(no subject)

Dropped by a friends' house after work, bearing an old computer for my ex-girlfriend. There, the GBfH was admired, and Jon established that waltzing while wearing it was in fact possible, although the bag had a definite mind of its own as to where you're going, something I'd noticed just walking around with it.

Earlier in the day, I took some pictures of the birds in the lagoon, but they were just a little too far away for me to get any particularly good shots. This was probably the best of the lot.

Birds by UCSB Lagoon

Even with what was effectively a 450mm lens, I still needed to get a lot closer to those birds.

(no subject)

This comment brought back to me memories of the 101->110 interchange, in my experience the Marianas Trench in the enormous shit hole that is driving in Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar with this, the important parts are as follows:

• The 101 S ends in central Los Angeles, forcing you to choose between the 5 and the 110.
• Suppose for the moment that you are trying to go south on the 110 (although it may inexplicably be called `west' for some reason). This is well marked, and you think you've safely landed on the 110.
• You now have half a mile to move left four lanes if you want to stay on the 110 and not get dumped unceremoniously into downtown Los Angeles somehow. God help you if there's traffic.
• Some will point out that if you only manage to make it over two lanes in that half a mile, then you end up on a weird section of road that peels off and then rejoins the freeway proper. So you're not completely dead.

To give you some idea of how difficult this feat is, I become a rather aggressive driver in Los Angeles (purely out of self defense, I swear!). It takes me the entire half a mile to get over those four lanes on a road with reasonably light traffic, and that's when I know it's coming.

If memory serves you have to face a related abomination if you're coming north on the 5 and want to get to the 101, as well; my girlfriend at the time missed this turn and decided to take the 10W to the 1N and go home that way (which ended up being a colossal error, but so be it).

The freeway system was not designed in Los Angeles. It was plotted out by a crack team of monkeys addicted to hallucinogens spraying red ink from fountain pens onto a topographical map. Many places can make similar claims, but Los Angeles is special: it has an enormous population, and the sheer physical size of the city and related areas is staggering. On one occasion, unimpeded by traffic, doing 80-85 mph, driving like a madman, it took me half an hour to get from the LAX to Union Station. That's from the periphery of the city to downtown.

(no subject)

I wonder how geeky you have to be to write an AppleScript to export images from iPhoto and write HTML for you.

Whatever the requirement, I hit it tonight. Sheesh. By the bye, why can't you script iPhoto's export functions? That would make this all so much easier...

Clouds in Goleta

Have a gratuitous photo, anyway.

Godiva

Godiva is a dialect of Java that provides general purpose abstractions that have been shown to be valuable in several very high level languages. These facilities include additional built-in data types, higher level operators, goal-directed expression evaluation, and pattern matching on strings. Godiva's extensions make Java more suitable for rapid prototyping and research programming. Adding these features to the core language increases the expressive power of Java in a way that cannot be achieved by class libraries.

A bunch of ideas from Icon and APL grafted onto Java. Here's the link to the language reference. There doesn't seem to be an implementation available. [Lambda the Ultimate]

Interesting. Java certainly has numerous issues. But without an implementation available...

Film development

Developed my first roll of Tri-X in 120 tonight. The Hewes stainless steel reels are worth the money in 35mm, and it turns out the 120 reel is remarkably easy to load as well. I'll have some photos later on tonight when the film dries.

I'm annoyed with myself because I mixed my packet of Hypo Clear wrong, basically rendering it useless in about 24 hours.