Speaker for the Diodes

QotD

2008-08-19T09:26:39Z

"For the philosophically minded - I humbly submit the following lesson: Only preach to the converted.

"When I found out about the hidden world of government malfeasance and financial cabals that are responsible for so much misery in this world, and that exist with the help of the media's complicity, I naturally assumed a lot of people would want to know. I spent all sorts of time and emotional energy on my soapbox, to be met with bored stares or snide remarks. The only time such speech-making and arguing was productive was when I had found someone already inclined to my way of thinking who was looking for answers, as I was.

"So Liberals, stop trying to convert Conservatives, and vice versa. Veggies, leave those BBQ eaters alone. If you want to change the world, start with yourself so as to provide an example, and then only preach to people who ask for a sermon!"

-- Ernie, 2008-04-03, responding to a Things I Wish They Had Taught Me In School essay (which was pointed out by siderea.)

Evening Forecast

2008-08-18T20:57:08Z

Not Good: still not moving well, feel like I'm thinking at quarter-speed, got too little sleep and it's now too late to safely nap and expect to wake up again in time for rehearsal.

Call it about a 25% of my actually getting out the door this evening. *sigh*

QotD

2008-08-18T09:26:37Z

"The annoyance we put up with at the airport is not a by-product of terrorism; it is the goal. It has become increasingly obvious that the real aim of terrorists is not to blow up plans but to inconvenience travelers and cripple an already overburdened airline industry. When one thinks of the staggering loss of time, money, and materials that are a result of increased security measures only one conclusion can be drawn: the terrorists have already won." -- Billy Biondi, 2007-12-29 (comment)

QotD

2008-08-17T09:26:39Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-10:

"Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci." -- Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)

["He who mingles the useful with the agreeable bears away the prize."]

http://www.presserfoundation.org/history.htm

(submitted to the mailing list by Patsy Wang-Iverson)

Pain Day

2008-08-16T21:26:05Z

Ugh. Not having a good day. Ran an errand earlier that was so close I felt guilty about driving, but when I noticed that just working the accelerator pedal was painful I figured that walking wouldn't have gotten me there today. Had planned to go to Storvik post-Pennsic revel tonight, but not sure pain meds will be enough. :-(

Also having problems with random stuff (not just my body) failing to work. Cell phone charger died (have kludged substitute working now), kitchen scale broke (may or may not be repairable with plastic cement), and clothes-dryer finally made good on its threatening noises and stopped working last night (with a load of sheets and towels in it).

On plus side, have fresh vegetables in kitchen given to me at Pennsic by the friend who grew them, have bananas purchased from an arabber yesterday, and have been promised some of neighbour's too-many tomatoes. (That's four people I know or have heard of who wound up with absurd quantities of tomatoes this year. OTOH, tomato consumption seems to be way up as well, so they're finding people to give the excess to. And the small tomatoes (especially grape tomatoes) are amazingly sweet this year, at least the ones being grown in MD and VA, which may account for increased tomato consumption.)

QotD

2008-08-16T09:26:44Z

"Car accidents are a leading cause of death for teenagers. The school board and your elected representatives want to make sure that you and your families are spared from such a tragedy, which is why the money for driver's ed was eliminated from the budget. Whereas last year I was teaching your older siblings how to shift and brake and three-point-turn during a six-week course, it has since been decreed that I actually need just one afternoon to tell you the only piece of safety information I'm permitted by law to share:

"The ONLY 100 percent effective method for avoiding car accidents is to ABSTAIN from driving until marriage.

"Yes, yes, I know you've been bombarded with messages from popular culture about how much fun it would be to get behind the wheel of a red convertible, find an unbroken stretch of country road, and, with the wind in your hair, see what she can do. I know that up until now you had the mistaken belief that getting a driver's license was a cherished milestone of your young, sweet, innocent lives. It isn't. It's a milestone, all right: a milestone indicating terrible pain, degradation, and certain death."

-- from "Abstinence-Only Driver's Ed.", by Suzanne Kleid, McSweeney's, 2008-02-22

How Many Tents?

2008-08-15T19:08:21Z

Does anybody have a good idea approximately how many tents there are at Pennsic? Do you think it's safe to assume that the ratio of tents:people is reasonably close to 1:1 (what with dining tents and storage tents, vs. tents with more than one person in them (and folks living in non-tent structures)) or is my guess regarding how many people share tents too low? Will the US Air Force (or Army, or whomever it is that uses us for photometry and reconaissance practice) tell us how many tents they counted? (I've heard they check the attendance numbers to find out how well their population estimation algorithms work, and that we make a rather convenient test case that way.)

