of detail because most people never enlarge anything, and thus won't notice.
On the other hand, whenever the lab seriously borks something or the film doesn't imitate reality well, people get annoyed. (Grandma should not have purple skin.)
What this means for digital cameras and people and consumers is unclear to me; When I forget to set the ISO to 100 on my 2004 vintage Sony point and shoot for a photo I really want, I usually am so put off by the chroma-noise and loss of detail that the results usually not worth printing. At the same time, I know other people who are upset that their point and shoots can't focus or take crisp photos in low light without a flash that the loss of detail and poor color reproduction might be worth it.
(Most of the images you see here are ISO 100...)
I have been riding my bike to work for about a month now. I'm extremely happy with it. I had originally started because the bus doesn't run often during the summer.... but I think I prefer to ride than take the bus. I get a little endorphin rush to start the day, and have an outlet for unchecked aggression on the way home. To-boot, if I don't feel like running when I get home, there's no guilt. I bought a lock to replace the one that I wore out at NMT, a tail light to replace the one that got destroyed in the hail storm, a new headlight and a bike rack. I'm stalking some panniers as well.
This is fun.
"That's not 'automagic'. It's 'automagic' when it just works and miraculously fixes some great problem in your life. A repeatable software bug that reliably causes disaster is not 'automagic'."
-Tod H. (Paraphrased), correcting me
"It's autotragic then!"
-Me
I should spend more time taking pictures and less time prognosticating.
06/12/07 (0545)
Sometimes I wonder if I am becoming a little too comfortable with the ChevOldsmoBuiacs geometry.
Things that sit in my kitchen and living room are bathed in a lovely orange light in the evening when the weather is good. In the summer, the light is patchy due to the huge number of trees around the house, so getting good photos of things is challenging, as the patches of light tend to move around with the breeze and the setting sun. Sunday night, however, I was able to catch a patch of sunlight before it found my target, and thus was able to eat dinner, and patiently wait, camera in hand, until just the right instant.
Been running cans for the past 8 days, which has been consuming most of my free time. I feel somewhat gui
