Category Archives: Photo Stuff

Waterrr, Photo Firsts (Maja, Russell, Ryan, Kartik), People Wars

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So we’re watching Austin’s apartment over the summer while he’s gone, and as I am alone for a couple weeks, it falls to me to make sure things haven’t exploded and to move his car a bit so it isn’t unhappy.

So I go to do that today, notice his kitchen sink is smelling a little funky again, and run some water down it and run the disposal to clean it out. And… water everywhere! (I guess the drain pipe somewhere under the sink leaks…?)
Which would be bad enough on its own, except there’s apparently some water sensor under his kitchen cabinetry that started going off. Loudly. Loud enough to hear from the elevators with his door closed. So that was clearly not going to work.
Of course, given that Austin is currently in Japan, calling him was not an option. (Called Max and asked him to poke Austin on IM for me, but no luck there either. Sorry for waking you, Max. D:) Checked downstairs in case there was a maintenance dude or some office or something, but no luck there.
I tried finding the source for a while, and unplugging every plug I could see in case that helped. No luck, so I started tripping his circuit breaker circuits to see if that would do anything. Still no luck.
I managed to isolate the sound to a specific area of the cabinets, which happened to have a little access panel cut out, so I went to ask a neighbor for a screwdriver, got it open, and found the alarm. (And dried it off to shut it up.)

So that was my morning, which was rather “fun” for some sense of the word. I’m just glad Austin wasn’t super upset about it… apparently it’s done this before to him, and he was never able to identify why. But I guess I’m not running the kitchen sink again. (He gets back in a week and a half anyway, so that’s not an issue.)

Anyway, in entirely unrelated news, I figured photo stats needed more people I interact with regularly, so here’s photo firsts of four new peoples. Stats has been updated with them as well.

First photo of Maja: July 26, 2013 at the climbing wall, with Michael.

First photo of Russell: September 5, 2013 at Max and Yubin’s (for board games).

First photo of Ryan: September 24, 2013 at our apartment (for board games), with Austin.

First photo of Kartik: December 6, 2013 at the climbing wall.

In other other news, I’ve started some preliminary work on the next People Wars expansion: Juxtapositions. (It’s getting weird to come up with good expansion names for letters…)
The expansion is themed around “Dream” cards, which play for free (with no limit) and act like characters once in play, but are discarded at the end of the turn. They’re intended as powerful one-shot things, with more powerful attacks and more traits, with the tradeoff of taking up deck and hand space for a single turn’s benefit. Of course, there are effects that let them stay around and such too.
(Conceptually, they’re supposed to be alternate universe versions of people, if they had gone on entirely different career paths, taken different paths through life, or generally had different personalities.)

Here’s a sample card. Since it’s a new template (for a new card type), let me know if you have any opinions on it.

Life, Photo Firsts (Austin, Max, Yubin, Michael), KoL, wedding

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As it’s the end of yet another 4-month interval, life‘s photo journal and photo stats pages have been updated. The stats update includes stats for Pittsburgh people as well, so here’s some photo firsts:

First photo of both Austin and Max:

April 26, 2012 at Yubin’s apartment after Greg and I were invited to their weekly games night.

First photo of Yubin:

Also April 26, 2012. Same place. Same event.

First photo of Michael:

August 9, 2012, also at Yubin’s apartment at a games night.

KoL has been going. I’ve been ascending more and feel like I’ve gotten better at runs (thanks in no small part to the terrible overpoweredness of the Smiths tome). I fell short of a 3 day Heavy Rains run today by less than 20 turns (hit the hedge maze). The run will definitely be under 800 turns. That’s a rather large improvement from what my runs used to be like.

I’m also really enjoying the new path. The path itself isn’t actually that hard… the extra ML granted by the water is actually super beneficial (at least to me, with like 150+ permed skills), and the path-specific skills granted mean turncount goes way, way down by granting an infinite-use fax machine, a banish, a stunner, a deleveller, item drop, a yellow rain, summonable equipment, and more. Crazy.

As far as weddings go, Susannah’s was last weekend. It was a fairly nice wedding and reception… photos of it are up at photos. This means we’re halfway done with weddings now, at least for this summer. I hear that there will another one early next year. So whee for that?

Photo stats galore

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Today is a special day, because it’s the day when I’ve been taking digital photos for half my life. To celebrate the occasion, life has been updated, and also here’s a ton of different photo stats. :D

First off, some numbers (updated from here). I currently have 360,233 photos tagged in Photoshop Organizer.

Here are the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo as well as the number of days between each 25,000th photo.

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days
150,000 175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000
February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011
147 days 284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days
275,000 300,000 325,000 350,000
December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013 February 17, 2014
245 days 282 days 260 days

Here’s updated stats for my two cameras, plus the D50 (for comparison with the shutter counts below):

Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 – November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years 105,067 photos $570 (+$250 repair cost) 78.8 photos per day 0.54¢ per photo (0.78¢ per photo including repair cost)
Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – June 13, 2014 1782 days; 4.88 years 20,266 photos $70 13.5 photos per day 0.345¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – June 27, 2014 1582 days; 4.33 years 158,801 photos $780 100.38 photos per day 0.49¢ per photo

I found out recently that the EXIF data of photos includes how many shutter releases the camera has made, which is more accurate since I delete many photos I take now. I also found the information for my old D50. Unfortunately my crappy SL30 does not track that data (and the filenames aren’t much help; the first photo is SDC16333.JPG, the most recent is SDC17918.JPG). My Kodak DX6490 also does not store that information (which isn’t entirely unsurprising).
(The D50 seems to store shutter releases as an unsigned 16-bit int, so it wraps around after 65535, so I had to do some maths. The 65535th photo was j4cbo at the Haight-Ashbury Fair on June 8, 2008.)

Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 – November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years 106,916 shutter releases $570 (+$250 repair cost) 80.15 shutter releases per day 0.533¢ per shutter release (0.77¢ per shutter release including repair cost)
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – June 27, 2014 1582 days; 4.33 years 197,675 shutter releases $780 124.95 shutter releases per day 0.39¢ per shutter release

I guess the lesson there is that I delete many more photos now than I used to. It would have been interesting to have numbers for the SL30, since I feel like I delete a lot of those shots given how many come out crappy.

Costco prints 4×6 prints for 13¢ each. To print all 360,233 photos would cost $46,830.29. Also, at a weight of ~2 ounces per photo, the entire stack would weigh 45,029 pounds, or 22.5 tons.

Also here’s some updated graphs.

Number of photos taken by month, log scale y-axis:

Same thing but with a linear y-axis (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU):

Total number of photos taken through time (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU):

And amount of time between 1000 photos (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU, so it starts at 131,000):

Movies, photos, People Wars, work

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In the past few years, I’ve only seen a couple movies in theatres: Frozen this past February with Austin, Yubin, and Max; and The Lego Movie this past March with my dad when I was in Phoenix.
It’s interesting then that I’ve seen both of these movies again in McConomy: Frozen with the rest of the in-town Fairfax group over Carnival weekend, and The Lego Movie tonight with Greg when we were out of ideas of what to do and decided to see whatever movie was showing at CMU.
They’re both really well-done films made for kids but enjoyable by adults. So that’s kind of awesome. I keep thinking I should buy Frozen in Thai when it comes out on DVD. I already enjoy looping the Thai version of Let It Go while I work.

In any case, life has been really uneventful lately. Due to whatever reason, I’ve been taking far fewer photos than usual. A quick check reveals that I only have 318 photos since the end of Carnival (since April 14), which represent a total of 619 shutter releases.
So it’s both interesting how much I edit down what photos to keep now (a huge difference from in high school and college when I would just dump my memory card and keep everything), and how few photos I’ve been taking (619 photos used to represent a single day of photos for me).
A lot of the editing is because tagging photos has grown to be a chore. It’s super useful to have tags to be able to find photos by person or event or location, sure… but having to manually do all that for every photo I keep is rather frustrating. This is probably a good thing for my hard drive consumption anyway.

I think it would be interesting to stop carrying my big camera around all the time. I do so now half out of a sense of fear of not having a camera with me for that one big thing or some important moment I want to capture. And it’s also kind of neat to have photos of mundane everyday life. But my little camera is sufficient for that… and after all, I survived for several months (after the death of my D50) with only the little camera. We shall see.

Work has started on the next People Wars expansion, Hijinks. It’s themed around Climbing characters and Route cards, which enhance task playing and scoring.
I’m worried about maybe having overbalanced the game toward tasks given all of the task-centric cards entering the game recently (and given that I haven’t actually played a game with cards past the Exchanges expansion)… but it kind of feels like attack decks have it so much easier that tasks should be getting boosts. Who knows.





Work has been rather interesting lately. The other senior dev on the team recently left Salesforce, leaving the role of senior team member once again solely on my shoulders. Between that and a bunch of planned vacations from other developers, there are days when I’m the only developer working, and we’re probably down to about 2/3 of our previous productivity. Which will mean interesting things given the jam-packed plans for the upcoming release.
I guess time is showing me to be a terrible leader and coordinator, especially given how I already know I do badly under stress (or, rather, I will get the shit done, but I’ll feel like shit the entire time while doing it and hate my life).
We’re hiring a new senior developer for the team, who will hopefully be able to ramp up and help handle a lot of the knowledge, planning, and design work (which right now I think is falling mostly to me). But until then, onward as best I can.
It’s just frustrating though when a lot of time is being eaten up by bugs and questions and emails. I pulled a task last last Tuesday (the 15th) with the intention of starting it the next day. But between bugs and other things, I ended up not having time to do anything on it until this past Thursday (the 24th).
Let’s hope that’s not a sign of things to come in the coming months.

Connecticut trip, photo stats and graphs

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life has gotten an update to both the photo journal and the stats section. People haven’t changed that much this time around. I guess we’re all getting older and more boring.
Patrick makes his first appearance in almost 5 years thanks to his wedding, 8 drops off for the first time since I moved back to Pittsburgh (since he moved to the bay area recently), and Emily and Justin return after more than a year of not seeing them.
Yay for people.

This past weekend, a bunch of us traveled to Connecticut to see Tim and Kayleigh’s new house, their new dog Scotch, and Mars and Dan’s new dog Panda. It was interesting cramming 11 of us into a 2-bedroom house, but it was a good time and full of fun board games, crazy miniature golf, tasty food, awesome friends, and cute puppies.





More photos are at my photos page.

Photoshop organizer now reports that I have tagged 336,971 photos. (The number of photos taken is quite a bit higher given that I actually edit down my photos instead of keeping them all now.) It might be time to update some stats.

Here’s the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo:

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000 175,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days 147 days
175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000 300,000 325,000
July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013
284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days 245 days 282 days

You may remember the camera stats I posted a while back. Here’s updated stats for the two cameras that still exist:

Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – August 16, 2013 1481 days; 4.05 years 20,033 photos $70 13.5 photos per day 0.35¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – September 3, 2013 1285 days; 3.52 years 135,774 photos $780 105.7 photos per day 0.57¢ per photo

Also here’s some updated graphs (first posted here).

Photos taken by month (log scale):

Photos taken by month (linear scale):

Photos over time: