thieves

thieves
Originally uploaded by phlatphrog.

On monday we were out touring cuz Diana was visiting from Big Island. At one of our stops somebody broke my window and took the stuff out of my car.

They took my brand new blue North Face bag which had a Voigtlander R2, 40mm and 75mm lenses, a book I was borrowing from the library, my mini iPod and the radio transmitter thingie for the iPod.

I took the car straight to the dealer and it’s there waiting for a new window.

So, I’ve been pretty whigged out all week. I have 2 other lenses which are now pointless without a camera.

Yes, I did call the cops and filed a report. I doubt we’ll get anything out of that.

I need to start hitting all the pawn shops to see if my camera and lenses show up.

I want it!

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

There is a bit in the video that is google-earth like. It looks like it might be a different dataset than what google is using. (Looks like it’s switching between satellite and maps depending on altitude.)

communicating

One of the things that makes flickr good is that the site communicates well. Too often we (by “we” I mean people who write software/websites) use language that is UNnatural. We somehow believe that a conversational style is not good enough. But we have to remember that The Point is to communicate.

So anyway, flickr uses language well, and it communicates well. This “guidelines” page is a good example. It may look light and breezy, but don’t think they didn’t sweat blood writing this document.

eddie would go

I heard the version that he died saving tourists at waimea bay, but it looks like this gives the real story. After reading this, I have a better understanding of the bumper stickers.

what is silver?

This is an interesting aspect of human perception. To the untrained, silver is a color. But is it? One thing that makes silver silver is how it varies over time in it’s environment. It’s more than a color, it’s a behavior.

In a photograph you can see “silver”, but you don’t really. You see a snapshot (sorry, can’t think of a better word) of how silver was at an instant. You can tell that what was photographed was silver, but if you were to extract the “silver” bit out of the photograph and replicate it, you’d find that it was gray, or white. It’s only silver in context.

Jeff Hawkins in “On Intelligence” talks about how vision relies on “temporal patterns”:

In real life, you constantly move your head and body and walk through continuously shifting environments. Your conscious impression is of a stable world full of objects and people that are easy to keep track of. But this impression is only made possible by your brain’s ability to deal with a torrent of retinal images that never repeat a pattern exactly. Natural vision, experienced as patterns entering the brain, flows like a river. Vision is more like a song than a painting. (p.57)

So, anyway, it occurred to me that this explains the discrepancy between our perception of “silver” as a “color” when it doesn’t mesh with our knowledge that “color” is a manifestation of particular wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation hitting our eyes.

Emacs mode creation tutorial

Yet another thing I should read…

eat your vegies!

I think this is my 2nd attempt to go vegi.

At the go meeting couple mondays ago I got to talking to Leon. He was talking about how he went vegetarian long, long ago and the benefits. (Don’t need as much sleep, don’t get sick as often.) This inspired me to give it another go.

I think it’s been a week now. I’m not being super strict, but I clearly have not eaten any hunks of meat. Also, I’m not having any trouble finding enough food. I’m worried my non-meat fat intake may go up. Leon described how he found himself eating a lot of ice cream and he figured it was lack of fat in his diet. He started adding more oil to his cooking. For me, I may have to watch the cheese.

So tonight I cooked up a rather strange concoction for dinner. It was sort of between a stir fry and tomato sauce. With broccoli and celery. All that on top of a small pile of quinoa. It was ok.

I tried a vegi-delite (or whatever it was called) at subway. That was ok too. Not great.

I’ve eaten quite frequently at taco bell. Some custom burritos and quesadillas. One burrito I do is: bean burrito minus red sauce add green sauce plus rice, lettuce and tomatoes. That works pretty well. (Like I said, I’m not strict here. I assume there is some animal fat of some sort in their beans.)

the magic

A handy-dandy magic telescope. Good for spying on friends far away…