I spent the morning with my girlfriend, and the afternoon doing house work in preparation for the arrival of the new computer I purchased. I sort of promised myself that before I set the computer up, I would finally gut the “office” (spare bedroom) of everything that had accumulated there and completely clear off my desk.

I was even more motivated when I realized that the computer would show up this week (and it did show up Thu Aug 2).

Needless to say, I’m backdating some of these posts.

As you can see, when the computer did arrive on Thu Aug 2, it was a really large box. The box filled the doorway (width-wise) and was about half the height of the doorway. A truly monsterous box.

No more will I have to suffer through system freezes and reboots (I still think the reason my last computer acts that way is either because of the power supply being too low power or the fact that I went completely stupid when I assembled the CPU & Heatsink the first time around and I didn’t evenly apply the heat transfer gel when reattaching the heatsink… either would cause that kind of problem.) I could have saved money by building it myself, but I might also have had to deal with the fact that I’ve lost the experience I once had. (I’ve only built one computer in the last 6 years… you forget some things when you let it go that long between exercising your skills.)

 

We took to Napa for some wine tasting and dinner.

We visited 4 wineries for tastings, at $10 a pop and got a little tipsy before heading to dinner.

I’d planned this dinner for over a month, and where we were going was a complete surprise until we got up to Napa. It was interesting that my girlfriend mentioned the week prior to us going up to Napa that if we wanted to do some wine tours we could always hit the Wine Train in Napa… :)

If you ever have the chance to experience the Wine Train, I recommend it. The food is a little “shi shi” (as my girlfriend would say). Duck Liver, Crab Dungeness, Caviar, Shark (as the fresh fish of the day), etc.

If you don’t like such foods, then you might instead want to arrange for coffee and desert on the train during one of their “Moonlight Escapades” (train runs scheduled to coincide with the full moon.)

Personally, the Shark had little taste but was good (I’m a heavy flavor kind of guy, so anything with a subtle flavor just gets missed by my pallete. I know that makes me incredibly low class, but oh well.) The Crab Dungeness and Salad in a Basalmic Reduction were definitely top of my list. The sauce on the duck entree my girlfriend had was wonderful. I didn’t hate caviar or duck, but I’d have to say that “the jury is still out” on whether I like them. I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to trying them again, but I’m not anxious to run out and do so.

The train trip was fantastic and definitely made the experience.

 

Sasha, freshly washed. Later she rolled around in the mud, invaded a trashcan and bathed herself in the buttered microwave popcorn bag that I had discarded while watching a movie with my girlfriend, and swallowed a foam earplug before we could pry it out of her mouth. She’s perfectly ok (the ear plug was soft foam and did not breakdown in her digestive tract), although until she got another bath, she reeked of popcorn/butter smell.

I think she doesn’t like the “clean” smell.

 

After working my ass off the week prior (mostly to get ready for my planned 4 day weekend), I had an idyllic weekend spread between my girlfriend’s house, my house and Napa Valley.

We went that evening to see a re-enactment of Shakespear’s play Julius Caeser. If you look carefully, you can see that some artistic liberties were taken with the costume (they were modernized). The director also removed some of the lesser characters from the script and re-arranged the lines (who spoke them) so that he could keep his cast to a minimum.

It was interesting, and some of the actors were even compelling. But knowing that it was an altered (they say “re-imagined” these days) version of the original script, I’m left wondering what it would be like to see it performed in the original.

 

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My brain hurts.

 

More from Stross’ blog, it seems that some enterprising gold farmer killed many gnomes repeatedly to spell out the website address of where you can go to buy gold.  As if Gnomeregan wasn’t bad enough, now we have gnome farming in Ironforge.

I apologize to my friends in Vengeance (Warcraft Guild, Feathermoon-RPG server, Alliance faction) who read a link on their forums to this post, which is yet again a link to the original article.  As a partial apology, I’ll link the photo from the article here:

 

I find William Gibson to be fascinating (in a remote and cursory way).  I’m a big fan of his earlier works and purchased Neuromancer in hardback many, many years after it was written simply to have it in my library.  Certainly the world has not gone Cyberpunk, but there are many elements of Gibson’s writing style that have come about.  I’ll spare you the off-topic banter and move on.

I subscribe to the Amazon Blog which listed an article today, the third in a series of three, detailing an interview with William Gibson wherein, Gibson referred to Charlie Stross’ assertion that there will never, ever be any manned space flight.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross‘s argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it’s so convincing. I read that and I’m like, “My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child.”

William Gibson, in the above referenced interview.

Googling for Charles Stross led me to this blog about the Stross speech concerning the future of Space Flight.  It’s a fascinating read, if you want to take the time.  The summary is that apparently Gibson got it half wrong.  Stross is not anti-Space Flight, he’s just very practical in his approach to what it takes for space flight to happen.  It would be better said to say “Stross believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel, until certain fundamental sciences catch up with the human imagination (i.e., magic wand.)“  Stross in his response to the above referenced blog (he makes an appearance) comments on how shallow (my words, not his) pro-space-settlers are:

And in the course of wading through 650-odd comments on my own blog, I’ve become rather less tolerant of space settler enthusiasts who assume that if we can just fire a few thousand tons of construction materials into orbit, the messy biological details will be taken care of by the janitor or somebody. Environmental science is the key to space colonization (if we don’t end up doing the upload/AI/posthuman thing), not just an afterthought or minor detail to worry about once we’ve sorted out the space elevator and lunar mines.

Charles Stross, in response to the blog article referenced above.

Of course, following a link from one of Stross’ responses, I ended up at his personal blog (I think), wherein, in much the same flavor of Michio Kaku‘s book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.  (Although the Amazon review is somewhat derogatory, the idea I’m aiming at is the attempt to theorize real-world advances in science and the socialogical changes that result therefrom.)  I’ve not had a chance to read all of the article, but it was such a fascinating jaunt in to the internet, that I felt it was worth sharing.

 

Before I give these to my girlfriend, I thought I’d show them off to you. 18″ chain (thank you Jaserah for the suggestions on picking things out), silver.

4 month anniversary, today.

 

Take 4 sucked, so I’m skipping it.  I’m convinced now after 5 attempts that I have no idea what I’m doing.  I’m learning through a combination of trial and error, mostly error.

Here you can see my 5th attempt at HDR.  The lawn in my apartment complex, near sunset.  With the wind moving the leaves, they will seem a little blurry.  This is exactly what you’re supposed to avoid in an HDR photo, but I was aiming at getting 5 shots to combine instead of my typical 2-3 shots.

Here is the +/- 0 exposure shot (1/25 sec, ISO-100, f/4.5, 44mm focal length), in other words, the “original shot” on which everything else was either over- or under-exposed.

Here you can see that the leaves seem a little more substantial, and the photo is a darker green.  Unlike the HDR photo, the hot-spots of light on the grass and pavement are blown highlights.  In the HDR, they are mostly blown, but you still get some green.

If I take a fragment of the entire frame from the the section of the composition with the stairs (see below)

(see the black frame), you’ll notice some unpleasant tone mapping distortion in the fragment (50% crop) below..

And here (below) is the same photo again with the undistorted sections diminished

If you look carefully at the two circular sections that are brighter than the rest of the fragment, you’ll see where the tone mapping failed because it interpreted the blown highlight as blue (this makes sense when you think about it, because “the sky is blue” and therefore the sky in the background (lower distortion) where the highlights are would be blue.) The other is a tone map distortion (upper distortion) is the result of “ghosting” due to movement of the leaves in the foreground.

As someone (Thomas H Palmer?) said “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

 

Harry Potter is set to be released tomorrow.  I ordered mine from Amazon.com.  And yet already spoilers have been released, the most infamous to date is the guy who photographed the entire book and posted the frames to the internet, the second most infamous is the New York Times article which actually spoils the book ending.

JK Rowling railed against the “Potter Review Spoilers.”

This entry will remain spoiler free, but I can tell you that I want to know what happens to Harry and Ginny probably more so than any other character (or couple) in the story.

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