Journal entries for August, 2004

During Nat Friedman's trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in January, he visited a small slum named Rocinha. When he met the children there, he came up with a clever idea - buy all the disposable cameras he could find and give them to the children of the village and ask them to take pictures of whatever they wanted and bring back the cameras to him the next day. On his blog he describes the trip and posts the pictures he got back (scroll down).

This is an awesome idea, and it's fascinating seeing what the kids took pictures of. The great majority of them of course are of their family and friends, but it's interesting seeing how they live, and how despite the fact that some of their houses have enough exposed concrete to look like construction sites, they still live surprisingly normal lives, and have televisions and stereos and even sometimes cell phones. It reminds me a lot of some of the poorer areas of PR. There's also some surprisingly good pictures. For kids who, as he says, have probably never used a camera in their lives, some of them have a pretty good eye for composition. (via)

I changed the path organization of my CMS, thus changing the permalinks in the RSS feed. Gasp! Sorry. I wanted to use a naming format that presents the entries like they are a collection of real files and directories, rather than making it obvious that it is one script that is retrieving an entry from the database.

However, since the URL of an entry is used as its unique identifier in RSS, if you are subscribed to the RSS feed then your feed reader probably just thought there were 15 new entries, and you were given the unique honor of being able to reread my recent wit and wisdom.

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An Amazon tribe is the only one known to man that has no concept of numbers or math, with only the words "one," "two," and "many" to describe quantities.

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I <3 Bea Arthur.

Awesome. I'm heading to Baskin-Robbins in anticipation.

I want this in my house.

It's good to see good mores being encouraged in our youth.

Bzzz, bzzz.

Finally, someone has discovered the perfect solution for me. Although I would hesitate to accept a puff from this sketchy guy.

What? Why are these four guys so mad at me?

Lately the subject of death, and how much it sucks, has been very prevalent in my thoughts. Not from any particular personal fear of it, but just sort of anger about the fact that so many things are subject to it, every single day.

UPDATE (8/29/2004): Included the accurate quote from Calculating God.

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Not The Net explains to us how to write a best selling fantasy novel. Disturbingly, having just re-read the Dragonlance series, it's particularly obvious to me how many of the points in the article apply perfectly. And having just visited the Camuy Caverns today, the point about all caves in movies and fantasy novels having flat floors stands out as well. But you still can't help but love fantasy novels. :)

Today while I was out a long-lost friend left me the longest and probably most enjoyable IM message I've ever gotten, and it made me happy in ways indescribable.

I Love Bees.

I must get back into robotics. Came across a description of the robots that were demoed as the final project for a class called Intelligent Machines Design Lab at the Machine Intelligence Lab at UFL, and every single one of them makes me go "that's awesome" and start thinking about how I could build something similar. My favorite project is the Tagbots:

The aptly-named Tagbots are little five-and-a-half-inch diameter, three-inch-tall robots that will putter about, playfully cornering and evading each other, playing the delightful and timeless game of Tag.

Time to break out the Lego Mindstorms kit and try and build something again.

I have no idea what exactly this is - the website is frustratingly yet tantalizingly undetailed. However, it appears to be some sort of children's movie featuring doggy poo as the main character.

About a week ago, some brave prankster snuck onto the uninhabited White Island volcano island in New Zealand and positioned a Dino figure in front of the webcam placed there by New Zealand's Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS). The part I like best is that They are not planning to remove it, counting on the sulphur and high acid environment to deal with the creature. (via)

Today Bryan, Cat, Andy & I went to El Yunque to do the illicit hiking thing. Was fun, nearly died, etc. On the way back we stopped at a little tourist shop on the mountain and Cat made us pose in one of those wood things with the painting of some scene with holes cut out for the faces. An old couple then asked if we'd take a picture with their camera of them in said device of self-esteem attrition. It turned out it was a cool old, fully-manual 35mm SLR. It reminded me how much I like shooting with a fully manual camera.

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I went to New Orleans for the weekend, to attend Bryan's wedding. Someone really didn't want me to get off this island. What ensues is an epic tale of hilarity, awkwardness, and airplane breakage to be retold for generations.

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[05:29:06] 283012677: hey i am a Chinese girl .wanna chat?
[05:29:06] *** Auto-response sent to 283012677: aaand, there go my nipples again
[05:29:22] 283012677: what is that mean?

The Perseid meteor shower peaked tonight, and it's supposed to be a very good one this year, so on the way home from work I stopped by a park nearby and set up my camera to see if I could capture any.

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bird and moon: A story told in comic strip format in a wordless style reminiscent of one of my favorite books ever, Kid Koala's Nufonia Must Fall (trailer - swf).

Another good example of wordless storytelling (this one not entirely safe to be consumed at work -- though that's exactly where I'm reading it) is When I Am King at Demian 5. It's the first link on the page. I can't link directly to it, as it uses javascript to open a window that is integral to the presentation, which by the way is very cool.

Doom3 is incredibly well done. I always praise Half-Life because it creates such an immersive, realistic experience. Half-Life is enjoyably creepy, but Doom3 is truly scary. The basic foundation on which they build the atmosphere is the graphics - it looks realistic enough to allow for suspension of disbelief; you can really get into it and forget that you are playing a game.

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I realized I've been throwing around the term "L-series lens" a lot and non-photography nerds probably don't know what I mean. Here is a good explanation of the characteristics of Canon's L-series lenses.

A big long post talking about how cool FedEx is and how big the new lens is. Hopefully I'll have some photos in the next few days, and of course there's Bryan and Cat's wedding this weekend.

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Something else that makes me happy: Mitch Hedberg fills a gaping hole in the incense market. Also, here is an interesting article about Mitch. I didn't know he wrote and shot a film that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. I also see he is performing at the Ferst Theater at Georgia Tech in Atlanta on 9/20/04. Man I wish I were still in Clemson.

Anyone with any experience shooting photos with SLRs has probably discovered that when it comes to obtaining sharp, contrasty, high-quality photos, a high quality camera is not nearly as important as a quality lens. You can strap a professional-level, $7200 lens to a $140 consumer-grade camera body and make great pictures, but putting a $65 lens on a $8000 pro body will still yield blurry, low-contrast crap.

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I love big butts and I am not being untruthful. (via)

The 14-year-old Hubble Space Telescope's STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) has failed and will probably not be repaired. The STIS is an important instrument, but it is the WFPC2 (Wide Field Planetary Camera 2) that is responsible for taking nearly all of Hubble's famous pictures. According to the status report released by the Hubble team, it sounds like the rest of the instruments on the satellite are still functioning, so perhaps this isn't as significant a failure as it seems.

It's only 65.4 miles to El Conquistador, and that's going the long, roundabout way and includes getting lost and wandering around a lot. Coming from being in the US, that seems so puny. Going to El Conquistador is this big ordeal, comparable to driving to Atlanta or something, but it's just down the road. As the crow flies, it can't be more than 20 miles or so.

But man, I wish I'd had my GPS receiver on and tracking my path like a real-time version of Snake. I'm willing to bet I'd have lost all four lives many times over.

It's ironic that listening to Cafe Tacuba (a Mexican band) evokes strong memories of being in Japan. (When I was in Japan I was missing home and wanted to listen to something in Spanish, so that's when I first started really getting into Cafe Tacuba.)