dirty little secrets
The rash of 40+ deg days we've been having has left me with mixed feelings. Snow covers up the death that defines fall. I don't have to see the brown grasses, the mud, or the rotting leaves. Even when the snow isn't "fresh" it presents a uniform texture that, to my eye, is pleasurable. But when the snows melt (and spring is months away) nature reveils her equivalent of "morning face."
In the city, melting snow piles don't just leave the sidewalks dirty with soils, salt, grime, and oil, but another joy: dog poop. I noticed this today while taking advantage of the warmer temps to do some walking during my lunch hour. I was in the River North part of downtown which is one of a few recent residential growth areas (lots of conversions). Apparently, when it snows out, dog owners let their pets crap in and around the large snow piles that build up from shoveling and plowing. As long as there is fresh snow and fresh shoveling, they are hidden from view. But now that the snow has melted, the sidewalks are saturated with dog poop. Urban dog owners in this part of Chicago are either idiots, lazy, or both.
That bit of unpleasentness aside, being able to get out and walk during lunch was nice. I took the cheap point and shoot digital camera I picked up via craigslist back in October and had some fun. Tomorrow I hope to do more of the same.
Detail of a sculpture called "The Athlete" outside the East Bank Club, an athletic club in the city
Kongtastic
(note: this is one of a number of "in draft" entries I've had sitting around. I've decided to post a couple in their current state with minimal editing, just to clear them out)
helloheather and I went with Joe and Andy to see "King Kong" back on December 18th.
It is a decent film with lots of WOW special effects it does need to be seen on the big screen. This project was very near-and-dear to the director, Peter Jackson's, heart. As a result, I think some of the normal creative back-and-forth between director, producer, and crew didn't occure here. This was Peter Jackson's dream and, after coming off of LoTR, who was going to stand up and say "No, Peter, I think you don't need this many giant bugs in this scene" ?
All the Whos down in Whoville.
helloheather getting ready for Christmas Eve. She's too darn cute 
Reasons to start playing the lottery…
http://luminous-landscape.com/workshops/aa-quest-pre.shtml
20 days in the Antarctic.
edit/update: Here is a rather nice trip report (first link) and photo essay (second link) of the most recent trip Luminous Landscape organized to the Antarctic. It was an 11 day trip.
http://photoshopnews.com/2005/12/20/antarctic-trip-report/
http://photoshopnews.com/feature-stories/antarctica-expedition/
Merry *hic* Christmas
Every year the Equipment Department has a Christmas lunch in the office. We do a crazy gift-grab where you bring in a wrapped gift and when your number is called, you can choose another wrapped gift from a table or grab an already opened gift from someone else. A single item can only be "grabbed" three times after being opened.
Since we started doing this 4 or 5 years ago, the amount of alcohol being brought in as gifts has risen to shockingly high levels. Of the 29 people participating in the gift grab this year, 21 gifts were alcohol.
On one level this is funny in the "you need to know these people" sort of way and it can make for some rapid and fun gift grabbing. But alcohol, for an event like this, is also a "don't think, buy booze" choice.
I didn't bring booze; I brought a box of Christmas trivia that can be used as an add-on pack with a number of games (including Trivial Pursuit). It was a "Gah! I need a $x gift for Monday" purchase while at the mall on Saturday evening, but still, it was different. Other non-alcohol gifts included: movie tickets, a stove-top popcorn maker, gift card to a local bookstore, Frango mints (with gift card) and a special edition Monopoly board game.
3-month review
It has been three months since I've left LiveJournal in favor of running a Wordpress-based blog on bernhard.us so I figure it's time for a review.
Things I like:
- I control the content. No "abuse team" that doesn't understand the law can force me to edit content or take away my account.
Things I miss:
- Phone Posts. Even though I didn't use them that often, it was still a neat feature.
- Whole-post spell-checking. Wordpress doesn't have a "check spelling during preview" feature and no such plug-in exists (that I'm aware of). Typos continue to plague me.
- Friends-Only posts. This is probably the feature I miss the most. Being able to filter-down posts to a select few has always been a major feature of LiveJournal. It's something that you just can't get with Wordpress, unless people are checking your site directly and have a username and password. Perhaps in the future, with extensions to the OpenID software, a system could be put into place allowing access to user-selected openid's to content (including RSS feed entries). Something to dream about at least.
- Spam filtering. I have to maintain a series of plugins to keep spammers at bay. LiveJournal seems to have an excellent anti-spam system set up, because I've almost never received spam there.
cetan_feed seems to be going well. It doesn't update as often as I would have thought, but it works and that's what matters. I'm glad to see 17 friends have added the feed to their LiveJournal account.
Overall, I'm still happy with this blogging method and will continue to use it. But, as always, I'm keeping my options open
Recent Photos
While sick, I spent some time uploading photos from past events. I'm still behind but I've made progress:
- Decorating our Tree
- Adam and Nicole's Wedding
- Aunt Lisa's 50th Birthday Party
- Lauren's First Birthday Party
Current Music: The Wailin' Jenny's - "Beautiful Dawn"
It’s life that throws you for a loop
I woke up this morning with a terrible sore throat. I believe it's thanks to post-nasal drip, but I also have aches, pains, and am very tired.
