Category: learning from my mistakes

I took a look at this but nothing I’m doing here even shows up on the Google Trends radar.

A busy day today. My partner in crime worked from home to avoid the kerfuffle around the dia sin migrantes events, but as it turned out, she ended up helping shuttle some friends — in their 80s — to a doctor’s appointment while I ferried their grandchildren home and provided what help I could to a Brownie meeting, also held here. There were 13 children here at the height of it all, sounding like 40.

When all and sundry were safely out the door, we were just catching our breath when a neighbor girl — 6 or 7 summers of age — came by with a hand-made May Day basket, of red construction paper, filled with seasonal blooms. I had never heard of such a thing, but it’s in keeping with tradition, evidently:

May Day – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

In the United States (and possibly Holland), May Day baskets are made. These baskets are small and usually filled with treats are left at someone’s doorstep.

The article goes on to say that the giver is supposed to leave them without being seen or the recipient gets to kiss their benefactor. I don’t think she knew that either . . . .

Given it was also our 13th wedding anniversary today, I’m glad someone saw to it that we got flowers. The traditional gift is lace. Not useful, but the modern gloss is fur or textiles: I can live with textiles, I think, especially for a knitter.

My pinholeday.org submission is here and the Flickr set is here. The f295 group’s images can be seen here: this one knocked my socks off.

Some lessons learned today. Instant film is pretty tricky to work with, unforgiving in fact. I finally got two images at 1 minute and 2 minutes where my 120 camera would have managed it in 6-12 seconds. Looks like 1:20 would have been about right, but that’s something I’ll figure out later as I work out the disposition of this camera.

Do I keep it close to it’s original configuration with the bellows? If I cut all that off and break it down to a Polaroid film holder with a pinhole, I can cut exposure times way down (as focal length decreases, you need less light, as the inverse square law states). There’s no compelling reason to keep it as it is, other than a trace of regret at taking what was a functional, if useless, camera and rendering it for parts.

The calculations here suggest it should work: with the shorter focal length, the exposure times are pretty manageable, even with instant film’s abysmal reciprocity characteristics.

On the real film front, things were OK. I wandered around the old Sand Point Naval Air Station, while a young cyclist worked up her confidence, and grabbed 4-5 images on color slide film. A beautiful day there today, some sailboats out, and some kind of intro to kayaking as well: you could walk up and take a sea kayak out. Colorful things, those. I’ll know this time tomorrow if any of that stuff came out.

I had some black and white subjects in mind but time and other commitments pushed them off the schedule. They’ll keep.

My stuff will go up here when I get it back from the processor. And a Flickr set will likely happen too.

Now playing: Last Boat Leaving by Elvis Costello from the album “Spike”

Technorati Tags: wwpd2006

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall April 30, 2006 02:19 AM:

The only crisis with Iran is the crisis with the president’s public approval ratings. Period. End of story. The Iranians are years, probably as long as a decade away, and possibly even longer from creating even a limited yield nuclear weapon. Ergo, the only reason to ramp up a confrontation now is to help the president’s poll numbers.

[ . . . ]

To the president the Democrats should be saying, Double or Nothing is Not a Foreign Policy.

I like it. Read all of the analysis (I have elided a bunch of it): he, as usual, sees through the smoke and mirrors so beloved by this administration.

How annoying would it be if I installed this?

Explorer Destroyer – Switch to Firefox, Make money from Adsense Referral:

Get this tool for switching people from IE to Firefox.
For each person you switch, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings.

I don’t think I would make a thin dime on this, so it would really be a matter of trying to break MSFT’s grip on its users. As obnoxious gadfly John C. Dvorak writes, IE was perhaps MSFT’s biggest mistake, born out of fear rather than out of any real purpose or (wait for it) design.

Technorati Tags: sucks less

Continue reading “is this worth doing?”

alspix stuff – Matchbox Pinhole:

My first couple of 35mm pinhole cameras attempted to be panoramic, wide angle jobbies but this time I thought it would be nice to get back to the classic square format.

Here’s my latest contraption which uses 35mm film to provide square images of 24 x 24mm. Using this size means that you can get up to 50 exposures on a standard roll of 36 exposure film. Now that’s what I call economy!

Heck, I’m thinking about it myself.

Living With War:

You can listen to Neil Young’s new album here.

Yow, he’s on fire.

The Internets offer up this long but worthwhile discussion of why the GOP needs enemies, be they Al Queda/Osama bin Forgotten, Saddam Hussein, China (remember when they were the looming threat?)/Iran. I wonder if Osama doesn’t understand the psyche of the American public better than the punditocracy and the campaign consultants. Even if he hadn’t destroyed the WTC — suppose his crew only managed to take over flight 93 — he still would have ensured the invasion of Iraq and the once-in-a-lifetime recruiting opportunity it represented.

Fukuyama’s Gift:

Here’s a story of importance, via Matthew Yglesias, who doesn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of what he’s discovered. Francis Fukuyama, the apostate neoconservative, says that in the 1990s, neocons tried to manufacture an enemy, because they felt that the Republican Party “didn’t do as well” when there wasn’t a ruthless, monolithic pinkomuslimcommienihilist threat to America.

And if you want more, you can read the incomparable Billmon’s review of the Nero Administration. Felons and hookers and bribes, oh my.

I found some raccoon repellent — Shake-Away — at Sky Nursery and applied it this afternoon. A liberal shaking around the commonly used pathways by these attractive nuisances, and we awaited the results.

Well, one thing I know, squirrels don’t much care for the smell, nor do rats. A squirrel attacked the bird feeder by jumping from a nearby tree, rather than shinny up the pole. He was joined by a rat, in a move I had not seen before. I knew they were about, but in broad daylight? Yuck.

A raccoon did show up. He managed to walk along and inspect just about every place I dropped the “repellent.” Lots of sniffing . . . no panic or undue concern.

I suppose it could be the kind of thing that needs to be evaluated: it’s not like a live coyote stepped in front of him, just an indicator of one’s presence. Perhaps the word will get around. Perhaps I need to upgrade to cougar scat . . .

Results may well vary.