Author Archives: Alan V

Carnival Photos, Gay Marriage, and Games

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It took me a week, but I finally got all my Carnival photos tagged and sorted (ugh the KGB meeting and Defector’s party were huge pains to tag), so they are now posted to photos2 for your viewing pleasure (all 8 galleries of photos). I’ve also posted a couple of new portrait galleries to portraits.




There’s apparently been a new ad “Gathering Storm” going around lately (and a Colbert parody that is awesome). What I find hilarious is that most of the arguments used in the ad were debunked before the ad even came out, back when prop 8 was the big thing.

Bleh. Religious right fail.

I spent most of today playing board games at Jeremy’s. We played Brass, which is a lot of fun and seems amazingly well designed. Then was a game of Agricola while Christine multitasked and played Power Grid on the Europe map at the same time (which features such interesting features as a city that gives discounts on trash and regions that disallow nuclear plants). Yay for deep, strategic games. <3 Agricola so much. Christine, of course, dominated both games (Agricola with an astonishing 60 points, Brass with a more reasonable 145 or so) and also won her game of Power Grid.

Life will likely get an update tomorrow.

Go Kart Racing

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Today we went Go Kart Racing as a team reward for winning the peer technology award thing. It was a lot of fun. but more difficult than I expected. I ended up 10th out of 14 or something. Oh well.

Some photos from Carnival are posted on Facebook. I mostly just clicked through each of the folders and randomly dragged images into a folder, trying to only include photos with people I knew (with a couple exceptions, such as the Mobot photo). I’ll post more comprehensive galleries to photos 2 later, I just wanted to get something up there so I didn’t feel left out.

Apologies for the lack of photo posts lately. I’ll try to include some with my next entry.

Carnival Over

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7 days, lots of people, and 10755 photos later, my time in Pittsburgh has come to a close. I had more time this year, and so got to do a lot more of the things that I wanted. However, I still can’t help but feel like I didn’t get enough time to spend with everyone. I suppose the only way to remedy that would be to live here full-time.

In any case, it was an awesome week, and many of my photos will show up on photos 2 or portraits at some point… likely not until later this week, since I will want tomorrow to sleep in and recover from the awesomeness.

So yeah, it was good seeing all of you again. My next trip to Pittsburgh will likely be next Carnival. I hope to see all of you then.

Poor camera

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Remember my senior year when my camera started creating black gradients at the bottom of photos when the shutter speed was too fast (over 1/60 or so, depending on the focal length)?
It’s doing it again now, noticibly so with the flash when zoomed. Ugh.

If you see me taking photos with my camera upside down this next week, that’s why. For some reason, doing so eliminates the problem. I will also likely shoot buggy this way since 1/200 at 300mm = half the frame is black.

On the bright side of this… the last time I had my camera repaired, I told myself it would not get another repair. As it seems to be on its way out again, I will be buying a D80 at some point in the near future. Yayz.

Also, in unrelated news, I did a test shoot of photos of 8 today, and it was interesting.

Boo for Great Clips!

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Today in the adventures of aIan and Alan, we got really, really bad haircuts. Whee!
At least mine looks a little better after the shower and subsequent restyling.

Lesson learned. Supercuts is acceptable but pricier. Great Clips is cheap cheap cheap but terrible.

Also, Pittsburgh is awesome and yet, even with a week, I’m still worried that I won’t have time to do everything and see everyone that I want to.