Snapped a picture looking out over the experimental farm through this morning’s rolling fog. Those are trees and a little shed. No horizon line, though – just white meeting white.

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Despite the the cake and cards celebrating my birthday, I don’t think the implications of being 35 really sunk in until I got on the treadmill last night to practice for the Winterman run and had to update my age. I know it’s just used for target heart rate calculations, but it was a bit [...]

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I was at the hardware store again last week and needed a couple of things from their loose hardware area. Two bolts, four washers, four nuts. It was like 24 cents worth of hardware that I needed to make a pair of handy clamps.
I bring the bag to the checkout and the lady looks at [...]

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I went back to life drawing after a bit of a hiatus and had a really good night – I even exceeded my expectations a bit and managed to not horribly embarrass myself with my final drawings. The guy posing (Jarl) was a real pro – he was doing crazy dynamic poses using [...]

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Yesterday was kindof a disaster for buses – we were getting sleet and freezing rain, so inevitably they were running really late and/or were too full to pick us up when they came. Finally a 176 stopped for a gang of us on Merivale, and we packed in like sardines, only two blocks later to [...]

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I read a while back about Reaction-Diffusion algorithms and always wanted to try them – really neat organic patterns (like leopard spots and fish stripes) can be modeled using a surprisingly simple set of rules. This works kindof like the “game of life” algorithm – you throw down a bunch of noise, and the pixels [...]

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I was talking in an earlier post about my slide photography rig – I’ve been messing with different techniques for capturing the slides since then and coming up with some ideas. I had an interesting brainstorm on the weekend which turned into a failure for unexpected reasons, and I thought I’d share.
After rummaging through the [...]

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I’ve started noticing this set of cheap photoshop tricks showing up on everyone’s 3d renderings. Here’s an example! I put a bunch of grey cylinders together and rendered them out with the default camera (and a sky light) and the result is kindof flat and boring.

But then you can take it into Photoshop and add [...]

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I’m building a slide-photography rig to be able to quickly capture a bunch of old family photos, but didn’t expect the inside of a PVC pipe to be so shiny. So my first few attempts produced some really fun swirly distortions that I thought were neat.

A good friend lent me his slide scanner, which does [...]

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The odometer in my 2003 Kia Rio reads 66666 today – the mark of the beast! The end of days is upon us! Someone call an exorcist!

On a less theologically cataclysmic note, this demonstrates how little we use the car – it’ll be 9 years old in a few weeks, putting my annual driving total [...]

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