May 2007 Archives

Great quote found at Mask Photo:

Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn't a very interesting photograph. If it was, they would have more to say.
-Anonymous

Grrr..... while I appreciate that Apache 1.x is old and busted and it's long past due to have converted to the new hotness of Apache 2.x, it really sucks to have your server's OS distribution simply deprecate the package and disable the ability to build it as well as anything that depends on it.

About 2 weeks ago Gentoo packages for Apache 1.x were masked in portage, which basically means they are marked for removal and the next time you update the system you get a message saying that the the Apache 1 packages are blocking the Apache 2 packages, and you have to remove them before going forward. Not a huge deal, I've heard that this was coming for a while. However, I was a slacker about it. So my idea was pretty simple, set up Apache 2.x on a different port on the server so I can run them both in parallel until the newer version is tested and everything is working fine, then remove the old version and swap the port over.

All this would work fine, except that along with masking the Apache 1.x core package, all the dependencies were modified as not to have to build for Apache 1.x. So for me I didn't have Apache 2.x installed when I setup PHP originally, so it doesn't have the Apache 2 module built, and I can't just rebuild PHP with Apache 2 support because that'll lose it the Apache 1.x support, as the current PHP package has Apache 1.x support removed.

Bah.

I found a possible solution in the forums which pointed me to downloading an older PHP version from CVS sources and installing it. Just a matter of wondering if it'll break anything unexpected. Also if I want to do any system maintenance like this at 11pm with a bit of (lovely and smooth) tequila in me :) Answer is probably no, I'll do it tomorrow sometime, or on the weekend.

I guess I can't bitch too much at the distro, they announced this change weeks ago, long enough for me to have setup and installed Apache 2 and had it all tested and swapped over long before 1.x was gone. However, it'd be nice to leave some of the dependencies around a bit longer... course, it really isn't the best OS for a stable server I'm (still) finding out... way to cutting edge and keeping on the cutting edge.

Today after the tire changing incident, I wanted to do some "studio" work with a nice flower Firefly got from my parents over the weekend. I have wanted to do the classic style still life because I could see it in my head, and wanted to see how hard it would be to create that in camera or a "studio".

I say "studio" because I don't have one, and have no idea how to work in one if I did! The budget version though is out on the deck, with my old dark blue curtains draped over the back of two deck chairs with a flower in a vase sitting on top of an upside down basting tray under the curtain. The basting tray lifted the vase about 4" off the deck, which made it slightly less hard on my knees as I got down to eye level with the flower subject. Also it made it so I didn't have to have a downward view as my tripod doesn't go quite that low. It was still very odd though.

I'm pretty sure I looked funny when firefly came home and found me half lying on the deck peering through a viewfinder at the odd arrangement :)

Still life definitely isn't as easy as putting a flower in a vase and taking a picture of it! First of all the background and lighting are tricky. I was using natural light, and the dark blue curtains weren't nearly as dark blue as I had thought they were, and they looked way to bright in the pictures (I was hoping it'd be dark enough to give me a plain background). Next time I'll light the subject myself a few stops brighter than the background. Second thing was the environment, lying on the deck, sun going down so it's constantly changing light.. sucks. Third I just realized that I took the pictures with the sun setting relatively behind me, which means I might have gotten different/better light with it off to the side more. Moot point if I do this with my own lights though (well, if I had them that is). Next is the subject... it's a nice flower and all, but it needs to be more/better different somehow. I guess the folks that make the really nice still life know how to create those subjects.

In the end I put the resulting pictures through Adobe Lightroom to do the black and white conversion and some playing with different color levels/filtering, then some minor levels/curves tweaking in photoshop. The first image is one I prefer more, but follows my previous macro flower photography, not so much the classic still life. The second one is more the "type" of picture I wanted, just way better than what's there.

Mondays are a drag to begin with, especially after a weekend after a 3 day week. Monday mornings are super-extra-double draggy when you start driving off to the train and hear an odd "wappa-wappa-wappa" noise coming from the car. Pull over (about 50 feet from the driveway is as far as I got) and found my back tire completely flat. Ugh. Ok, not going to make the normal train. Luckily my spare is inflated and I remember how to use the jack. Got the later train at least.

Middles of Monday suck, but are made even more sucky when you get a call from your wonderful fiance (that wasn't the drag) saying that the nail in the tire wasn't a simple patch job, but had destroyed the sidewall of the tire as well, so you have to get either a new one or a used one (lucky for me I got a used one setup and balanced for only $100).

The end of a long Monday (which started very early and seems to be ending later all the time) sucks even more when you know that you will have to change a tire for the second time in the day. Bleah.

