My camera arrived this morning—from Buy.com. Some modern tracking and ordering system, guys. If you didn’t make people pay $10 to talk to a live customer support rep after they have paid for merchandise, this shit wouldn’t happen. I cancelled the order last Friday after they couldn’t tell me when it would ship. So now I have to figure out what to do with two cameras.
Then the real camera arrived, and it’s very, very sweet. I’m currently charging the battery, but it looks and feels fantastic. The Ikelite housing came in this morning, and it fits the camera like a glove. All the function buttons are useable, the case is solid and sturdy, and it feels good to hold. I can’t wait to try this out.
Did you know that you can take a firearm, nunchuks, or a billy club on a plane as checked baggage, but you can’t take a flare gun or a ‘gun lighter’ under any circumstances?
I read on Slashdot that Adobe has announced their platform of choice for Photoshop is Windows. I understand that the sheer economics of PC sales demand software makers to bow to the prevailing champ, but I doubt this will affect the quality or performance of their next products. I just hope they optimize Photoshop 8 for OSX a bit better—it runs like a sloth on my PowerBook.
Jen and I took a trip up to the Home Depot yesterday and loaded ten 80 lb. bags of pre-mix cement in the Scout. We got about 70% of the hole in the backyard filled, and returned for the other four bags to finish off the job. It turned out to be the perfect amount, and this morning our initials are inscribed in the hard-set surface. This week I’m going to begin loading in the ‘used’ brick up at the Lowe’s and bringing it home a bit at a time (we almost had to stop short for a blinkerless merge ahead of us with 800 lbs. of concrete on the back springs, and the Scout didn’t like that) so that we can take next weekend and begin replacing the floor.
D’oh. I forgot to pull about 30 shots off Jen’s camera today—I took a series of boxcar pictures down by the Harbor Tunnel while they sat idle on the rails. Many of them were tagged pretty heavily and the juxtaposition of the colorful paint vs. the faded lettering and rusted walls was very visual. I took them in sequence so that I can stitch them together later or view them singly, but they do me no good in her camera without the adapter card. Dangit.
I need to devour these pages this week and brush up on some old knowledge.
I’m 32 today. Remarkably, I still feel like I’m 25, and that’s a good thing. Even though I’m a slug and I don’t excercise at all, my body is holding up well, and more importantly I feel like I’m ten years younger.
Today is another research day; I’m immersing myself in the world of underwater photography, hoping that I can learn as much as possible before they throw me off the boat into the water. For those that are interested, I found a few good sites and a few forums for underwater photography enthusiasts.
Present. Oh, and I also ordered a Canon G3 from buy.com this afternoon, with a 256MB card, for a total just over $680. Not bad, considering local stores list them for $700. There’s still other things I need to pick up for this before I go diving:
- One or two extra batteries
- Straps for attaching the unit to my BC
- An extra PCMCIA adapter for SmartMedia
- Possibly new foam inserts for the Pelican to fit all this stuff
I’ve given up on the solar recharger for the PowerBook; it just is too expensive and bulky. Especially considering I’ll be lugging two Pelicans thru the airport—one for the housing/flash units and one for my laptop and camera.
So the company bought a digital camera on my advice. It’s a really nice camera—a Nikon Coolpix 4500, and it has all the features you’d want in a camera if you were interested in doing more than snapping shots of your dog. The problem is, it has so many features, you have to be a computer scientist to figure out the menu system. (it took me a while to figure out how to get out of the idiot mode into the program mode, and only then could I edit the menus to change the ISO and other settings, which left me taking pictures that looked like blurry snow.) Ordinarily, I’m pretty adept at figuring out interfaces (okay, not quite that adept) but this one is just cryptic, man. So I go into the box and find the manual, and it starts talking about “Conozca la Coolpix 4500”, and continues from there. To their credit, I got a Nikon lady on the phone and within minutes she ordered an English manual for me, but based on some of the C|Net reviews, I’m now seriously considering a Canon G3 instead.
Nate just bought himself a Canon S230, and in a few minutes I understood the interface and enjoyed the pictures it took, so Canon has won points for usability. Plus, it’s about the size of a carton of cigarettes. I’m going to wait for the user’s manual to show up for the Nikon, and go lay hands on a G3 and then report back as to what my thoughts are.
Okay, i don’t have $400 just laying around, and the security is a joke, but this offering from Martian Technology is strangely appealing.
Last night, while toying with some more interesting navigation for the photo archives, I finally got around to submitting a photo to the Mirror Project. It was a shot I took in Ellicott City last year, actually by accident, in the windshield of a Model T Ford.
Album of the day: The eponymous first album by the B-52’s.
ThinkSecret has a bit of information which illustrates a very good point. In an article on the upcoming Illustrator 11, Adobe concedes that most owners of versions 9 and 10 still use version 8 because it’s faster. I agree, and I’m one of these owners. At the release of 9, the interface, upgrades, and modifications to the application began to drag down an otherwise powerful tool to the point where I ditched for 8 it two weeks after installing it. For the same reasons that I still use older versions of MS applications (I have a copy of Word 4 for the Mac that I use on a Powerbook 100, and it does fine), I avoid some newer versions of popular software, because the tradeoffs can be too great. I hope Adobe, and other vendors, learn this lesson. (PS. It’s about time they rolled the poor orphan Streamline into Illustrator. The path was clear six years ago. Let’s hope they’ve refined the recognition sensitivity.)
28th street bridge, 2.26
I got the eyes checked this afternoon, and it turns out that my prescription is just a wee bit stronger than last time, but no marked difference. Here’s to that. While at the mall, I also stopped in to the Apple Store and bought an Airport card for Jen’s Powerbook, so we’ll both be wireless from here on out.
