New camera!

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Nine months ago (yikes!), I was an idiot and left my camera at a bus stop on my way to work. Ever since then, I’ve been using a camera that my friend Rick very kindly let me borrow until I could afford a new camera of my own. Well, it looks like that day may be coming pretty soon — I’m getting a new camera for free!

My current job has me staffing a facilities management (FM) site — running a small on-site copy facility for a company’s local offices. There’s been an ongoing contest for the past few months among all the various FM sites that we run for this company (they operate in a number of states) for the most number of positive customer comments. Each FM site was to send in any customer comments they received, good and bad, and the site with the best ratio of positive comments to income (to keep smaller single-person sites like mine on an even keel with larger, busier facilities elsewhere) wins.

Well, I got a call from our local account manager this morning letting me know that we won! Not only did we win, but it was a virtual shutout: our site got somewhere around 120 positive comments (no word on how many negative comments there were, but I know I haven’t seen any), and from what she told me, all the other sites got zero. Apparently, for some reason, while we were passing out comment cards and following up with customers to make sure their jobs were done correctly and on time, the rest of the sites just didn’t bother to participate in the contest. Seems more than a little bizarre to me, but I’m hardly going to complain!

So next Wednesday, I’ll be heading out to have a little celebration after work at one of the local happy hours with my manager and our account manager, and at some point in the near future, I’ll get my prize — a new digital camera!

Of course, seeing as how I’m a greedy little self-centered sod who’s never satisfied with anything, I’m wondering if I can manage to do myself just a little bit better. According to the flyer announcing the contest from a few months ago, the camera in question is a Nikon Coolpix 3200. Now, it doesn’t look like a bad camera, but is has gotten a few troubling user reviews on DPReview. Also, it apparently comes without a memory card, and the memory cards it uses are SD/MMC, while I have a couple of CompactFlash cards (including one 256Mb) here that I’d hate to have to replace with something else.

What I’m wondering is if there are any local business (Best Buy or something similar) that will take a receipt-less “return” of an un-opened box — this is the Christmas present season, after all — in exchange for a sale on a slightly better camera in the same rough price range (letting me pay the difference if the target camera is slightly more expensive). Since the current retail for the Coolpix 3200 is in the \$200 range, I figure I could get one of the mid-range Canon Powershot series for just a fairly minor out-of-pocket cost — if there’s a place that will let me do this, of course.

Any ideas? If not, I’m certainly not going to turn my nose up at being handed a free camera, even if it’s not everything I might want! No matter what, it’ll be nice to have a camera of my own again.

iTunes “See My Ships” by Violent Femmes from the album 3 (1989, 3:17).

Konichiwa!

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First off, my apologies, as it’s entirely likely that I managed to mangle the Americanized version of a Japanese greeting. As I only speak English (and some 10-year old, mostly forgotten German), these things are bound to happen.

Looks like the recent Wired article that I’m mentioned in just got picked up in Japan (Yahoo, Hotwired, Goo, Excite, and Infoseek), which is sending another round of visitors my way.

As I said earlier this week: If there are any visitors hitting my site for the first time who might be curious about just what happened to me, I can direct you to my fifteen minutes of fame archives, and specifically, the photo, the day I was let go, and my wrapup and responses on the whole shebang.

And, of course, feel free to kick around and poke around the rest of the site. Nice to see you here!

Mind Hacks

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Just added to my daily reads: Mind Hacks, the companion blog to Tom Stafford and Matt Webb’s book Mind Hacks, recently released by O’Reilly.

Full of fascinating brain play (literally), like this post on how we perceive our sleeping habits:

Our own perception of how much we slept during a night can be startlingly inaccurate. Dr Allison Harvey (now of UC Berkley) took insomniacs and measured how much they actually slept during the night. Despite the insomniacs reporting that they had only slept for two or three hours, they had in fact been asleep for an average of 7 hours – only 35 minutes less than a control group who didn’t have any problems sleeping.

