I was taking some trash out and saw this guy sitting on the wall. So I tossed the trash, and zipped back inside to grab the camera.
There wasn’t a lot of light and I didn’t know how long it would stay put so I used a large smattering of settings hoping that one would come out well enough. That’s the best shot. Most of the others are too grainy from using too high of a sensitivity.
Anyone know what kind of bug that is? Mom, I’m looking your way.
I read The Design of Everyday Things awhile ago. Since then I’ve noticed basic design principles that are either good enough or bad enough to draw notice. Sometimes it’s only in contrast with a better (or worse) design that you realize how bad (or good) a design is.
I came across a particularly illustrative example of this while we were rearranging our books after having purchased another bookcase. Occasionally when you buy a set of books they’ll come in a thin cardboard box. This is the cardboard box that a set of J.R.R. Tolkien books was packaged in:
Notice how it’s built like many simple boxes with a flap that tucks in. You don’t think anything of it until the moment you attempt to slide a book in on that side. The cover hits the flap and you risk damaging the cover if you try to force it.
This is the design of the box that all of the 3-packs of books from the Wheel of Time series came in:
Specifically designed to have no flaps that might interfere with sliding a book back into place!
Since a lot of my work involves user interface design I try to pay attention to functional designs and pick out what is good or bad about them.
It turns out that it’s really hard to create good interfaces, which is why I try to appreciate them when I find them. It can be painful to watch users interact with some of the interfaces we put together at work. As a team we bend over backwards to make things as simple as possible—then you watch someone still completely fail to interact with the system successfully without coaching. It’s hard, but we’re really figuring things out and have been getting a lot of praise for our most recent designs.
If you’re in the application development world and you’ve never really watched an “average” person use a computer, you need to do it. You’ll have your mind blown by how kooky their actions are. It never occurred to me that some people will always drag-and-drop to copy/paste text. They do it because it’s faster than right-clicking and selecting copy and then right-clicking and selecting paste. But they’ve never learned that ctrl-c / ctrl-v is far more convenient. We made some people really happy when we made sure to account for this drag-and-drop behavior in our application. It wasn’t hard to do, we just never imagined it would be useful!
We’re on our way to Utah. I get to recruit at BYU again and with the addition of a plane ticket for Jess we get to have a brief partial vacation for very little cost to us.
At the moment we’re sitting in the airport. Today I had the privilege of refusing to go through the back-scatter machine and instead receive an unceremonious pat down. What a waste of time and money. I wish everyone would refuse to use the back-scatter machines so that they would be forced to get rid of them (or make them mandatory, which is probably more likely I suppose).
The pat down was as much of a joke for security as any other process currently in place. As far as I can tell it’s simply designed to be more awkward than the back-scatter machines so that people will just put up with the machines. It’s a normal pat down (actually I’m fairly certain I’ve received more thorough pat downs going in to concerts) with the addition of touching the bottoms of your feet and swabbing your hands with chemical detector swabs.
It certainly wouldn’t be remotely difficult to conceal something past the pat down I received. When will sanity and cost-benefit studies again be used to guide our decisions as a country?
I did a search a moment ago and was surprised to discover that real-time searching is enabled for my account. This is apparently Google’s big announcement today. It’s kind of neat; no more hitting “Enter” or clicking “Search”.
It doesn’t seem to be active for everyone yet. I pulled up a different browser without logging in to my Google account and there was no real-time searching there.
The name they’re using is “Instant Search” there’s an option next to the search box to turn off instant search:
I recently purchased a 50-200mm telephoto lens as well as Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Photography Field Guide. I’ve been learning a lot. I’ve been trying to apply the things I’ve been learning, so here are some pictures and commentary about what I’ve been up to. (Also, in case you are unaware you can click on each of these to see a larger version.)
When we were down near Monterey for our anniversary I took a whole bunch of pictures and posted a few to that post, but I wanted to do something a little more interesting with them. I went digging back through them and came back to one I posted previously mainly unedited. Here is my new version. I haven’t entered it in competition yet, but I think I’ll be titling it something like “Fading Memories.”
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Last weekend Jess had a campfire / pack meeting for Cub Scouts that we went to. I took a whole bunch of pictures, but only had one that I particularly liked. I used a tripod and took a 30-second exposure. The moon is completely overexposed, but I still like the idea.
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The camera club meets the first, third, and fifth Mondays of each month (if there is a 5th). The fifth Monday meetings are variable. This month we’ve been assigned categories to shoot pictures for. You aren’t allowed to use old pictures; you had to have taken the picture during the 2 weeks prior to the meeting. Two of the categories are “White” and “Reflection.” I came up with these shots:
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This morning Jess had training for Cub Scouts so I got up as well and went out to take pictures. Unfortunately, the sky was heavily overcast all morning so I didn’t get any of the highly desirable, lower-angled, warm sunlight I was hoping for. I first drove up towards Del Valle where the aforementioned campfire had been. I had seen some S-curves in the road that I was hoping I could get some nice pictures along.
This one is a 4-second exposure.
As I was messing around with my settings a bicycler came riding up the hill, so I did my best to quickly set up something decent (I’m taking fully manual exposures to help me learn how each of the settings affects the exposure). I was able to get this shot.
After Del Valle, I drove back into town and stopped at Centennial Park where there’s a totem pole. I know this image would look better if I had some good sunlight; with the overcast sky it’s just kind of flat feeling.
There’s a little rose garden near a bagel shop where we like to grab a snack and read on the grass. There’s a statue there of three kids holding hands and twirling around in a circle. Sadly there’s not any good backdrop in the area (naturally occurring anyway, I’m not to the point of carrying around fabric to create impromptu backdrops). So I framed this up with a cement wall. The wall got overexposed, but that’s better than a car driving by, and I was able to just tone it down to a grey anyway which isn’t too bad.
I tried to take some pictures of the roses in the garden. Peterson recommends overcast days for flower close-ups because you can get nice uniform lighting. This doesn’t work very well, however, when the wind is blowing like crazy making the flower dance around. I tried some “artistic” shots of the blurry flower, but I didn’t like how any of them came out. However, there is a fountain there as well and the overcast sky (along with my neutral density filter and polarizing filter) allowed me to have great control over my exposure. I started with some long exposures, like this 3-second one (using the filters).
Then I cranked the shutter speed all the way up to 1/3200 of a second and removed the filters. I got some really fun stop-motion shots of the moving water.
And this one:
Those have been my photographic adventures for today. I’ll definitely be entering many of these into the camera club competitions. I’m having a ton of fun. I need to start learning how to take good portraits at some point, but Jess does not like the idea of modeling for me.