David Pitkin

Mission accomplished as far as getting the blog back up and running in a stable environment. Now my trusty Mac Mini is running lighttpd under launchd which means Apple says it should stay up all the time. I updated to the latest revision of typo and away we go again. Still to do is fix up my theme away from the azure. Since themes seem to be an active parts of typo this might prove to be some work. Launchd is great, after reading this post the only piece missing for me was that I had to change the environment PATH variable for launchd. Probably a result of the patchwork of programs I am running on it.

This blog is now running via lighttpd on a mac mini PPC!

I still need to move the blog to /blog/ but that is for another day or week.

Vacation in London and Paris was fabulous. In related French news there is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique who’s students are at the top of every investment bank recruiters list for big bucks. Nicole El Karoui is an amazing math professor who has the best classes for quantitative analysts in the derivatives market. This demand for “quants” is also very strong in marketing hiring and new college grads who have studied these fields along with statistics are in high demand.

I have wanted to go to “Photographica,” the camera show that the Photographic Historical Society of New England (PHSNE) has put on for a few years. I knew it used to be in Waltham and after an email from a friend I was reminded to look up where it was this year. It was in Watertown, and by a twist of fate I was in Boston this morning with some time to kill. Talking to a few characters there I learned a bunch about some of the rangefinder cameras that I want. I almost bought a Leica IIIg for a reallly good deal but the lack of a built in meter scared me. Here is a table full of lenses.

The large format cameras and collectable Leica camera systems were the most interesting for me to stare at and there were a lot of them there. The table the most people were talking about was a guy who had about 3 full folding tables full of lenses and 35mm SLR bodies for 5 dollars each, they were all being sold as-is, it was wild.

This

was the one table with the really fancy modern stuff like a 500mm fast lens.

I did buy two things and spent a grand total of 20 dollars.

• A replacement film winding lever for my Minolta SRT-201
• A 50mm F1.9 Minolta lense for 5 bucks!

It was great! I hope that next time I have a rangefinder and can buy a new lens.

My MacBook Pro has the SUPER annoying processor whine. First I ran PhotoBooth to keep it quiet but then each time I tried to use the iSight for something legitimate I would have to go quick PhotoBooth, and there was the battery usage from running the program and iSight 100% of the time.

Next I learned of Apple’s CHUD. This would let me turn off one CPU in the System Preferences but I quickly found out that after going to sleep the second CPU would be re-enabled.

Okay I am running Tiger so Automator should be the solution but that very quickly was ruled out. Next try was Proxi which could be what Automator should have been a friend said. I then had to find out if there was an AppleScript event for “wakeup”. Now we were getting somewhere. I found SleepWatcher but it is a PowerPC binary, okay but we have the source so we can compile it to be Universal. I followed the Apple instructions but they missed a critical step. Success so far. 1. Install SleepWatcher, replace /opt/bin/sleepwatcher with a Universal binary 2. Add "hwprefs cpu_disable 2" to your /etc/rc.wakeup file I killed SleepWatcher with the Activity Monitor and restarted it with ‘sudo /opt/local/sbin/sleepwatcher -d’

Silence is golden, I hope this works!!

My Nokia 6682 phone has been great. Today in class I found a really nice feature, when the phone is ringing the right soft button is “Send Msg”. When I pressed it a new text message to the caller is composed with the body “I will call you later” and you can send it right to the caller. Now that we can reliably send text messages between carriers it’s cool. Now if only we could text to a land line phone like in Europe. Oh well.

I learned today that that the percentage that a store or merchant pays to the credit card company when you use a reward program card is higher than without! The credit card companies would have you believe that they are giving you the rewards but instead they are skimming it out of what they make the stores pay! What a scam!

This afternoon I took advantage of working near Lincoln and saw a talk by David Sibley. He was presenting his analysis of the video that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology believes is a Ivory-billed woodpecker that has been long believed to be extinct.

His presentation and published analysis in Science convinced an over-tired me that the evidence was inconclusive at best. He did not seem very happy about the entire situation but I agree that when conservation dollars and attention is being spent that all the information needs to be out there. It sounds great to re-discover a species but identifying birds is hard, David Sibley would know that better than anyone I know.

I used mPix to get some 35mm film developed after a friend told me how great their prints were. I signed up on their website and they mailed me a pair of plastic mailers for me to send my roll film or disposable camera to them. I shot some ISO 200 print film with a 17-35mm lens just for fun and dropped it in a mailbox.

About a week later I emailed their support to ask if they had gotten my film since I had not heard, I have been busy at work. Of course before mPix responded I got an automated email that my scans were ready to view! There support did respond a little while after that. I logged back into their website and found out that to just see my scans I had to pay 4 dollars. I usually pay a little more than that at CVS to get just the film developed and a PhotoCD so I was okay with it. The digital versions of the files that I can download and view for that 4 bucks are too tiny! Only 25k and 470×317 pixels. I can pay for a CD to be shipped to me with the full resolution pictures but that is extra and takes more time. Kind of a bummer.

I can’t imagine why I can’t just view only the high-resolution photos. I also emailed them to see if they were going to return my negative which they said they were and did today. I don’t think that I will be sending them any film to get developed again unless there are high-res versions available to download. They are supposed to have amazing prints it is too bad that none of the pictures I sent them were that good. The next time we get some prints I will upload them to mPix.