Category Archives: Photo Stuff

New phone, new lens, same old Facebook

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I still exist. Things have happened, but I’ve been less interested in writing about them and more interested in just doing them. However, my photojournal has been updated through today and photos has a couple new galleries, so you can hit them for all the details.

The last few days have involved new toys. Last Wednesday, work upgraded my old Blackberry (bleh) to an iPhone 5 (meh?). This was a decent thing, except I quickly found that the iPhone fails at its namesake… that is, it’s a pretty terrible phone. My first day of using it involved lots of “huh?” and “what?” comments from both ends of the conversation, whereas I’d never really had issues with my Blackberry. I suppose the iPhone is better for things like GPS (but not maps? well, at least it has maps…) and apps, but that’s not what I use my work phone for. Both of my primary usages of the phone (email, which was better with a physical keyboard, and the phone itself) have actually been downgraded. As such, that “upgrade” has been a large disappointment.

However, I was recently convinced by Greg to (finally) purchase the 35mm f/1.8 lens I’ve been wanting for several years. It arrived just before Thursday games, which gave it a perfect opportunity to be broken in, and it worked pretty awesomely (for low-light, indoor photography), and continued to be useful every day since (as there have been events every day since). In fact, since I took my first photo with the lens at 5 PM on Thursday, I have taken 1050 photos with it. It’s super fast, it’s super light, it’s wider angle than my 50mm f/1.8, and it’s also super quiet (since it’s a SWM lens).
My only real problem with is not an issue with the lens but with how I use my camera… I always shoot in single-area focus mode, and I tend to leave the selected area in the center and reframe rather than moving the focus point. As a result, when I’m shooting wide enough to get more than peoples’ faces, I tend to focus on the person’s torso rather than their face. Which worked fine with my old (f/3.5 and up) lenses, but fails with my f/1.8 lens since the depth of field is often too narrow to get their face and torso both in focus. (This wasn’t an issue with my 50mm f/1.8 because I can’t frame much more than someone’s face with it.)
So, overall, I’m extremely happy with my new lens. It literally has not left my camera since I first mounted it (even when I had taken my 18-200mm lens along as a backup).

Besides that, as I mentioned in my last post, I reactivated my Facebook account with the goal of using it as a contact directory (and not actually updating it or checking it), and it’s actually working out well for that purpose. However, in even the brief time I spend on it to click through to someone’s profile, I discovered that Facebook now logs (and shows in your history) every search you make (including click-throughs to profiles where applicable). On the one hand, I’m sure they kept this information before, so at least they’re showing it now. But on the other hand, WTF, guys. I’m tempted to once again deactivate my account, but instead I’ve been wiping all information from my wall (“Timeline”), removing all uploaded content, leaving all groups, and wiping my messages inbox. If I’m going to be forced to use you to be able to contact certain people, you’re going to get as little information as possible from me.

Anyway, boo walls of text, so here are some photos with my sexy new lens.





Edit: Okay, Facebook, what the hell?! It’s bad enough that it’s difficult to untag yourself (has to be from the activity log and not from the original post item), but you track when you untag yourself too?! I swear, you’re logging every single click I make *somewhere* and you’re going to regurgitate that information at some point in the worst way possible. :\
Also I can’t find any way to untag myself from recent tags (like in photo album descriptions).
Time to deactivate again? The creepiness of Facebook is seriously overwhelming its usefulness as a contact information directory for me.

Election, Facebook, RPG Get, and internets

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There was an election on Tuesday. It was my first time using a no-paper-trail electronic voting machine, and that made me more nervous that it should have. I then spent the entire day worrying about the results. In the end, it turns out my worry was for nothing, but it was still not a great experience.

To be clear: I am not a Democrat, and don’t (and didn’t) vote along party lines. That said, I think Romney is a terrible candidate (since his campaign decided they would just ignore facts and say whatever they wanted), the Republicans as a whole are an unreasonable party taken over by the far right (like in the general party denial of science, desire to increase military spending while cutting everything else, and goals of cutting taxes for the ultra-rich). It wouldn’t have been the end of the world had Romney won, but I think we would have been set back many years and would come out the other end worse off for it.

I don’t know. I think this article does a reasonable job of summarizing my views on Republicans. I often feel like, had I been born 20 years earlier, I would be a Republican. As it stands now, it seems I identify more with the Green party (90% agreement with Jill Stein) and Libertarian party (80-ish% agreement with Gary Johnson).

I think the lack of an ability to contact friends is getting to me enough that I’m going to reactivate Facebook (probably tomorrow). That said, I still plan to keep it blocked like it is now to prevent it from doing horrible tracking across the web on me, and I don’t plan to actually use it since I still disagree with the short blurb style of modern social media. I just think it would be useful to make sure I always have a means of contacting friends. Stupid Facebook.

Progress continues (slowly) on RPG Get. I have a text-only test deck created, so I should soon be able to see if the mechanics work at all. If so, I can tweak and refine them. I’ve also been feeling the Photoshop itch lately, so I might start designing card templates. We shall see.

