fine whine

So ever since I read about them on Neatorama, I wanted to make some random CD covers. From what I read, the recipe was simple:

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of the band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the album title.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, license permitting, is the album cover.
4. The finished product belongs in the CD cover meme pool.

I turned out a few in as many hours. I tried to stick to the rules, but couldn't bring myself to use the photos that were marked "© All rights reserved" when I knew there were ones licensed (via creativecommons) for derivative works, as this would likely be considered. Though I ended up reloading a few times more than I liked, I did come across enough to make these (and a few more that I'll eventually upload).

Making fake album covers is nothing new to me. Back when I was first learning Photoshop I'd made many a cover using stock photography for a fictional band called "Spontaneous Grape", going even as far as creating a fictional record label* to release them. But coming up with the titles was often the trouble, and moreover selecting photos that I thought would be interesting even more so. Without those aspects to worry about, I can crank these things out much faster.

Eventually I'll get them up on flickr, annotated and everything else. But I've got to take a break from making them first.

* The name of the label was Ludd Records, and it was rather a bit of a dumb in-joke. One of my many online identities was that of "Luddite Industries", which I thought to be a particularly sophisticated joke, in that the Luddites would not likely be operating a web site. Here's the logo, which I drew in AutoCad, knowing it better than Photoshop at the time.Someday I'm going to make a black t-shirt with this on it in white.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I spent six minutes* on Google identifying this fish (as seen in an earlier post):

It is a unicornfish, more specifically a Whitemargin unicornfish.

At the Aquarium I did not see anything mentioning this. Perhaps I'll take a sticky note with me next time to annotate their fish spotting guide.

* ... and then another six minutes posting this. I'm apparently not a fast typist.

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.

Yesterday morning, in the wee hours*, a baby was born. Actually, I can vouch for a more than a couple babies being born yesterday morning and the night before because I could hear them crying somewhere down the hall from me - I spent the night in a Labor and Delivery room at the hospital.

Which would seem an odd choice to spend a night, except for the fact that I was there to coach my wife through having our baby daughter, Natalya Anne.

"Coach" seeming to be an odd term, since I really had no idea what it was she was supposed to be doing, and moreover physically how she could do it.

But back to the room. It was a pretty nice room, though some of the chairs might have been a little more comfortable. Jessica had a nice bed, but I was stuck fending for myself in what I could piece together from what I could scrounge together.

Surprisingly we both got some rest (apparently I was actually snoring at one point) after Jessica received a much-needed epidural, though to her credit she toughed her way through a considerable amount of pain (or at least made noises like she was, and squeezed my hand rather convincingly) before having it administered.

These are the sort of battle stories mothers trade. For my part the guys compare stories of shouting and squeezing and little else.

But that's for later on. For now I'm spending some time quality time with my family, in a smaller room with considerably less (comfortable) seating. I think we're going to be here for a couple days, and nights in which other people will be more than willing to take care of our (presumably) crying baby for us. This, I have heard, is a good thing.

* 3:48 AM to be precise, and furthermore she weighed 7 pounds, 1.5 ounces and measured 20 inches long. Why do these numbers matter so much? And not any others, like width, or volume?

In college I took a geography class taught by the then-editor of Goode's World Atlas, John Hudson. Though a good teacher, he was also pragmatic and understood that, to reach more than just the interested third of his students (and in particular, the ones sitting up in the balcony tossing back a few cold ones), he'd need to spike his slideshows with interesting and funny slides. This he did, showing us amusing sights and signs from all over the continent, all the while attempting to teach us all about the geography of North America.

While I remember less than I should of the material (to this day I can't recall where durum is grown, and if it is in fact used in the making noodles or something else) I do remember a few of the photos. I'm pretty sure he didn't have this one, for when we discussed the midwest, but it would've been among his collection. If you click on the photo above* you'll see why I took the shot.

Or you can look here:

It truly boggles the mind, this "Nameless Creek". It's something of a logical fallacy, along the lines of "This statement is false" or some such.

* The photos above are hosted by Zooomr, and I have posted them because they are giving free "pro" accounts, with additional privileges I do not know, to bloggers and people like me. Thanks Andy for the heads up. I'm a pathological joiner of anything free, so it was a given I'd try this site out. Can it compete with flickr? Only time will tell.

40 geez

Though I own no shortage of digital cameras*, I rarely seem to have one handy at the right times. Recently I've seen a number of scenes or things I'd've liked to have photographed, only to find that I couldn't. One that I was able to capture is the label linked in this post, which if you read all the way to the bottom mentions "shocks in excess of 40 G's" as a warranty voider. I find that funny for a few reasons:

• Not only will a 40 g** shock likely cause more problems than a voided warranty, but how could you measure it? Does Seagate have physicists on staff, poised ready with slide-rules to calculate the forces on a (shockingly) dropped drive? How could you, or they, prove it wasn't in excess of 40 gs?
• What happens at exactly 40 gs anyway? How 'delicate' can this equipment be if they are willing to stick their necks out for a drive dropped at any shock under 40 g?
• I've been away from physics class for a long time, but last I checked 1 g was the acceleration of gravity, about ten meters per second squared. Forty times that would likely be higher than many a terminal velocity, wouldn't it?

But that's the only photo I've taken lately. Two others I didn't were:

• A giant '76' gas station sign lying at the roadside, in the overgrown grass and weeds, discarded by a company unwilling to be proud of its past.
• Two workers in a cherry-picker bucket in front of a video billboard. One has his fists raised upward in the universal pose for victory, and the 'board is shows some nice colors.

Okay, maybe you needed to be there. Better yet, you would've brought me a camera, too.

* Three at last count, and I'm not counting broken or throwaway (i.e. sub-VGA resolution) ones.

** I'm italicizing the g because Wikipedia says so.