Freecycle

Freecycle is an amazing thing.  Erica and I have used it to get some interesting stuff, like a basket for her social sorority and me for some film.  

I’m amazed that I have been able to acquire so much free film.  In the lot today I got two rolls of Fuji Velvia 50, one roll of Kodak Portra 160, a roll of Kodak Supra 800, and a roll of generic ISO 400 from Dollar General.  Evidently the roll of Kodak Supra I got doesn’t exist anymore.  I was shocked that I got two rolls of Velvia as I’ve heard it’s amazing.

In other news, I’ve decided to not use Target anymore for my film processing, the negatives weren’t cleaned properly, the scans weren’t that great (but better than Sam’s), and they weren’t cut.  Not having them cut meant I couldn’t get them easily rescanned by a friend from work who has a flatbed scanner with negative scanning ability.  I think I’m going to wire up some white LED’s and make my own top light to try and scan my negatives on our scanner.  My next developing job will go to Hy-Vee Drugtown and if they suck, I’ll put the money into the photo club from work and get a discount from the camera stores in town.

I have gotten my photo workflow a little more organized.  When I finish with a roll, I input the shot data into a file template I created for a script I wrote.  This particular script, written in Python, sets the EXIF data of the film scans using the shot data I recorded put into the file.  I need to polish it up by adding some error checking and working out the code being called from a different directory than the one you have your pictures.

Another Start to Another Weekend

It’s another Friday night and I’m chillin at home watching Lilly while Erica is out doing stuff with her mom. I was going to play Halo but Justin is going out with people and Rick didn’t answer his phone.

My car decided to shit itself yesterday and I had to leave it in the parking lot at work over night. I looked at it over lunch and the serpentine belt has come loose and the tensioner has sheared off of it’s mount and lodged itself between the engine block and the chassis. So without cooling going to the engine it’s not a good idea; not to mention the lack of power steering or having the battery charge up.

I was just messing with the OS X Automator to create my own workflow for certain things and it’s a pretty cool feature of the OS. I now have a workflow to batch rename files to “image-XX.XXX” and another to convert to gray scale (black and white essentially). The only problem with Automator is that you can’t have it ask for user input, it if did, I could easily make a batch resizer which asks for the percentage to resize the image to.

No luck with the camera winder from the guy at work. His eBay auction didn’t have it in the box, but I am going to get the broken Pentax ME Super (all black and hard to find!) that was in the shipment. Evidently the mirror is locked up, but I have some ideas on how to fix it. It’ll be exciting if I can get it working because I’ve realized that I need manual control for panoramas. Aperture priority works fine until you get to different light into the sensor that changes the shutter speed causing the exposures to not match up. Since I don’t have the winder I can go ahead and load the 36 exposure roll into my camera and hopefully head out to the Sac & Fox Trail bright and early in the morning for some pictures along the river.

I’ve made two of the camera lens bags out of the 6 I have material for. I’m sure I can make more, but I don’t have enough boot laces for the draw strings. They work well and I’ve even made a DIY front and rear cap for the 2X tele-converter. I’ll probably work on the rest sometime this weekend, maybe even start sewing one up tonight before I cut out more material for the Pentax 80-200mm, the 135mm for my Vivitar, and the one that Erica has requested.

Post Christmas Update

Been a while, but have been busy due to Christmas and taking care of the kid. Christmas wasn’t bad, was able to fly my Havoc Heli for a while at her cousins’ house. I made them rent Halo 3 since they wanted me to bring the Xbox up and we played some local multiplayer before jumping into Big Team Battle. They got bored with it for a while, so I played the second level (Crow’s Nest) with campaign scoring turned on and got the achievement with 24K+ points. I was pretty excited by that. 7 more meta game achievements then its on to the 5 remaining Lone Wolf/Campaign achievements. I’ll be able to hash out one of them easily as it’s the only campaign one of them left and requires destroying a vehicle with equipment (trip mine and Brute Chopper on Tsvao Highway.

I’ve been hanging out in the iTeam IRC room since I’m trying to get it to compile on my Mac. So far nothing has worked and I’ve tried 5 different Xcode projects.

Sean and his girlfriend will be here today for a couple of days before he heads back to Virginia to begin his initial flight training. Still need to get him his present, but I don’t know what.

I’m rewriting my Tecplot file viewer to read in a generic PMARC output file, definitely a feat in C++, but I’ve figured out how to parse strings easily with stringstreams and the code looks pretty similar to my FORTRAN code that parses the PMARC output file. Haven’t tested the actual reading of the corner points, but the part to get the patch data works. I also need to work on the main loop and the SDL initialization to get it to compile on the Mac. I finally figured out how to do colormaps. It’s not the prettiest solution, but I have it go from yellow to reddish purple. I ended up making a Python Tkinter program to view to colors to see how they go together. Here is some output. I don’t know why I keep messing with PMARC file viewers, but it’s something to program I guess. Maybe I should just for-go all that and try my hand at doing the blog writer using Cocoa and Obj-C or help out the iTeam guys.

I think my wireless access point is going downhill. I need to log in to it to change settings, but can’t connect to it’s IP address. Total suckage.