Though I’m not sure if I get the math here.
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Category: Idle
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I’m not sure I can keep eating this way
Paula and I met Dick for some drinks and snacks tonight and headed over to Lot no. 3 in downtown Bellevue. We had some Salumi cured meats, a PB & J (peanut butter, BACON and jelly) and, of course, a Plate O’ Bacon.
What the hell, this body’s just on loan anyway, right?
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I think my heart just stopped…
Sundays are a great time to visit John Howie Steak in Bellevue: happy hour in the bar lasts from 3pm to 10pm. For $40 Paula and I had two glasses of wine, a soda, mac & cheese, steak sliders, crab salad and, my new favorite food, tempura fried bacon with maple ponzu dip.
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Mommy, where do hippos come from?
Mexico, dear, just like watermelons and Taco Bell.
The computer is telling me I’ve played enough solitaire for today.
What’s wrong with the picture? Here’s the problem, there’s a two of clubs out next to the seven… and another in the stack under the four of clubs.
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But I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk
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This morning I rushed to catch the elevator up from the parking garage and as I stepped in I said “thanks” to the woman holding the door for me.
Turns out, however, that I reflexively said “thanks” only to realize, after I got in the elevator, that her hand was nowhere near the open button. She had seen me coming and made no effort to hold the lift for me.
How sad is it that the other person got caught doing a dick move and I feel bad for coming across as passive aggressive?
Gran Tourismo, Playstation’s ultimate driving simulation game (some argue it’s the best on any platform), has announced a feature that bridges the gap between video games and track days.
Back in the good old days, when Mike and I used to have “racing budget”, we practiced driving Laguna Seca on the PS2 with Gran Tourismo, then went and drove the track for real. If we did it now, however, we could take it one step farther by bringing the results of our track day back home and reviewing them on the new version of Gran Tourismo.
Here’s how it works: while at your track day you record your lap times and lines using GPS and “CAN”. When you return home you put the data on a USB stick and plug it into your PS3. You can replay the data by watching your run around the track or use the data as a ghost and race against yourself to improve your lines or see how you would fare against, say, an F1 car (spoiler alert: not very well).
What type of data logger hardware you need isn’t terribly clear in the press release, it just says you need log CAN data. As for tracks, I think it’s a safe assumption that the feature will be limited to the tracks already part of the software.
Panoramic pictures are a great way to convey the scale and beauty of a scene, but building a panorama requires a good set of tools. Fortunately Microsoft Research is giving one away for free.
For the longest time I kept Microsoft Digital Image Suite on my computer only for the purpose of stitching panoramas. My photo editing tool of choice is Photoshop, but Photoshop CS’s panorama stitching was so cumbersome and ineffective that I didn’t even try CS4 until I was writing this. Digital Image Suite does a good job… but only if images are really well lined up. Thankfully, however, Microsoft Research released Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE).
I’ve compared the results of Microsoft Digital Image Suite, Photoshop CS, Photoshop CS4 and Microsoft ICE.
Photoshop CS did only a passable job at creating a panorama. Items weren’t lined up and there is obvious banding where the exposure differs between pictures.
DI did a beter job of lining up the pictures and blending the exposures, but still not great.
Photoshop CS4’s Photomerge feature does a nice job both of lining up the images as well as adjusting the exposure across the frame.
Microsoft ICE generated very similar results to Photoshop CS4 on my set of test images. Both CS4 and ICE had trouble lining up the railing in the center of the picture (probably a result of me shooting the sequence without a tripod). CS4 has a more even feel to the exposure and the perspective feels less warped.
Bottom line: ICE is by far the easiest tool to use of the set and generates results comparable to the $700 CS4. While I still live in Photoshop for image editing I use ICE for stitching panoramas. It’s a smaller application and has nice features like "autocrop" which automatically removes the inevitable curved seams on a stitch.
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My inbox is possessed
Looks like my volume of unread mail has passed the “too much” threshold and has hit the level of “down right evil”.
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Some tips for surviving Sci Fi movies
If you find yourself anywhere near a mining operation: hail a cab, pronto.
In the future we’re big on strip-mining other planets. I have yet to see a Sci-Fi movie where a freighter full of soldiers and Mega Corp employees travel light years to a foreign solar system then farm the hell out of some unsuspecting planet. Know why? Because bad stuff doesn’t happen to farmers. Miners, on the other hand, seem to have the karmic deck stacked against them. Archeologists are only slightly safer. The conservative among you should just avoid breaking rocks at all.
Short, dark and pretty
If you’re joining a military squad, look for the one with the tough Latina. The universe is chock full of massively muscled, BFG-toting ultra soldiers. If you spot a little woman from Puerto Rico you can be sure she’s something special… she’s made it this far. Rest assured, when all the other space marines wet their pants and go to pieces, this woman will keep you alive.
Avoid robots, robots are bad
Sure, they may seem like they’re there to help you, but then that’s when all the screaming and running and blood starts. There are robots out there to kill you too. You can trust them, at least they’re honest wanting to kill your worthless meatbag self. Basically avoid them all. The good ones will break, then kill you. The bad ones will just kill you (yeah, you wish they’d break).
Don’t touch that
No, seriously, don’t touch it. Do you know what it’s for? Do you know how to use it? Is it poisonous? How about what happened to the last guy who touched it? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Please just put your hands in your pockets.
Keep your friends close and your engineer closer
Your junk is going to break because it’s… well… junk. The big mega corporation that is funding your little operation only cares about the bottom line (note: evil corporations don’t need a separate warning because corporations are evil and cheep, just like the real world). So, as sure as death and taxes, you better be able to fix it when it breaks. I know, the engineer is chatty, overweight and a general PITA, but keep an eye on him. After all, you can’t toss the bad guys out the airlock when the latch is jammed.
Finally
No good ever comes from pissing off Sigourney Weaver.