QotD

2008-08-15T09:26:38Z

"They say that if a thought has occurred to you, somebody else has already thought of it too, and posted porn about it on the internets.

"So why can't I find Mark Foley/Bill O'Reilly slashfic that ends in MPreg?"

-- sabotabby, Gaybortion! comic strip, 2006-10-18

[I do not know whether any was created in response to that cartoon.]

That Macro Lens-Combo

2008-08-14T21:26:13Z

Okay, now I'm home for real. After an extra day and a half in Arlington due to running out of spoons, I replaced that tire yesterday afternoon and took Perrine back to Baltimore in the wee hours of this morning.

As promised, here are pictures of the high-magnification lens-combo that I used to make the Salt and Pepper macro photo that I posted Tuesday.

(For the sake of comparison, to the right is what I usually use for magnification between 1:1 and 2.4:1 -- for anything below 1:1 I most often just use a straightforward macro lens.)

Here's the entire setup that I was shooting with/at/on, showing the lens-combo mounted, giving an idea of its size, illustrating how I positioned the flash where I wanted it, and verifying that I did shoot it during daylight, as keith_m043 pointed out, in case anyone had any trouble believing that. (You can also see the specks of salt and pepper on my PDA's screen, which I didn't expect to be clearly visible in this shot.)

(If you click through to the Flickr pages for these photos, then click the "all sizes" button, you can see larger versions than what I'm posting in this entry.)

For a closer look at just the lens assembly by itself:

Since I was shooting digital, I could see after each shot whether I needed to nudge the flash a little closer or farther away -- with film, I would've had to do the math, and/or make a guess and "bracket" brighter and dimmer than that guess (and wait until the film was developed to find out whether any of the exposures had been correct. I've done shots like this on film before and have gotten some fun results, but this is one of the things that digital makes easier. Since I was shooting handheld (that's the one bit that I'll admit was a little crazy about the whole enterprise -- I was braced against the table but I ought to have been using a tripod) I had to hunt across the surface of the PDA each time to find the two grains I wanted while looking through the big lens.

As I described in my original entry, the parts that make up that threatening-looking long black club are: the M42->K adaptor, a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm f/3.5 lens, a clip-on lens hood (that I happened to notice was the same size at the 'away' end as the built-in hood on the 200mm lens, thus making it easier to tape the two lenses together -- it's shaped for a different focal length, but that didn't matter in this setup), and a 55mm f/1.8 lens.

Now I'm pretty sure I could have done this all with more modern lenses (I need to go through the camera bag that I took to Pennsic and see whether I remembered to include a K-mount teleconverter when I packed it -- I do know that I brought two Konika ones by mistake (I didn't bring the Konika cameras with me)) ... but the first 200mm lens I put my hands on that day was a screwmount lens, and I knew I had screwmount teleconverters, and the screwmount->Kmount adaptor was handy, so I went retro on the camera end of the stack of lenses. (The way I was shooting, the modern conveniences of more modern lenses would not have come into play anyhow.)

For the reversed lens, there was actually an advantage to using an old screwmount lens: because the iris actuator isn't connected to the camera when a lens is mounted backward (there are some adaptifiers that remedy this with an arrangement of cables, but I've never seen one up close, much less had the spare cash for one; I'm not sure how common they are) I had to stop the lens down manually for each shot. I could've just left the lens stopped down, but that makes the viewfinder dark and difficult to focus with. Most of my screwmount lenses have a "manual/auto" switch because they're designed to work on cameras so old that having the camera operate the iris hadn't been done yet, as well as with slightly newer ones that did have a way to do that. So with the right vintage of screwmount lens, I can just slide that switch when I'm ready to shoot ... or slip a fingertip over the actuator pin. (The K-mount lenses have a lever instead of a pin ... operating that manually probably wouldn't be too much harder, but since I haf the screwmount lenses handy anyhow, one of those just seemed easier.)

I think the 'hardest' part of all this isn't so much knowing exactly how to do it; it's knowing ahead of time that this is possible, that it's even one of your options. And having a suitable assortment of lenses on hand to stick together (whether with gaffer's tape or a proper 'reversing ring') of course. Practice does count for something here as well, but if you think this is fun, then you'll get the practice. ;-) There's a little bit of math involved, but not all of the formulae you'll see on web sites about macro photography actually get used in the field -- mostly, you need to have a rough idea how much light each technique will cost you and what conditions make different techniques more convenient or less so.

Even the imposing club of a lens looks less intimidating when viewed as a collection of ordinary parts...

