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While I wait for this flu that I’ve got to go away, I’ve been finding crap on the net. Here is some of the crap I’ve found so far today:

Starbucks craptastification of Starship’s “We built this city”, which I actually used to like listening to as a kid (the Starship version, not this shite). Oh, and don’t get me started on Starbucks! I’m not a huge coffee drinker but I’ll have a couple of cups a week. My god the coffee over here is generally crap. There are a couple of Euro-themed restaurants that seem to get the coffee right but not much else does. I was working late one night and one of my colleagues asked me if I’d like a coffee. I thought “Yeah, that’d be sweet!” I really started looking forward to my coffee. When he came back I saw that he’d visited the local Starbucks. My mood hit the brakes and swung in the opposite direction. Let me say this: I really, really hate Starbucks coffee. I drank it anyway because he’d gone to all that trouble to get it for me but I think that was the worst coffee I’ve ever had. I was even worse than when I had a Starbucks coffee in Australia.

Ok, next site: How to win at Pac-Man

Next: Yahoo Serious is still around. Sort of. God damn I can’t remember how many times I watched Young Einstein.

Next: The audio from of my favourite movies Office Space (because it’s all so true) combined with the visuals provided from an old cartoon series called “Superfriends” involving Batman and Robin, Superman et al. Captain Planet had not been invented yet. Oh, oh, oh, the mash-up movie is here (I think this was done a while back, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it).

Are here. I’ve got pics of signs advertising a brothel called the “Shady Lady Ranch”, a nice pic of a Joshua tree, pictures showing my affection with roads going off into the distance, having fun riding bombs, and pictures of highly sophisticated and blossoming towns.

UPDATE: When browsing Flickr photos, you may notice that you can’t view higher resolution versions of the photos. They’re making a stack of changes at Flickr, so this should be fixed in the near future. It doesn’t really worry me at this stage because god damn at least they’re actually making changes!

UPDATE: The problem with not being able to view larger images was with me and I’ve fixed it now.

You may wonder why the hell I’m making this post at 5:18 in the morning. Well, I got back from work last night as sick as a dog and fell asleep straight away. I woke up about an hour ago but have so far been unsuccessful in getting back to sleep, so I thought I’d strum the guitar and crank up the compy. I then saw my dead iPod sitting on my desk. I remembered I was supposed to take it in for a warranty exchange a couple of days ago. I thought ‘well, there is no harm in trying to charge it again’. I put it in its dock and paint me green and call me Gumby, the bloody thing started charging. As you could imagine I’m pretty chuffed about that! I’m also at a loss to explain why it didn’t charge before, even when connected to my friend’s proper charger. Weird.

For a little while now I’ve been looking for some good panoramic stitching software. Panorama tools has always been my first choice but I couldn’t find a suitable front end for it. That is until now. I’ve found a really good open source frontend called Hugin. I use this combined with Panotools and Photoshop to produce the panoramas. If you want to dabble in panoramic photography just follow the guidelines on what to do in the download section of the Hugin website. They have a pretty good summary of what other tools you’ll need. Then you just blend any seams between panoramas using Photoshop and these guidelines.

I got interested in Panorama photography in my final year of Uni for my Honours project, titled “Panoramic Video Imaging”, whereby my task was to control a pan/tilt unit to take a series of photographs of background scenery and stitch these images together to form a panorama (1). This image was then to be used to aid in motion detection to subtract from the current scene the background information at that pan/tilt position and weed out the interesting data. I never got it finished, although I did mathematically derive and code by myself routines that warped images onto a spherical manifold according to the provided pan and tilt position. I could also perform a reverse transform too (is all this sounding pretty technical now?!? 😉 I was pretty chuffed about that at the time because I thought I’d never get that far. Apparently one of the people who continued on with the project the next year didn’t like my stuff. So I went to that year’s engineering expo, looked at what he had done and listened to him bag the guy who did panoramic stuff in the previous year. He didn’t realise that I was that guy though. I was feeding him questions on stuff I knew I didn’t have enough time to complete the previous year and then I let him run with that. I had a good chuckle. Good on ya mate.

I’ve updated flickr with a panoramic picture taken as we were heading out of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It’s a big picture for those on dialup internets connections. There are still some things I have to fix with this panorama. I did stitch it pretty quickly though without much time spent to tweaking. Firstly there is a bit of blurriness in the middle of the picture. Secondly the clouds near the horizon look washed out from overexposure, although this wasn’t present in the initial pictures. If Panotools was able to handle High Dynamic Range photos and I was able to take such pictures reliably, I wouldn’t have that overexposure problem. Ah well.

(1) Hats off to my fellow team members on that project: Mark Norman and Phil Galbraith who worked on the hardware and Guy Blucher who did some pretty snazzy motion detection stuff. Also big kudos to Matt Fettke our guide through the whole ordeal, and of course Matt Goldberg, who kept on annoying us from the next room over (jks).