I've had to cancel both a dinner with our friend Greg, and an open house/christmas party with writer_grrl and her husband at their new house.
I hate being sick, especially so close to Christmas. I've had chicken soup, jello, and 7-UP which has helped a little bit, but I'm still feeling lousy.
Freedom Fri-days
Because my company doesn't allow vacation time to carry over, I have to use everything up by the end of the month. So I elected to take 3-day weekends for December. It's been very nice. Today the only thing I really accomplished was to snowblow the driveway and post photos from the wedding this past weekend. We've also picked up the new tire for helloheather'a car and had a great pizza lunch at Nick's Pizza in Crystal Lake.
Right now helloheather is upstairs getting cookie batter ready for Christmas cookies which is a great feeling.
In other news, it looks like the blog spammers have found this blog: I've been deleting about 20 comments a day. Fortunatly 99% of the comments are being captured by the anti-spam tools, but I still have to manually delete each one. It's time to look into the latest Wordpress Anti-Spam techniques.
9 days ago, our Canon A80 passed 2 years of ownership. Because I'm a geek, I've been keeping some stats on how we've been using it:
First Photo: Dec 1, 2003
# of photos as of Dec 1, 2004: 9,545
# of photos as of Dec 1, 2005: 17,918
# photos per day (avg) over two years: 24.5
Current photo count: 18,238
estimated photo count for Dec 1, 2006: 26,925
A couple weeks ago, I found our first hot pixel. This is a pixel (or group of pixels really) that exhibits the same color regardless the information around it. Ours is blue. This is different than just sensor noise. It's not a stuck pixel (i.e. it does not show up in every photo) but it is probably on its way to becoming one. There are four solutions to this problem:
1) Ignore it and do nothing
2) Use the Clone tool in Photoshop to eliminate it from the images (easy process for one photo/time consuming for many photos)
3) Send the camera to Canon where they will map-out the pixel (esentually making the camera blind to the pixels in question and interpolating the image area from the surrounding pixels)
4) Buy a new camera.
3 and 4 are, of course, the most expensive solutions and now that I know it's there, I can't ignore the problem. So option two it is. Thankfully it's not yet in every photo which keeps the post-production work down. But if you do notice a blue dot in the right third of the photo, I missed one
X3 -Teaser
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/x3/
Though directors are changing for X3 (Bryan Singer isn't directing this one) I'm looking forward to it.
It’s all madness I say!
I'm not sure why Canada is sending us all their cold air, but a note to our friends to the north: THANK YOU, WE HAVE ENOUGH ALREADY! NO, REALLY, WE'RE FULL.
How the weekend played out
So, a bit of an update from my rant on Thursday
First, I was able to get an appointment at my eye doctors Thursday afternoon. Thank goodness for cancellations. He was able to fit me with some disposable contacts, except he didn't have the right prescription for my right eye. So, I've been slightly dizzy since Thursday. Hopefully I'll have the correct prescription before too long. I am pleased with the disposables though. The last time I tried them, they didn't fit right, but these seem to be a good match.
After finally coming home from the eye doctors, we decided to drive up north. We were really only two hours later than our planned departure time, so all would not have been lost. Except, when we tried to leave, we discovered that the left front tire on helloheather's car was flat; really flat. After filling it at the closest service station, we drove out to Rockford on it. By the time we got there it had lost five pounds of pressure, so we turned around and headed home. Friday morning we headed to the tire place where Heather had these under warranty. They discovered an internal tread separation (rather dangerous) but because the tires are an odd size, no one ever stocks them. They placed an order for the tire and we had to drive home on the donut. We transferred all the gear to my car and finally we could leave for Wisconsin.
The drive was uneventful and we arrived around 1:30.
Our plan was to go skiing up at Granite Peak during the evening run (4-9pm) but due to a combination of very cold temps (10-12 deg) and equipment problems (helloheather's ski boots were so tight she was nearly in tears) we abandoned that idea after only 1 run. Back to the cabin for spaghetti and movies and warmth.
Saturday we met up with helloheather's dad and step-mom for lunch then onto the church for the wedding. The ceremony was nice and it snowed out which made things very picturesque. The reception was lots of fun and, due to the fact that it was at the hotel where we were staying, something of a blur later in the evening
Sunday was mostly a travel day after breakfast and was pretty uneventful.
So, that's the weekend in a nutshell. Rather hectic at the beginning, rather nice at the end.
How to ruin the weekend
Step one: wear contacts
Step two: wear contacts all the time, leaving your need for backup glasses low
Step three: wash your right contact down the drain
Step four: curse. a lot.
Step five: Call the eye doctor and find out that because your eyes are so bad, your contacts have to be MADE BY HAND and will take one to three weeks to get in.
Step six: not be able to drive or see really much of anything with said backup glasses that are probably ten years old thus requiring you to get new glasses.
Step seven: mix all of this together so you can't leave on time to get up into Wisconsin for skiing and a wedding and everything else that's happening this weekend.
After this weekend I'm going to start looking into LASIK surgery.