I got myself an Agri-Fab 42 inch lawn sweeper, and I am very glad I did so. I bought mine when it was still properly summertime, and I ended up saving more than $50 compared to the current price. Fallen leaf season is upon us, apparently.

Yeah, it fills up pretty quick, but you can sweep your lawn in circles, looping back to the grass-pile to dump every one or two passes.

It even picked up walnuts. Not all of them, for sure, but I didn’t expect it to pick up any.

Poor little fried powerstrip. I hope nothing downstream got fried. I guess I’ll know in a minute.

Some lights got really bright and some others went dim. Some lights stopped working at all, and the ‘fancier’ electronics went haywire. (Power adaptors started giving off bizarre smells, other appliances started buzzing, etc..)

I called Consumers, and they said that someone would be by in the morning to sort everything out, and that I didn’t have to be here for that. The lady I talked to seem to have an idea as to what had happened here.

Reassured, I went outside to see what had happened and I saw a large, fallen, walnut-tree branch sitting on the wire that runs from our side of the street to the house on the other side of Henrietta. Yikes! the fallen branch had bent the wires down to about car-radiator height. I ran back to the phone and told Consumers about this and was told that it would be dealt with right away.

I actually stood guard outside for quite a while to make sure nobody got electrocuted. Eventually (near midnight) I gave up and called 911 to get a cop out to watch the wires. A nice one showed up and spelled me. (He even had flares to replace my expiring, pathetic candles.)

Later, a CE truck showed up and moved the fallen lumber off the wires. Cool, I figured (the activity woke me up). Not so much, actually, as I awoke the next morning to the same electrical problems as the night before. Rats. Figuring that the info I had gotten the night before was still operative, I went to work (without a shower or coffee).

Ok, so I get home from work Thursday night to find everything still fucked up. Apparently nobody from CE came by to fix our wires. Frustrated, I drove back to Ann Arbor for a shower in a hotel room. I did try and call CE again, but they were no longer in ‘storm’ mode and weren’t going to take that call. Slept at the hotel.

The next day I called CE again, and was told that ‘power was retored’ at 11pm the previous night (while I was sleeping in a hotel room in Ann Arbor). Cool! I’ll go home and turn the mains back on.

Um, nope. Got home tonight (Friday) to find everything just like I left it (just as fucked up).

Called CE around 6 pm to, er, complain a little (I was very polite), and was told that someone was ‘on the way’.

Called back at 9:20 to get a clearer definition of ‘on the way’, but the person I talked to had no access to any info on the service call (though she could see it in the system). We’ll see, I guess.

Update: Power was back to normal on Saturday morning when I returned from Laundry. Yay!

Tendulkar fell 9 short of his 100th century.

Over time, I would get emails asking me to join my ‘friends’ ‘professional networks’, and I usually would. It felt, well, sort of pointless to do so, but I would (usually) do it.

My initial unease with LinkedIn was caused by my being unable to grasp any sense of the meaning of it all. Was it just a case of digital Pog collecting, or was there an actual point to it? If there was a point, was it a good one?

Additionally, I did not enjoy making the decisions I was being asked to make. And not just because I couldn’t really figure out what it meant to decide one way or the other, but because I didn’t like having to choose, on each request, between a simple yes or no. Frendo or no frendo? This lacks nuance, and the choice often left me feeling queasy.

I had been thinking, generally, about what is valuable on the Internet last fall. And it occurs to me the LinkedIn is gathering a lot of valuable information at almost no cost to itself. Well, good for them. A ton of websites are trying to do the same thing, in sort of an underpants gnomes kind of way. The usual deal, though, is that people want to contribute all kinds of free data and meta-data because they get some added value back (tell Netflix which movies you already like; Netflix tells you which other movies you might like, for example). LinkedIn wasn’t holding up its end of that bargain for me.

All this time, additionally, I was picking up a hum in the media background about how LinkedIn was being used (and, in some cases, being misused) by companies and their HR departments. And the feeling I was getting from that hum was unpleasant.

In the end, I took the easy way out and deleted my LinkedIn, er, account? Whatever it was, I deleted it. I am given the impression that doing this has lowered the value of LinkedIn for some people, and I apologize for that if that’s the case for you. The fact that LinkedIn was of no value to me and, simultaneously, causing me some (almost spiritual) distress, led me to my decision.

