Thursday, October 26, 2006

router dave's bimmer

A couple days ago router Dave came over and we went on a photo shoot with his car. I guess it went from a photo shoot out on the town in his car, to a photo shoot of his car... which is okay with me (just not quite what I was expecting). Anyway, he just got a D70s a while ago, so it was an exercise for him and his camera, and I think I was just there for the ride. I took all these (except for the one that has me in it :))


It's ME! (note my SB-600 off to the side)


A blinking8's inspired shot (his is much better of course)


another one... I think I like #2 better.


Shot with the 50mm for the shallow DOF


In contrast with the above, this was shot with the 17-80mm at 17mm I really want an uber-wide angle like a 12-24DX or something.

All in all, it was fun driving around the downtown parking structure, but I'm not too impressed with my photos. I wasn't really feeling it I guess; I wasn't too inspired (maybe it was the car, who knows?). Also, the lights we were shooting under were just horrible! They were the yellow streetlights like they put in big cities, and my camera's white balance hated them! I did my best to correct them in photoshop (another reason to shoot RAW), but they still aren't perfect. That's the reason the color is different in just about every shot.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

more cabin pictures

Okay, I went through a handful more of the pictures I took while I was up at the cabin. I made it my goal to shoot every picture with my 50mm 1.8 prime lens just as an exercise to make me think outside the realm of an 18-70mm zoom lens. I don't know if I failed miserably or not; I'll leave that up to you to decide :)

Take a look:


Playing around with a polarizer I borrowed from router dave


more polarizer...


horribly overexposed; I should have taken another shot metered at the window and combined them in photoshop. Oh well.


The grave of a 4 year-old boy, Jacob Ray Bowerman, who died in 1879


Pretty leaves and window

I love the cabin, and can't wait to go back in the snow again - or just wait until all the leaves turn colors in a few weeks and take more pictures.

The barn is considered USFS property, but most of the other old buildings are owned by a guy in LA who bought up most of the land in the area as a getaway from the city, and it seems like he's never around. There's only one and a half livable houses, but a handful of old mining and logging shacks (like the last pic above), all of which are extremely photogenic. I can't wait go back (maybe sans-family next time)

Monday, October 23, 2006

long exposure night pictures

I went up to the Cabin last weekend with my family (including aunts and uncle). The sky up there at night was crystal clear before the moon came out, so I decided to seize the night and take some pictures.

I put the camera on a tripod and let the shutter wide open. Here's what I came up with:











I really like the third one down. I'm thinking about making a photoset on flickr with these and some others I took up at the cabin. Update.... soon?

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

I still laugh...

... every time I see this picture:



It's a picture of me on a mountain board that was taken in my backyard. The week I got my speedlight, I was snapping shots of my roommate messing around on his BMX bike and he asked if he could take some pics as well, so I hopped on his mountain board. It's funny, I probably took 80 frames of him, none of which are that remarkable, and this is the second one he shot :-/

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

big decisions

I had a lunch meeting today with 2 guys who are responsible for a local startup here in Chico. I have been in touch with them off and on since the inception of the project, but haven't done any real work for them. I got an email yesterday asking if I could help them out with one aspect of the site before they release it. I said yes.

I guess they are also interested in hiring me to do some code maintenance and possibly some feature requests in the future for them because their head code guru is leaving (for personal reasons... not because he doesn't like it!), and I still don't know what to say. They also mentioned that if they get the site off the ground and stay in the black for a while, they will most likely get a second round of venture funding to expand their operations and maybe start a full-fledged business out of it. They both want me to come along with that as well.

I don't think I'm going to do it, but it was almost flattering that they asked. I've been under the "school" mentality for so long that it startled me to think that in just a year or two I'm going to be out there looking for a real job. I think - okay, I know - that this isn't the job for me (for reasons I'm not going to get into here), but it was still an eye-opener to think that a job like that could be it for me.

I wonder where I'm going to wind up...

Sunday, October 15, 2006

C.H.U.G.

The Chico Hops Ultimate Gathering was this weekend. If there's anything I like about ultimate players is they know how to name their tournaments. From CHUG to the Davis Ultimate Invitational (DUI) to the Oregon Fall Ultimate Conference (pronounced "Oh Fudge" among pleasant company), they know what's up.

This year I played on the community team from good 'ol Redding again. We were pretty terrible - we only won one game - but we still had a blast! We had a mixed group with everyone from from High School students to a journalist at the Record Searchlight to the founder of Shasta QA playing with us. We played 4 games yesterday, and 2 this morning against teams from all over California and Oregon, and of course, Chico (who we beat!)

It's really weird though. I feel like we started the ultimate group in Redding a couple summers ago with myself, Cameron, Stassia, and a few other kids we knew from high school, and now it's grown into something so radical. I mean, they're sending teams to tournaments! I guess they meet twice a week now, once on Sundays when they have the real games with the hardcore group, and pickup games on Wednesdays where a turnout of 80 people isn't out of the ordinary! It's really cool to have been a part of that when I was in town, I almost miss it.

But the tournament was fun, we got dirty, and I got to hang out with Sheryl and even watch her play a tiny bit. I am thoroughly exhausted and I feel every muscle in my body right now, and am just ready for bed. But go figure, I have a calculus assignment and a circuit to design due tomorrow morning. I feel like all I do here anymore is bitch about school. :(

Friday, October 13, 2006

catastrophe!

On my MacBook Pro, I use the beta of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to edit and manage all of my photos. It's what I've been using to go through my pictures from Europe, as well as all the pictures I have taken since then including with my new speedlight.

So I was casually going through checking out the directory structure of the ~/Pictures/ directory comparing how Lightroom managed files as opposed to iPhoto and Aperture. Somehow, SOMEHOW, I managed to move the ENTIRE DIRECTORY to the trash. Yes, that trash. The one that deletes things.

Now the weird thing about OSX is that even though the directory was in the trash can, I was still able to access it directly from the root navigation panel when I opened my disk from the desktop, so I was unaware I was even browsing a deleted directory until I tried to open a photo and it bumped back an error. I opened the trash, which of course already had the usual ~30 files and folders ready for deletion, and didn't notice the folder called "Pictures", probably because it was surrounded by folders of pictures I had legitimately deleted.

This is the part where I say that you'd better be sitting down if you have a weak stomach.

So the trash can is giving me weird errors. How do I fix it? I empty the trash, naturally. So I did. I watched the progress window, which notes how many files are remaining to delete. On a good day, I have a hundred or so at a time, but this time it was counting UPWARD of 3,500, so as quickly as I could I selected the TINY little x to cancel.

It was too late. EVERY photo in my Lightroom library had been deleted. Every. Single. One. But here's my saving grace: I had all my Europe pictures duplicated in my iPhoto library as well from the pre-Lightroom days. Thank god.

Anyway, now when I open Lightroom, it looks somehting like this:



There are some "ghost" images which are still cached in the backup files that Lightroom automatically creates, but other than that, there's nothing; no hi-res images to be exported at all.

I was at work when this happened, so I stood up and cursed for a bit, told everyone my story, then the FIRST thing I did was create a DVD backup of all my important files, including what pictures I could salvage.

Moral of the story: Backup your data regularly!

Thursday, October 12, 2006

gymnasium photography

So, I had a photo date set up with Rob for tonight, which we were talking about last week before I found out about my massive calculus midterm tomorrow. I am way too good of a friend, so instead of studying like a good boy, I went out and took some pictures in our school's alternate gymnasium. We had a guy Rob sorta-kinda knew from the basketball pickup games let us in. The gym was completely empty; it was just us, our cameras, and the net. We messed around with a party strobe light Rob brought along but quickly found it was not bright enough for our needs. I brought out the trusty SB-600 I bought a few weeks ago, and fired it up.

After much goofing off and running around the pitch-black gym (we even covered the red exit signs with our jackets), we set up the tripods and started shooting away. Here's what we came up with:



It was crazy. We had some fun shots doing cartwheels in the strobe, dunking with the flash, and just running around, flash in hand, firing away. The shot above was a 4 second exposure with the aperture set at 3.5 (to let the most light in) and the flash fired manually a few feet from the camera. Oh yeah, also set at ISO 400.

All in all, it was a lot of trial and error, but we learned a lot and can't wait to go back and do it again.

So now after my crazy adrenaline rush of jumping around in a gym all night, I get to study for what is probably going to be the hardest test I've ever taken in my life.

I'm surprisingly calm. I wonder if I'm still in shock that it's in less than 12 hours?

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

code poetry

A few years ago in my early days of HTML and PHP and CSS and all the other acronyms I was learning, my mother got me a t-shirt that reads "code poet". I know it's trendy, but it really is true.

By days I am a aspiring young college student ready to go out and make my mark on the world, and - also by days, I suppose - I work in the graphic design studio at my university building standards-compliant, CSS based, accessible web sites. It's funny that I am immersed in a world of layouts, press checks and color separations when my own world is one of pixels, the DOM, and strictly RGB. My co-workers wonder how I can sit in front of a bunch of gobbly-gook code for hours on end and be entertained and even inspired.

It all comes down to that t-shirt: to me, code is poetry. It truly is art. Take a glance at the source code for this very page and you will see that I have pored over every line to make sure everything, well... most everything, is pixel perfect down to the last bit.

Which brings me to why this is on my mind. I stayed up until 3 this morning getting this darned javascript to work correctly. Why? Because I can. It wont mean much to anyone, but the view comments button below this post triggers a new http request to my server which populates an inline div asynchronously via javascript.

