Friday, October 31, 2008

On Values

[08:59] Nat: freitag lawl
[08:59] Nat: i stole ur typing
[08:59] Lauren: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_1uQwe9lNs
[08:59] Nat: no can do, chiefette
[08:59] Lauren: ph boo
[08:59] Nat: phboo
[08:59] Nat: that is funny
[08:59] Nat: not as funny as values
[09:00] Nat: values is a weird word when you type it a lot
[09:00] Nat: u gets to step up to the plate and be phonetic
[09:00] Nat: word manager baseballman said "U! you are not carrying your weight around here, go hit a home run please"
[09:00] Nat: and u was all "I cannot do that because I do not have arms :-( "
[09:01] Nat: so baseballman said "okay, sound like yourself for once instead of o. o gets a lot of attention anyway."
[09:01] Nat: and u smiled and yelled out "U!"
[09:01] Nat: the end :-)
[09:01] Lauren: whut

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Trip to the Land of Twinkies, Day 4

So, I've been kind of light on content this week.

Part of this is because I made the decision to leave my camera in a safe in College Park. This was a wise choice from a logistical standpoint, as I had to walk over 2 miles from the West Natick MBTA commuter rail station to the Hampton Inn.

That's fine - I haven't been able to go anywhere, and the only thing I've wanted to take a picture of are the bright red trees out in the parking lot. Little maples, very pretty.

Anyway, I was planning on doing some google maps editing and uploading my GPS log from the trip up here. We hit 151 miles an hour at one point, and apparently the whole notion of lining out the train route up the Eastern excited me. Or something.

Unfortunately, here's what I've been dealing with since I got here Monday night:

Macintosh-4:~ natkuhn$ ping 128.8.76.2
PING 128.8.76.2 (128.8.76.2): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=203.091 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=47 time=999.273 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=47 time=394.044 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=47 time=839.724 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=47 time=419.128 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=5 ttl=47 time=1003.461 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=6 ttl=47 time=1004.051 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=7 ttl=47 time=1003.662 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=8 ttl=47 time=954.812 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=9 ttl=47 time=1010.508 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=10 ttl=47 time=1003.984 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=11 ttl=47 time=1003.854 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=12 ttl=47 time=1003.493 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=13 ttl=47 time=1003.364 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=14 ttl=47 time=1003.827 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=15 ttl=47 time=1003.112 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=16 ttl=47 time=1008.885 ms
64 bytes from 128.8.76.2: icmp_seq=17 ttl=47 time=1002.986 ms
^C
--- 128.8.76.2 ping statistics ---
19 packets transmitted, 18 packets received, 5% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 203.091/881.403/1010.508/248.835 ms


The values <1000ms are cool; the internet works when that happens. Even the values > 1010ms are generally cool; I've had working internet here when it gets up to 2200ms - working, but slow.

It's all those values - sometimes hundreds in a row when I have non-working internet - that hit between 1002 and 1004 that are convincing me there's some kind of artificial packet shaping at work here, and that it's horribly broken.

I tried to find the Hampton Inn tech support contact number, and instead, I found installation/configuration guide PDFs meant to be used by contractors installing this stuff in all kinds of hotels. In them, it says that Hampton Inn (and its parent, Hilton) asks the contractors to prevent contact between user computers.

Hmm... bonjour, anyone?

I turned off mDNSResponder and mDNSResponderHelper using launchctl and actually got working internet. It's been worse today, but still up more than down. (of course, as I type this, I appear to be stuck in a good stretch, with over 60 pings <30ms.)

Anyway, the situation is affecting all web traffic, including Hampton Inn websites, and all traffic associated with IMs, and most traffic associated with IMAP. SMTP is out completely when this happens.

Well, as it is, FileMaker training is going well. I've learned a lot of optimization tips for the database work I've done over the years, and also learned that nothing I was doing was outright incorrect in the professional sense - they live by the rule "if it works, and it does what you want, it's right." Today was calculations, tomorrow will be scripting. I've spent a lot of time in these, so it's actually been easier for me to deal with than the database planning stuff we did yesterday and Tuesday. An aside - Did you know that FileMaker has average and mode functions, but not median? We learned how to reinvent that wheel today.