Now this is brand commitment... this guy got a tattoo of the optical layout of the Pentax 71mm Limited Edition Prime Lens. Yowza. I like cameras too, but I don't have quite that much love for them :) Course, at least this isn't a big logo or something :)

A couple of good friends from out of town are in for a couple of days, and we decided to go see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

I didn't like it. It wasn't that it was bad, it just seemed like both the studio and the editor went nuts a few times. First of all, it too way too long to get to things. There were some great battle scenes that too basically the entire movie to get to. Then they lasted way too long. At a certain point I really just stopped caring about the characters at all and wanted to finish the thing up so I could go home! We also waited throughout the entire credits to get to the scene that is after it. Waste of time there, sorry, but while it was an interesting reveal, the 30 seconds of footage wasn't worth the 10 minutes of credits we sat through.

It did have it's good points though. The characters were still great, the cameo by Keith Richards was fun to watch, and there were some good snappy funny lines (though sadly not as many as the first one).

The main problem with this movie was they seemed to want to push way too much into it. Aside from the problems of the intertwining "who is betraying who" plot lines, it seemed almost like the director was sitting there saying "we have to have a scene with a giant whirlpool", and "lets give some wonky mystical explanation for this character here", and "make sure that we have a scene with Jack Sparrow fighting Davy Jones on a mast.... in the rain.... while they're in a frickin' whirlpool!" (at this point I imagine Gore Verbinski (the directory) falling to the ground gasping for air). The trivia on imdb says they started filming without a finished script if that tells you anything.

Yet it was still a fair enough movie! Action, pirates, great special effects, and wrapping up the whole second movie (fairly) nicely. My recommendation though is to see it on DVD if you have a decent sound system/TV set, or on cheap night at the local theater.

Cool article on Digitizing Your Film Archive with Aperture, but should apply nicely to Lightroom or your other DAM program of choice.

Just a random shout out to Joanna Rees and her photography, who is an old classmate from high school who I (re-)discovered through Facebook. Joanna and I weren't in the same circles back then, however same as what happened to another old friend of mine, Jason, she's into photography. This is now another person that I get to live semi-vicariously through, as she's good enough to be doing work for magazines, and from the looks of it, it's very good. Funny how things go full circle in life eh?

Damn you facebook and your addictive qualities!

I borrowed 5 seaons of The Sopranos from my uncle in law last week and let them sit for a while, until I was sick with a cold last week before finally putting the first disk in, just to check it out. Damn, what a great show! It certainly helped that I saw Goodfellas for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and have heard the real Henry Hill a bunch of times on the Stern show to help me get into it. So basically the last week I've been watching 1 or 2 or 5 episodes a day (more over the weekend) and have ripped through the first season and a half.

It was really funny to watch Firefly adamantly not watching through the corner of her eye as she pretended to read on the couch (she refuses to watch The Godfather too), and then call and ask what happened if she was out of the room for any time while I was watching... but she's not watching it, no sirree.

The issue for me of course is that the series is coming to an end (only 2 episodes left I think) I hear things about the latest shows in season 6 and know that I still have another 68 episodes to go through (that's 3400 minutes or two and a third days!). I wonder if there's an episode list with a list of episodes you can miss, you know, the "fluff" episodes... thing is, with there being only 13 episodes a season for 5 seasons there won't be much fluff.

So yea, don't start watching The Sopranos if you can avoid it, it's really good :)

My buddy Shawn called up this lazy Sunday morning and wanted to hit the swap meet. Since I'm always one for the fun, excitement and danger of the swap meet, I agreed. Standard stuff, rows of bad DVDs, plants, crap, more crap, etc etc. My one golden find was a dingy looking copy of The Complete Battlefield Collection, which consisted of Battlefield 2 and the three booster packs: BF 2 Special Forces, BF2 Armored Fury and BF2 Euro Force. Big scratch on te DVD, but that didn't seem to matter for the install, and more importantly, the registration codes for the boosterpacks worked! Wh00t!

Of course, I've been playing the next iteration of the Battlefield series, Battlefield 2142, and coming back to this game (even though it's not that old), I'm realizing how much better 2142 is as far as speed to load, UI in the menus, etc etc.

Oh well, I got it for $15 (it was labeled as $35), so I'm happy. I didn't even think it'd install or register properly, so I'm way ahead now :)

A day of firsts for me, though none of them really hugely exciting :)

• First time finding one of my old jobs (from the graphics place where I had the MacBook) on a job search site. I'm sure other jobs of mine may have ended up on places like that, but I've never actually found them myself for.
  
• First cold or sickness of the year :( I sound like an 80 year old 4 pack-a-day jazz singer, deep and throaty. Sadly I also am sneezing, sniffing and have what feels like a rasp in the back of my throat.
  
• First time being called "fucking useless" by a client. After what felt like a really long 1.... 2..... 3.... count he did say something like "awh, I gotta give you guys a hard time," but I definitely did get taken aback, and had to search my memory to see if I'd dealt with this particular person before and that I could expect that sort of joking familiarity with him. Just kidding around I guess, but fairly unprofessional. Kudos to my manager to calling to see if I was actually affected by the guy, that was nice. He didn't want to give me a month off and a raise for the mental trauma that it put me through though :)