The Life of PhotoJim

Haven't posted in a few days... bad boy.

I spent the weekend in Edmonton visiting friends. It's a long drive... 7.5 hours. I remember now why I like to fly places. Unfortunately, the really nice scenery doesn't begin for another couple of hours of driving west of Edmonton.

Fortunately, Edmonton drivers actually understand the concept of letting someone in when they signal. If they didn't, it would be complete gridlock because there is constant traffic in Edmonton. In Regina, by contrast, the traffic is a lot more bearable so people don't feel the need to be polite. If you signal to be let in, you're as likely to have a gap get smaller as to have someone let you change lanes.

There's a cool gaming shop in St. Albert. I bought Settlers of Catan and some of the expansions. It's one of my favourite games, so I thought I should have it in my own pile o' games. I also bought a copy of Carcassonne. I haven't played it yet, though. It looks quite intriguing. If you want to head in that direction, here is a link to the store, Mission Fun & Games. No, I don't get a commission.

I got satellite radio about a year ago. If you've had your head buried in the sand for the past decade, it's a subscription service where you get several dozen channels of music and talk content. Because the content is broadcast from satellites, you can receive the service even in very rural areas. (In fact, reception in downtown areas of cities can sometimes be a problem, although larger cities have terrestrial retransmitters to solve the problem. Alas, Regina is not one of these larger cities.

Despite this, I'm really enjoying the experience. I'm using XM Satellite Radio. It has a huge variety of music. I'm told that the audio quality is slightly better than the competitor's, especially on audio channels (I have to test this myself). XM has all NHL and major league baseball games, which I like a lot since I follow the Blue Jays. It's been handy during the playoffs because no local channel has the playoff games.

The competitor is Sirius. In some ways it's better: its satellites are higher in the sky, which permits reception in areas of taller buildings or mountains. However, the satellites move in the sky (XM's are geostationary, and are in the same place all the time), so if you're using a home receiver, you can't just put your antenna at a south window and expect reception to stay good like you can with XM. Sirius carries the NFL, NBA and CFL. Sirius will have NHL games for this season but after this season, XM has the exclusive rights. I don't know if Sirius has all the NHL games this year the way XM does. Sirius also has CBC, although most of the CBC channels can be received over the air as well.

So should you get it? If you're in your car a lot and like music but don't always want to listen to CD, it's great. If you hate commercial radio as I am coming to do, it's great. If you like a huge variety of music or want to try some new genres, it's great. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Sirius CBC channels, Canadian content is rather horrible (the Canadian news channel on XM is of horrible quality, both technically and content-wise). Then again, that's what the CBC news website is for, right?

I'm really happy with satellite radio and I plan to keep it. (My receiver is integrated with my car receiver, so even though there is a box in the car to get satellite radio, you don't really know that - it's like using broadcast radio.) My favourite XM channels so far: 26 (Flight 26), a current music adult contemporary channel, and 175 (MLB 24/7), a talk channel exclusively about major league baseball. This latter channel alone makes me wish I had a receiver I could use in the house.

No posts for a few days, sorry. I've still been playing with 8-bitters.

I have several hundred (perhaps thousands) of disks full of software that I've been given. I'm going through them one at a time to see if anything is good on them. Also, these disks are getting old so they need to be copied to new disks to prevent bit rot. (A few things are already lost, unfortunately.

It's fun... it's tedious. But it's neat to find new treasures.

Playing with the 8-bitters again tonight... and my monitor died.

This is old stuff... as I am now well reminded. Fortunately, these old monitors are basically TVs so they can still be fixed. I hope. I think.

I went to the regular monthly meeting of the local Linux users' group last night. There are a bunch of cool people in the club, but I definitely am realizing that I'm in a minority to like the really old hardware that I like.

The Commodore computers I've been playing with lately are still cool, though, in their own right. I read a passing mention earlier today of how the Commodore serial port was like a computer network. Really, it was. Disk drives and printers had their own CPU, RAM, ROM and I/O chips. (The famous and much-maligned Commodore 1541 disk drive was almost as powerful as a VIC-20; it had a 6502 processor, 2K of RAM, 8K of ROM, and a pair of 6522 VIA I/O chips; the VIC had 5K of RAM, 16K of ROM and a video chip but was otherwise similar.) That meant that loading a program off disk was like transferring a file via nfs - you were asking another computer (the 1541) to send you a file. There were even some neat programs that would run in the disk drives self-containedly - one played "Daisy Daisy" by manipulating the disk head and stepper motor. I'm not sure it was great for the stepper motor, but it sure was cool.

