Hand Coding

My cousin Ian and his fiancée Briana got married last weekend (Labor Day weekend) in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. As it turns out, they live in the Chicago area (I believe), but they chose to have the wedding in the Charlotte area since many relatives (including Ian’s parents and my parents) live there.

Ian and Briana had their wedding at a botanical gardens in the area and it was lovely. There happened to be a 30% chance of rain on the day of the wedding, if memory serves, but it didn’t end up raining until quite later in the evening. The reception was held indoors, so the rain didn't have much of an effect on the festivities; and, even when people went outside for a smoke (or just to go outside), there also happened to be an awning around the circumference of the building.

It also so happened that this was one of the first opportunities I’ve had to make use of my Lightsphere flash diffuser. The basic idea with diffusers, if you’re not familiar with them, is that they serve to diffuse and scatter the light coming out of one’s flash in order to help reduce that portrait-in-the-headlights look that can be common to some cameras.

With the Lightsphere, like all diffusers, the enclosure attaches to the end of one's flash. On top of that, an additional strategy that’s often used — and one that I put to use — was to fire the flash upward to reflect it off the ceiling. In may sound a bit weird to fire, at first, but by firing the flash upward, the light becomes even more diffuse as it bounces off the ceiling (and then the walls and so on, a bit like billiard balls might travel across a pool table).

What ends up happening is that the light which may have formerly been harsh and direct is now much softer and generally absent of that yucky-flash look. This is all a good thing, but I can attest that it can take a little getting used-to. One adjustment (both on the part of the camera and its operator) is that the camera isn't always able to compensate for the longer distances that the light from its flash has to travel (up to the ceiling, off a wall, nothing but net and onto the subject).

Fortunately, this generally only requires a few minor adjustments to bump up the flash power; unfortunately, the operator has to remember to do so. In my case, I fell more into the latter category. Luckily, I was shooting entirely in RAW mode (well RAW+JPEG), so I had some leeway toward adjusting some of my shots that had ended up a tad underexposed as they came out of the camera. In the end, though, I was quite pleased with how things worked out. I had a great time at Ian and Briana’s wedding and the photography fun was just an added bonus.

One of my coworkers, T.Scott, had his pen start leaking on him after a recent flight. And, in case it might help anyone else, I thought I’d write a short post about a strategy that has worked pretty well for me. In short, you can generally prevent pens from leaking if you keep them upright (tip pointed-up) during flight.

That way, if the air expands within the chamber (due to a change in air pressure), the air can harmlessly escape through the tip (rather than pushing the ink through it). Typically, I’ll use the pen’s clip to attach it to one of the in-flight safety cards in the seatback in front of me just before takeoff (while keeping the tip pointed up, of course).

PS Some pages that address this topic also recommend removing the cap during flight (while keeping them pen upright) to allow further airflow through the tip of the pen. I’ve had good results without having to remove the cap, myself, but that option is there if you had wanted to take extra precautions.

As I do every March, headed down to Austin earlier this month for SXSW. I also brought my new camera along, a Canon 40D which I’ve had since around February. To go along with that, I rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens from lensrentals.com (an awesome online lens rental shop, if you ever need that kind of thing).

I had always heard generally good things about image-stabilization including some reports of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/8 sec or even 1/4 sec. Given that I seem to encounter a fairly average amount of camera shake (as opposed to an extraordinarily low amount of it), I was cautiously optimistic about how much the image stabilization system might be able to help me.

In short, I couldn’t be more pleased. If the phrasing wasn’t so religiously-exclusive, I might even be tempted to call this the Jesuslens (see also: Jesusnoun.) Or, put another way, if this lens wasn’t around $1,000, I probably would have bought it by now. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I knew that I’d be hand-holding shots at SXSW and I was hoping that this lens would come through for me — it sure did. I managed several keepers at 1/8 sec. and even down to 1/6 sec.