So yeah, that's the story. Sorry for the blank slate. Again. Or as always.

Edit:: as if that weren't bad enough, it would appear there is a configuration error on our xserve. Now, my website is ugly. This is because everything lives on that xserve.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Unboxing of a different sort

We have something called a Super Grand Mart up the street from me now. When first I went, I had absolutely no idea it was an Asian market, or at least, primarily an asian market. That said, I chose to go back to raid the snack and beverage aisles for comedy's sake. Not much comedy, mind you, but hey.

So here's my bag:
bag

Inside, we begin with a bag of spice that came from a section of only bags of spice.
chili
So, either ground up spices are snacks, or Super Grand carries 40,000 different kinds of this company's products without getting into the snack section of the catalog.

Next, Jasmine tea. Whatever.
jasmine tea

Now, this amused me...
blood pressure tea
This tea tastes awful. I choose to blame the ingredients list, the last item of which is Horny Goat Weed.

On to the snacks!

My mom taught me many years ago to eat Pocky.
bag pocky
All of the white nerd in me, however, cannot possibly imagine the need to buy a bag of Pocky this big. Equivalent to five boxes of regularly packaged Pocky, the price of this magical item is about $4. Regular Pocky is not. I moved on from the bulk pack of Pocky to get some of my favorite variety, the comically named Pocky Men's.
pocky men's
Dark chocolate, dark pretzel, all tasty. A lot of people refuse to believe that such a product exists, but if the marketing wizards at Glico are to be treated as authorities on the matter, Japanese women are not allowed to eat Dark Chocolate.

The most elusive and, despite the fact that I already knew of its existence as well, most amusing product of the haul, though, is the box of Pocky Giant.
pocky giant
I haven't opened it yet, so I have no idea what awaits me. $12 dollars for that box, though... it should be like unwrapping chocolate-covered pretzel rods of gold. Or at least tasty.

As I left the store, I was offered a door prize for shopping. Do you know what that was?

This.
door prize
Note it's not even iodized salt, and I don't use salt for anything, so I couldn't help but walk home with a giant stupid smile on my face for having been handed a can of salt.

Bonus: Look at the sticker on the bananas I bought at Giant earlier...
banana lol

Monday, September 1, 2008

hey look at that

I got the stuff from .migration_temp moved over, and I've changed the template to reflect the new location of the stylesheet. That, of course, means that the site looks right again.

Unfortunately, I now have a google/blogger toolbar up there, which I see as detrimental to the viewing experience. Not that I have much to view, but as soon as I'm done trying to fix my catalog of posts to remove specific references to WAM, I'll get that fixed.

I also have 51 pictures from downtown today that I need to post. I have them processing in jAlbum, so that'll be good for eventually. Oh, motivation - you come in the form of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Edit: Okay, I've updated all posts from 2008. I was going to try to get back to 7/2007 tonight, but I've just flat out lost interest in deleting "http://www.[wam or glue].umd.edu/~natkuhn/" from links. Actually, given that I also deleted all galleries older than 2008, I may just get rid of posts that had pictures from before 2008.

I've learned an important lesson - when you bother to specify a base URL, use it. If I had done that in the before time, back when I was actually posting this stuff for the previous three years or more, I wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

On the true meaning of pain

I just made chili that was actually physically painful to put in my mouth.

I made a stab through the end, it took me four ounces of milk per forkful of food.

Something tells me I'll need to buy ingredients to dilute this one a little bit when I stop at the store tomorrow to buy more milk.

Update on the Content Vortex's Current Sad State: Well, I haven't done much of anything, as is clear. I did, however, find all of the stuff I had lost in a folder called .migration_temp that was buried somewhere in my directory structure to which I did not previously know I had write access. As awesome as that is, replacing my stylesheet and background graphic is easy enough - replacing all of the inline links to everything in the posts will be horrible and time-consuming, however, and may take me several eternities to fix.

We'll see how I do on all that, what with the busy season for school coming up.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

It's pretty clear the content vortex needs help

They killed WAM for me, finally, and in the process of ensuring that all references to WAM still exist, the directory they created for the material from my pub space is not accessible to the public, and nothing I've been able to do to it so far has made it work correctly.

I'm investigating alternatives now, I'll keep you posted on what I get going.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

on blindly doing stuff

I went to try to find a geocache in Daniels today... I was, as far as I can tell, right on top of it, but I had to give up when something got into my eye and forced me to stop. When I got back to my car, it turned out it was actually a little tiny fly - little red eye and all, still stuck near the inside corner of my eye.

Yeah so... I'm done going outside until I have my full-shade sunglass lenses tomorrow.

Incidentally, if you go out on the first nice day in two months, expect to run into a lot of people who are blocking the road with their kayaks, or that guy who was poking algae with his fishing rod.

No, I don't get it either.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Hurf Durf

So let's see... I've been more or less completely off the radar for quite some time. Personal projects, birthday from last week, and moving stuff into my storage thing downstairs.

Some things I've accomplished:
  • I now have the Pioneer HD radio add-on doodad in my car. HD radio works remarkably well where I am, but WTOP's HD3 signal is just too weak at the moment to be of any significant use for my inbound commute. This is especially dismaying, as I get HD subchannels for almost all other stations that offer them. I think the only one I have problems with on anything resembling a regular basis is WIYY (98 rock, Baltimore) and even that is only once I get inside the beltway. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with it, though. It does make picking a route home easier, and getting into town to go to the zoo is easier with the added information.

  • I've gotten maybe 15% of my film collection done. I still haven't picked any frames to put up, but oh well. I've got the pathway to where I want to hang some of my bigger posters clear, so at least there's that.

  • For quite some time, I've been wishing someone would make a functional equivalent of Transitions lenses that weren't corrective. Turns out they do... I just ordered a set of climate control (i.e. removable gasket sealed, a feature I'm looking forward to for walking around in the winter) light adjusting shades. Bonus - polycarbonate lenses, ANSI rated to some standard or another. I'm going to give them a whirl; it seems like if they're good enough for the department of defense, they should do something resembling the trick for me.

  • iPod Touch software 2.0: 10 bucks got me the ability to use my iPod as a remote control for iTunes on my desktop computer. Oh, also, I can connect to the campus network without needing a login page now. That's about it.

  • Sweating. Why has it been so hot lately? I've actually gone to see two movies in the last 8 days... one of them actually cost me $10 to sit through.

So that's it for now. I'm starting to feel really useless with my inability to spend more than 20 seconds outside, but I imagine this will fix itself one day. I'm actually going to try to go out for a short walk tomorrow, so I will hopefully have killed a roll of the Kodachrome and have some pictures to post for once.

I seem to remember doing better than this last year and the year before... think it was the move?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Hey look, an update!

I've been busy. A lot.

Here's one reason:

mirror

Somebody drove by, hit my car to break its mirror glass, and then hit the car in front of me to knock its driver's side mirror assembly clean off. Insurance... is sure insurance, so I went ahead and ordered a piece of glass for it for $25.01 shipped. You'll note this is a full order of magnitude less than the insurance deductible for the repair, $250.

Anyone know what kind of magic grey goop they use to affix mirrors to cars? I have a few days to think about it.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Update: Day 7


  • My cat's favorite place to sleep while I'm gone is on my kitchen counter.

  • I get BBC news over the air.

    • BBC news is very excited by the US election cycle

    • They're also really happy about Clinton leaving the race

    • Evidently, this is not a distinct channel; it's really on MPT.

  • I have a brand new dishwasher. Literally.

  • I move big stuff tomorrow after 10am.

    • You may note that it's supposed to be a million degrees tomorrow.

  • At least now, I can live here, as I have my kitchen fixings.


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Monday, June 2, 2008

on moving

An excerpt from a status email I'm writing about my move-out process:

I have most of the loose junk from all over my room boxed. Yesterday, I took all of my music stuff over to the apartment and hid it in various places so it continued to look like nobody lived there yet. That exposed a great deal of floorspace, so much so that you wouldn't even recognize the place now! I should take a picture when I get home.

