Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

December 11, 2006

i blame etselec

Filed under: Funny,Personal — cec @ 9:19 am

it’s probably not fair to blame etselec, but i do.

You scored as Friedrich Nietzsche. Well you’re an egotistical maniac, and you are so very iconoclastic that you probably are currently lost in a post-modern Jupiter, I mean jungle of self-definition. Don’t let it get you down though, someday, through a willful onslaught of reinterpretation of dated forms and ideas, you will strike on something that passes as remotely new, and people WILL be into it on the basis of how hip it is alone. Also, the average espresso drinker looks up to you.

Friedrich Nietzsche
83%
Dante Alighieri
75%
Miyamoto Musashi
67%
Stephen Hawking
58%
Jesus Christ
42%
Sigmund Freud
42%
Elvis Presley
42%
O.J. Simpson
33%
Hugh Hefner
25%
Charles Manson
17%
C.G. Jung
17%
Mother Teresa
17%
Steven Morrissey
17%
Adolf Hitler
0%

What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You?
created with QuizFarm.com

You Belong in San Francisco
You crave an eclectic, urban environment. You’re half California, half NYC.
You’re open minded, tolerant, and secretly think you’re the best.
People may dismiss you as a hippie, but you’re also progressive, interesting, and rich!
Where Does Your Inner Californian Belong?

December 10, 2006

Setting up a Christmas tree

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 9:34 pm

One last comment on the day – K and I went out to get a Christmas tree this afternoon.  The place we usually go was just about out of trees.  In fact, they had run out, but spoke to another tree seller who hadn’t sold all of his trees yet and they bought a good chunk of his stock.  Even still, there were only five 7 foot trees, a bunch of 6 foot trees and an 8 foot tree.  Unfortunately, the only decent tree was the 8 foot one.  Fortunately, we’ve got high ceilings 🙂

Now, back when we used to get a Christmas tree at home, my father’s least favorite part of setting up was getting the tree in it’s stand and perpendicular.  For the past two years, that’s been my least favorite part too.  You climb under the tree, tighten some screws, have the tree fall over on you, stand it back up, loosen some screws, tighten others; repeat until it’s close enough and then have the tree fall over in the middle of the night.

This year, it finally (laugh all you want) occurred to me that the smart way to set the tree up is to leave it bound in it’s netting while putting it in the stand.  This works great.  No branches to climb under, it’s easy to tell if the tree is vertical, etc.  When done, bring it in the house and cut off the netting – perfect!

We’ll post pictures once it’s decorated.

pictures from the new camera

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 9:16 pm

I haven’t posted any pictures from the new camera yet – mostly because they’ve been throw away shots where I’ve tried to get a sense of the new camera. But here are a handful. Only the picture of Luke (the snake) is full sized (3872 x 2592), the rest have been reduced.  Oh, and the red bellied woodpecker was taken using my 300mm lens with the doubler and the 1.5x magnifying factor of the digital.  He was probably 30 feet up in the tree, so I’m not too unhappy with the shot – now I need to get a shot of the pair of pileated woodpeckers that hang out in the back yard.
dsc_0181_m.JPG dsc_0155_m.JPG dsc_0104_m.JPG dsc_0094_m.JPG

hrm, having issues uploading the full sized image, let’s try this:

dsc_0143_t.JPG

looking on the bright side

Filed under: Personal,Plumbing — cec @ 8:48 pm

Turns out that there is at least one advantage of having constant plumbing problems – you often have the part you need. I had been noticing a leak under the kitchen sink. In checking it out, I found that the nut holding the drain in place was lose. As I tried to tighten it, the nut broke up in my hand.

Resigned to not having one of the dual kitchen sinks, I put a bucket under it and blocked it up. After dinner, we went on our walk and on the way back in, it occurred to me that I had a spare drain segment with a plastic nut. Installed the new nut and no more leak!

December 7, 2006

going digital

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 12:10 pm

Okay, I’m taking the plunge. A Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens and 8 GB worth of SDHC cards arrived on my doorstep yesterday. The D80 body was a Christmas present from K’s parents! I used extra birthday money to get the memory and the lens kit.

I’ve got a number of reasons for going digital.  There’s finally enough resolution in an affordable camera. The D80 is a 10.2 megapixel camera. That’s about 1/2 as much as I can pull off of a slide using a 4k dpi scanner, but about twice what I usually do scan – good compromise. The SLR body will use (almost) all of my current lenses. I tend to take more nature photography images than other types, the D80 gives you a 1.5X increase in focal length as compared to my film cameras. Last night I tested it with a doubler and a 300mm lens. That took me out to 600mm of glass, plus the 1.5X factor – 900mm equivalent in something I can hike with! The ISO adjustment means that even the 2 f-stop loss of light from using the doubler is manageable.

Initial impressions – wow! Beautiful, large, sharp, vivid images. Light weight camera. VERY responsive. Nice ability to bracket shots. Great control over the color balance. One gripe, my SB-28 flash will not work in TTL mode, only automatic and manual (as an aside, TTL as an acronym is too overloaded: through the lens, transistor-transistor logic, time to live, etc.).

I’ll still bring my F5 and some film with me to Yellowstone next year. Just not as much film and probably only Velvia 50 for landscape shots.

December 5, 2006

The Tragic Treasury

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 10:53 pm

Why didn’t someone tell me about this sooner? Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) and Stephin Merritt are the Gothic Archies who’s new CD is the Tragic Treasury: “Music for a Series of Unfortunate Events.”

For a sample, see Funtime OK (a mp3 blog), or Youtube:

YouTube Preview Image

My favorite so far is “Shipwrecked.”

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress