CARS - Camera Allowance Rebate System

About three or four times a day, for about two weeks now, I google “olympus e-p1″. The Olympus E-P1 is the most hyped micro-four-thirds digital camera. It is easy to say this because a) there are like three micro-four-thirds digital cameras in the market, two by Panasonic and this one by Olympus, and b) early versions of the camera were leaked in Japan and the release has been a slow trickle, with lots of word of mouth.

This will probably be my next digital camera.

There are some nay-sayers: David Pogue (article in question here) from the NYT, but you know how many times i have rolled my eyes at a Pogue’s technology articles? A million billion trillion times, so many times I have extraocular muscle syndrome (the eye’s analog–that I just made up–to the wrist’s carpal tunnel syndrome). But the Digital Photography Review’s review also had similar concerns, in fact, they are very similar to Pogue’s. So much that I think… hold on, yes, DP Review’s review was released on July 29th, Pogue’s review on July 30th. Consider how Pogue raves about the camera, so much so that I was starting to question the headline “Instant Love, Followed by Letdown” until the very end where Pogue begins to realize the con’s, the very same con’s found in the DP Review’s review… that’s right, I’m calling out Pogue.

These con’s include no viewfinder (in one kit), no flash, difficult viewing of the LCD in bright light, and a slow autofocus. Some of these con’s have been tackled by Olympus’ twitter feed–and yes, I am quite aware of the fact that a mark of my obsession is the fact that I am following olympus’ twitter feed–but even without that defense from Olympus, for the set up I want (17mm pancake lens kit) there is a viewfinder, and the other cons do not apply for me. No flash: I’ve NEVER used images taken with flash on my current digital camera, they never look right, I prefer natural light and if there isn’t enough… I think of the words of a friend when I complained to him about low light situations and blurry images: “get a tripod”. LCD brightness: I have dealt with shooting in bright light scenarios already, you simply shield the LCD with your hand or your body’s/head’s shadow. The only drawback I can foresee is the slow focus, but I can probably live with that since I already spend long bouts trying to focus on bugs in macro shots. Patience is a virtue when taking pictures.

Besides, the camera shoots beautiful HD video. Enough said.

The other major drawback is the price, 900 bones. Which is why I wish there was a funded CARS program that would give me cash for a trade in of my old digital camera… sigh.

Pitfalls of Work Marathons

Often I will go on these work marathons, which have nothing to do with running, but have everything to do with a break down of my general work ethic: work smart not hard.

This motto breaks down because occasionally you do actually need to work hard in order to implement your smart work. These bouts of hard work often pay off ten-fold, so in a sense, they are part of working smart.

In one such marathon, I automated a series of tasks I knew I would have to repeatedly perform for an archival research project I am doing for my thesis. The involved the use of three distinct programs with no shared architecture; one was written primarily in python, another in the interactive data language (IDL), and another was a compiled C program that ran on the shell command line. Each one ran interactively, but I assumed I could fake the interaction somehow, and in one long marathon that lasted about two nights I figured out how.

But there is a dark side to these marathons. I slowly forget everything I had to learn in order to program it. It is a bit like cramming for a test. And now, when I go back to the code to add new features, I find myself trapped in a maze of foreign looking commands. There are bits and pieces of code that seem to do nothing but when I remove them… doom, the code crashes. Then there are the obscure comments and obtuse variable names that probably meant something at some point and definitely followed some logical chain, but now serve as indecipherable hieroglyphs written in fixed courier font on the walls of this labyrinth I’ve created.

Such is the price of a million monkeys on a million laptops parsing the output of a million automated calls to a handful of third party programs.

The Brief and Illustrated
Story of My Eyebrow

(opens in new window)

Moon–fanusi jihal

Being the anniversary of the moon landing, not to mention the fact that I am an astronomer, it is apropos that I should write something about the moon.

Today, on a long meandering evening walk about my city, beyond the borders I normally mind, that is, invisible barriers put in place by my reluctance to return to the past, and I came upon a darkened pathway over the interstate highway 490. A few overhead lamps were malfunctioning. One, the furthest, just behind a tree in the foreground, struggled to shine. It had a murky amber color, bordering on red, the red waning sunlight becoming increasing deflected by dust. For a moment, I thought it was a waxing moon. I turned my head away, towards the cars passing below me, then quickly looked back. The lamp was shining brightly, as if it has been ashamed when I watched it struggle.

Earlier today, on the drive to the office, another driver beside me, male, preened his hair, spraying a mist from a bottle, then combing with his fingers as we waited for the light to change. I wondered if he would be embarrassed to turn over and see me watching him. But he didn’t take his eyes off his cropped image in the rearview mirror. And I thought of Borges’ short story, Mirror of Ink, in which a cruel governor of Sudan is transfixed by a mirror created on his hand from a pool of black ink placed there by a prisoner. The mirror displays scenes to him, images from the world, the future, and so on, and the story culminates with the governor laying witness to his beheading, the shock of which kills him.

That Borges… but thinking about it… just yesterday I found myself in the grips of borgesian moment, at Mendon Pond, where I had inadvertently, and unknowingly, circumnavigated a pond and found myself retracing the path. Suspicious familiarity came in small bursts of minute details: the arrangement of pink flowers with yellow stamen on a bush, an iridescent green dragonfly perched on a blade of grass, and the sound of water trickling under a bridge up I now expected to find just ahead. It was at that bridge that I had previously stood and watched the water for minutes because it seemed to ooze rather than flow, and then, in the present, I had an eerie sensation come over me, as if I half expected, any moment now as I retraced the path, to see myself leaning on the bridge’s rail, silently watching the water ooze. I did not see myself and looked over my shoulder expecting to see…?

What is the difference between the images we make up in our heads and the images we see? That is but one of many discussions occurring between bicyclists riding up a mountain pass in the French Alps in the absurdly hilarious film Up and Down by French New Wave film director and critic Luc Moullet, which, incidentally, I watched last night. That discussion about images is straight from Jean-Paul Satre’s The Imaginary, which I’ve mentioned before on these pages. I often think highly of myself when I recognize bits and pieces of a film from literature, but I quickly douse that thought when I realize I probably missed a ton more than I recognized. Too many books, too little time, too slow a reader!

Which brings me back to the moon. Or should I say, Moon, the film directed by Duncan Jones and starring Sam Rockwell opposite Sam Rockwell opposite Sam Rockwell opposite a computer voiced by Kevin Spacey… a terrific film full of fodder for the mind, with respect to — spoiler! — cloning and clone rights, and for all those Helium-3 proponents. I won’t give much detail here about the film, but I do recommend it, and I will add this: despite Sam Rockwell’s excellent performance, my friend Kris made a film once (I can’t find it!), and I think he did a better job acting opposite himself than Rockwell does (Rockwell doesn’t quite get the focus of his eyes right)… but then again, Kris was being Kris, and his film was shorter, but still it was a feat!

Moon.

Sherbert Dreams

I’ve completely redesigned my website. If you read this in an RSS reader, consider coming by for a visit and let me know what you think of the new design. I’ve made significant changes to the fotos section. More changes might be coming to that section in the near future. Its just so hard to decide how best to represent the ungodly amount of fotos I have on this website… anyway, I am still thinking about the colors, that is, I might try to inject more color of a broader spectrum in order to step away from the monochromatic schemes I seem to favor.

I call the theme sherbert dreams because it is simple, crisp, muted, but delicious.