Sorry for the delay my friends, I’ve been really lazy, I was on the road for 3 weeks straight, and at the moment I’m enjoying being lazy, but I’ll have SEVERAL posts up soon.

B

I’ve been reading a lot about HDR photography, and was inspired by these 2 collections of HDR photos: 20 great HDR photos part 1 and part 2. I decided to give it a shot, having never done it before, and only using my Canon powershot SD 750.

HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range“, it is a photography term. I’ll distill it down for you as I understand it, you take several pictures of the exact same thing, usually from a tripod, but each time your exposure values are changed. If you took old school photos with a 35mm, that’s increasing/decreasing the shutter speed to generate under/overexposed photos. If you’re on a point-and-shoot digital it’s changed the EV value from -2 up to +2 over a series of shots. HDR is typically in high contrast situations, for instance, shooting into the sun: if you expose the sun properly everything in the foreground is dark, if you expose the foreground properly the background will be washed out (backlit). But, when taken of everyday things that you wouldn’t ‘need’ HDR for, you can get stunning results:

Now mine isn’t necessarily stunning, but it is pretty cool looking, and quite dramatic when you consider the originals:

After you take the originals you combine them is Photoshop, it has an HDR feature, and then to really bring out the surrealism you apply a filter made by HDRSoft called Photomatix.

It was definitely a good first try, I think this will come in pretty handy since I like to take pictures of skylines when I travel all the time, we’ll see what I come up with.

I’ve been a ‘pirate’ for about 8 years now. Pretty much as soon as I set foot on a college campus, it was what everyone did, and this was during Napster’s hay day. After Napster shutdown, I resorted to stealing files from the UNM network that users left exposed (this was usually intentional on their part and almost all music files). When I exhausted that, kazaa/limewire was on the scene. I used kazaa for a long long time, and eventually I got tired of downloading one song at a time, only to have it turn out to be static that was planted by a record company in the network. It would seem that I quit that right before the RIAA started snooping on shit, and lucky for me, I never had an open share folder, I just downloaded. And then, Sloot’s brother turned me on to BitTorrent, which I perceived to be really complicated at the beginning. Since then, BitTorrent has gained public acceptance and they have super easy to use programs now for 5th graders and house wives. Consequently, more and more things are available via BitTorrent; music, movies, software, ebooks, and often times it’s used to legitimately distribute large files, like homebrew indie movies. When I got a laptop for work I started getting more and more into downloading movies, usually the ripped files from a DVD (as opposed to the handheld camera in a movie theater). One uploader has proven himself over and over again, that is AXXO, and his counterpart KLAXXON (who came to fame by ripping older movies when axxo took a break for a couple of months). If you google either of those terms, you’ll be greeted with a flood of torrents that are backed up by thousands of seeders, I downloaded The Bourne Trilogy this morning and at one point was rolling at 449kb/s, the fastest I ever remember in NM was 170kb/s.

Things in pirate land had been going just fine, and then the concierge asked me this morning why I couldn’t burn all those movies I had downloaded to a DVD so that we could watch them on the TV. I didn’t know the answer the that question, but in this day and age there must be a plausible solution right? Indeed, which brings me to the next level of piracy. To burn a video file you must first convert that file to DVD format. This was done by Xilisoft’s AVI to DVD converter, torrent provided here. The trick with that one is that the original file must be an AVI, and for a 90 minute movie the conversion takes almost 3 fucking hours, but it’s worth it. If you’re original file is not an AVI check out WinFF which is a freeware program that will convert pretty much any video format to any other format, this program is also useful for making videos play on your iPod. Alright, now that you have your DVD video files, you need to put those on a disc for which I recommend Nero 7, and of course there’s a cracked version here. Now what’s really amazing is the quality, it translated incredibly well to TV, I thought it would’ve been much worse, but from a couch’s distance away, it looks awesome, and it’s all mother fucking free!!!

The next step is for me to cancel my cable and use that money to get a netflix account and then rip every single one of those disc, which I’m told is also easily accomplished using DVDShrink.

Happy Plundering!

WIRED Magazine used a picture of my tattoo online for a section called “Reader’s Best Geek Tattoos”, how rad would it be if they actually printed that in the magazine:

Woot!

I’ve been pondering the idea of selling my car and relying solely on public tranport and my ever-growing collection of bicycles to get me where I need to be.

Why I should do it:
The savings would be staggering. My monthly expenses for my car are my loan payment $310, insurance $217, and Gas $50. Quarterly expenses include oil changes which I do myself but still cost $30 in materials, and occasionally I wash the thing which runs about $20 when I do it right. So over the course of a year I would save myself $7,124, or $593 a month! That’s like getting a 13% raise! Not to mention the whole ‘it’s cool to be green’ thing and using less gas.

Why it won’t work:
It’s fucking hot here! So riding my bike to the corner grocery store would entail sweating like a mother-fucker and when the outside air temp is 115, it’s closer to 140 on the pavement. When I returned from the grocery store I would promptly have to shower and do laundry. Plus, if I rode my bike to a social function, I’d be sweaty and disgusting the entire time. As far as public transport is concerned, it’s amazing how slow it is. When driving from my house to the airport (which is the primary function of my car and my job) it takes me about 15 minutes with traffic, it’s 7.6 miles away. To do this same stretch using CAT (Citizen’s Area Transit) takes an amazingly long 1 hour 35 minutes, which includes walking 2.4 miles often times while carrying 3 bags of luggage.

That just won’t work, for a 6 am flight, I need to be at the aiport no later than 4:45am, which means I would have to get on the bus 3:10am! That sucks balls! In the future, the city is planning on rolling out “ACE” Rapid Transit, which is similar to ABQ’s Rapid Ride. I have no idea what the ‘ACE’ acronym means, or when they plan on having it unveiled, but the proposed route they have only travels the strip to downtown, nowhere near my house or the airport.

If we only had a train system like DC or the Bay Area, but we don’t, so I’ll spend $7k this year instead. Unless there’s something I haven’t considered…