So I am watching Lost. And it is getting towards the end of the show. All of a sudden, the screen turns bright yellow. And shortly after that, I get this dialog box. WTF?!
Man I really hate big corporations sometimes. Their anti-theft/anti-piracy tactics get in the way of paying customers. Another thing that I hate about this DVR box is that it is unusable if the cable goes out. It doesn’t matter if I have recorded shows on them. The box won’t work if it can’t get an authorization signal.
I went to our local cooking supply store for equipment to make a modification for a photographic flash. It was not as esoteric as you were probably thinking. Just a couple hundred black straws.
You see a flash creates a lot of spread out light. Even when you manually zoom the flash as narrow as it will go (to 105mm).
However, if you put a lot of long straws in between the flash an your subject, those straws act as a limiting element. You switch from a wide rectangle to a small circle. Neat, huh?
I came across this plugin for Adobe’s Photoshop program. It is called
Fractalius. It produces an interesting effect. But is it worth forty bucks? How often would I use it??
How does one improve honey? I am not saying that it needs improvement. But, apparently Popeyes does. Take a look at the ingredients list. Honey is first. Which is good. But then they add sugars. All different kinds. And then because the honey has been watered down, they add color and “natural flavor” back in. Okay I guess. Now what is really confusing is why they add so many different versions of the same thing. Honey contains fructose and glucose. Corn syrup contains glucose. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contains more fructose than glucose (making it sweeter and therefore more appealing to consumers). Sugar contains sucrose. Fructose is pure fructose. So it seems that HFCS is redundant. And you can reduce it further because honey contains fructose and glucose. You just need sucrose and perhaps some fractional amount of either fructose or glucose to get the percentages correct.
All of this tweaking is odd to begin with. Isn’t honey sweet enough to begin with? If it is a cost issue then ditch honey altogether and just use “natural flavor”, caramel color, and what ever sweetener is cheap enough for you.
Well, given that I was playing around with some Strobist techniques that I recently learned, I wondered how it would hold up for game photography. So I whipped out my metal Tichu box. And substituted it for the can of peanuts place-holder.
Since I was already lighting the background separately, I played around with adding a background Dragon shadow. And I learned that it is surprisingly difficult to cut and place one properly so it it will it would be easily recognizable.
One thing that I learned about the flash was to use the multi-stroboscopic mode (around 30Hz or so) and press the test button. It looks exactly like a flash light and you can get an idea what the shadow will look like. Don’t hold the button down too long, it tends to overheat the flash bulb.
It seems that another Mighty Fine Burger is opening up in Round Rock. It is right next to the new REI and new Specs.
Doesn’t that sign seem wrong somehow? What are they really trying to say? They are under new management now. Which is sad. I hope that my favorite lunch time sushi place has a little more stability in its life…
Originally, I had wanted to take a picture of the pyramidic step pattern of the beer foam. But my crappy iPhone had some electronic, drunken hiccup and produced another level of step pattern!
It seems that my garage door has broken! Which was not a surprise, really. A couple of months ago, my neighbor across the street was experiencing problems with his garage door. It would act like the pressure sensor was broken and change directions occasionally. Soon after that the spring broke. Given that our houses were built at the same time, it was no surprise when that happened to me. And it looks like the garage door opener almost ripped out the bar off the door from the now extremely heavy door.
Apparently it snowed in Austin last night! I woke up in the morning an found a little bit of evidence still lurking in a corner of the yard…