With the aid of the back of a chair in my hotel room for additional sturdiness, I was also able to work through a set of four 1/2-second exposures of the Austin skyline which I then was able to stitch together to form a panoramic. (Incidentally, Photoshop CS3 is more intuitive than I thought it’d be for making panoramas. They’ve really improved that functionality over CS2.) I may have to try that panorama-thing more often — that was kinda fun.

I’m going to SXSW this year (in fact, this weekend) and I was looking around for an online calendar that might help me plan which panels I was going to. (South by Southwest, in case you might not be familiar with it, is a music, film, and interactive festival/conference in Austin, Texas.) The sxsw.com website usually has a semi-usable calendar, but I just couldn’t get it to work this year.

Some friends of mine mentioned a third-party calendaring option, Sched.org, and I thought I’d give that a shot. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s great — it’s easy to use, intuitive, and uses just enough Ajax to be helpful without getting in the way. Anyhow, I’ve worked out my calendar and I think I’ve figured out most of the panels that I’d like to go to. As you might guess, if you see two panels listed for the same time slot, it means that I like both of them and just haven’t yet figured out which to go to. For instance, like these:

• Saturday, March 8: Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device vs Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (both at 2 p.m.)

• Sunday, March 9: Scope Creep and Other Villains vs Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (both at 10 a.m.)

• Monday, March 10: Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update vs WaSP Annual Meeting: Don't Break the Web (both at 5 p.m.)

Of course, I’m open to ideas if you have any suggestions on resolving those stalemates. One way or another, I’ll figure things out :).

My parents moved to a new house in the Charlotte, NC area over the summer (more specifically, to Cornelius, NC) and I went to visit them over Thanksgiving. Naturally, I took my camera along and I’ve posted my shots from the trip.

In addition to my usual camera gear, I also took along my WhiBal white balance card and it worked a treat. In particular with the turkey preparation scenes within the kitchen, the lighting was an amalgamation at best — there was cloudy-sky natural light coming through the windows, a few overhead CFLs and the occasional splash of incandescent light from the adjacent rooms. I’m not sure any sane person would have known how to manually set his or her camera’s white balance to properly account for that, but it was a complete non-issue with the WhiBal. Such a handy gadget, that.

I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.

For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.

It’s early March and that can only mean that it's time for SXSW, a multi-part film / music / interactive festival. I’m only going for the interactive part, myself, which focuses on design, web coding, and such. Anyhow, if you’ll be down in Austin, here’re some of the panels I’ll be going to:

Saturday

• 10:00 am — A Decade of Style (with Eric Meyer and Doug Bowman)
• 3:30 pm — Stop Designing Products (with Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path)
• 4:05 pm - Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
• 5:00 pm — From Tags to Riches: Life After Code

Sunday

• 10:00 am — Accessibility Wars: A Report From the Trenches (with Sharron Rush of Knowbility)
• 2:00 pm — Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web…but Were Afraid to Ask
• 3:30 pm — Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use (with Ian Lloyd of accessify.com)
• 4:05 pm — The Future of JavaScript (with Andrew Dupont)

Monday

• 10:00 am — Ajax Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Shui (with Jeremy Keith and Derek Featherstone)
• 12:45 pm — The Weblog Awards, Trade Show Day Stage
• 2:00 pm — The Growth and Evolution of Microformats (with Tantek Çelik)
• 4:05 pm — Javascript: The Big Picture (with Peter-Paul Koch / ppk)
• 5:00 pm — WaSP Annual Meeting: Takin’ it to the Street

Tuesday

• 10:00 am — Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields (with Brendan Eich of Mozilla)
• 2:00 pm — Music From the Masses: The Remix Revolution
• 3:30 pm — How to Make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Usability Work Together
• 5:00 pm — The Ultimate Music Recommendation Smackdown

As you might be aware, I went on vacation to South Africa in February with my family to celebrate my mom’s birthday. There’s not need to focus on numbers — or at least that’s what she would say ;) — but let’s just say that it was her 3Cth (hex) birthday. Anyhow, I’ve finished processing the photos from my trip to South Africa and I’ve posted those at Flickr.

