Greg

Home sick :(

Started coming down with something yesterday afternoon/evening and when I woke up this morning it wasn't better.  Plus I've picked up a cough :(.  I've been getting a lot better about not going to work when I'm sick so that I don't spread it to the rest of the team.  Today is good and bad because I had been scheduled for a lunch interview - good because I definitely shouldn't be eating right next to some random person making it more likely to spead this, bad because I had to scramble to get someone to cover me.  There's definitely something going around as there are a few other people out too.  Anyway, in addition to the general achiness and the cough/rough throat, there are two things that I noticed this morning that are unusual for me, and I hadn't really thought about in a while

1. I slept for aobut 11 hours (not including a brief interruption while I sent email that I wasn't coming in).  I just can't sleep that long anymore - if it was back in the college days it'd be a different story.  These days, unless it wa sa really late night, my body just wakes up around 7/7:30 and I can't fall back asleep.

2. I wasn't hungry.  And am still not.  I'm now conditioned to eat breakfast regularly and fairly early.  So if I haven't had my cornflakes by 9am, I'm really crazying them.  Or coffee.  Or anything!  Must.  Eat.  Soon.

First photography excursion of 2006

Headed out to the aquarium this afternoon for the first 'photography outing' of 2006; met up there with Carl who is also getting more into photography these days.  I recently got a zoom lens for the camera and wanted a chance to try it out.  I'm definitely still learning to keep film speed, shutter speed, etc. in mind at the same time dealing with manual focusing.  It's still way too easy to fall back to a 'cheat mode'.  I mainly bounced between using a cheat mode to work on my manual focus, and using auto-focus to work on my controlling the rest of the exposure - though I did take some that were "all me". 

Unfortunately, you definitely get some distortion from the glass of the tanks.  And some grubbiness from kids putting their hands on the tanks.  And some of the fish are damn fast!  Fortuntely a number of pictures still came out very nicely. :)   The next step in my evolution (beyond moving to full control of exposure and focus all the time) is to work on my "post-processing" of the pictures - pretty much everything that I've posted to date is untouched after the camera.

Photos are now online here.  A couple of my favorites:

• clownfish with coral.
• tank with a bubbler - first shot focuses on the bubbles, and the next two on the fish through the bubbles.
• Orthodox crosses with space needle in the background (photo).  If only the phone wire wasn't there.  Oh well.

I've also added a couple to my 'learning to use the camera' group (ok, I also only just created the 'learning to use the camera'  group :)).  I took these during the downpour this morning; I was trying to zoom in on a puddle on the balcony and catch the raindrops splashing up.  Which is a lot harder than you'd think - it's a lot of "focus in the right place and shoot a lot to throw away".

How much does accuracy matter?

As part of my new year's resolutions, I've actually been going to the gym (no, really, I have).  Eating better isn't going as well (damn you cookies, damn you!), but I'm still getting into a little better shape...  Now that we have a new battery in it, I've been using our bathroom scale to see how I'm doing - I realize it's not necessarily on the nose but it gives me a frame of reference.  I might not be up on the latest in scale sales trends, but it strikes me as strange that it measures in half-pound increments.  And I'm not sure that it's really that accurate.  Which really all just adds up to me getting annoyed because it looks like my weight is like a EKG graph (ok, if it was really a EKG you'd be doing some serious CPR on the patient - it's not that steep of swings).

How accurate does a bathroom scale need to be?  Why bother with that extra half-pound?  Is to the nearest pound not sufficient to give people the idea of what they weigh?  It's not like i'm measuring packages or amounts of food and need it down the ounce...  I've been wondering if this was really the best selling point they could come up with.  It must be working to some extent - we did end up buying this model after all :)

Hobbies that take time

I was thinking about it during a conversation about snowboarding last night - a lot of the good hobbies of our day just take a lot of time.  Snowboarding?  At least a half-day commitment - and that's if you're just going up to Snoqualmie.  Which, by the way, apparently has great snow right now.  Golf?  Four hours for the round; five if it's a weekend and you're behind slow people or the course is just stacked up.  Plus transit time.  If you buy a boat?  You're going to be out and on it for at least a half-day at a time.  Going to the Seahawks game (go 'Hawks!)?  Four hours for the game, plus transit and padding time.

This is all well and good up until you try to do other things as well.  For example, I'm trying to go the gym a few times a week these days - yes you can go ahead and laugh now :).  So, that blocks from going night skiing/snowboarding up at Snoqualmie.  And then I've had enough other stuff that I needed to do during the weekends most weeks to have prevented me from being able to set aside enough consecutive hours to be able to head up to the mountains, and this upcoming weekend has already shaped up that way too...

Is there any point to my rambling?  Not really; just that it's very easy to accidentally overcommit  yourself and not realize it until the snow season is half to mostly done :(

The certainty of the wrong

Ever have that feeling that you know you're right about something.  Usually something inconsequential.  And you're wrong?  I got to enjoy this last night during a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit 20th anniversary edition.  The question had something about "tar baby" "author" and "mississippi" in it, and the right answer was Toni Morrison.  Except I was very convinced it was Beatrix Potter.  Yes, the Beatrix Potter that wrote Peter Rabbit.  Even better?  I was convinced it was Beatrix Potter because I was thinking of the Br'er Rabbit stories, and had decided she wrote that (warning: links are wikipedia so take with a grain of salt :)).  Boy, sometimes the neurons really misfire connect random things.  Referencing a tar baby from Br'er Rabbit merges into Peter Rabbit merges into Beatrix Potter.

I mentioned the edition we were playing because I find the Trivial Pursuit has gotten harder from edition to edition.  Or maybe I just missed about 20 years of pop culture.  Or the writers of the questions have a different view of culture than I do.  The likelihood of me getting a "pink" or "brown" question right these days is incredibly low - thank goodness it's a team game :)

[edit 1/10/06 9:31PM - fix spelling of likelihood]

First blog post of the new year

Had a conversation with a friend over coffee the other day about New Year's Resolutions.  He wasn't a big fan of them with the theory that he hasn't kept his and doesn't know anyone who has been successful either...  So, I took a look at last year's resolutions and succesfully did a couple of them, with the majority not happening.  I still feel that this is a good time of year to look at how you're getting on (which basically translates into resolutions or not).  I think I'll stick with everyone's favorites of "get (back?) in shape"  "be a better person" "spend less" and so on. :)  I'll be learning to sail some time this summer from the Center for Wooden Boats - something that I keep being told is the coolest Christmas gift people have heard of lately. 

Another one of my goals this year (again) is to get back in touch with some of my friends that I've dropped out of contact with.  And keep it up.  And instead of writing emails right now I'm writing this post...  Oh well.  Speaking of posts, looking back over the 2005 I had 53 posts.  Which is up from the 13 I had from March->end of year in 2004.  The busiest month was June (wouldn't you have thought I'd be out enjoying the sunshine?) and the lowest number was the zero in March (when it  was probably raining).  Man, I'm backwards some times.

[Edit 1/9/06 ~12pm: clean up grammar slightly]