Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Oh, Available Light!

pretty

There's a flower on the porch that looked inspiring in the street light. I took a picture without adjusting for white balance, because the street light is orange. It looked kind of stupid, so I reset and tried again.

I like it, but I'm not sure why.

This is what it looks like in real life because of the orange street light.

Friday, July 27, 2007

bug

gnat

Diffraction softened it up a little bit... but that's to be expected, reversed 28, halfway closed down, and the 25mm tube doing what they do.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

I had an idea

I think that tomorrow or the next day, I may go through my box o' old pictures, you know - relive the magic of seeing prints for the first time out of the development process... take pictures of some of the good ones I don't have on a computer already. It'll be fun!

Also, this is post number 500. Whee!

Also, sorry I don't have any pictures for you today. I actually had to go sit in the union for 40 minutes today because work was so crappy, then it was 106 degrees on the bus (according to the little compartment thermostat in the back), and I chose tonight as the night I wanted to put crap from the living room up in the attic. Now it's 9:45. Oh well.

Tomorrow!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Lazy rabbits

the rabbit will be with you in a moment

It was laying down, but sat up right as I was starting to focus. Then it stretched its back leg and left it there.

Trix are for kids.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Can have a posts

falls

Lack of imagination powers activate! I actually think the slower flow rate made for a more compelling scene, sort of.

Here's a thing I found:
gerp

Good times! Battery change, last shot was 6228. Last change was at 4537. 1,691 on Energizer e2 Lithium AAs. One problem was the way they end of lifed. Very uneven voltage provision; sometimes, it would fail to autofocus, and turning it off for a few seconds would bring them back to life for another 10-15 shots. I don't know. I put in Olympus branded CR-V3s again.

Friday, July 20, 2007

The Geese!

geese on the mall

The mall is not usually where geese are. They were in front of Tydings, but the stupid clown children on campus scared them away.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Backend changes

Instead of serving up individualized folders, each with their own set of navigation icons, I'm going to be taking the entirety of my library to work one of these days and let it sift into one folder there.

What does this mean to you?

For a while, some of the archive posts may be a broken JPEG.

Close-up work

Here's a gallery of stuff. Most of it is just me seeing the various magnifications with things; it works well with my 28mm, 50mm, 135mm, and 50-200mm lenses. Exciting!

Here's a small spider!

spider

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Close up wheel bug

wheelbug

Some more close up stuff, I was playing with the 50 f4 and my stack of things from atop my monitor when the dog needed to go outside. There I found the wheelbug. You can actually see a small bug on it just behind its rear leg joints there. The really up-close shots of its head (terrifying, eh?) are with the reversed 28.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

A Management Meditation

Delegation.

Much is made of the effective differences between managers who can delegate tasks to their employees and managers who can not. As an example, I lead a crew of thirty Classroom Support technicians, each required to perform support appointments multiple times per shift. We do over 100 distinct appointments a day sometimes, so it would be completely impossible for just one person to do the job. I am required to delegate, and there are some people that do not understand that working in such an environment is not an excuse to do a foul job. When things go wrong, I get yelled at, and rightly so; it is the responsibility of the supervisor, after all, to ensure that his or her office is run smoothly and according to the needs of the customers.

There are also supervisors who more or less refuse to hand out tasks as they are assigned to their units. If I call something upstairs to the assistant director for user support services, he will do it personally (unless otherwise occupied with dullardry at that specific moment). I have to rotate task assignments - if I don't, nobody does.

I have also seen the end result of not delegating tasks that can and should be handed out to employees. Undue stress, a lack of desire to be at work, a general lack of respect for the perceived work ethic of employees - all of these collaborate to create an unfavorable environment for actually getting anything done without suffering. Note that things do get done, but at a greater cost - paying employees to not do much and bearing an entire office's workload.

[Nerd mode: on]

However, I can also think of one supervisor who refused to delegate, and that refusal saved him his life. Darth Vader was aboard the first Death Star during the onset of the Battle of Yavin, at which point it was reported to him that the rebel alliance was sending smaller fighters than the station's defenses could track and counter (save for poor Porkins). His response? He called for a crew to be readied, and personally led the defenses.

Why would he do such a thing? Well, Imperial pilots are likely to be specially trained standard henchmen, but standard henchmen just the same. In fact, we can see this during both the pursuit of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid belt and the Battle of Endor. So it makes perfect sense that Darth Vader, being the arrogant, angsty Anakin Skywalker we all grew to hate thanks to Hayden Christensen's portrayal of same, would personally oversee the defense of the most important weapon in not only the struggle against the rebel alliance, but also the empire's ruthless control of the entire Galaxy.

Of course, due to Han Solo's change of heart and decision to support the rebellion, Vader missed the opportunity to foil Luke's chance at successfully lobbing the torpedos down the exhaust shaft, and was thrown off into space; however, an important side effect of that twisting rocket ride off into space is that he lived to continue the fight against the rebels. He wasn't aboard the "invulnerable" Death Star, brought down by but a single fighter, just as he had implied earlier in the film.

So, the moral of the story seems to be that there are times where it pays to be selfish and distrustful of your subordinates - it might just save your life.

Bonus discussion question! Do you think the Death Star had attracted an atmosphere by the time of its destruction?

[edit from 2019: as I've been scrolling through and removing broken posts from years past and marveling at the number of spilled pixels about nothing, I think this is it - this is the post that I in 2019 find most embarrassing. I think I must have written this right after I got my DVD copies of the original trilogy Star Wars movies and watched them back-to-back-to-back.]

Friday, July 13, 2007

No Pirates?

nopirates

This is the third character in the character pallate for Webdings on Mac OS X.

Beetle Beetle

bettle in trouble

I have a dedicated macro lens now; my dad got me an M 50 f4 1:2 for my birthday, and my uncle just provided me with the 25mm extension tube I can use with it to get 1:1 forward, as well as close focus capabilities for my DA lenses (since it has the electrical contacts, I believe).

Thanks Dad and Uncle Lance!

I forgot how to laugh

(8:17:59 AM) nurrwick: yabbos
(8:18:07 AM) Jeff: haHA
(8:18:30 AM) nurrwick: hoHO
(8:18:45 AM) nurrwick: HoHo
(8:18:49 AM) nurrwick: HOho
(8:18:51 AM) nurrwick: :(
(8:19:04 AM) Jeff: ?
(8:19:10 AM) nurrwick: I'm doing it wrong

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Look at the sky

sky in july

Seriously. It was too nice this morning for this week. Can we move today's weather to this weekend?

Monday, July 9, 2007

Everything I know in life...

stapler

My Red Swingline has been autographed by the man who played the character who sums up my approach to life perfectly. Thanks, Ron Livingston!

And Thanks, Lauren, for hauling around my stupid chunk of red metal to better fulfill a stupid goal of mine!

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

You hate fisheye

stormclouds

The clouds on the right side are the ones that produced the tornado; the ones on the left are the ones that are overhead right now.

That storm gave us about 15-20 minutes of heavy rainfall and lightning on average every ten seconds or less.

Woo!

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

One of a kind

An 225

I saw the Antonov An-225 today. Apparently there's only one.

What it was doing at the Memphis airport, and the fact that an aircraft that large and heavy can land in Tennessee, those will remain mysteries to me.