The cat was enjoying himself while I had my entire train of junk stacked up all over my bedroom with a big trash bag and big recycling bag next to each other in front of the fridge, but later turned on me and went insane after I had everything cleared up and he could actually move about the room uninhibited. He started yelling at empty patches of walls, at the two stacks of finished boxes I made, and bare carpet over near my computer. He also decided that he really needed to get inside of a box containing a t-shirt, two pairs of gloves, and the original packaging from my Panda-Z figurine. I had placed my bucket on top of it to keep it shut, and he went over right after I turned off the light and started trying to open the box without first removing said bucket... THOOMP THOOMP THOOMP came the sounds from the wall as I sprung forth from my bed while trying to figure out whether or not I wanted to yell at him to feel better about myself. The box ended up in the closet on top of my underwear and he went to sleep shortly after another tour of "HEY! EMPTY CARPET! I SEEEEEE YOU....." with much pouncing on the imaginary rats and small children he must think live there.

The important lesson for this part of the story is that if you really, really want to confuse a deaf animal, clean up your room. I can't wait to see what happens when I rearrange the living room later today, and then again tomorrow when I shampoo the other part of the carpet.


Thursday, April 17, 2008

Fun with Macro Flowers

43reverse
I finally strapped the 43 onto the camera in reverse. Took me long enough, eh?

50macro
This is through the 50 macro at about f16.

Why? Well, someone on DPreview's pentax board asked what a teleconverter or extension tube might do for their ability to use the 77 limited as a close-up lens. The light on campus was good today, so I went for the example photos.

If you're interested, I posted the comparison shots in gallery form. They're all explained in the notes.

Woop.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Where I've been...

So, you may have noticed my activity tailed off for the last however long. Allow me to explain - my dad is in town. In a quest to entertain him, I suggested we attend brewery tours at the two craft breweries whose beers I really enjoy drinking.

troegenator
Tröegs Independent Craft Brewery - Harrisburg, PA: These guys (and, in fact, Tröegenator beer itself) got me started on craft beer years ago. Hearing Chris, one of the founding brothers, talk about beer was a really good insight into how a homebrewer approaches commercial cooking. They said the entire brewery has something on the order of 10 employees; they pretty much only serve Pennsylvania and parts of the surrounding states. They did manage to have all of their current beers on tap, though, which is quite impressive. I ended up with two cases of beer from them and the most metal drinking vessel ever produced - a 30-some-odd ounce ceramic drinking horn.

dogfish
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery - Milton, DE: A very different place. The bottling like has 8 people working near it, the office at least 15 if not more. Any given part of the establishment is larger than the whole of the Tröegs brewery. You can tell they ship a lot more beer, and the fact that the tour guide spent less time talking about the actual brewing process is indicative of a different approach to beermaking. He spent more time on fermentation, which makes sense given that DFH prides itself, in a manner of speaking, on funny approaches to the creation of alcohol. Comparing the beers of the two is pointless, as they serve largely different markets. The only overlap comes on the pale ales offered by Tröegs, which still carry characters unique unto themselves. They had fewer beers on tap for sampling, but had a wider variety of their products for sale.

I'm not sure how much I learned, but I had a good time, and I think my dad did too, which is really what counts in the end. If you like beer, I can recommend either as a good way to kill a day.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

The moon done gone and gone

So, Josh - did you have a clear night to use your glass at the sky?

Sorry I've been unproductive lately. Extreme cold coupled with a general lack of interesting subjects nearby have kept me from doing anything in the last week. I'm hoping I get to find something to shoot tomorrow (if campus is closed) or Sunday evening, but who knows.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Thoughts on fringing

I took some pictures last night of the ice stuff, then drove my car around an icy parking lot like a madman. It was fun, but I left all of that at home because of the water. Big mistake, there was a really cool "tree laden with ice that's assaulting the sidewalk" thing going on outside. Oh well.

I'm writing this, though, to muse about "purple fringing" as an image aberration. Someone posted a comparison of the Voigtlander (sp?) 40/2 and the Pentax DA 40/2.8, which garnered a response from someone who had compared the lens to both the DA 40 and the FA 43 (which I have). Their conclusions were that the Pentax lenses both produced more purple fringing.

This sticks out because I've never noticed the 43 to produce purple fringing - it has standard lateral chromatic aberration, but it is relatively well behaved until I get into such high contrast situations that sensor blooming takes over the boundary regions.

