Wirehead's blog

biking

(crossposted from another blog)

Max speed: 31.3 mph (downhill)
Distance: a mere 2.43 mi (mostly uphill)

I am sitting underneath a bunch of trees that I've called the Chapel. So far I've seen a bluebird and a woodpecker.

I took back the previous light set and got a front light with a 1w Luxeon Star and a super bright back light. I'll have to do s'more commuting and see how good it looks.

I do like having two water bottle holders because I am not yet in shape.

IMAGE_005_rot.jpg

Final distance 5.34 mi.  I was doing about 25 mph on the straightaway.  Oh, and I found a neato nifty secret entrance to Rancho San Antonio.

LASIK is evil, kiddies

I've known this for a while.

Dono, I'm a fan of aging gracefully unless your eyes are really fucked up.  Glasses are sexy and stuff. :P

Western Digital hard drive hell

So I try to mix up the brands of hard drive I buy, just in case one brand turns out to have problems in the long term.

Of the drives that have died, I lost one Seagate after a lot of moving about and, more recently, two Western Digital drives.  And I try to avoid buying IBM... now Hitachi.... after the DeathStar thing.

The first one I've already griped about.

The second one is one of my two photo drives, which has me a bit upset.  The bright side, of course, is that I've got several copies of the digital pics and at least one copy of the film pics on other media... either DVDs or another hard drive.  But I want to make absolutely positively sure that nothing's going to be lost.  Thankfully I discovered problems when the SMART monitoring went off, so I had Mrs. Wirehead copy stuff over last night from the older drive to the newer drive.

So I have a 500gb drive that was intended for me to rebuild my C: drive and the RAID-0 array onto that is now going to be used as one of the photo drives.

Of course, I'm running out of brands.  Maxtor was picked up by Seagate, I don't quite trust Hitachi, and I don't qute trust Samsung.  So it's WD vs. Seagate... and Seagate seems to be more reliable.

Kicking my ass

(Crossposted from another blog)
So, getting back into riding after several months of no riding is kicking my ass big time.

The new tunnel under El Camino Real for the Stevens Creek Trailis kinda nice, but I still need to find a good way to safely navigate once I've popped up on the other side of El Camino.  The problem is that the part that's been opened dumps me off on the side of El Camino Real that's not very bike-friendly and so I need to hunt down some good internal road connections so I can actually avoid hazardous traffic.  Whenever the next segment opens, I'll be fine... but they have to open the next segment first.

I need to adjust stuff.  I realized on the way home that the seat was too low, so I fixed that.

I can haz bike

(Crossposted from another blog)

Trying it out

So I opted for another hybrid-ish bike.  I wanted something that would work like the one I had before because that was working quite well for me.

So I now have a big 22"..... frame size bike...

It's got a fully hard tail, no bouncy thing in the seats (which mostly I'd just use to boingy up and down on at stoplights) but it still has a suspension fork up front.

It's a little higher end.

This one came with toe clips, which I'm not 100% certain that I like, although I'm getting the swing of.  I figured I'd just go clipless sometime because a lot of folks have said that it's easier to go clipless than deal with toe clips, in terms of being able to mount and dismount easily.  Either way, if I don't like them, I can just remove 'em.

It also has trigger shifters instead of twist-grip shifters, which is causing me to need to adjust my biking style.

So, I biked 5.2 miles home with the new bike.  Looks good.  Let my mom know that the check she gave me for part of the cost of a new bike at Christmas was going to be cashed tomorrow.

Changes in how I approach Flickr

On the railing

So I just went through and removed myself from a bunch of groups.  And then I removed some tags and phrases in the descriptions that were attracting too much attention from people who are just looking for pictures that satisfy their particular fetish.

See, I don't get all bitter and unhappy and generally emo about how a site changes as it goes from a cute little community to the Next Big Thing.  But I've kinda stopped caring about some things.

I check the stats once in a blue moon.  But I don't look at my "top 10" or check out Scout anymore to see how my popularity is shaping up.  I'd much rather have people who follow my works and comment and be able to discuss the context of something in the larger body of my work and stuff.

I also don't even look at Explore anymore.  It's kinda a cognitive toxin.

Back when I was just getting on Flickr, the best way to get people to see your work was to groupwhore so I tried to add my photos to a rational number of groups and then go back to older photos and add them without being obnoxious.

But now I look back and I'm never going to try to be part of the community of a group.  I'm never going to browse the group.  So why bother to be there anymore?

So I thought that we'd be all over the news with the Chinese torch stuff...

See, I was half worried that the torch would see tons of protests here and then be fine everywhere else, but it seems like everybody else is also mad at China, so it's a global fiasco.

Going back to the well

Coverage

I kinda reached a point a bit ago where I realized that I'd forgotten about some of the stuff I wanted to accomplish.  I had spent too much time doing normal shooting and not enough time doing crazy lighting.  And I wasn't using my light toys.

I realized that part of this was a programming problem.  See, I discovered that the sort of logic that I wanted to program in was just getting too obnoxious when written in assembler language.  So I sat down and rewrote the firmware in C one day.  I had targeted it for the scheduled session with one particular model, who turned out to be a drama-queen flake... so it was not until a bit later that I actually got a chance to use it.

I'd also realized that I hadn't tried to do any good lighting setups in a while, so I started playing with some self portraits with good gelled strobist lighting, too.

Paths

Anyway, I think I went back to the well to do some really cool stuff.  Key thing I'm doing is combinations of techniques.  So, instead of just painting with light, I'm painting with light plus using my strobes, which does much to increase the hit rate.  You won't notice as much if the model moves and it gives me a very controllable base level of exposure to work with.

And it feels good to have gotten back to this stuff.  It turns out that just writing the firmware in a different language helps a whole lot.

It looks like I can get one or maybe two shoots with one set of color patterns before I need to make a new set of patterns.  This is huge compared to the rave toys you can buy...  I can have a lot of variety in the looks I get.  I'm only scratching the surface of what I can do with these boards.  The first generation was just some simple triangle-waves.  Now I'm going to have multi-step repeating sequences.

Mandy

Dono, it's also nice that I found three really cool models in a row, after some models who were drama queens.

The most recent one and I were on the phone before the shoot, and I had kinda interjected that I was doing this for the fun of shooting, not because I was a big commercial photographer.  And she told me that she was in it for the fun as well.

Big upshot, of course, is that I'm absolutely drowning in film to be dealt with at the moment.  And more needs to go to the labs.

But yeah, clearly every time that I lose the urge to shoot, it comes back, and it's actually a positive thing, because I'm usually better with a bit of reassessment and thoughts about what I need to work on.

I can't wait to see what reesie does after being brainwashed last Friday by yours truly.  Can fishnets not be far away? :D

Wow... suddenly lights come on

So I've got my email sorted out pretty well, with a bunch of stuff nicely merged.

And I kept getting these LinkedIn invites from people I didn't know.... and it turns out that if you go back far enough, I exchanged maybe one email with them ever.

MS Outlook is 95% gone from my life

I'm doing a huge email spring cleaning.

The remaining things stored in Outlook:

• Some really old emails, a decent percentage of which is spam
• A bunch of fairly out-of-date address information
  

Otherwise, it's all on my pair of IMAP servers.  See, mail comes in to sitesuck, my hosted Linux box.  But storage is expensive on sitesuck, so I really don't want to have all my email there.  So immediately useful stuff is split out into folders, spam is separated out, etc.

All of the mailing lists that I wouldn't be checking while at work or on the road and my old archives are all copied over to another IMAP server, junkyardog, so they can get as big as they want to be.

I'm going to like this.  I'll have a super clean view of my email now.