Another poignant reminder of my own mortality as an icon of my youth shuffles off this mortal coil.
Ride The Wild Surf
The Allen Oldies Band celebrated the release of their new album “Ride The Wild Surf” last night at the Continental Club. Needless to say, a good time was had by all.
Especially entertaining was Tomas Escalante (Suspects/Clouseaux/El Orbits) and his son singing backup on “Sweets for My Sweet”, a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and originally recorded by The Drifters in 1961.
Chromatic Aberration
In optics, chromatic aberration is caused by a lens having a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens).
In real ife what it means is that in some lighting situations my ultra-wide angle lens shows some abnormalities in the form of colored fringing on objects to the far left and the far right of my images as evidenced in my recent photo of the lightning strike over 610 in Uptown.
This is taken from the left side of the original image:
As you can see, the building has a red border along the right edge that is also noticeable along the top of the tree line. If you look at the HDR image I rendered from the original RAW file you will see that the cromatic aberration is much more pronounced.
This is pushing me to learn more about post processing software tools. I have been experimenting the Adobe Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and the initial results are promising:
Vote For The New White Racial Slur!
Gawker.com asked for and received over 350 suggestions after requesting a new racial slur to describe white people. They’ve narrowed the selection down to 10 choices.
Rambins Ivories Osmonds Cyclons Altoids Brunchers Mayflowers Elmers Frecklers The Casians
*EDIT* Aparently the choice is now down to “‘Nillas” or “Altoids”
You can cast your vote here.
I’ve also been reading Stuff White People Like, not only for the obvious humor, but the insightful self examination as well.
Flickr Explore
Flickr uses a software algorithm/program that ranks the thousands and thousand of images uploaded each day based on something they call “interestingness” and then places the top 500 on their Explore page each day.
Nobody can say with any certainty what makes a picture “interesting” or how the algorithm works, exactly, but for sure Explore is a GREAT way to check out some of the better pictures uploaded to Flickr on any given day.
Even better is finding that some of your own pictures have made it to the Explore page.
1. Fake Miniature Car Show, 2. The Astrodome, 3. Minding The Store, 4. Vanishing Point
If you use Flickr to host your own images and would like to see if any of your pictures are now or ever have been on the Explore page you can use this tool at Big Huge Labs to find out.
Saving Throw
A 20 sided glass gaming die from 2nd century Rome sold at Christie’s for $17,925. Apparently the person who sold it obtained it from his father who brought it back from Egypt in the 1920’s
Unusual and intriguing in a nerd/geek sort of way. I must confess a sort of “my precious” desire for such an object.
You can see similar objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Beside Myself
Click image to see full size
Don’t Peep In My Ear
The one time Dooley tends to get territorial is when it’s time to clean his cage. He just can’t seem to stand it when I put down fresh newspaper or wipe the cage skirt. He doesn’t mind coming close for tickles, treatums or scritchums but hates when he feels his precious filth is being violated.
And what does he do to display his displeasure? He makes what I call the “sonic peep”. It’s not whistle, not a hoot or any sound effect. It’s a high pitched, super short “peep” sound. Imagine the quick toot of a coaches whistle…in your ear.
Dooley has mastered the “sonic peep” and knows how to execute it for maximum pain. He moves to a spot in the cage that puts him as close as he can get and peeps directly into your ear when you are quiet and distracted. And boy does it hurt! And I am fairly sure Dooley knows it.
Early on I discovered that Dooley had three criteria for executing the sonic peep:
1. The distance between him and my ear had to the shortest it could be
2. It had to be quiet
3. No eye contact. It is always a surprise attack.
This has lead to the creation of the “Don’t peep in my ear” song which I sing while performing routine maintenance and cleaning on Dooley’s cage. I also eliminate the element of surprise by looking at him frequently.