Photo: May 2004 Archives

Addendum: Yes, that's a satellite dish. Yes, that was intentional.

I went to sleep shortly after taking this picture. I had a dream that, in the middle of the night, the carnies started setting up their carnival in our parking lot. It was freaky, largely because I didn't want to go out and deal with them. Luckily, it turned out that it was actually people setting up a rave.

It was disturbing.

Chinchilla taking a dust bath. She's so cute it makes me sick.

Of note is that this was her first dust bath in ten days. And during those 10 days, we force fed her medicine mixed with cranberry juice with an oral syringe and got it all over her chin. She was miserably post-surgery dirty and seemed very, very happy to finally get clean.

Right now at work I'm watching The Merchants of Cool. It's hardly ground shattering to my easily classified GenX cynical world view, but it’s interesting none the less. For example, I had no idea that Hip Hop was universally a mouth piece for Sprite. Who knew? Bwahaha, the mook and the midriff. Ok, so some of these interviews with “young people” are really bizarre.

Speaking of Hip Hop being the commercial mouth piece of a massive corporation, I’ve been listening to cLOUDDEAD nigh-on constantly. Ok, so it’s not the mouth piece of anything as far as I can tell. It’s in my car, it’s in my work space, I brought it to work. Thus far Christine has brought home the self titled album and Ten. It tickles me is a place that’s frightening. I’ve no way to describe it. “Experimental Hip Hop,” maybe? “Avant-garde-hop”, possibly? Who knows. The point is, it burrows deep into my forebrain and lays its evil little eggs of music and bizarre wordplay in the folds.

As is tradition with really wide photos, click the thumbnail to see a larger version.

I took the improvised slit camera's sensor out of the 50's twin lense reflex camera nad stuck it in a late 60's twin lense reflex camera. One with aperature control. And focusing. And the ability to be mounted on a tripod. Stuff already seems somewhat sharper.

Or, here's a "roll out" of a vacuum cleaner.

Plus, with it being on a tripod and all, I can demonstrate another use for slit cameras: panoramas! (There's a TV over there on the right. I'm doing this in my basement with horrible light, so cut me some slack, here.)

What I need now is a more modern, higher resolution, color portable document scanner. One that interfaces via serial/lpt/usb, so it can be plugged into a laptop. Then, I want to make another one, but done right. With proper housing, cable jacks and cabling rather than being wrapped in electrical tape and soldered straight to speaker wire. Not that I'm...you know...suggesting that anyone who has a color portable document scanner laying around get ahold of me to donate it to the cause, or anything...nothing of the sort.

We had coupons for Hollywood Video, so we went out last night to rent movies. Tucked in the parking lot, around the side of the building, a carnival had magically shown up.

Yeah! A carnival! I love carnivals!

Holy shit! This isn't the good kind of carnival, with crowds of people getting fleeced and paying good money to ride a tilt-a-whirl put together by junkies with bailing twine and semen. Nor is it the good kind of carnival where teenage girls trade head for bad pot with greasy, toothless carnies. It's the bad kind of ghost carnival with almost nothing by way of facilities and rides, and no one there but a single family.

I'll be honest. I was too scared to get out of the car. I should probably go back and shoot the creepy lone carnies that sit by the rides and stare at people driving past.

Since it's a heavy-ass picture day here, here's another tiny thumb linking to a really wide version held off site. Give it the clicky-clicky. It's smooshtastic.

It should be obvious to anyone at this point that I've totally lost it.

So when I say "end cap", what I mean is "I'm still awake and dicking around with this."

As an end cap to my long cLOUDDEAD fueled day of tweaking and nerding. here's a photo that's probably too wide for your browser window, so I won't just toss it here. So, please, click the thumb and see the whole thing.

Quick shot of what's left of the scanner...

Quick shot to get across the idea that this is really slap-dash of the back of the camera...

Right here is an example of a full strip.

Oh, and here is one of Andrew Dividhazy's articles on the simmilar yet vastly superior scanner based linear digital camera he built which inspired my little endeavor.

This thing is so very much fun to play with.

