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

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.