Anyhow, that's how I did it (or at least what I did it with).

QotD

2008-08-14T09:26:41Z

"Age is a matter of feeling, not of years." -- Washington Irving (b. 1783-04-03, d. 1859-11-28)

QotD

2008-08-13T09:26:42Z

"It says something about the Bush regime that they've managed to turn me into someone who cheers when people die." -- violachic, 2008-07-12 (regarding the death of former White House spokesman, Tony Snow)

A Spicy Pennsic Pic

2008-08-12T23:35:35Z

Although there's nothing particularly Pennsic-ish about this photo, I did shoot it at Pennsic. (I was showing off my macro skillz for some of my camp-mates after they'd watched me photograph an insect.) And I like it enough that I couldn't wait to post it. I'm especially pleased by the reflection of the salt.

Er, yeah, that thing that folks keep saying looks like an ice cube is a grain of table salt. :-) And the blobby, round thing on the left is neither a meatball nor falafel, but a single grain of ground black pepper. They're resting on the screen of my PDA, lit from the side by a flash.

No conventional microscope involved, though the question of whether the combination of lenses I cobbled together constitutes an improvised microscope or just a scary-looking macro lens is left as an exercise for my readers. From the camera out, it was a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm lens, then a 50mm lens backwards (attached to the 200mm lens by gaffing their lens hoods together). I set the flash on 1/16th power and adjusted its brightness by sliding it slightly closer or farther away.

1000x641 version

Two Thousand Three Hundred And One (Plus Sixty Or So)

2008-08-12T19:36:29Z

Okay, so I'm mostly back from Pennsic ... I got in yesterday, pulled all my stuff out of the truck, made a brief stab at organizing things a little (barely enough to count, really), rested a little, then started getting ready to go to 3LF rehearsal ... failed to get everything together in time (I spent too long figuring out how to bungee the bass in place in the back of the truck without enough of my other stuff around it to keep it from sliding around on the sheet of plywood that was the top of the pile), skipped rehearsal, delivered the truck to the merchant who paid me to drive it to Pennsic and back, and proceeded to the home of anniemal and syntonic-comma to finish burning to CD the photos that I'd copied off of CF cards during Pennsic, and to borrow their lawn to rinse and dry my tent's groundcloth. So I feel like I'm not quite completely home from Pennsic yet. Almost ...

Also not yet caught up on electronic (or any other) communication.

I feel like babbling a bit about photographic and technological aspects of my trip; I'll write a more rounded trip report a little later.

The final photographic tally for Pennsic, including the drive up and the drive home: three rolls of film (one roll of 135 and two rolls of 120), six gigabytes worth of CF cards (spread over fourteen cards because I started off with the small cards in order to be using the 1G cards at the end when I expected to be shooting more) that have been copied to nine CDs, two thousand three hundred and one digital photos (not counting the ones I deleted before removing the card from the camera, of course), and a metric crapload of editing to do over the next few ~~weeks~~months. I got a number of adorable shots of children with and without their parents, which need to get emailed to the right parents as I sort and edit them. And I sold one photo on site the day I shot it (I delivered it on a CD).

I took a RV/marine battery with me, and an inverter, hoping to be able to run the Vaio. That didn't work. The battery didn't have enough juice to power the laptop when I got there, though it did run the chargers for my cell phone, PDA, and iPod. Hooking it up to solar panels (two different rigs) only got it as far as 11.6V, never enough to run a computer. :-( I did borrow anniemal's iBook once she arrived (and recharged it from syntonic-comma's battery while his solar panel tried to recharge my battery), but I never got around to plugging the Vaio into a working battery, so I never got the addresses off it for some folks I'd planned to send SMS messages to but whose email addresses weren't already in my phone; I also never connected to the Internet from Mystic Mail (the on-site ISP) or through anybody else's portable connection. At the moment my battery is hooked to a car-battery-charger and is fully charged, but loses about a hundredth of a volt every ten seconds when the charger is disconnected.

On the last day, my cell phone charger stopped working reliably. I thought it was a problem with the power it was getting from the inverter, but now I've got it plugged into house current and it's still not doing much. Eek! (I never see the phone say it's charging, but the battery indicator does read halfway now, as opposed to dead last night. So the charger must be doing something some of the time.)

The drive home got off to a rocky start, what with loading my gear into the truck in heavy rain, then having to get the truck pulled out of the campsite by a backhoe because the ground softened under it during loading. (They tried using a tractor first, but just spun the tractor's wheels. So plan B was to move it a few feet at a time with the backhoe. I'd never fully realized what an impressive piece of equipment a backhoe is, until now.)

