Someone left an Epson Stylus Color 640 on the curb when they moved. A little dirty and rained-upon, but appears intact, so we'll see if it works as a LaTeX printer from my Linux box.
Who says train tracks can't be sensual.
As mentioned in an article in today's New York Times Magazine, the Random Hall housing building of MIT is where undergraduate Elizabeth Shin, overwhelmed with pressures, committed suicide. Beside that building, someone has unwittingly put up an unfortunate billboard.
This morning, found Zeitgeist Gallery boarded up. Probably a fire yesterday evening. By the time I passed again, at 4:30pm, someone had tacked up on the plywood a painting on canvas (closeup, digitally skewed). Dated today, the painting depicts a bird, perhaps a spirit or a phoenix that rises from the ashes, over a 'Z'.
Don't much like any of the photos I took during a long walk today, partly because I was using the viewfinder most of the time and forgot to verify that the light settings were appropriate. So here's a seagull in flight I snapped last week in Harvard Square (shrunk). Shot by prefocusing with the AF as I tracked the bird, then snapping a second or so later. Lucked out that the AF worked so well.
Touchpad on a ThinkPad is so wrong.
Touristy snapshot of an otherwise unassuming tree. On the way back, colorful wires.
During this morning's walk, shot these bridges (shrunk and grayscaled in Gimp). I have a very different shot from another angle but I want to go back and try to get another part of one of the bridges in the frame.
S10's battery has died each day for the last three days; I really need to learn to save battery by using the optical viewfinder more often. This morning I did find I was able to get three more non-LCD shots out of the battery, including the bridges shot above, after the first low-battery shutdown. The engineering annoyance with the S10 here is that, when the battery is low, the S10 always shuts down after a shot, which involves motorized retraction of the lens and a loud beep. To take another shot in low-battery state, you have to power it up again, which involves motorized extension of the lens. Once the S10 has defeated the battery in combat, this triple motorized shutdown/startup routine is its finishing move.
QOTD comes from NYT article, "Elvis Lives! (As a Marketing Effort, Anyway)":
For us, it's about taking a property and figuring out, how do we make him hip, young and irreverent—into a brand that's relevant to this younger demographic.
—Joe DiMuro, Sr. VP of strategic marketing, RCA Records/BMG
Headed towards downtown around 4:30am to look for dawn photos of the skyline or downtown architecture and morning wakeup. The morning fog felt like a mist, and illuminated downtown landmarks like the Hancock and Prudential buildings were completely invisible from any point on the Longfellow bridge. After failing to find a postcardish shot on Charles St. (too dark, and packed with cars), ended up shooting after 5am in the Boston Garden — duck, fog, and bridge (all JPEGs shrunk only, per usual) — and then on the Esplanade.
People keep asking what kind of digicam I use. Canon PowerShot S10 (compact, 2-megapixel, 2x optical zoom), picked up discontinued close to a year ago for a little over $300. Since it was a US market version, it did not include a rechargeable battery kit, which is absolutely necessary for the S10 Battery Slayer, so I added the Canon DK-110 kit. If I were getting a new digicam right now, I would first look at the most compact Canon Digital Elph models, like the new S200 and the discontinued S110. I like to carry the camera everywhere for serendipitous photos, and even the S10 in a soft case is often cumbersome. Actually, I want two separate cameras — an ultraportable for carrying everywhere, and a digital SLR for planned photography (and since, if you don't already have a portfolio, an impressive-looking camera might be taken more seriously by volunteer figure models). But the S10 is a good budget-sensitive compromise, now that I'm learning its light-handling character, though I would kill for a perspective-correcting lens when shooting architecture. dpreview.com is a good digicam review site.
When buying digicams online, shopper.cnet.com is the
main price-comparison site I used. It's good once you know specific model
numbers, but not good for product selection. I was pleased with the service
from Beach Camera, who happily replaced my S10 when it arrived with a hot pixel
near the middle of the LCD. One tip if you're buying discontinued models:
don't think they'll decrease monotonically in price — they actually seem to
increase in price after a short drop, presumably as inventories are
exhausted and only resellers with ridiculous prices are left to snipe the
consumer who doesn't know that newer models are better and lower-priced.
Tried photographing Boston lights with tripod from the Cambridge waterfront sidewalk around 2:30am today. What I believe was a state trooper parked across the parkway for five minutes, then startled me by coming over and taking a shot of his own, with flash. We exchanged smalltalk about film vs. digital before wishing each other a good night. (I have determined launch positions and trajectories, and obtained targeting visuals for the guidance assist systems. The Americans, they suspect nothing.) That photo, cropped, was taken afterwards, camera maybe three feet above water level, from a small floating dock, in an attempt to capture the odd reflections. The lighting in the skyline photos looked tremendously better on the S10's LCD at the time than it does on my dim CRT or my bright laptop LCD. That crop was the best I could salvage. Shooting the skyline just before dawn would be better.
Currently 92°F here. No, wait, now it's 52°F.
Test patterns = wallpaper.
Went out in the foggy wee hours this morning in search of a train yard to photograph, and found the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge (photo at 4:31am). S10's battery gave out right after that shot, as I was about to lengthen the tripod legs and move back along the ledge another five feet to try to get the full reflection of the first tower. Not planning on returning too soon to that vista, as I don't want to make the dark-colored Crown Victoria nervous. Found someone else's better photo after returning home.
Paul Graham says in his Sept. 2001 The Other Road Ahead article, of the company that became Yahoo Store:
With server-based software, you can make changes almost as you would in a program you were writing for yourself. You release software as a series of incremental changes instead of an occasional big explosion. A typical desktop software company might do one or two releases a year. At Viaweb we often did three to five releases a day.