Alright. Before I can ramble, you have to look at this picture. Go ahead, I'll meet you down there.

Ok, now that you're thinking "Why the fuck am I looking at this stupid squiggly bullshit?" we're on the same page. This is the very first test shot of my successful, not-at-all-broken, ACTUALLY MAKES AN IMAGE digital strip camera/slit camera. Right now, the guts are strew out of a desk, with the important bits crammed into an ancient Kodak Duaflex II. Which means mystery static f-stop, no focus control and glass that looks suspiciously like some sort of cast resin. But this is proof-of-concept stage for me, so getting something that looks vaguely like wiggly florescent lights is OK by me. Obviously, I'm stoked as hell. I'll have to toss pictures of what I did to this poor scanner so that you may appreciate my concern for its well-being.

I make myself sick. Look at that. Clear, level horizon. Rule of thirds crutch composition (bonus cheese points for doing thirds horizontally and vertically.) Bland stock Iowa subject. Weak-ass fore-middle-back delineation.

Ahhh, now this one is after my own heart. Patterns. Quarters. Quasi-minimalist color. Distracting text. Not even the slightest hint of vast corn fields and natural Iowa what-not.

I need to be back in the darkroom. Bad. I'm obviously losing my mind.

Went and shot a bit at the skate park around noon. I'm never happy with my skater pictures, so I decided to go out at noon so I could blame it on shitty light.

Ok, now don't get me wrong here, but does the sign next to the faded flag say "Black Parent"? It sure seemed like it at the time. Confusing.

Ok, this whole "high speed film grain emulation" on this digital camera is bugging the hell out of me. Remind me, next time it storms all weekend and I'm up at dusk and dawn to bring a real camera to work. At any rate, here's todays UFO picture.

Big old badass thunderstorm is supposed to hit in about 15 minutes. So, you know, here's a picture from yesterday morning's light storm. Here's hoping the power doesn't go out. Or, if it does, that the batteries are fully charged. Or, failing that, that the generator starts without intervention.

Oh sure, they cancelled our warning and gave it to Cedar Rapids.

Note to NPR and other news agencies: Stop talking about cicadas. Seriously. Stop. One story just about did it for me.

Kodak Duaflex II. Takes the god-forsaken 620 format. This is what I'm dropping the scanner guts into, if you've been paying attention to that whole thing.

I was going to write a long, involved rant about how Chalabi's current fall out with the US goverment is a ploy to position him to take a prominent role in Iraq and an indicator of exactly how recently the administration realized which direction the wind was blowing.

Then I realized that anyone who would buy the idea would have already thought of it and I'd just look cynical and crazy to everyone else. So, uh, over here is a really nice tool for Kingdom of Loathing to figure out where stuff is, what you need to combine to make things, etc, etc. See, I'm not crazy. Just inane.

Oh, right. Via Boingboing, there's a great gallery of photos from an abandonded Japanese island/reef/thingamajigger. Whoo-yeee, these photos are fucking sweet.
Seriously.

I just found a leak, quite at random, in another office. There was already a trashcan under it, but the leak had spread out a bit and the can required repositioning. I swear this place is going to shit, but at least both of the bathrooms are in working order again.

Oooooh yes. The guts of the scanner are almost exactly how I hoped they would be. Ok, there's one ribbon cable that's shorter than I would prefer, but that's ok.

J3 has been eating crickets that are larger than I would prefer, but she's a real trooper about it. She's started building herself little off-the-ground hammocks around the cage. Which is kinda bad since the crickets get tangled up in them. And when they get tangled up, she doesn't hunt them down. See, she's just not that kind of spider. I really need to clean the thing out, since she's been doing that odd bird-poop looking thing and leaving husks everywhere.

Last night was a trip down memory lane. In an attempt to get this hand scanner up and running, I plugged in an old hard drive. Which turned out was my old main HD, circa 1998. Hooo boy. Old code, old graphic work, old horrible windows 95 networking whatnot. But I got it working. And now all I have to do is break it, then fix it in my oh-so-special way.

Then cram the whole fucking thing into an antique Kodak that doesn't take modern film. You know, same old-same old.

