*no answer*

Please. Leave. Message. After. Tone. *beeeeeep*

Photos of fire

They're still uploading as I write this, but I've put a set of photos of fire on Flickr.

All of the photos were taken at the highest resolution my camera allows (3072x2304), were taken at the highest JPEG quality setting the camera allow and were taken with a simulated film type of ISO64. In short, they're at about as high a technical quality as my camera is capable of producing. Each image is about 3MB, and the entire set comes to about 1.2GB.

I tweaked shutter speed and aperture settings to get the effects that I wanted.

All the photos in that set are CC-By, which means you can do just about whatever you want with them, so longs as you give credit. Additionally, you can download the full-size images, embed, order prints, etc...I opened up all the permissions I could find.

The coolest photo I've taken to date. (<1024x768 version)

I happened across a site that asked people to take pictures of themselves and some sort of association with the word "MOO", without faking it. (i.e. without digital alterations, I suppose. They said "put some work into it, like the rest of us.")

I don't have an external flash, nor do I have an external snap trigger. To get this image, I had the word MOO display on my laptop screen, and used the magnifying glass you see in the picture to focus the projection of the image on my laptop screen onto my face.

I couldn't find my tripod, so I had to set up my camera across the room, use the autofocus to focus it on the chair where my head would be, set the camera to manual focus, turn off the lights, set the snap delay to 10 seconds, then hightail it back to the chair and get the magnifying glass in position.

To make sure the "MOO" was focused and in the right place when the snap took place, I had the electronic viewfinder hooked up to my 22" LCD TV, so I could see and get it focused.

The camera was set to shutter priority, ISO64, with a 4sec shutter speed, and the camera was allowed to select an appropriate aperture setting. I had to turn up the brightness on my laptop screen so that enough unfocused light would fall that my face could be seen in addition to the MOO.

The coolest photo I've taken to date

On fighting on two fronts

So I frequently get in philosophical debates with my two most senior coworkers. It's a lot of fun, and we regularly touch those topics which aren't considered polite among friends--politics, religion, abortion, evolution, economics, etc. All that stuff people kill each other over in some other countries. But we have different opinions, viewpoints and degrees of tolerance, yet still end up having a healthy debate and exchange of information and ideas.

I've noticed that they each have very different styles of debate, if one defines a style as the types of arguments and counterarguments, approaches taken, sources of material, concepts and presuppositions, etc. One of them I can debate against quite effectively, usually breaking down the arguments and using them and their requisite assumptions in more effective counterarguments. I have a harder time debating the other coworker, but I can usually hold my own for quite a while. (I don't have a good metric for this; Debates get paused and resumed, multiplexed with other debates, etc.)

When I have a really hard time is when I'm on one side, of a debate, and they're both on the other side. (Actually, we each have a hard time in that position, and each such scenario happens occasionally.) I run into a problem where the the stipulations, assumptions and allowable assumed interpretations for when I'm debating one of them aren't all also valid for debates with the other, so I end up having to put in four times the work to try to make the same point. And making supporting arguments is even more difficult, because there are precious few complex and sophisticated stipulations that hold true for both of them, so I frequently wind up going deeper and deeper when making my supporting arguments, usually getting stuck somewhere in the realm of theoretical science.

"Theoretical science? You're not qualified to debate and discuss that. Why go there?"

Yes, theoretical science. No, I'm not qualified to go there. But I keep winding up there because I'm forced to back up assumptions about everyday phenomena with the underlying principles, and then have to back up the principles that underly those, and then...you see where this is going.

And as soon as we hit the level where popularly reported science hasn't figured out what's going on, then I'm stuck and have lost the debate about something that started as mundane as why people have babies, or how many generations back a family tree can go.

(Speaking of time, could someone please give me a rigorously proven way to explain the accuracy ranges of carbon dataing and dating by geological layers? Preferrably including an explanation as to the nature of the carbon 14 cycle, why we still have it if it's unstable, why we have any radioactive elements at all, and so on? It's one of those recurring foundation topics.)

A Twist on the standard PC repair shop

It occurs to me that there's one thing a brick-and-morter PC repair shop could do to set itself apart from others, get more customers, and increase customer satisfaction even in the face of utterly unrepairable systems.

If the system is deemed to be too expensive to fix, have a firing range on site where the customer can "take it out back and put it out of their misery." (With all appropriate and necessary supervision, of course...)

I'm annoyed at SourceForge.

I've been trying for several days now to get ImplSearchBot accepted as a SourceForge project. Both times, it's been rejected for revision as "We're sorry, but due to the thousands of project requests we get per day, we don't have time to look at all the links." (Though I didn't get the reply to the first attempt until Monday, when I submitted it on Saturday.)

I was mildly annoyed the first time, as the links I'd included pointed to the bot's existing page which contained its description of behavior and its source code, and the description wasn't that long. Still, I understood where they were coming from, and replaced all the URLs in my request with several paragraphs detailing the behavior, theory and benefit behind how ImplSearchBot works. Then I resubmitted.

The next day, Tuesday, I got another rejection notice, for the same reason. Scratching my head, I looked over the request I'd sent, thinking I'd forgotten to delete the URLs in addition to the technical description I'd provided. No dice; I'd correctly removed the URLs.

So I scratched my head some more, trying to figure out why they were complaining about links. Then I saw it. I'd included as part of its description "I created ImplSearchBot as part of administering rosettacode.org" -- I often refer to Rosetta Code as rosettacode.org, for the simple reason that the phrase "Rosetta Code" sometimes gets confused with either spoken/written language software or the software used to run old Mac software on newer Macs. Someone or something saw the term "rosettacode.org" and decided that they would have to click on it before making a host/no-host decision, and clicked the "reject because of URLs" quick-reject button.

I'll try one more time, removing mention of Rosetta Code's domain name. If it gets rejected again, I'll find someone else to host it. Google Code has a nice system going, but I know a fair number of folks who don't want to touch it because they don't like the privacy implications of having that much mineable data under the control of a single company. SourceForge was a close second choice because they've got a long and established history hosting Open Source projects, and I've participated and run projects there before. I'm not crazy about GitHub, partially because I haven't yet learned Git, partially because they're a new player, and partially because their free accounts are limited in size.