A photoblog and other things

I just love this day of the year. Nothing screams out “sucked in for being single” more than today. Luckily around work with a bunch of nerdy engineers you don’t notice anything different. Well, no, I might have noticed something different if I moved from my desk today. I stayed firmly planted in front of the computer screen blasting tunes away on my iPod. Nothing says “I love you” more than Rammstein screaming out “Bestrafe mich”. Anyway, I actually feel sorry for the people in relationships who look forward to Valentine’s day because they know they’ll get roses/chocolates/hand made Teddy Bears. Because, you know, Feb 13th and Feb 15th aren’t good enough days for that. If that’s the only day they actually receive that sort of attention? Well… I pity them.

Hold on, I lied up there. I did leave my desk today. I had to go get some blood samples taken for my new doctor. Talk about pain – and I don’t mean getting the needle stuck in my arm – but having to fast for a day beforehand. I eat, and I eat a lot, and when I don’t eat I become extremely agitated. I think that’s why I was so pissed off with Valentine’s day this year ’round. Normally it doesn’t affect me this much.

You know, here I am complaining about the finer things in life, Valentine’s day and not eating food for a day and sometimes I forget about the people I support monthly through Oxfam and what sort of lives they may be living. You know what? I might just go give the money that I would have spent on Valentine’s day (or any other day if I was not single) to Oxfam instead. That will make me feel much better.

This may be the coolest thing I’ve found on the net today, and I don’t know why I haven’t stumbled across it beforehand. It’s called HDR (High Dynamic Range) compression. In a nutshell, it enables a greater range of light to be displayed in a single photo.

It’s particularly useful where photos have both light and dark areas. Normally to capture detail in the brighter parts of a scene you’d have to underexpose but then detail would be lost in the darker areas. Conversely, to get detail in the darker areas you’d have to overexpose but then the brighter areas are all washed out. With this technique you get the best of both worlds where both light and dark areas show detail. The only drawback is that you have to take multiple pictures of a scene at different exposures. This requires a tripod to avoid camera shake.

Hopefully image sensors in digital cameras will get to such a high sensitivity that you can use much faster shutter speeds to achieve the same exposure. For example, the longest exposing picture in the sequence that took 1/4 second today would only need 1/500th of a second sometime in the future. You could choose to take an HDR picture on your digital camera and it’d take a sequence of pictures all at different shutter speeds say in less than 1/100th of a second, meaning you wouldn’t have to use a tripod. That’d be awesome.

Examples of HDR pictures can be found here. Since pictures speak 1000 words you’ll probably understand what I mean a lot better by looking at them.

This just cracked me up… for about 5 minutes or so.
http://sites.gizoogle.com/?url=http://daecks.blogspot.com

So we’re heading west along the 595 to Fort Lauderdale last night at around 11pm, looking forward to hitting the town after a hectic week at work. At the intersection of the 595 and the Florida turnpike traffic had slowed to an absolute crawl. All I could see ahead of me were flashing lights everywhere and my mate and I were speculating as to what it could be. “Wow, there must be a huge pile up of cars ahead”. Emergency vehicles were bloody everywhere. There were a couple of smashed cars along the side of the road but as it turned out that wasn’t what was causing the problem. We looked towards the exit ramp for the 595 leading onto the turnpike and there were 30 or 40 emergency vehicles parked the whole way along. Then we looked a little more to the right and there were bloody flames everywhere! I don’t know how we missed that to begin with. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. We thought it could have been a plane crash or a petrol tanker. As it turns out a petrol tanker had overturned.

The enormity of things over here never ceases to amaze me. There are some seriously screwed up things that have happened while I’ve been over here, like four hurricanes hitting Florida and this and God knows what else.

What else? Ok, how about this one. This happened on my Christmas vacation trip at the end of last year. We were heading to Lake Tahoe from Yosemite at around 10pm and most routes in had been deluged with snow and had to be closed due to the threat of avalanches. So yeah, it was snowing pretty heavily. (Actually, because the snow was so thick it had a psychedelic effect as you drove along. It was incredibly distracting). We were about 20 miles out of Lake Tahoe and visibility was nothing when we had to put snow chains on. As we were doing this, “the woman” in the car shouted “Did you see that?!?!” We said we didn’t see anything at all. A car coming the opposite direction had just gone straight off the side of the road. Fortunately there were quite a few cars pulled over so a few other people had seen what happened. We all rushed over to where the tyre tracks left the road and saw, about 150 feet down a slope that nearly went *straight down*, an upside down SUV wedged between 2 trees. We were calling out to anyone who may have been alive down there… we actually didn’t think they would be. Fortunately, they were alive and fairly well. I threw a rope down to them and helped pull them up. They were a bit shaken up and had a couple of minor cuts. Considering what had just happened, I found that absolutely amazing.

Again, that shit is whack.