Got a Logitech scanman today. It uses an ISA card for an interface, which I hadn't even thought about. So now, I must dig through these old machines and try to find one that's old enough to have ISA slots but new enough to handle GIMP/XSane.

I've been enjoying checking the referrals from search engines.For example, this served to amuse me greatly. I'm not sure what's more humorous, that someone would search for "Hunter S Thompson Nipple Tweaking," or that I show up as fourth on the list. Either way, I feel like I'm missing something. Like, there's a really great picture of HST giving Nixon a really vicious nipple tweaking that I've never seen. Or there's an inside joke there somewhere.

Not to be a slobering fanboy, but if it were for sale, I would definantly buy the home version of "Kingdom of Loathing." I realize that the whole competative/clan/chat thing is part of the game, but the 40-turns thing is killing me. If you've no idea what in the world I'm blathering about, just ignore me.

I feel like pinball is on the upswing in Iowa City. At the Deadwood tonight, all three tables had multiplayer games going on at the same time. I was there for a couple hours and I never once touched the Lord of the Rings table...though I'm starting to enjoy the Simpsons table more. You'll have to excuse me for nattering on about bar games. I've heard rumor of an Asteroids machine in town that I never knew existed. Which is exciting in a really horribly nerdy way.

Additional: I just found this guide to manipulating the Kingdom of Loathing economy. I'm amused.

It's that time of year...the time of year where I have time to prep and post things that have been sitting around for five months.

Of course, this also brings the risk of posting something I've already posted before but don't remember. If you see something like that, point it out and I'll reward you by going, taking and posting a photo of someone bellowing one of these damn Herky on Parade statues.

Kingdom of Loathing is fun. It's somewhere between nethack and Legend of the Red Dragon. With stick figures, pop culture references and drinking. Plenty of drinking, for sure.

I need a negative scanner. Or a decent flat bed.

I also need one of those old school rolling hand scanners, but that's on the way. I'm going to try to install it on a brownie and see if I can make a workable digital slit camera out of it. My thinking is that if I'll need a laptop with me to capture, I may as well use stepper motors to control the roller, which controls the data aquisition rate. But yeah, I'm nerdy. We've covered this.

It's finals week at the University of Iowa. This means that sleep is, in general, at a premium. The neighborhood I live in is probably right around half student. I was up late last night studying and procrastinating studying. I had a final at noon and fully intended to get up with barely enough time to get there on time.

Around 7:30, the happy fellow shown below, opens up with his chainsaw down the block. And of course, being a professional tree-trimmer, he has to have some way of amusing himself during the long hours of attacking foilage with machines. The way that he used to keep himself amused and occupied was by trying to keep the chain moving at an exact velocity. Even when he wasn't actually cutting anything. And I'm sure it's very satisfying to be able to tell how fast the chain is moving and affect its rotational speed with nothing but the shortest bursts of power, but by 9:30 when I finally gave up on sleep, even I could tell just by listening. Sure, a chainsaw is pretty obnoxious, but it's so much worse when the noise isn't constant.

Mushroom hunting photo from a while back.

I'm really enjoying this whole digital camera/macro/spider combo.

I've spent this week pulling all-nighters in the darkroom. I'm to the point where I could stop printing and have a project, but there's a load of prints that I intend to reprint early next week. However, I'm going to have extra 16x20 fiber paper. And the paper I use is rebranded name-brand paper that's almost expired. The rub is, it's quite possible that by the time I'm back in the darkroom in the fall, it might not be the best to work with. Since I don't know *what* brand it once was, I can't really be sure if it'll print well later, or if it'll be grey highlights and muddy shadows.

So yeah. I'm tempted to blow through the extra paper, making gift and sale prints. Really just gift prints, since I've never actually tried to sell a print. In spite of all of my rambling, if you think you qualify for a gift print, this weekend would probably be the time to remind me of all of the wonderful things you've done for me.

Early, I stated that Jerusalem the third was a sexually mature female. Well, guess what? My guess on maturity based on size was wrong, wrong, wrong. She just scared the crap out of my by molting, which if you catch it at the wrong time looks like a horribly mangled dead spider.