fine whine

Back before April I began working on the first major redesign of the non-fine-whine portions of my website since August of 2004. I'd meant it to be an April Fool's joke of sorts, as the new look and feel resembled the so-called Web 2.0 design ethos, but it would've been a pretty weak attempt at a prank.

I made some major progress on it in the weeks leading up to the first (see my contact page for a mostly-functional example) but got stalled working on a photo gallery, particularly one that would show my flickr photos in some decent way. I'm not entirely happy with the ways photos end up being shown here, and as such, have decided to write a simple script to do exactly what I want.

I haven't coded much of it lately, and probably won't for a while, except that I've got some new neat photos to show off, and unfortunately I end up linking to the flickr page instead of something that looks nicer. Anyway, take a look at this:

That looks neat, doesn't it? Check out these two:

Here are the rest* of the fish photos.

So how did I do it?

Well, we went to the zoo today (see more of my Zoo photos from today's visit and others), and I took my camera, as usual.

This time, though, I wanted to try something new. I'd never been able to get good photos of the fish because of the poor lighting, but this time around I decided that a longer exposure could compensate for the dimness, since more time with the shutter open = more light.

Which is fine and dandy if the photo's subject isn't anything moving. Fish, though, swim. This tends to make taking still snapshots of them a tad bit more difficult.

Thinking however of the way some photographers capture moving cars (for example) - moving the camera to match the car - I tried to focus on the fish, as it were.

Fish don't move the same way cars do, however, but they're much smaller. My attempts at panning were met with the occasional success, and I look forward to going back soon to try again. I bet I looked somewhat silly, waving around my camera, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for neat photos.

* The rest of the ones that weren't too blurry or incoherent, that is. I took nearly thirty pictures in the Aquarium, and was happy to even have seven or eight that look good to me.

Sometimes I give the impression that I am very busy at work, and don't have time to do anything other than my official responsibilities*. While I would not want to dispel that impression, I do know that I occasionally get distracted and find myself doing things other than work at my desk.

There's something to be said about all work and no play, they say...

One major facet of my job, albeit one often overlooked, is hanging garments on hangers. I know it sounds very, very exciting, but the real tedium sets in from the sheer number of garments that need to be hung, and accordingly, the never ending boxes filled with hangers on which to hang them.

Let me tell you about hangers. All of the hangers we use are not created equally, and many of them aren't even made by the same companies. I imagine our specifications for the hangers are relatively loose (they need to have a hook on top, two shoulder-like protrusions, and whenever possible, some capability to be cascaded) and as such we end up with something of a mix.

I don't really spend much time thinking about the hangers, but one day recently I did notice that one of them was stamped with a patent number. Knowing that among the wealth of knowledge accessible by Google is a patent database (or two), I looked up that patent (5096101 for the curious) and learned a few things, among them, these:

* There are a number of patents for hangers, which would ostensibly be very simple things.
* The patent in question was for a feature not on this hanger - the little tab between the hanger and the hook that shows the size, or other information (as seen at Target).

So this is ultimately what I have found: A&E Products has somehow stamped some of their hangers with an almost completely irrelevant patent number.

As opposed, say, to writing a completely irrelevant post.

* Time that could be spent otherwise on things like, oh, posting to a website, for example. I've back-dated this entry to around the second week or so I didn't post it, but meant to do so.