I went through today and cleaned up my legacy online presence, which mostly means I went through and deleted old pages from Angelfire. I remembered I had http://www.angelfire.com/dc/alan, but it surprised me when the password reset indicated my email address was also associated with http://www.angelfire.com/pro/gildershadow. It’s kind of interesting to look at the old version of the Shadow and Gilder Shrine. It kind of makes me miss video games. At some point, I should bring my Gamecube (or Dreamcast) back and play more Skies of Arcadia.

Speaking of Angelfire, it’s become rather terrible, but I guess that’s the norm for free hosting sites these days. Its interface is super cartoony, its password reset functionality doesn’t even really work (it errored out on me every time, but apparently the password had been properly reset?), its control panel is super sketchy (throwing errors pretty regularly for things like deleting files), and you can’t change any account information (more errors). It makes me glad I have my own domain now.

I’m bored, so have some quick and horrible Photoshops.

Life in general goes.

Life, friendships, photo firsts (Kathleen, Ty), and photo stat graphs

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life has been updated to go all the way back to my first photo.
It’s really interesting to look back and see fragments of my life from back then, and it’s also interesting how little I used to take photos. The “Photos taken today” value starts out in the single digits, fluctuates wildly (depending on the day and event) between ~150 and ~30, and then starts to creep upward in high school.
Much of this is probably due to the cameras (slower to react) and storage (small internal memories only, small memory cards). But as you start going forward in time, you start having more and more documentation until my senior year of high school hits and I have photos from almost every day of school.

Anyway, the stats page has also been updated, so it’s time for more photo firsts.

First photo of Kathleen:

October 29, 2000 in front of my parents’ house after she came over.

First photo of Ty:

December 21, 2000 when he came over for a sleepover. (The photo is tiny because that’s the resolution I took it at. Yay old digital cameras!) It’s a bad photo because he was doing silly poses for the camera.

I might post more old photos later, but for now, you can go and look at them in life.

In other things, going back and looking at old photos has made me feel kind of nostalgic.
I read an article a while back about why it’s hard to make friends when you get older, and have been pondering the idea in general.
I left my friends group in middle school to go to a special high school (and was later completely abandoned by them when there started to be conflict between our schools over funding), and didn’t have trouble making new friends.
In college, I was thrown into a new situation in a new state and didn’t have too much trouble making new friends. (Took me most of the first semester to find my group though, rather than just latching onto people I knew or lived with.)
When I moved to San Francisco… pretty much nothing. The people I interacted with were people I had already known from college, and it wasn’t until Greg visited me and introduced me to Sharon that my social life there started to exist.
I think the big difference is that, in high school and college, a bunch of us were thrown into a new situation together where we knew very few people (if anyone). We were all forced to meet people and make friends. When you start work though, you’re entering a situation where most people already have lives and friends, and it’s harder to work your way into an existing group.
This is probably also why I am not having much success at making new friends in Pittsburgh. Not that I’m really complaining though, because I do a lot of fun things with the people who are here. But it’s worrying all the same since the people I know here are continuing to move away.

Edit: Here is a graph of number of photos taken by month. The y-axis scale is logarithmic because early months had double- to triple-digit numbers of photos taken, and later months regularly had thousands (and the extreme had over 12,000).

Here’s the same graph with a linear y-axis scale.

Here’s a graph showing number of photos over time.

And here’s a slightly more obscure graph on number of days it took to take another 1000 photos. The x-axis is number of photos, and the y-axis is number of days elapsed between the 1000 photos. (Basically, this measures how often I took photos.)

Tartan, games, People Wars, photo firsts (Owen, Charles, Mark, Justin)

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Today was Tartan production. I was supposed to do layout for sports. What this meant, in practice, was staring at the intranet and its distinct lack of sports articles that were ready for layout. I did manage to get the first broadsheet page to copy though, but that’s because it was a page 3/4 full of ads, so I just filled the remaining 1/4 with a sports commentary and submitted it. Instead, I did some copy and some photography and did some early layout for the special section. Because, oh yeah, the TOC is this week. (I’m not going, thankfully… but this means that some awesome people are back in town and hopefully I will get to see some of them again.)

Afterward, Keith, Dan, Marina, and Owen came over and we played games.

I won the game of Ingenious against Owen in a tiebreaker… up until my last play, we were completely tied (lowest color at 9, next at 11, next at 12, next at 14, and two maxed out). I ended the game with a play that increased my third-lowest color by one and won the game. It was amusing.

Won the (very short) game of CMU Chrononauts when other people patched the timeline to my character’s desired state. It lasted less than four times around.

Lost the game of 6 nimmt to Dan by one point (16 to 17, with Greg in third place at 34).

Then I won the game of Bohnanza by tiebreaker (cards in hand). Dan, Marina, and I all had 14 gold and Owen had 13 gold.

So it was a night with many (very) close games, which was a lot of fun. Friends are awesome, and games are awesome, and I’m glad that games with friends are becoming a regular part of my life.
(There was also an awesome gaming marathon with people last weekend.)