As it stands now, we may get a foot of snow tonight through tomorrow, or we may get an inch. It’s hard to say, because the local forecasters admit that they just don’t know. Meanwhile, I spent $20 putting a little more than 9 gallons of gas in the Scout this afternoon, just in case.
Via Kottke, here’s a great link to an idea I wish I had: Using a peephole for a fisheye lens on a camera. I may have to unscrew the peephole on the back door to try this out for myself. Also from the same source: The Lomoizer, for all of us who can’t afford the camera right now.
Ok, I’m stupid. What I didn’t do was set the Base Station up as a bridge;, I left it in its original configuration as a DHCP/NAT router, so in effect I had two machines (the SMC broadband router in the basement and the Base Station) battling over the right to serve the machines on the network. No wonder I couldn’t see the other machines on the network, or the printer. And I think this will allow the autosensing features in OSX to work as advertised. Jen’s computer is up and running flawlessly, after a brief detour to the network to download Airport 2.04 for OS9 (it was not included on the enclosed disk).
One final bit of good news: We ordered tickets to see David Sedaris at the Lisner Auditorium in April. It promises to be a funny and interesting evening. Jen hopes he’ll talk about the Rooster. (I think the last time I was at the Lisner was to see 10,000 Maniacs back in about 1990 or so.)
I posted some pictures of the fun this morning. I heard from Todd that the office is closed again today, and we’re both thinking that we won’t be able to make it up there until Thursday. I don’t doubt it.
Apparently some folks have had problems upgrading to OSX 10.2.4, but I’ve been running smoothly so far (knock on wood.) Overall it’s stable and smooth, and because I’ve never used the modem on this machine I’m immune to what seems to be the majority of the connection problems. And anything to fix the printing problems from Carbon applications is a good thing.
building, 3dmax, 1.15
…is currently spinning in the ol’ headphones. I’m creating a mixed-use building facade in Max, and it’s very, very cold in this corner of the office. It’s actually hard to type because the tips of my fingers are cold.
I’ve been trying to figure out what the best low-cost solution for a home server is. I think, for the peace-of-mind, I’m going to ditch all the old SCSI-era Macs in the basement and find a used iMac to serve from. I need to have something that can tunnel through the firewall, serve AFS volumes and also be available inside the house for MP3 consolidation, backup, and mail services. I’ve been scouring Ebay and other sites, but the common pricepoint is usually around $500. I’ll have to just keep looking.
Ona related note, people, make damn sure you zero-format those drives before you pull them.
Behind the Curve. OK, so it’s been out for a while, but A Rush Of Blood To The Head by Coldplay is a beautiful album.
I’ve been thinking that there hasn’t been a whole lot of photography on this site since, well… last fall, really. I still have the camera, and I still take snapshots, but right now, in Baltimore, there’s not a whole lot to take pictures of between my office and house that I haven’t already shot. I realize I have to get out and explore more, but lately there’s been this cold front sweeping through the area and I just don’t want to get out of the damn car.
3:45 3DSmax is a buggy piece of crap that crashes as much as Quark used to back in the day.
So I went to the Target with Jen to look for assorted stuff a few weeks ago, and we found ourselves in the sock-and-underwear section, which is also conspicuously near the hat-and-glove section. I looked through the hats they had there and found a tuque in a lovely green color, and wound up buying it because it’s warm and light and fits my big fat cranium pretty well. To my dismay, Jen has taken to calling me Eminem when I wear it, although I leave the hoodie at home. Today I have it on because it’s 20 freakin’ degrees outside and my office thermostat is set on ‘meat locker’. They are calling for snow tomorrow night, which means the fair city of Baltimore will go mental and buy up all the toilet paper, milk and bread visible. Then they will leave their houses and drive extra-fast to go someplace and crash their cars into each other because the idea of the all-season tire is a foreign concept (and you can’t fit an all-season tire on your super-low-profile racing mags now, can you?)
I began sketching out ideas and a rough storyboard for a narrative I’ve been thinking about last night. I have a basic storyline together and a visual idea for how I’d like the first pages to look, and I’m still working on how to present them in an online format. One of the other problems I’m seeing is how to take pictures of the reference points I’d like; my camera doesn’t have any setting for manual exposure or lighting conditions besides ‘dark’, ‘normal’ and ‘light’. Most of the beginning of the story is set at 3:30am, so it’ll be difficult to get what I need.
Postscript: I read the manual and found a ton of features that I had overlooked before, including the ISO settings, the infinity focus setting, and the digital zoom feature (duh!) I also found the timer function. So I’ll freeze tonight and take a few pictures and see what I get- All may not be lost!
So we got the credenza into the house (no small feat) and I put it where the IKEA TV cart was. Once the TV goes downstairs and the stereo comes down from the office, (and the green wall is painted red) it’ll look real nice in the living room.
I also got my film for the 620 cameras yesterday, so I’m loading two of them up tonight for Jen and I to use. We’re going to test each out to see how well they work and we’ll use the two best for taking B/W pictures. I’m excited to use the Duaflex and the Ansco, and I think the Brownie will take real clean shots too.
OK, so I believe that Ray Fiennes is a casting coup for the role of Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon. However, Harvey Keitel as Jack Crawford is about as good as Marilyn Monroe as Lady MacBeth. And no matter what you say, William Peterson is still the best Will Graham, CSI or not. It will be interesting to see how well Ed Norton does in that role, and which movie is better. What’s your favorite?
I added my home workspace to the workspace exhibit at somebodydial911. Penn is happy that he’s a star on the web, too.
Zeldman comments on experiences loading, fighting with, and de-installing OSX on his machine, and offers a ton of helpful links to different sites claiming to know how to intall it the correct way. For the record, I was able to get it running just fine. The only problem I had with software were the fatal exception and core dump errors in my brain.