started out going by epicenter cafe. excellent if slightly pricey croissants baked fresh on site. most of the baristas do a good microfoam as well. super comfortable roomy space to work on a laptop.

headed over in the general direction of thirsty bear via abandoned roadways next. there are still quite a few vacant office buildings in soma. they have that look of buildings raring to be remodeled and retrofitted as the expansion continues.

eventually I wandered up to the waterfront and walked a fair ways along the piers themselves avoiding the embarcadero sidewalk itself as much as possible.

seeing coit tower in the distance I followed an old brick lined street heading directly towards it.

the road terminated at the base of a steep staircase zig-zagging up the hill towards the tower. as it turned out the staircase itself was a verdant pathway through the very heart of a neighborhood.

finally, at the end of many flights there was coit tower itself. frankly I don't really like the thing very much. however the murals are pretty nice, and I have fond memories of the penny machine from my childhood.

my way back turned out to be through chinatown. I'll need to spend more time there some other time. It was getting chilly, so I ended up with a pretty tasty bowl of rice porridge at new king tin restaurant.

First up is the leaving of the apartment.

And then a meandering stroll through the moscone

A quick pass through uh. whatever this area is called

A skirting of the metreon

And finally... arrival at the westfield mall!

The basic problems can be summarized pretty easily. 1: Every printer made which can do color has generally been designed and tuned for color by the manufacturer. 2: The printers generally use carbon in some form for the blacks. carbon is actually _brown_. And brown is sort of a very very dark yellow. 3: To make the brown become grey or black like the user expects it is necessary to use some cyan and magenta to counter that shift towards brown. 4: In general the printer makers have been unable to tune this properly AND keep their setup reasonably well tuned to color at the same time.

The above image is my main test as I continue to tune my printer for various different papers and inks methodologies. I'm trying to use some software called QuadToneRIP (an inexpensive shareware program which uses the printer drivers from GutenPrint and builds a fairly precisely tunable black and white print engine on top) It was taken at that orangish canyon park near Las Vegas which I've forgotten the name of. Notice how the striations seem to SHINE out of the stone. And how the large deep deep patch of shadow on the right upper side has some VERY dark detail in it. If you can't see anything in there your monitor is probably not set quite right. try turning the brightness up and the contrast down a bit. Anyway, when I print this photo out with the standard drivers it's magenta. Under some lighting less magenta, under other lighting more magenta, but always magenta. Additionally, there is no detail at ALL in the shadows, and those brilliant striations are blown out to overexposed white with no detail.

I could certainly try to fix these 3 things with various color control sliders but it seems unlikely that I'll REALLY be obtaining what I want. Another approach which has a large number of adherents the art community is to use photoshop curves to carefully correct these problems. I may still give this approach a try, but it does seem a little silly to carefully figure out how to undo the over magenta-ing of the image when I might as well start with NO magenta or cyan and apply those corrections myself.

Enter QuadToneRIP (QTR)... It doesn't use the epson drivers to do any coversion of grayscale values to dots. Normally you tell the epson driver things like : In this area I want a gray value of 127/255 (50%). Then the driver decides what sorts of dots it wants to put down. In the QuadToneRIP case it tells the driver : Put a black dot here, here and here. Then a light black dot here and here. The mechanisms for tuning QTR are non-intuitive to say the least. There are also a LOT of ways of going about it and it doesn't help that there's really only ONE easily findable guide on doing this which of course only does it one way.

I think I'll write a quick and dirty guide as to how I set QTR up since it was a fair bit different from that one guide, but I'll summarize my position here. 1: Get as close as humanly possible with the basic correction factors. All of them are low order curves and thus very natural looking. 2: The most important things to assess are : 95% black needs to be visibly different from 100%, 5% white needs to be pretty damn light, tonality needs to smoothly go from light to dark (assess that using a SMALL circular gradient : one here) 3: Use as little ink as possible while still getting to the blackest black your printer can make. 4: _IF_ you linearize then make sure that circular gradient still looks smooth.

wintery grey skies
nowhere to go in the cold
wish sun would return

Not too bad! A little cold... a little grainy... scrape the mud from my teeth and we're all good! Except that for the 3rd time my poor phone was immersed. I've fixed this phone so many time now that I'm fairly sure I can build a new one from parts off of ebay if it ever dies a final death...

As you can see above the phone has a few parts missing post mud removal and drying out... Amusingly enough it works just fine missing the entire screen, earpiece camera module. Only in speaker mode though. Eventually I got everything working again with the original parts other than the screen backlights. I'll just have to order a new screen module I guess.

Thus did I decide to move on up to an EOS 20d. Pretty hefty purchase, and it took a week or so to get here since I only placed the order after I sold the rebel. Yay! Now I have a new toy!! Anyway, since it's the only digital I have right now I have to take pictures of it with itself, and here it is along with a first run of some crummy photos with it.

Advantages the 20d has over the Digital Rebel (300d) that care about so far? A secondary rotary dial for easier and faster manual exposure. Lightning fast startup time. Extra durable and rigid magnesium body. Better focusing screen and prism for manual focus and composition. 8.2mp (Not sure I care about that one). 1/8000 shutter speed (Could be useful in the crazy bright cali sun). Much more grippy rubber grips (Did you know I don't use a camera strap?). Proper mirror lockup. ETTL2 flash (Finally distance info combined into the flash data! Did the Nikon patent expire?). Ability to turn off info overlay in playback mode. Ability to display histogram by default in record mode image display! (No more blaming the lcd for incorrect exposure). Better auto white-balance (It still stinks relative to the point & shoots).

I've been struggling with my artwork for some time now. A very similar problem to the problem I have with my technical projects. Is it really worth doing? What does this gain me? Is this really something new? Does it need to be new? For example, my intention for this imaging website is to be able to do everything in one place. PhotoShop style processing, Image blogging, Gallery creation, Gallery and Blog sharing, RSS feed creation, RSS feed aggregation, mail order printing, etc. Not only do I want to do everything in one place, but I want it to follow naturally from a simple clear user interface. What has been built so far is basic features in nearly all of those areas. But it is an extremely large scale project to build the necessary full powered UI and extra support to make the site excell in all those areas.

So the same problem with my art. I'm a photographer and I'm fairly decent at some aspects of photography. My mind has been kind of stuck in a rut for a while though. Is what I'm doing really art? I'm not bad at it, but I'm mostly just capturing slices of the world that I find aesthetically pleasing. To make my work really worth it I need to move on to other aspects of art such as dealing more properly with the human form. This would be a big committment though! I would need to begin building relationships with models, studios, other artists, galleries, other display venues, etc. I don't exactly shy away from communication, but that's a heck of a lot of communication! Where do I find time for anything else?

Oh well, in any case here are some of my photos which have been heavily warped, distorted, shredded and mangled by judicious application of my many filters. They've been chosen because they in many ways resemble that form of art known as 'modern art'. I suppose one would usually create these with a brush. Nevertheless I do feel that these are just as creative as any oil on canvas piece. Why? Well remember I created every single one of my filters from nothing. Code was written to create the filters themselves and then the filters were employed in various patterns, strengths, repetitions and modes to reinterpret the captured light of my photos. So are they art? Are they not? Are they more art than my normal photos? I don't know... What do you think?

Oh yeah, when viewing each image don't forget to hit the 'nofilters' link on the left side to see the original photo before my meddling.

Laying out stabilize.net's deeply nested structure in RSS which allows only one level of nesting - Ended up flattening all levels with at least a little body text into RSS items, and leaving out sections with no body text.

Automatically adding appropriate RFC822 date/time to each article when the pages are edited freeform - Ended up maintaining hashes and times of each of the above flattened sections so that changes to sections of the page could be detected independently and assigned times.

Linking from RSS items back to a 'real' article - Used those #blah page relative URLs (I have no idea what they're called), I generate them in parallel in the RSS generator and the HTML generator.

Why did I bother? I've been seeing those XML links around for quite a while now, and frankly both the desktop installed and web-based RSS aggregators still stink. Yet for some reason a lot of my friends have taken it into their heads to actually use those RSS feeds they get for free from various blogging software. How can I resist outputting my page in a format they'll actually look at? (maybe) Anyway, I suppose after having gone to this much effort maybe I should double my effort and make a decent aggregator website too. :)

In passing as we enter the car I note that it doesn't really appear to be a taxi like say the NYC cabs I ride on occasion. It really looks more like a private car, complete with tissue paper dispenser on the rear deck. The lady driving pulls away from the curb rather rapidly and at a pretty extreme angle. Police lights start to flash at the second curb, and a police car cuts her off with lights blazing. After much incomprehensible Chinese is exchanged between cop, driver, and hao (I don't speak mandarin at all) Hao tells me that the faux-taxi driver was in fact scamming us. After a bit of surreal drama involving the driver begging the cop for something or other (probably to be let off) on her hands and knees and with tears streaming we're brought to the airport police station. They write up a statement for us, and Hao signs it. Finally they direct us to the shuttle bus area and we're onto a bus headed to our hotel.

We enter the forbidden city easily enough and after we enter our tour group pauses briefly for a few people to use the facilities. As we get going again what do we see in the distance, but more goose-stepping communist officers. They promptly line up across the main courtyard and block all access to the central pathway through the city. Not a problem! We use the side passages. But at every courtyard where we could access the center of the forbidden city we find yet more of the faceless legions blocking our way. It happens that everything to be seen is in the center and it looks like the government has decided to be particularly arbitrary today and essentially close the entire forbidden city to everyone so as to let the elitist party officials and whatever albanian official or president they're fawning over go through without risk of coming within 500 meters of all those abhorrent commoners and peasants. Oh wait... what was the point of the communist revolution again? I seem to have forgotten... do they know?

Anyway we essentially saw nothing for the day despite having paid for our tour and our tickets to enter the forbidden city. I would be much less irritated by a closure like this if the government had at least seen fit to announce the closure beforehand so as to allow tours to be scheduled around the times it would be closed. But no. That would be telling the masses too much information. Who knows! They might rise up against their communist masters and dare to look them in the eye!