There was interesting funness Friday night when there was a party celebrating Patrick’s successful thesis defense. There will likely never be photos posted from that, because yeah. It’s amusing to me how much grad students can act like undergrads when it comes to alcohol and partying. But there were board games at that too, so I have played lots and lots of board games this month (plus the usual Thursday board games at Yubin’s), and it’s not even 1/3 of the way through the month.

I’ve been working more on People Wars’ new expansion set: Exchanges. The theme of the set is effects that hurt you but grant some larger benefit (like reducing your hand size to 1 but letting you play more items each turn, or reducing work on tasks by 1 but not working when exhausted and letting other players use the character to play cards). I’ve been really happy with how People Wars is coming along… as a game, it feels more mature than its previous variants (PPA TCG, Student Wars), and I also feel like each expansion set has a distinct theme and feel.

In any case, it occurs to me that I never bothered posting the first photo I took of Owen, Charles, Mark, or Justin even though I added them to photo stats, so I should remedy this.

First photo of Owen:

November 2, 2007 in Scotland Yard (with Sully, Sam, and Josh)

First photo of Charles and Mark:

April 27, 2006 at the SCS BBQ (this was before I knew them; can you find them both?)
My first photos of them after actually meeting them were in San Francisco on July 12, 2009 and August 4, 2009, respectively.

First photo of Justin

August 31, 2008 in front of my apartment building (when he was coming over for games)

Meme: ITG and comprehensive camera stats

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It seems that 8 will be moving to the bay area at some point in the near future. This makes me sadder than it should. Meh.

As for meme topics, we have ITG. Which I’m actually not quite sure what to say about.

The first time I played DDR was in a Gameworks in Arizona Mills, probably in middle school or so. I didn’t know what I was doing and stepped on the arrows pretty much as they came on screen. Then I added another player after the first song (which that machine apparently let you do), wasting some money because player 2 only got two songs instead of three.

I think I started being interested in it in high school, when we went to a Fry’s Electronics and they had the PS version of DDR set up with pads. This was intriguing, and my parents bought me a PSOne, DDR, and two mats with the promise that I would play it for exercise fairly often. (Of course, this didn’t really happen. I was such a horrible kid. :P)

My first real experience with the arcade machine (and hard pads) then was in college when I came to CMU and discovered the DDR machine in Scotland Yard my freshman year. From photos, it seems the ITG machine appeared around December 2005. I remember the brief period of time when the machines existed side-by-side, and I remember being annoyed at the “elite” ITG players who wouldn’t alternate with DDR players (like myself) since you couldn’t play both machines at once (the music got mixed up and way too confusing and threw everyone off).

I think I really got into ITG the summer I had the PLSC internship in Pittsburgh (2006). I played with 8 at least once a week every week that summer, and managed to progress up to 10s. (I think the desire to avoid my room and my horrible roommate at the time had a lot to do with this.) I’ve pretty much been playing since then, although my general interest in it seems to have lowered somewhat.

At this point, I’ve stopped trying to improve on song difficulty, and have mostly resigned myself to playing casually in the 9-11 range. I also really, really like marathons and mods, so I’ll do that a lot. But the ITG machine at CMU has been having issues lately, and the stupid company in charge of it keeps screwing it up, so I don’t know if it’s really something I’ll continue doing regularly.

Also, wow… I’m making a lot of posts this month. This is weird.

I now have 296,595 tagged photos in Photoshop organizer. I think we’ll break 300k by the end of August. Or maybe not, because I’ve been taking fewer photos lately. We shall see.

I went through and tried to find the first and last photos taken by each camera. Photoshop organizer doesn’t let you sort by filename, and I have way too many files to do EXIF data searches, so some of this may be off by a few. (In particular, finding the “last” photo my Intel camera took is a pain because it still works, and I was using it for its portability even though high school even when I had gotten the Kodak camera. And it didn’t even record any EXIF data, and you can’t do a “negative” search in organizer. So blah.)

And it turns out the photos aren’t all that interesting anyway. So here’s just the dates of each camera’s first and last photo.

Intel Pocket PC camera October 6, 2000 September 18, 2003 1077 days; 2.95 years
Olympus C3000 Zoom September 28, 2001 December 5, 2003 798 days; 2.186 years
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 December 8, 2003 March 17, 2006 830 days; 2.274 years
Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years
Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 Current (last July 20, 2012) 1089 days; 2.98 years so far
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 Current (last July 25, 2012) 880 days; 2.411 years so far

Getting numbers for how many photos each camera shot would also be interesting, but not easy to do.

Edit: Searching by filename and using the power of maths should give reasonable estimates of total photos. Therefore:

Intel Pocket PC camera 15,829 photos $200 14.7 photos per day 1.26¢ per photo
Olympus C3000 Zoom 10,647 photos $450 13.3 photos per day 4.23¢ per photo
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 49,413 photos $500 59.5 photos per day 1.01¢ per photo
Nikon D50 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 18,571 photos $70 17 photos per day 0.38¢ per photo (so far)
Nikon D90 97,068 photos $780 110.3 photos per day 0.80¢ per photo (so far)

Cost estimates don’t include charges for accessories (extra batteries and lenses in the Nikon case), electricity, or memory cards.