And I'm, like, "Wow. How did you manage to do the CM and QA so quickly?!" Further in the article, he explains:
At Viaweb our system had so many components and changed so frequently that there was no definite border between software and infrastructure. [...] A bad bug might not just crash one user's process; it could crash them all. If a bug in your code corrupts some data on disk, you have to fix it. And so on. We found that you don't have to watch the servers every minute (after the first year or so), but you definitely want to keep an eye on things you've changed recently. You don't release code late at night and then go home.
A lot of wisdom in that article, but I think it's important to note that — when speaking of production servers — development can be too rapidly incremental.
Saturday night at 1:30am, snapped the Widener Library while passing through Harvard Yard.
The gaincompliance.com domain name is free to anyone
who wants it (free, except for whatever transfer fee your registrar charges
you). Mail me if you want it, or wait for the 31-May expiration. One of the
testimonials that prompted the original registration: "I decided due
to inmate's aggressive nature and stated combative expertise, to use the M26
Advanced Taser to gain his compliance." But sayings like "Don't
you make me Gain Compliance on you!" aren't as timelessly humorous as
they first seemed.
I'm not making this up: DykeFinder.com
The Swan Boat armada deployed in the Boston Garden today. Reconnaissance imaging from 0415 shows the Swan Boats grouping and moving into position under the cover of darkness.
The weblog pages are now broken up into month-sized chunks, to the relief of HTML layout engines everywhere.
Jonathan Rauch's article, "Seeing Around Corners," in the April 2002 Atlantic Monthly is an exceptionally accessible article on complex system phenomena and simulation. I think I want to challenge some of the conclusions and implications, but will have to come back to it in a few weeks, when I have the attention to do it right.
In Cambridge, communist bookstores have management consultants for neighbors (photo yesterday evening).
Olin Shivers' History of T.
Today's trek was around Harvard Square, where last summer I did all the standard touristy photo-ops to death. Today, the only interesting things were some film students shooting a scene on the bridge, and a knife-juggler by the T stop, neither of which I shot — the film students, per my privacy rule; the juggler, since nobody was yet watching him, and I didn't want to make him nervous by photographing whilst blades were flying about. I did try shooting some of the social mechanisms of the geese that live along the Charles River there, but there was no apparent drama, save a few brief skirmishes (cropped; S10 using prefocus).
I thought the chemical dry-cleaning process was rather well understood, but a large banner above Cambridge Cleaners in Harvard Square suggests that divine intervention is somehow involved. It takes the (faux) French to remind us that the spirit of America is to sell mediocre coffee at large profit margins.
Tell us a story, unca' Neil. Around 1990, I was renting a bedroom in a condo complex in Oregon that abutted some ponds. Perhaps every few weeks, a duck or goose would be slain messily by a car, and the corpse would remain as a warning to other waterfowl, til the passage of time, rain, and tire treads wore it away. One day, as I was walking along the paved drive from the complex to the main street, a mother duck was leading a column of fuzzy little ducklings from one section of the pond, across the drive, to where the pond continued. A Cadillac comes along the drive, and slows just enough to miss what appeared to them to be the last duckling. What they did not see was the straddler duckling that would hit the drive just in time to have a good chance of becoming one with it. Without a conscious thought, I stepped into the path of the car and put my hand out for the them to stop. After they'd braked, I pointed with my arm to where the duckling had begun crossing the drive. As the duckling procession proceeded, I went on my way. I tried smiling a "thank you for not slaying that baby duck, isn't the world great today" smile at the car's side window as I walked past, but the window was reflecting and I could not see the occupants. They did not immediately drive on, and afterwards I hoped they were not too badly shaken.
Installed and will be trying out Privoxy, a successor to Junkbuster.
Spent majority of day walking around downtown Boston. Snapped I.M. Pei's Hancock Tower by holding S10 right at the street curb, angling up. The framing was a little off, and I knew the flare near the top of the building would be there. S10's stupid battery died as I was snapping various buildings' reflections in the Hancock Tower's sides at street level. NB-5H batteries are $25+ third-party and $40+ Canon, so I've been resisting. Using the viewfinder instead of the LCD is supposed to save lots of battery, but I need the LCD for seeing what the light settings are anyway.
In Chinatown, especially if you're veggie, try out Buddha's Delight at 2 Beach St. Second floor with lots of large windows. Don't be scared off by the graffiti in the stairwell.
Been going out walking before or shortly after dawn lately. Obligatory snapshot of the Boston skyline and Charles River at 6:05am. The lighting in the scene was problematic, but I think the S10 could be made to do a better job than I got it to in the spontaneous shot. As that crew team crossed the frame, another boat entered the frame and was angling out of the wake of the first boat, which I thought ruined the movement in the two other shots I got of them. The battery died shortly after that shot (which happens way too often with the S10!), which of course meant that over the next 90 minutes I saw numerous great potential shots. Fortunately, all the missed shots were of static scenes, and will still be there tomorrow morning if the sky is clear.
A few sky photos I took last summer. Just after a storm on July 10th out front my apartment. A cross in the jet trails on July 16th over campus. Red sunset streaks on August 18th. All taken with Canon S10 digital, scaled down from 1600x1200 with no other editing.
Snapped a photo this morning of Somerville looking towards the Boston skyline a few minutes before 5am. Pretty obnoxious street lamp in the foreground, huh? Taken from The Citadel (20-Sep-2001 photo, which is why the flag is at half-mast).
New release of SSAX port to PLT.
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