Next year, I must make sure that all the email addresses I'll want are copied to my phone and/or PDA before I leave, instead of counting on being able to access them on the laptop. And find out whether there's any cure for a lead-acid battery that self-discharges at a rate of a millivolt per second.

I'll write up more of what my Pennsic was like, as opposed to how my electronics worked or didn't, after I get back to Baltimore again and have a proper tire on my minivan where the toy spare is currently mounted. And then I've got twenty three hundred photos to sift through and edit.

QotD

2008-08-12T09:26:47Z

[Florence Ambrose is a genetically-engineered "Bowman's Wolf", and a spaceship engineer. Sam Starfall, a squidlike alien in a humanoid environment suit, is her captain. Varroa Jacobsoni is a psychologist working for the corporation that created Florence's species, testing the "don't hurt humans" safeguards designed into her brain.]

Varroa Jacobsoni:	"Given only a second to react, how do you decide if someone is human?"

Florence Ambrose:	"Clothes! They're wearing clothes. And I look for shape."

[...]

Varroa Jacobsoni:	"Why did you choose clothing first?"

Florence Ambrose:	"If humans ever modify themselves to live in space without suits, they may not look human, but will probably still want pockets. So, given that you can't use size, shape, or even D.N.A. as being one hundred percent accurate, how would you define human?"

Varroa Jacobsoni:	"I'm passing you, because it's a lot easier to pass you than to answer your question."

Sam Starfall:	"Now that's* human!"*

-- from "Freefall" by Mark Stanley, 2008-06-02 and 2008-06-04 (quoted strips are part of a story arc that started 2008-03-17)

SMS Post

2008-08-11T19:30:12Z

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

Am home, unpacking. Not checked email or LJ yet.

SMS Post

2008-08-10T20:19:57Z

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

There are 7 robins in front of me checking out spots that had been under tents.

QotD

2008-08-10T09:26:38Z

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-19:

"For those of you who don't have a blog yet, think of one as a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention." -- David Carr, The New York Times, Jan 15, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15carr.html?th&emc=th

(submitted to the mailing list by Lynn Kisilenko)

QotD

2008-08-09T09:26:46Z

"Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves." -- Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588-04-05, d. 1679-12-04)

SMS Post

2008-08-09T02:01:49Z

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

2 Viking memorial boat burnings this year. 2nd ended a little while ago.

QotD

2008-08-08T09:26:45Z

"You can't win them all -- but you can try." -- Mildred Ella ("Babe") Didrikson Zaharias (b. 1911-06-26, d. 1956-09-27), American athlete (basketball, track & field, golf) and musician (vocals, harmonica) (via Jone Johnson Lewis' collection of quotations on about.com)

QotD

2008-08-07T09:26:41Z

"[Opposing homosexuality is] kind of like 'opposing left handedness', and about as useful." -- "recovering ex-Pentecostal", 2008-06-03 (3rd comment)

SMS Post

2008-08-07T00:08:26Z

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

New rule: if it gives you an ice cream headache rinsing your hair, the shower is too damn cold.

SMS Post

2008-08-06T05:41:28Z

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

Made it down the hill and got bass safely stowed shortly before skies opened up.

QotD

2008-08-05T09:26:41Z

"First, we need to bust down that old conservative trope that tax money is always wasted. The conservatives originally sold themselves as the party of prudent, business-like management of the public purse, contrasting themselves to 'tax-and-spend liberals' (an accusation that finally seems to be dying a painful and ironic death). But if they actually were running this country as you'd run a business, they'd be taking that revenue and looking for the best possible investment. And, since the beginning of the nation, the best investments we've ever made have been those made directly in the American people themselves.

"Invest in a school, and over the course of the next several decades, you'll get tens of thousands of literate, creative workers . a few of whom will go forth and transform the world, and the rest of whom will do well, pay taxes, obey the law and contribute to the life of their communities. Invest in housing, and you put more families on the road to accumulating middle-class wealth, which will make a difference for generations. Invest in transportation and communication, and you streamline commerce for the next 50 years. Invest in new technologies, and you seed new industries that will create jobs and generate tax revenue -- which can be invested again for even further prosperity. Invest in a GI Bill, and you get the Greatest Generation, and the postwar boom they created."

-- Sara Robinson, "Stealing Our Future II: Democracy, Fear, and the War on the Middle Class", 2008-01-31

SMS Post

2008-08-04T22:49:19Z

[Posted from my cell phone via SMS]

Made it up the hill with the bass and played with Wolgemut in the market.