I was talking to hunter last Friday about macro photography and a great, relatively inexpensive, device to take macro pictures with almost any lens. Essentially, the ability of a lens to focus on a close object is related to the focal length and the distance between the inflection point of the lens (point inside the lens where the image flips) and the film plane. It’s something of a funny relationship for modern lenses with multiple internal pieces of glass. However, the important thing to remember is that your ability to close focus depends on those two factors. ...

Back in August I wrote about a rehab possum that K was taking care of – she was very much a cutie. I was looking through some pictures on the camera and realized that I had a few more of her. Now that she’s all grown up and has been released, I thought folks might like to see them: Here she was back in August: A month later, in September: ...

Last week at work was pretty interesting. On Tuesday, L and I flew up to Dayton for the day to meet with our sponsors. That meant a 6am flight out and originally a 11pm return flight. Fortunately, we wrapped it up a bit early and landed home back around 8:30pm. The meeting went well. We were presenting some ideas that I had to the sponsors and they seemed to like them. Strangely enough, in talking to L, he said that he hadn’t really understood what I was proposing until the meeting. Not bad for a guy who wrote a short paper for the sponsors that described what he didn’t understand! But then, I guess that’s why L’s a full professor 🙂 ...

Okay, slight confession time. I’m something of a closet political junkie. Not so much the “who’s up, who’s down campaigning politics, but the questions of policy, who supports what, what makes sense kind of thing. If I were involved in politics directly, I suppose that would make me a wonk, not a hack. Anyway, K and I were having a discussion last week about the presidential primaries. K’s position was that if Huckabee wins the GOP primaries, we’re all in serious danger because the man holds positions that are bad for women, minorities, basically everyone that’s not a middle class white heterosexual male. I, on the other hand, maintained the position that a Huckabee win in the primaries would be hysterical. 🙂 ...

Is this thing still on? Okay, it’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged anything. As I’ve stated before, this tends to happen when I’m too involved in living life to actually write about it. Fortunately (unfortunately?) it’s nothing terribly exciting. Let’s see: Guitar: my guitar playing has been scientifically shown to have 10% less suck than it did a month ago. However, with such a large amount of suck to begin with, we’re still not at anything that looks like good. I’m getting more fluent with the open chords and can switch between them reasonably well. I’m just starting to learn barre chords – the E barre chord to start with. There are still vast tracts of untouched suck in the barre chords. Also, I’m actually thinking of picking up some lessons – the ones at jamplay.com seem pretty good. Work: still going well. There’s enough to do. I’m still not entirely used to billing by the (tenth of an) hour. Also, not really looking forward to flying to Ohio next week. I’ll only be gone for a day, but, ugh – who wants a 6am flight to Dayton! Break-in update: nothing much new here. Still looking to make it harder for someone to break in. Had a neighborhood watch meeting last weekend – that’ll be good. Turns out this may be neither contractors nor kids. There are apparently some professional (stretching that word a bit) thieves working this area. There have been some eight different break-ins near by. Non-profit work: I’m convinced that whomever coined the phrase “academic politics are so sorted because the stakes are so small never worked with a non-profit. It’s just amazing the degree to which politics enters into the smallest damned thing. New year’s resolutions: didn’t make any – never do. That said, I am trying to exercise more and cut down on my use of vulgarities. Profanity and cursing can wait until another year 🙂 I think that’s about it for now.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water, is one of my favorite zen aphorisms. Okay, so no hauling water for me – at least not unless the drought gets worse, but there’s going to be a lot of wood chopping in my future. On Saturday, margaretc’ s husband, ‘A’, came by and took out two of the trees that have been worrying me. They border our drivway and both had holes in their bases. Since they’re not small trees (40-50+ feet tall), I was worried that they would either come down on the house, the 500 gallon propane tank, the cars, the well, the power lines – you get the idea. It seemed better to take them out on our own terms. ...

One of my projects at work involves information markets: tools to extract aggregate knowledge from groups of people. For example, at Intrade, you can buy and sell contracts on questions like, “who will be the democratic nominee for president? or “how likely is it that the US economy will slip into recession? The market price reflects the cumulative belief that a given event has a certain probability. IEEE Spectrum also recently did a piece on information markets which talked about Microsoft’s use of a market in 2004 to predict the likelihood of an internal product meeting its production schedule. By opening the market to its employees, who presumably had knowledge of the issues with the product, Microsoft predicted that it would ship three months late – which it did. ...

It’s been about a week and a half since the attempted break-in. On Tuesday, I replaced the window they broke out. I called around to a couple of different places and everyone said that they could send someone out to give an estimate, but it would take a few days and then the part would be on order for another 3-5 days. Fortunately, on local glass shop said that if I brought them the sill in the morning, they would be able to replace the glass that afternoon. So I spent the morning taking apart the window. It turned out to be easier than I thought, but I did have to take off the lower sill to get to the upper. ...

I picked up a new kitchen faucet at Lowe’s today. As usual with this sort of thing, removing the old faucet was the worst part. The nuts holding the old faucet on to the sink were standard plastic nuts – attached to badly rusted screws. After 30 minutes of trying: first by hand, then with a towel by hand, then with a wrench, then oiling the screw and trying the wrench, I gave up. Thinking about it for a few minutes I realized that I have a 1″ drill bit for putting holes into a sink. I got the drill and just drilled through the plastic nuts. Victory! ...

Some weeks it just doesn’t pay to leave the house. As K and I were getting ready for bed last night she noticed that the bathroom window was broken. Being a wildlife rehabilitator, her first thought was that some bird (maybe a hawk) had smashed into the window. I went out to check. Nope – someone had removed the screen and smashed the window with some junk they found on the deck. ...