But the thing I was working on last night was this little gem right here:

currTime += 10;
newCurrTime = currTime/duration;
if ((newCurrTime) < 1)
newHeight = -scrollH/2*newCurrTime*newCurrTime + scrollH;
else
newHeight = scrollH/2 * ((--newCurrTime)*(newCurrTime-2) - 1) + scrollH;
sDiv2.style.height = (newHeight + "px");
setTimeout("reScrollRe()","10");

Above is the code which tells that div how to make its entrance so to speak. Once the data is populated, I recursively un-hide the div a bit at a time every 10 milliseconds. The cool part is in the 2 lines up there after the if and else - that's where the math is done. The div un-hides itself faster and faster, accelerating until it reaches the halfway mark, then slows down until it is completely there.

Again, I know that this means nothing to anyone, but this is my poetry; this is my art of self expression. Right here.

Monday, October 09, 2006

oh, the irony

I was reading about google's acquisition of YouTube on Forever Geek just now, when a google ad actually caught my eye. This is a rarity these days, as I have been trained to avoid those little text boxes altogether, but check this out:



Now, I remember laughing when I saw flood shelters being advertised on news sites thanks to google's adsense program, but this is too much to bear. It is a google AdWords advertisement that literally says "Don't sign up for AdWords". I know that technically it is not an ad BY google per se, but I still see some irony in it.

Wherever you get your jollies, I guess.

In other news, I picked up a couple more simple freelance jobs. I really need to put some work into my portfolio I decided. I need to get back in to this whole web thing so I don't get rusty. Bleh. College.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

computers = love/hate

I love computers when they work. Something just makes me happy on a core level when I can write a few hundred lines of code, and have everything work. Even if it's not working correctly, all I need is that glimmer of hope while debugging to keep me going.

Recently I've had a tremendous influx of comment spam from my comment system. I'm not talking about the 20-30 per week I've been deleting manually for months; the last 5 days alone I've gotten well over 2000 spam messages on various posts throughout the archive which goes back several years. I deleted most of them with crafty sql queries targeting key words (like viagra) and IP addresses (which I do log thankfully), but it got really old, really fast. I've been keeping an eye out for a good solution for keeping it at bay, but nothing has really caught my eye until I found Akismet, created by the lovely people at wordpress.

Now, I use blogger to manage my posts, but I wrote all the scripting for the comments myself (well before blogger offered this as a service; d'oh!), including the AJAX and backend and stuff, so it's pretty klunky at times. Most importantly, however, is I can't simply drag and drop plugins for filters and templates. If I want something, I code it. Which is how this post started.

I implemented Akismet using the provided PHP4 class (which saved another couple hours of coding), but still had to finess it all into my existing system which took about 2 hours. I've been meaning to re-write the whole system in PHP5 using new OO features as an excersice to keep me fresh, but my host hasn't updated versions yet, so I'm a bit lazy with that.

What this all really comes down to is that I really like coding. It's fun.

And remember, e-mail me all the bugs you find :)

***UPDATE***
For sh*ts and giggles, I added a counter to the About This Site section to track how many spam messages the filter catches. It's been less than 24 hours, and it's already way past a hundred. I don't like spammers :(

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

A Picture Share!

Fun class notes on my desk! It's a datapath diagram of a processor!

Sunday, October 01, 2006

download fest 2006

On Friday after our weekly game of ultimate frisbee, I hit the road with Sky, Mandy, B, and Alys down to The Bay for the Download Festival on Saturday. We spent the night with my sister in San Jose, and after our wonderful pancake breakfast, everyone went to San Francisco to hang out for a while, while I stayed with my sister and her roommates and went straight to the concert.

The weirdest part is that I was not planning on going with my sister. We both bought our tickets with different groups independently of each other. The weirdest part is when Sheryl, my other sister, called me a few days ago. She won tickets - won them - to the same concert from a radio station in Sacramento. We all met up at Shoreline for a great show.

I was really impressed with the show. We stayed at the main stage where a band called Rogue Wave started off. I wasn't really in to them, but we had fun drinking on the lawn and just hanging out for a while. They were followed by TV on the Radio, who were better, but I still wasn't in to them as much as I could be.

But then came the bands I know. The Shins played next, which was way cool. They didn't strike me as a band that would put on a good live show, but they were really good, and sounded excellent. Muse followed next, who also put on a terrific show. I amlost liked their live show better than their actual albums! The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were alright; the lead singer was very lively and all over the stage, but sounded exhausted.

And of course the headliner, Beck. Who can't like Beck? He put on a really good show, with a full miniature stage and marionettes for the cameras (which was weird...) I wonder how it must be, after performing the same set of songs umpteen times a month for years on end. Does it ever get old? The same songs, the same encore, the same crowds? I think it would, even if you do party like a rock star. But regardless, it was a good show :)

And naturally, when the show ended at midnight I got to drive everone back to Chico so people could get to work today. I still haven't gotten out of bed today. It's 1:30M.