To add insult to injury once we finally reach the end of the side passage we find that we're not even allowed to leave because the communist officials and their 'foreign friends' might eventually decide to leave themselves. Of course no estimate is provided of when such an auspicious event might occur, so tens of thousands of people are stalled in the side passageway as the 'elite' meander along. Being american-born I am by now quite angry, but the vast majority of the people surrounding me seem quite resigned to their lot in life. How do they do that? Did the communists lobotomize them all? So as to make them all good communist slaves? And why on earth is someone from albania taking advantage of this?

The next day we wandered around quite a bit as well, visiting among other places 'Manon Cafe' which serves Illy espresso, and Leonidas chocolate. Leonidas is probably my favorite chocolate maker. Their chocolates in manhattan stores are flown in from belgium every week to ensure perfect freshness. They're not excessively sweet like most American chocolate makers and are actually quite reasonably priced for a premium chocolate. Most of their collection is pralines, and I'm lucky enough here in San Mateo to have ready access to one of the few sources outside of manhattan (Draegers). After some good espresso in the cafe and a bit of chocolate we wandered around a bit more before heading over to Broadway to see 'Hairspray'. Great Musical! See it!

After the show we hurried over to an absolutely delicious Ramen noodle shop named 'Menchaiko' near Broadway just before they closed. Menchaiko was recommended by Hao's Japanese hair stylist, and it didn't disappoint. I had a bowl of delicious thick ramen noodles, and Hao had the chef's choice Oden. As our usual custom when we eat we swapped dishes a couple times during dinner in order to 'maximize the breadth of our experience'. I have to admit that the noodle shop was at least as good as my usual exceptional noodle shop in San Mateo (if not a touch better).

After dinner we wandered around some more and ended up in Times Square before heading back to the hotel. Unfortunately I was too busy eating and didn't take pictures of anything except the hairspray sign, and Times Square.

The Met!

Central Park!

Back to JFK

Landscape - What can I say... I like to capture the beauty I see in the world about me. The vast sweep of nature surrounding me makes me feel like a part of the world even when I'm alone. Capturing those feelings that nature inspires is one of my goals.

Light and Shadow - Bursts of sun, soft leafy shadows. Everywhere a ray of sun strikes there is an accompanying transition to shadow. The transitions and tonalities are as varied as the world. Seeing the dynamic interplay as the sun drifts across the sky gives me a sense of depth.

Tactile - Grains of sandy beach, fibers of wind gnarled wood. There's a certain mental tactile feel to close cropped segments of things we can easily imagine touching with our hands. I think my liking of this stuff has a lot to do with the way my mind works. I visualize EVERYTHING mentally from concepts to code, not just things which are in fact visual and tangible.

On Sunday morning we got up long before sunrise and headed over to badger pass in search of some good snowshoeing. There was much more snow around badger pass and we were able to hike and snowshoe through the snow for about 13 miles. We had originally thought that we'd manage to make it to ostrander lake, but apparently we're not quite in good enough shape make it the 21 miles that would have required. By the end of our trek we were both quite sore and tired so we ended up heading back to yosemite village for an extremely filling meal at the Camp Curry buffet.

We had intended to return to the park on Monday morning (president's day) but the morning was heavily overcast and the steady rain coming down showed no signs of letting up. Therefore we decided to head back to the bay area and spent a pleasant afternoon and evening at home. View the full gallery!

For the final word in proper diopters one has to buy a dual element diopter which corrects for this problem by combining two elements which cancel each others' focus divergence. Common dual element diopters are filters such as the Canon 500D and the Nikon T6. They're awfully expensive though costing over $100 each in the sizes I need. At that price one might as well buy a real macro lens such as the Canon 100mm Macro USM. The results would be better. So why do I want diopters? Well they're a heck of a lot smaller than carrying an additional lens! They're even smaller than carrying an extension tube (another method of achieving macro). Will I be satisfied with the quality? Well I'm really not quite sure yet. Here are a few sample images. View the full gallery!

I spent most of the time at ISO 1600 on my digital rebel shooting with available light to avoid running out of power too early. Later in the parade I used flash occasionally at ISO 400. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the distance and coverage of the built in flash in these conditions, but it did drink a lot of power. View the full gallery!

Another limitation of the lens is its odd tendency to have massive flare in the regions closer to the edge of the circle. People (myself included) believe this to be primarily due to this silvery looking band inside the lens. Light most likely reflects off of this band and bounces around inside the lens for a while before eventually making its way to the sensor. One might wonder why they don't paint that band black like the rest of the inside of the lens. I personally suspect that the silvery band is not in fact silver, but simply a result of the glue cementing one of the lens elements to the lens body! Thus it's reflective and silvery because it's functioning as a mirror! Anyway, taking the various limitations into account here are some pretty neat images from the lens. View the full gallery!

I got the camera just in time to play with it this weekend, so I took quite a few pictures from various locations in this area. Here's a selection of some of the more interesting pictures. View the full gallery!

I've found a few other people to try out my site during this alpha phase and I'll iron out any problems which come up prior to opening use of the site up to the general public!