This shows that insomniacs (and probably the rest of us) are very bad at judging the time it takes us to get to sleep, and the time we actually are asleep. It also suggests that worrying about sleep, and our beliefs about how we’ve slept, have a big role in the negative affects of what (we believe) is a sleepless night.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else pops up on their weblog, and I will definitely need to pick up the book as soon as I get a chance.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “This Hollowed Ground” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 3:04).

Blade Trinity

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I’d been iffy on whether I wanted to bother, but this pre-release review of Blade Trinity just put it on my “must see” list:

I attended a free sneek preview of Blade Trinity this evening at Pacific Place…. I expected very little from this movie and I received my expectations in abundance.

Pluses:
– Parker Posey as a vampire
– Ryan Reynolds mostly naked
– visual effects

Negatives:
– plot
– dialog
– editing
– direction
– poor action scenes
– Kris Kristofferson
– cliche footage of the city moving at 20x normal speed
– unintentional comedy
– excessive product placement (iPods)
– lame pop cultural references
– vampiric pomeranian (really!)
– “Dracula” err, I mean “DRAKE” groan

Parker Posey is always fun to watch, and a vampire kick-me dog?!? Oh, this I’ve gotta see!

(Maybe not until it hits video…but then, I’ve occasionally paid for worse in the theaters…)

iTunes “Melt” by Leftfield from the album Leftism (1995, 5:13).

Howdy, Wired readers!

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Over a year after the incident, I’m getting another few seconds added to my fifteen minutes of fame: last week I was interviewed by phone by Wired, and their article hit the ‘net today:

What do a flight attendant in Texas, a temporary employee in Washington and a web designer in Utah have in common? They were all fired for posting content on their blogs that their companies disapproved of.

Aside from that leader being a wee bit misleading (I was let go by my previous employer, not the copy company I currently work for), it’s not a bad article.

Update: Wired was kind enough to slightly edit the introductory paragraph to clear up the wording a touch. Thanks much!

If there are any visitors hitting my site for the first time who might be curious about just what happened to me, I can direct you to my fifteen minutes of fame archives, and specifically, the photo, the day I was let go, and my wrapup and responses on the whole shebang.

And, of course, feel free to kick around and poke around the rest of the site. Nice to see you here!

A Book of Blogs

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Thanks to Alicia, I just found out about this project of Tvindy’s:

With all the phenomenal writing that has appeared on our various blogs over the past several months, wouldn’t it be cool for us to get together and publish a physical anthology of our greatest posts?

The way I envision it is that several of us agree to participate and have a couple of their entries published in the anthology. Since most people (myself included) find it hard to evaluate their own work, we can make suggestions as to what the best entries of our fellow bloggers are and urge them to choose those. That should make for some interesting debates.

The final product would be a paperback, containing hopefully as many as fifty entries in no particular order. Each entry would identify the name (or pseudonym) of the author and the URL of her/his blog. We’d make a nice cover using combined artwork from various blogs, and there would be an introduction at the beginning explaining what the book was.

He’s got more thoughts on how to approach the project in his next three posts (make that four).

I think this sounds really good, and would love to contribute, if anything I have is deemed worthy of inclusion.

Taking a quick look at my recent Four Years post where I pulled out a lot of highlights, I’m thinking that the following posts would be most likely to work well:

If anyone else has any other nominations, though, I’d be glad to see them. Your views on the “best” posts as readers might be quite different than mine as author.

Cartoon Skeletons

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Hello Kitty

This is good — an art exhibition of conceptual drawings of cartoon character skeletons.

Animation was the format of choice for children’s television in the 1960s, a decade in which children’s programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.

I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

Pity I’m not in Portland to see the actual show!

(via MeFi)

Cover Tunes

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Mike linking to this punk cover of Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ reminded me of something that I had bouncing around in my head yesterday.

There’s no end of punk/goth/alternative/industrial covers of pop songs — KMFDM’s cover of U2’s ‘Mysterious Ways’, 1000 Mona Lisa’s take on Alanis Morisette’s ‘You Oughtta Know’, Bigod 20 doing Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’, and countless others (including the only-in-my-head, never-going-to-happen cover of Garth Brooks’ ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down ’til the Sun Comes Up’ by Ministry with guest vocals by Les Claypool).

