SmallWhiteCube Blog

A Few Film Shots

Wed, 7 May 2008 00:54:15 GMT

I just finished up a roll of Kodak TMAX100. For the type of photography I tend to do, I think ISO 100 quite a bit too slow, but I wanted to give it a shot since I know it's highly regarded and I'm still experimenting with film. Here are the shots I like:

You may notice some dust on a couple of those. I really need to work on my handling practices with this film - I'm far lazier than I should be. The next roll I shoot will be Ilford SFX 200, an Infared film.

Remembering Winter

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:03:18 GMT

I just got around to uploading some photos I took with my macro lens last month. Considering it's a 70-degree blue-bird day today, it takes a bit of a stretch of the imagination to remember that everything was covered with white stuff, regularly, just a month ago. I'm pretty happy with these:

In more recent events, I did some bouldering at Flagstaff with a visiting NLP researcher, Szu-ting, on Friday. A couple photos from the set:

A Week in Phoenix and Other Adventures

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:12:49 GMT

I just got back from a week-long stay in Phoenix, Arizona. I was there to attend INFOCOM 2008 and present my paper which appeared there. During the conference, I stayed at a hostel which was within walking distance of downtown Phoenix. My talk went quite well, and the conference was a good experience. The hostel was also an interesting place to stay. Certainly, it was very different than the last hostel I stayed at, in DC. It is run by a woman named Sue, who's a bit of an odd one, but warms up to people over time. As is always the case, I met a bunch of interesting travellers at the hostel.

After the conference was over, I met up with some of my extended family who wandered off to Phoenix sometime in the mid eighties and as a result, I don't get to see very much (nearly 12 years ago was the last substantial visit). It was great to hang out with my older cousins and meet a whole clutch of younger family who I'd never met. Outside of the conference, and visiting with family, highlights of Phoenix include sneaking into the Hotel San Carlos to use the pool and picking and immediately eating fresh oranges, tangerines, and lemons.

All of my pictures from Phoenix are here. These are my favourites:

Just prior to leaving for Phoenix, I helped organize a BBQ at my lab. Google provided funds for the event, and John G. and I used the money to buy 4 pork butts and make a heart-stopping amount of linguica and mild italian sausage (30 pounds of sausage, all told). We made the sausage into 1/3 lb. patties and grilled it up. No one in my lab has died of congestive heart failure yet, so I guess we didn't get them this time. The pictures are here. A couple of the better ones:

Finally, just yesterday I was able to get up to Flagstaff to do a little Bouldering. Didn't actually finish any problems, but made good progress on several which I should be able to hike on the next trip. Photos are here. A selection:

No More Toil

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:21:00 GMT

A bit of a housekeeping note: I've finally finished moved anything of importance to the wiki and got rid of the "Toil" link from above. The minimal content management system I had developed way-back-when which this was based on, was from the cold days before wikis were beautiful and easy and everywhere. Hence, its days were numbered.

In other news, I've added two more publications to my fledgeling CV. The first is for the IEEE INFOCOM 2008 Mini-symposium, which I'll attend and give a talk at in mid-April. It has to do with modeling user behaviour in wireless networks (in terms of activity). The second is something I worked on with Eric Anderson at the University of Colorado which concerns modeling of environmental effects on antenna directionality in wireless networks. It was accepted as a poster at ACM SigMetrics 2008, which is in Maryland this year. Both are well-respected conferences in my field. I've also got two papers in submission and a third which will be submitted this weekend. All three are pretty solid papers, so I have high-hopes.

Photo Gallery Obesity Epidemic

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:29:26 GMT

My online photo gallery was about to breach 7 GB, which was really more than this server (a VPS) could handle. So, I've moved my photos to a sub-domain hosted elsewhere. All (old) links will redirect properly. It's amazing that some foolish hosting company will give me a terrabyte of storage and a hundred gigs of transfer for $3/month...

I also just uploaded the result of shooting 5 more rolls of expired film. These were scanned using the VueScan software which I broke down and purchased after trying it out and realizing that it will save me several hours of post-processing time on each roll of film. That's it for the expired film booty. My next film shots will be on Kodak T-max 100 ISO and/or Ilford SFX 200 (an IR film) - I'm still trying to find out what film I like, but I don't think I'll be bothering with color film from here on out (unless I get more for free!).

Here are the better shots (IMHO):

Spring Snow - these were taken with a roll of ISO 200 on a morning where the fresh snow-cover was super sticky - gravity defying.
Bear Lake Snowshoeing - A short hike with prospective Ph.D. students in Rocky Mountain National Park.
St. Patrick's Day - Shot with ISO 400. Lots of noise (grainyness) in these, especially in the blue and green spectrum. The B&W ones I extracted just the red "layer" which removed some of the noise. I think the grainyness mostly works for these shots, though.