Update 8am: Some weeks it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Headed out the door this morning, went out to the garage and hit the button to open the door. Apparently it had frozen down overnight. The opener broke it free, but when it did, there was much jerking and bouncing, and the chain for the opener jumped off the sprocket. After a half-hour of trying to fix it, working up a sweat, and giving my collection of blue language a good workout, all I had succeeded in doing was working up a sweat, tearing up some knuckles, and jamming the cable on the other end of the opener so it’s completely screwed up. Called for professional help, and what do you know, I’ve got time to do some more shovelling outside. Maybe I will get the area in front of the garage cleared yet.
Ugh.
As I mentioned yesterday, there was no power at work, so I got a snow-day. It wasn’t a complete day of lazing around by any means, since the snow was wet and heavy and shovelling it turned out to be an all-day task (broken up by trips inside to rest up and cool down), but by the end of the day, I’d caught up on a few things around the house, shovelled all the sidewalks, and given up on shovelling the area in front of the garage. I’d tried to start the neighbor’s snowblower figuring I’d clean up the area between our garages with some mechanical help, but that turned out to be a no-go and was probably more exhausting than heaving around shovelfuls of soggy whiteness.
What the heck. It’s supposed to get warm next weekend, and I can attack the packed-ice trails my tires will make in front of my garage once more of the snow is out of the way. Right?
|
| Pillsbury A-Mill |
| 1860x2752(475k) |
| 432x640(22k) |
Today’s picture is the first one I’ve processed using HDR techniques that turned out something like what I actually saw at the time. It’s far from perfect, what with everything in the left half of the image looking blurry from a little motion between the various exposures, but the medium-size version looks okay, so I’m relatively happy with it.
I think the answer to getting even better results is going to require a two-pronged attack. One is to hang some weight from my tripod so it’s less-likely to wobble around between shots. The second is going to be figuring a way to adjust the camera and take the next exposure without touching it. The auto-bracketing only does three frames I think, and requires a trip to the menus, but I need to take a look at it and see if maybe I can use that to make this sort of picture turn out better. At which point I’ll probably get bored with it and move on to something else.
- Whenever things are looking glum, taking a few minutes to read Jeff’s assplosion story cheers me right up again. I love me some internets. They prove that life could always be worse. Probably not safe for work, due to language. [WVSR]
- Rob from Cockeyed.com got a credit card from a Torn-Up Credit Card Application. And people look at me like I’m insane when I run those things through the shredder.
- Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt says Ready or Not, Bird Flu Is Coming to America, and people should start stocking up on foodstuffs. Three months after a strain that can jump to humans hits the country, half of the people would have been infected. Well. [instapundit]
- And if that’s not spooky enough, Technology Review talks about The Knowledge of how to make bioweapons. A long and scary article. [instapundit]