I want it to go the other way.

I want to hear Britney Spears cover My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s ‘Days of Swine and Roses’ (“Christian zombie vampires!”). N*SYNC or whatever boy band is around taking on The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Dominion/Mother Russia’. Janet Jackson’s version of the Violent Femme’s ‘Day After Day’. Eminem doing Concrete Blonde’s ‘Bloodletting’.

And so on.

It’ll never happen (the closest thing to this that I know of is Russian pseudo-lolita-lesbian duo t.A.T.u. doing Morrissey’s ‘How Soon is Now’), but I would so buy an album of covers like that.

iTunes “Jesus Christ Superstar” by Laibach from the album Jesus Christ Superstars (1997, 5:45).

Panoramic Experiments

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Yesterday afternoon I decided to go for a bit of a wander through the weekend downtown shoppers to work on an experiment I’ve had in mind for a bit.

I’ve found over the months that I’ve been using it that the camera I’m currently borrowing does really well at evening, low-light photography, dropping the shutter speed down to do so. I’ve been curious at how panoramic shots would turn out if I took them in the evening, where the long exposures would blur any cars and passing shoppers.

After some experimenting yesterday, I’m somewhat pleased by the results, though I definitely still have some tweaking to do before I come up with something I really like. The issues I’m running into are twofold.

First, I need to try to track down some information on this camera and how to use the manual mode. Last night I left the camera on fully automatic, which works well for single shots. However, as it’s metering separately for each shot, I’m ending up with brightness and color shifts when I stitch the panoramas together. I think I should be able to compensate for this by noting the settings the camera chooses for the first shot on automatic mode, then switch to manual mode to duplicate those settings for the rest of the shots.

Secondly, I’m still figuring out the settings for the stitching software I’m using. I’ve been taking the shots with the camera positioned for portrait (vertical) shots — it takes more shots to create a full 360° panorama, but there’s more vertical image in the final panorama. However, this also means that there’s more distortion at the top and bottom of each image, so while the final panoramas are close to seamless across the middle of the shot, there are occasional artifacts (such as buildings or poles suddenly splitting in two) at the top and bottom of each panoramic.

Still, I like the direction that these are going, and each time I try, I’m getting a bit closer to what I’m aiming for in my head.

Here’s the best of my experiments from last night:

4th and Pine, kitty-corner from the Bon

4th and Pine

This is actually pretty close to what I had in my head, aside from the color shifts. One thing I didn’t think about ahead of time that amuses me in the final image is that of the four stoplights in the shot, two are green, one is yellow, and one is red. Seems a wee bit confusing for the drivers!

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.7Mb): westlake2.mov.

Pike Place Market Main Entrance

Pike Place Market Main Entrance

Standing in front of the famous fish market, surrounded by Christmas shoppers. Lots of movement in this one.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (2.5Mb): pikeplace2.mov.

Pike Place Market Flower Stands

Pike Place Flower Stands

In one of the side entrances to the market, right between two of the flower vendors. I like the sudden switch between the bright bustle of the market itself and the darker outside world.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.4Mb): pikeplace4.mov.

Pike Place Market and Waterfront

Pike Place and Waterfront

Outside the far end of the Market, looking over the waterfront. I think this one’s probably my favorite of the batch (of course, it’s also probably the one with the least amount of odd artifacts).

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.5Mb): pikeplace5.mov.

Waterfront and Seattle skyline

Waterfront and skyline

Standing on top of a picnic table in the park directly behind the Market, overlooking the waterfront, the Alaska Way Viaduct, and catching part of the downtown Seattle skyline.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.6Mb): waterfront2.mov.

And that’s it for this round of experiments. More (and hopefully better quality images) will follow later on, I’m sure.

iTunes “Hard Day Blues” by Waters, Muddy from the album Folk, Gospel and Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1946, 2:51).