Then it struck me - people don't understand the difference between lens aberrations and digital sensor woes.

Why would this have hit me? Simple - the wikipedia article makes it apparent that the internet believes that purple fringing is more of an issue for digital photography than film. If what we were seeing was due to lens errors, it would be just as present on film exposures in the same conditions as the digital exposures with the same lenses.

I've looked at some of my shots with film that I still have online and am not seeing anything in that nasty purple range at all in my images, let alone at high-contrast boundaries. Even in a shot with the DA 10-17 on my MX, I don't see what could be described as purple fringing on the right side - the trees simply start disappearing into the sunlight. There's another thing that leads me to believe it's sensor related more than anything else: it's the same color as the nasty artifacts that come off to the north, south, east, and west of the sun in images like this one. Fortunately, in that case, most other people don't notice the problem, but it screams to me "DIGITAL! DIGITAL!"

I don't know, I'm thinking it might be fun to set up a test with some lenses "known" to cause purple fringing and shoot the same images on digital and on film and see if you get the same results.

Basically, I don't buy purple fringing as a strictly optical phenomenon; I believe it's the medium that makes or breaks it.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Film and Filtration

Cascade in Monochrome

Okay, so I walked the Grist Mill Trail from its head to swinging bridge, then walked up to the "impressive" part of cascade falls.

Before I set out on that, I picked up some Ilford Delta 100 and 400 film and a 52mm red filter. Armed with both my *ist DL and MX around my neck (which must have made me look like the most phenomenal nerd ever), I set out with a misloaded roll of color film and the 43 on the MX, and the 50-200 on the DL. Nothing exciting from the digital, but I wanted to try to set up a "black and white" shot with the red filter on a digital camera. That's what you see above. Seeing as how I'm using a quarter of the photosites on the sensor, it should come as no surprise that detail takes a pretty good hit using this method. I already knew that would happen, but it came as a surprise that the meter can no longer be trusted - the camera doesn't know the difference between film and the digital sensor, so it meters down three stops even though the red channel stays just as sensitive to the light coming in. Blah blah blah translation - trusting the meter results in an overexposed shot in the amount of the color filter's exposure factor: in this case, about 2 stops, give or take.

Figuring out a conversion workflow (because I KNEW I needed to shoot raw to do this) was an interesting challenge. I figured out that if you go to the "calibration" tab in Adobe Camera Raw and desaturate the reds and greens completely, getting a monochrome image is just adjusting the blue saturation down to the point where all three histograms line up perfectly. Then you go back to the first tab, bump up exposure between 2.5 and 3.5 stops, and fiddle with shadows until you get the overall contrast you're looking for.

At any rate, I'm taking the film in to have it sent off tomorrow; hopefully, sometime this week, I get the results of that back.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Limited distance walkabout

I "got a little lost" on the trails; they have the road closed for repaving right now, but I figured it'd be fun to walk trails to the falls instead of walking down the road. I went up ridge trail to part of rockburn branch trail, then turned around and went back to the start of morning choice trail, walked that through to connector trail, then picked up ridge trail until the trail shelter where I turn back down river road. I pulled out a stripe the same length as two tenths of a mile on the scale marker, I got about 17 of them from start to finish which is close to three and a half miles. Ridge trail is pretty tough work, not as bad as buzzards rocks trail was, but it goes into and out of several drainage creeks off the higher plateau. I ended up running most of the trail from the point where it intersects with connector trail until I met with the road again. By that point, it was 2:40, and I wasn't sure I was going to have enough time to get to the falls, set up, get meaningful pictures, and get back to the parking lot before the park closed (4:40).

Bird list - GBH, a couple dozen robins in with the 30 or 40 chickadees, small numbers of what seemed like song sparrows, but I didn't get a better look than that, three pileated woodpeckers, a downy woodpecker, female ruby crowned kinglet, and (finally!) a brown creeper.

Good walk, though, good run for those parts that I ran. I like the lightweight kit, though I should have left the tripod in the car instead of bringing it with me. I'm ordering a set of trail maps for some of the parks around here and to the north tomorrow; hopefully I can save myself the trouble of heading out without a reasonable goal or idea of where I'm going next time.