Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Pimp my A95

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One of the (few) downsides to my little Powershot A95 is that as a point-and-shoot style camera, it’s a touch limited as to what it can do — a standard 3x optical zoom, a fixed lens so no other lenses can be attached, no threads for filters…little things like that. Very normal for a point-and-shoot, of course, but at times, a wee bit limiting.

However, one of the nice things about the A95 is that it is possible to attach some accessories to it. Canon’s Powershot cameras include a detachable ring around the lens assembly that, when removed, reveals a mount point. Canon also supplies a few accessories that can attach to the mount: an adaptor tube, which can then have either a wide-angle or a telephoto lens attached to it. However, as the A95 is a couple years old, these items aren’t incredibly easy to come by anymore.

Last week sometime I stumbled across LensMate, a local company that makes aftermarket adapters for the A95’s mount in both 52mm and 37mm sizes. I went ahead and ordered the 37mm adapter (since I knew my work carried some 37mm filters and accessories), and it arrived in the mail yesterday.

I took the camera in to work so that I could make sure the adapter worked with the filters I wanted to pick up. It did (no surprise, but nice to have it confirmed), so I got three Quantaray filters: a UV Haze, a Neutral Density, and a Circular Polarizer.

Since 37mm is a standard size for camcorder lenses, our store carries a few accessory lenses originally designed for camcorders. Since they’re the same thread size as my new adaptor, I started experimenting with those, and as it turns out, we’ve got a set of a .5x Wide Angle Lens and a 2x Telephoto Lens that fit perfectly, so I started playing with those to see how well they worked. Verdict: not bad, and I may want to pick the set up after my next paycheck.

Then things started getting silly.

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Seahawks 34, Panthers 14

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Y’know, I don’t care about football. Never have.

But even I can’t be a complete curmudgeon about the Seahawks’ win today. First time in thirty years…I guess it was about time.

So…yay. Go Seahawks.

I might just have to pay some small amount of attention to the Superbowl this year. Weird.

Heh — I can hear fireworks going off somewhere outside. Seattle’s going to be a pretty happy city tonight.

Seattle Nightlife

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…as summarized by Cor Tenebrarum on the SeaGoth message board:

  • The Mercury: OMG THE THIRD DRINK I HAD ON AN EMPTY STOMACH WAS DOSED!1!11!1!!111ONE
  • The Vogue: You can’t smoke.
  • Noc-Noc: You can’t smoke, and OMG THE FIFTH $1 SPECIAL I HAD ON AN EMPTY STOMACH WAS DOSED!11!111ONE
  • The Catwalk: Sorry, our drinks are too weak now, we have to shut down.
  • The Phoenix: Come to Pioneer Square! If you don’t get beat up and called a queer by sailors on weekend leave, you’ll have a great time!

iTunes “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).

(Another) iTunes Meme

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Ganked from spikesandstuds:

  • How many total songs?

    15,906 (72.3 GB; 86 days, 12 hours, one minute and nine seconds if played beginning-to-end with no breaks).

  • Sort by song title — first and last?

  • Sort by time — shortest and longest?
    • Shortest: 0:04 — An untitled ‘hidden track’ that consists of a girl yelling “Let’s hear it for Nine Inch Nails! Woo! They’re good!” off of NIN‘s Head Like A Hole single.
    • Longest: 1:18:18 — The full mix version of The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera.
  • Sort by Album — first and last?

    (This doesn’t include all the downloaded tracks that don’t have album names assigned.)

  • Sort by Artist — first and last?

  • Top five played songs?

    1. Break by The Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
    2. Going, Going, Gone (Razed in Black mix) by Information Society, off of InSoc Recombinant
    3. Da Da Da by Out of the Ordinary, off of Welcome to the Future
    4. Take California and Party by the Propellerheads (featuring the Jungle Brothers), off of Take California
    5. Pleasant Smell (Rethought by Clint Mansell and Keith Hillebrandt for the Nothing Collective) by 12 Rounds, off of Pleasant Smell
  • Find the following words. How many songs show up?
    • Sex: 189
    • Death: 155
    • Love: 859
    • You: 1302
    • Home: 107
    • Boy: 533
    • Girl: 339

iTunes “2525” by Laibach from the album N.A.T.O. (1994, 3:48).

Beastie Boys are the new Bon Jovi

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The New York Times reports on a new concert film from The Beastie Boys:

They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

[…] While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. “The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert,” Mr. Yauch said.

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”

The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.

Heh. Me being a child of the ’80’s, this sounded very familiar. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like what Bon Jovi did for their video for “Bad Medicine“:

For their “Bad Medicine” video the band invited fans to the video shoot, handed out additional video cameras for fans to keep, and collected the resulting footage at the end of the night, which was cut into additional footage shot by video director Wayne Isham.

Okay, sure, so the B-Boys did a full-length concert film and not just a five-minute music video, but still…. Everything old is new again.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).