I was also pleased to be able to make use of my new camera, a Nikon D80 that I had bought just a few weeks beforehand. I went with the 18 - 135 mm kit lens at the time and it worked out great. I’ll probably buy a faster lens at some point (this one is F3.5 - 5.6) — or maybe even one of those fancy vibration reduction lenses — but I wasn’t about to start dropping big money on accessories right after the purchase of the body & kit lens.

I was away for about two weeks and I took 110 shots. I selected about 60 of those to process and, in doing so, whittled down the list to 35. It’s not that I don’t like processing photos — once I get going, I find that it can have an almost zen-like quality — but some of them just didn’t work out for one reason or another. Most often, one of those reasons was that I ended up blowing out my highlights for one reason or another. Put another way, once you hit pure white (255, 255, 255), you’ve lost all color information for that pixel and even if the image as a whole is darkened (such as to correct exposure), that pixel can only become grayer.

For example, if you’re taking a shot from within a darkened restaurant that happens to include one of its windows, you’ll probably end up with a big ol’ block-o-white where that window would be since the camera is attempting to set its exposure based on the rest of the (darkened) scene. Or, in my case, you might be taking some shots from within a museum that happens to include a handful of skylights (to name just one example). Dangit. I guess when your colorspace has “only” 256 shades of gray, there’s not much you can do. (Maybe shooting RAW might help?)

PS I offer a tip of my hat to Scott Kelby’s book, “The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers” — though I’ve been making use of image editors for years, I hadn’t extensively used Photoshop up until I started processing these photos. The book is very down-to-earth and has screenshots every step of the way; I recommend it highly.

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 10.2 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

Kottke is reporting on a promotion by Swiss Knight cheese where they're offering 500 American Airlines frequent flier miles with the purchase of each cheese wheel.

Now the big thing is cheese. This weekend I was handed an opened wheel of processed cheeses by a friend. He said that his brother-in-law had caught wind of a frequent flyer promotion whereby you get 500 miles for each purchase of this cheese wheel and had purchased 75,000 miles for ~$300, which also means he’s got more opened cheese wheels than he knows what to do with. […]

I may just have to stop by the supermarket on the way home from work this evening ;). (And, it certainly doesn’t hurt that DFW Airport is one of American Airlines’ hubs.) [Via: BoingBoing]

Update 2006-11-29: I checked the Albertson's just off Arapaho & Hillcrest on my way home from work last night, but I couldn’t find any Swiss Knight products :-/. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Albertson’s as a chain doesn’t carry them, but I didn’t see any at that store.

SXSW is loads of fun, but, invariably, there’re some tough decisions on which panels to go to — this year is no different. I've managed to figure most of them out, but there’re some for which I’m still a bit torn. So, for these guys, I’m open to suggestions :).

Saturday, March 11th — 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

• How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting (Room 18ABC) …or…
• James Surowiecki Presentation: The Wisdom of Crowds (Ballroom E)

The DOM panel would normally be a shoo-in for me, but I remember hearing from a few people last year that the similarly-titled panel “How to Bluff Your Way Through CSS” wasn’t merely a snarky title, but literally a panel on how to pretend that you’re knowledgeable about CSS. If that’s the case with this DOM iteration, I’m not so sure I’d be as interested.

Monday, March 13th — 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

• Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common Ground, Part 2 (Ballroom E) …or…
• Microformats: Evolving The Web (Room 17AB)

Eric Meyer or Tantek Çelik? That’s a tough one. On one hand, I dig web standards; on the other hand, I always end up missing Çelik’s panels on microformats (due to conflicts like this one) and people tell me that they’re very good.

Monday, March 13th — 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

• Peter Morville Presentation: Ambient Findability (Ballroom E) …or…
• WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel: Getting the Job Done Right (Room 16AB)

And, in this case, Morville’s presentation sounds really interesting, but I don’t really want to miss out on the accessibility bits either :-/.