Gamey portraits

It’s Pi day. Happy Pi day!

It’d been a while since I had done any real photo project, and our new house is begging for things to put on the walls. People came over for games yesterday, so I took advantage of the situation and got some portraits shot for the game room in a crappy makeshift shooting studio in the basement. (This is the photo shoot I had been wanting to do ever since I shot Vincent in William’s stairwell in bright clothing.)




Moar people!


They look pretty good on the wall

I’ll probably get them printed in some nicer format eventually (nice prints in a frame, or maybe canvas prints), but it feels good to be doing photo-y things again. Now I want to shoot more portraits. :X

400k photos and electrical woes

This past Friday was a fun milestone: I broke 400,000 photos tagged in Photoshop Album — Album is reporting 400,307 photos tagged through today.

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
275,000 300,000 325,000 350,000 375,000 400,000
December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013 February 17, 2014 March 21, 2015 November 13, 2015
245 days 282 days 260 days 397 days 237 days

Here’s updated stats for my two cameras. I now also use my work iPhone for photos sporadically, but those numbers are not represented here. Perhaps I should pull those in next time I do a stats post.

Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – October 1, 2015 2257 days; 6.18 years 20,772 photos $70 9.2 photos per day 0.34¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – November 15, 2015 2088 days; 5.72 years 196,539 photos $780 94.13 photos per day 0.40¢ per photo
252,751 shutter releases 121.05 shutter releases per day 0.31¢ per shutter release

And the usual 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):

Here’s the 400,000th (tagged) photo. It’s our electrician getting a wire through the ceiling so we can replace the second-floor panel with a better one.

Which (finally) brings me to the fun we’ve been having with our house.

One of the things the inspection for the house (before we bought it) brought up was the lack of grounded outlets, and general knob-and-tube wiring, on the second floor of the house. Obviously, since I work from home with computers, and we have 6 computers between us, it was pretty important to get this remedied. We got quotes from quite a few electricians, and eventually settled on Patco Electric, as Pat was very thorough and also friendly and easy to get along with.

He comes Thursday to start the work, and things proceed reasonably.

Once the knob-and-tube wiring is out and the panel disconnected, we run into a minor snag upon discovering that the first floor’s living room light, foyer light, and porch light are also fed from the second floor. Not too terrible though… easily fixed by running a wire down from the second floor. (We were pulling up the floors anyway to avoid cutting holes in the plaster walls, so pulling up a few more boards wasn’t an issue.)

Friday, the work continues, and I took the day off work to sit in the house and be available in case things go wrong. The first part of the day proceeds awesomely… they successfully fish the new main wire to the second floor through the first floor closet and into the basement, then through the (finished) basement ceiling and around most of the room to get it into the panel.

It took a couple of tries, and eventually required cutting a hole in the ceiling as the fish stick was able to get through but the thicker cable wasn’t — cutting revealed that the stick was passing through a ~1cm gap between beams that the cable couldn’t have. But that was fine, and the rest of the work proceeded mostly as expected.


The problem came up when they turned the power back on to the second floor. The ceiling light fixtures in three of the four rooms didn’t come back on, even though they hadn’t previously turned off when cutting the knob and tube power. Cue lots of searching by the electricians. A few hours later, it turns out the previous electricians had done some mess of wiring — the ceiling lights have a hot wire coming from somewhere else (probably the third floor), but their neutral line was going through the second floor knob-and-tube wiring. This basically meant they were not shut off via the second-floor circuit breaker, but were dependent on it to complete the circuit, so its removal meant they no longer worked.

The electrician is coming back next weekend to rewrire those lights as well, but yeah… yay for horrible previous people doing horrible things. I guess that’s what we get for buying such an old house. :P

Saturday was a nice break from things, and we spent the day at William’s house where David was having an “experimental music birthday party”. For us non-musical people, it was mostly hanging out and talking, which was interesting anyway. Here’s a fun photo of Vincent in Wiliam’s basement stairwell.

I have an urge now to shoot people in bright clothing against a white background (maybe with board game components?), blow out the saturation for effect, and then print and frame these photos for the game room or something. Perhaps a project like that will happen at some point.

Election, Facebook, RPG Get, and internets

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.

Photoshooooop

Pittsburgh got cold. Kind of yay cold, except today was kind of unfortunate until the landlord turned the heat on. Trying to code when your fingers are numb is not fun.

Piccars!
(Click… they get bigger)