In case you haven’t heard about this plan already: I am in week two of a six week ‘vacation’ (I use the quotes because I’m sitting in Munith, not on a beach somewhere) that has, as its goal, the end of my cigarette smoking nicotine addiction.

I am taking the time off because, A, I get so miserable while trying to quit smoking that it would jeopardize my career to inflict that misery on my co-workers or our customers, and, B, by ‘investing’ something valuable in the effort (vacation days), I am challenging myself to not fail.

Yes, there is a glamour to smoking that I understand, but I am not addicted to glamour (ask anyone who is, even glancingly, familiar with my wardrobe). The chief thing that I am really aware of (now that I’ve been chewing nicotine gum and gently dissolving nicotine lozenges pretty ardently) is that smoking (whatever sort of thing) is an awesomely effective drug delivery system.

Now that I think about it, every drug that has been widely smoked has hit the peak of its ‘success’ using that delivery system.

Marijuana, yup: To this day, all of the medical marijuana advocates insist — insist — that smoking is the only useful delivery mechanism. All kinds of people have been trying to replace spliffs with other things (pills, whatever), but the truly miserable patients who seem to get help from The Chronic only seem to get help when they smoke it.

Cocaine, yup: Coke was just an amusing thing people did with their excess income until the world found out a simple way to make it smokable. Once people started cooking coke (into ‘crack’), all hell broke loose. Meth smoking has a similar history.

Nicotine, yup: While tobacco is still ‘chewed’ (actually sort of, er, sucked on – gross!) by some and snorted (as ‘snuff’) by others, smoking is the killer hit when it comes to enjoying tobacco. I gotta tell you, after my experience with the nicotine gums and lozenges, I totally understand what the hop-heads are saying about medical marijuana.

I found that tinnitus is, basically, untreatable. OK, then, no need for health-care.

I then noticed that, in addition to the tinnitus, I couldn’t actually hear much through my left ear. I had gone years without an annual checkup, and I needed to set up a new ‘primary care physician’ (per my HMO), so I scheduled an annual with Dr. Farmer (who, I learned later, is the former mayor of Ypsilanti — wow).

She gave me an annual (which didn’t seem to interest her much, what as I am actually pretty healthy in spite of my bad habits) and referred me for a hearing test based on my self-reported hearing problems.

The referral dance (required by my HMO) ended with me getting a hearing test at an audiology lab. Yup, that left ear I was wondering about? Doesn’t hear stuff.

The hearing audiology lab referred me to an ear doctor, so I scheduled another appointment. Another referral dance later, I got one. The ear doctor’s office called me later to tell me that I’d need a hearing test before my appointment. Once I said that it was A FUCKING HEARING TEST (previous four words not verbatim) that led me to schedule my appointment in the first place they checked their paperwork and said “Oh, yeah, we got that. Never mind.”

Phew.

So, eventually, I go in to see the hearing doctor. He looks at the results of my hearing test, then peers into my cranial cavities, and then says (roughly; paraphrasing) “You’re deaf in your left ear. It might be a tumor, so I’ll schedule an MRI to check that out”. This took less than five minutes (of his time. Me? I had to take the whole afternoon off).

Yay! Another referral! One more and I’ll have the complete set.

I actually dug the shit out of my MRI. Even though I knew it was costing more than I had spent on the last two cars I had purchased — combined. Even though I knew that there was very little chance that it would find a real problem (“One in a hundred” according to the ear doctor, which is probably crap statistics. “One in a hundred” is the statistically ignorant way of saying “extremely unlikely”).

It came back normal. No tumor seen.

MRIs are noisy and expensive, and I enjoyed mine. But I didn’t have to pay for it. I wouldn’t have gotten it if I had been asked to pay for it, and, honestly, I should have told all concerned that I didn’t want the one I got even though it was ‘paid for’.

What if I did have a tumor that caused the deafness? Well, eventually I’d probably have some other symptoms (that I’d be watching for, what with all the deafness). In any case: the tumor hypothesis was presented to me as unlikely.

Seriously, people, how much clean drinking water could be made available to Haitians for the cost of one pointless MRI? How many cholera deaths would that prevent?

My right ear is fine as well, so I’m not just healthy, I can also hear. The world is as mono for me as an early Beatles album is for the rest of you, and background noise is hard to separate from foreground noise, but I can hear.

Thanks, all, for the concern.

The classic example (for me, anyway) is the 55 mph stretch where I really want to drive 60 (as, it seems, most people do, and, it seems, that the cops don’t really get upset about), but the car in front of me will only go 55.

It turns out that if you get stuck in this situation for 10 whole miles, you only ‘lose’ about 55 seconds of time. Yes, 55 seconds over 10 miles.

10 miles at 60 takes 10 minutes; 10 miles at 55 takes 10.91 minutes (10 minutes, 55 seconds).

Another plausible example is where you want to go 70, but traffic is going 65. 10 miles later? You ‘lose’ 40 seconds every 10 miles.

Stewart’s complaint (and mine as well) is that our political discourse has been turned into theater by the US cable news outfits (and the non-cable news outlets have been forced to follow suit), and that this is a bigger problem than it probably seems on the surface.

I was very pleased by the turn-out for this event, and not just by the (frankly, astonishing) number of people who came to be counted, but also by the fact that the crowd was filled with people of so many different ages, races, and political motivations. It did seem to me that all the people who showed up were genuinely concerned about the non-sensicality of our contemporary political discourse.

The one-issue activists that were there will probably be disappointed by the reactions they got from this crowd, but the one-issue activists were missing the point: Today’s rally was more about creating a rational conversation than about fighting back against some other side’s biases.

So, yeah, figuring out which news peg to hang today’s events on is going to be hard for the current TV news media to figure out, because the crowd was pretty much repudiating the whole idea that every political item has to be hung on a news peg. The entire event was a pretty direct criticism of the very news outlets that everyone who wasn’t there on the Mall has to rely on for reports about the event.

If, as I contend, the entire rally was a (rather pointed) criticism of our contemporary news media, be warned: that same news media cannot be relied on to cover the rally objectively.

Here’s some of my attempts at HDR

OK, then. I’ve been asked to share some of my thoughts and tips on using Photoshop to create HDR images. So I will.

Why HDR?

All cameras are limited in the range of values that they can capture in one exposure. Ansel Adams made his bones by getting a really nice spread of tones (from black to white) in his prints using the ‘Zone’ system. The main idea was to avoid having large areas of your image that go completely black or white. The goal, expressed in a simplistic way, was to have information everywhere you looked in the picture — to avoid flattened black or white areas.

The hard part in achieving this is that when you pick an exposure level for a photo, your camera will probably end up getting one end of the black-to-white range wrong. Set the exposure correctly for the shadowy areas, and the lighter areas will be over-exposed; set the exposure to capture the details of the brighter areas and the shadows end up looking all blobbed up and black. It’s hard, but Ansel Adams got really good at getting a really nice spread of grays without blobby blacks and blown-out whites.

So did Eadweard Muybridge, but he cheated. Muybridge wouldn’t worry about getting the exposure on the sky right when he shot landscapes, because he didn’t need to: he had a drawer filled with beautiful negatives of nice sky-shots filled with detailed clouds, and he just double-exposed his prints with the sky shots he had laying around. That fixed his blown-out sky problem. This trick made him a lot of money long before he achieved lasting (and, in my book, deserved) fame by perfecting stop-motion photography.

In his defense, Muybridge would’ve used the modern HDR techniques outlined below if he could, but it was really hard to do the double-exposure trick with negatives that weren’t all sky. If I recall correctly, he tried it, and it didn’t work out.

While it is probably possible to get nearly-Ansel Adams-quality exposures out of modern digital cameras, few of us have the patience (or, let’s admit it, the skill) to manage it. So we cheat.

(Relatively) Easy HDR with digital cameras

Every digital camera I’ve owned (going back, now, to 1999) has done an acceptable job of calculating a pretty good exposure automatically, but all of them (from a Fuji FinePix 1300 to a Nikon D50) usually pick an exposure that leaves muddy shadows or blown out highlights — sometimes both in the same picture. Time (read: Improved technology) has improved things, but even today few digital pictures end up ‘perfectly’ exposed.

Happily, though, as quickly as a modern camera can calculate a decent exposure, it can calculate a related under- and over-exposure. This is called ‘bracketing’, and your camera probably offers it as an option.

What your camera will do if you turn this on is take more than the ‘best’ calculated exposure; it’ll throw in others just above or below the calculated ‘best’. For this discussion, we’ll assume you’ve set up your camera to include an under-exposed pic and an over-exposed one. (There are other ways to use bracketing, but you’re on your own for those, champ.)

My guess is that the camera makers included this feature, originally, so that you could compare the three images and pick the one that best suited your intention when you were shooting. What we’re talking about with HDR, though, is taking the best parts of each of the three and combining them into one image (I’ll try to be careful here and not call the results of HDR ‘pictures’).

Side note: I own a D100 that I picked up used (and cheap) as a back-up camera, and it doesn’t seem to bracket as ‘widely’ as I can make the D50 bracket; I think Nikon, when they made the D100, was still thinking that bracketing was for taking three different, but still ‘OK’, pictures. My D100 pics don’t seem to HDR as nicely as my D50 ones do. YMMV

Techniques

So: at this point you should have three pictures that are as near to identically framed as you could manage, but that are spread out in exposure (from ‘ouch, way too bright’ to ‘ugh, muddy and dark’ with a pretty normal looking one in between). Photoshop (the only image editing software I’m going to reference, ’cause it really is good and you should probably be able to lay your hands on it somehow) has a menu item located at File->Automate called ‘Merge to HDR…’ You could go there and then select the three pictures you have and then go along for the ride. Try it. That’s where I got started, but I ended up unhappy with the results; I didn’t feel that Photoshop was making the same decisions I would have, and I wanted more control.

If Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR…’ makes you happy, use it. It’ll save you all the work I’m going to outline in the rest of this post (it’ll even save you the trouble of reading it).

Back yet? Let’s try another technique.

First, though, let’s review our goals. We, typically, want to take the middle picture (which should be pretty good, but probably has some blown-out highlights and some muddy shadows) and add the nice bits from the other two photos to it. And we don’t want the results to look horribly fake. Photoshop has some tools that will help us.

The main one is Layers, which will let us stack our three picture on top of each other in one image. That’ll be the starting point. I get there by selecting the three pictures in Adobe Bridge and then choosing Tools->Photoshop->Load Files into Photoshop Layers… Skipping Bridge, you can open all three picture in Photoshop and paste two of them on top of the third. Either way, you’ll end up seeing only the top one on your screen, but if you open Photoshop’s ‘Layers’ Window (accessible in the ‘Windows’ menu) you’ll see a Layer for each picture.

Since we’re going to be seeing parts of all three layers in the finished image, it’s important that they all line up with each other. There is a chance that you held your camera so still that the pictures all line up perfectly, but mine never do. I select all three layers in the Layer window and then go to Photoshop’s Edit menu and choose ‘Auto-Align Layers…’ In the resulting dialog, I choose the ‘Auto’ projection option and hit OK.

If that works, your image will be lined up much more nicely than I can ever seem to manage when I try to adjust the alignment by hand.

Staying in the Layers window, you can re-arrange the layers so that the ‘middle’ picture is at the bottom. The idea here is to leave the ‘too dark’ and the ‘wow, that’s over-exposed’ layers above the ‘meh’ middle picture, but to delete the bad parts of them so the good parts of the ‘meh’ layer show through.

That leaves us needing to delete the ‘bad’ parts of the light and dark versions of the image. I do this using Photoshop’s Select->Color Range… option. What this option does is automatically select all the pixels in the current Layer that match whatever is set as the Foreground Color, but with a controllable amount of ‘fuzziness’.

Let’s review the steps we’re going to take in English before I lay out the step-by-step Photoshop routine; understanding the process in English will help you keep track of where you are, and to figure out what went wrong when you misstep:

The starting point for all this pixel deleting is a three-layered image with the middle exposure at the bottom (and all of the Layers Auto-aligned). If you aren’t there right now, go ahead and catch back up. Additionally, these steps are based on having the lightest (over-exposed) Layer on top, so go ahead and drag it to the top (if it isn’t already there). (It doesn’t really matter to the outcome which Layer is on top, but I’m only going to describe it in one order, sorry.)

The steps:

In the Layers Window, make the middle Layer invisible and select the top layer.

In the Tools palate, make sure that the Foreground color is set to pure black.

Use the menu item Select->Color Range… to bring up its dialog window.

Select Localized Color Clusters (or not, but I’ve enjoyed the results when I do).

Adjust the Fuzziness to Max (200). (Or less, but that’s for when you get a sense for how Fuzziness works.)

Hit ‘OK’. That will return you to the Layer with a bunch of selection-indicating lines buzzing at you. You can’t really tell by how it looks, but all of the darkest areas (the interesting ones in this Layer)) are now selected. We need to:

Use the menu item Select->Inverse to get everything but the darkest areas.

Hit the Delete key. Voilà!

A side note: If you overlooked the ‘hide the middle Layer’ step, the deleting will reveal the too-dark Layer that’s underneath; don’t panic. Just go ahead and hide the middle Layer now.

Before we move on to ‘fixing’ the dark Layer, let’s pause and play with what you’ve done. First, hide the selection-indicating lines (turn ‘Extras’ off in the View menu, or just hit Command-H). That’ll make it easier to evaluate what happened. In the Layers Window, show can alternately hide and show the over-exposed Layer to get a before-and-after comparison. If the results look more-or-less OK, we’ll move on. If you want to re-do the deletion with different settings, undo (Command-Z) the deletion, Deselect (Command-D), and try the Select->Color Range…/invert selection/delete steps again.

OK? Back to steps.

In the Layers Window, make the middle Layer visible, the top Layer invisible, and select the middle layer.

In the Tools palate, make sure that the Foreground color is set to pure black.

Make the previous selection go away by hitting Command-D (or choosing Select->Deselect).

Use the menu item Select->Color Range… to bring up its dialog window.

Select Localized Color Clusters (or not, but I’ve enjoyed the results when I do).

Adjust the Fuzziness to Max (200). (Or less, but that’s for when you get a sense for how Fuzziness works.)

Hit ‘OK’. That will return you to the Layer with a bunch of selection-indicating lines buzzing at you. You can’t really tell by how it looks, but all of the lightest areas are now selected. We need to:

Use the menu item Select->Inverse to get everything but the lightest areas.

Hit the Delete key. Yes, that was mostly copy-and-paste from the top (over-exposed) Layer’s instructions, but the differences are important. I often do the light-Layer steps on the dark Layer (and/or vice-versa) by accident and have to undo them. No worries, we haven’t saved anything yet. (Funny side-note: I just typed them backwards and had to re-do the typing.)

Go ahead and make all three Layers visible again. The rote stuff is done.

While the image is still in three Layers, you can adjust the Levels (or Curves), contrast, sharpness and even the Transparency of each Layer individually to get the image looking the way you want. After that, you can use the menu that pops up from the Layers Window to flatten the image. Then you can make your final, global, changes.

There is a pretty good chance that your Layers got skewed a little in the alignment step, so you’ll probably have to crop the image a little to tidy it up.

You’re basically done. Congratulations. Me? I do one more step: I copy the HDR and paste it on top of the original middle exposure, crop and flatten that, and use ‘Save As…’ to make the final image. That’s just an easy way to preserve (one third of) the EXIF information along with the HDR.

Enjoy.

“Woof woof” this, motherfucker! [BLAM! BLAM!]

Craig Ferguson is a funny, funny man.

I didn’t have to go to Hawaii because those folks have their shit together enough to figure out how to merge papers using their current software on their own. I didn’t have to go to Canton because they’re so far behind that there wouldn’t be enough work for me to do. Either way, cool with me.

I’m planning on going to visit Centennial tomorrow. It’d be nice to get her in the water soon (meaning in a week or so), but, well, we’ll see. There isn’t much in the way of dropping her really, just a little paint touch-up. There is one project that I’d like to complete while she’s on dry ground, though.

There is a roughly square hole that goes right through the boat, the one that the engine pokes out through. At a glance it looks like a clever solution to the problem of fitting a motor, but reflection exposes an annoying flaw. To elaborate, the hole the motor sticks out through functions as a speed brake; it interrupts the smooth flow of water from stem to stern.

I am pretty sure that this is a big cause of my tacking woes. I have a sheet of copper on the way that I’m going to fashion into a fairing that will smooth over this opening. We’ll see.

Hat tip to the incomparable @hodgman.

To break through that, you need hard-hitting campaigns and simple slogans. And I have a sinking feeling that once again, the Obama team is going straight for the capillaries. Let’s hope they prove me wrong.

Maybe just go read it, but, still, “straight for the capillaries” is Nobel-worthy.