Maybe because this hardware is simple and yet complex, I like it. I have a chance of understanding how everything fits together. Unquestionably, it's a part of my history, a little memory of my childhood, too. As much as I enjoy modern computing, I don't love using an Athlon 64 as much as I do using a Commodore 64. Of course, the Athlon system is far more pleasant to use and does far more cool things. :) But ... the experience isn't the same.

So, get out there and get yourself a hopelessly obsolete computer! Or if you're worried about your basement filling to overflowing, get an emulator. This particular one, VICE, is excellent - it even runs close to full speed on my Pentium 200 notebook. It emulates just about every 8-bit Commodore computer ever made. Very fun.

Ever think about going back to school but you feel like you're too old?

I went back to school at age 30... but that's nothing at all compared to this man who just finished a law degree at age 91. Wow.

My first dabblings into the computer world were back in the 1980s. We had Commodore PETs at my high school, and while I was there we got a Commodore VIC-20, which was a blast because it was in colour and had a real joystick port! (No more hammering the A key playing Space Invaders!)

The summer after I finished high school, I got a Commodore 64 as my first computer at home. I had a great time with it. I got rid of it a couple of years later when I needed some money.

Of course, nowadays this stuff is given away and the really cool bits are generally affordable, so I've reaccumulated some of the stuff I had and gotten some of the stuff I wish I had had at the time. I don't use it every day but I like having it.

Today I decided to play with it. I have a Commodore 128 with three 5.25" floppy drives (two 1571 drives which store 340K and a 1541-II which stores 170K), and a 3.5" floppy drive (1581, which stores 800K). This would have been an awesome system in 1985. :) Today, it's fun but there are certainly some annoyances. For example, a task that we take for granted on modern computers, file copying, requires an external utility on the C128!

Despite these quirks, I miss the 8-bit days. The simplicity of the hardware made the experience more fun. The games are simpler too! (Who needs a manual? Just grab a joystick!)

I have several hundred floppy disks to go through, just full of games and productivity software... so I will be able to keep busy for awhile.

If Commodores interest you, a great website is Lemon 64. If you have an IRC client, the channel #c64friends at irc.eskimo.com is enjoyable, too. There is a regular chat there every Saturday night (North American time) but impromptu chats break out. Stop on by!

A few months ago I got a large format camera. In case you're not familiar with them, these are cameras that shoot on very large negatives. Each piece of film is an individual shot. In my particular case, the sheets of film are 4 x 5 inches (about 11 x 13 cm). To give you a sense of the resolution, if you use the highest-quality scanner out there to scan one of these sheets of film, you get about a 13-gigabyte scan. Gigabytes. Huge.

It's quite a lot of work to take a photograph with these cameras, but it's very rewarding. First, these cameras are capable of feats that smaller cameras just can't do. You can adjust perspective (for instance, where buildings appear to lean because you are shooting up at them). You can also adjust the plane of focus. With a normal camera, the plane of focus is always vertical (i.e. everything at a certain distance from the camera is in focus). However, with a large format camera you can make it so that the plane of focus is different, even horizontal. This means that the ground in front of you and the ground 5 km away are all in focus, but the top of the fence three feet in front of you is completely blurry. There is a lot of potential for creative effects, to say the least.

I'm really enjoying using large format gear. It's really fun and even though the camera takes a long time to set up, I don't mind. It makes me slow down and think more, and that's no bad thing.

Two of my favourite photography sites... the Analog Photography Users' Group ... and the Large Format Photography site. The first site is exclusively about film photography, which works fine with me since that's all I shoot (and I all I want to, in case you're feeling sorry for me). I love computers, but I have no desire to do any of my photography on one. :)

So... imagine you were on the highway in the middle of nowhere, and your transmission failed and you couldn't go forward anymore, but reverse still worked. What would you do?

If you were this guy in Australia, you'd simply go backward. I guess he should have gotten a mobile phone so he could get help? :)

This is really cool. It's a University of Regina art project where you can send messages to people riding a bus in Regina. It's so simple... but it's intriguing.

I tend to get a little obsessive about new music. When I get a new CD that I really like, I listen to it a lot, and then after awhile I bore of it a bit and I put it away for awhile.

I had gotten that way with the new Sheryl Crow CD Wildflower. I hadn't listened to it for a few months after listening to it to excess.

I still really like this CD. It's a well-engineered recording, with well-written songs, catchy melodies, lovely harmonies and at times an infectious rhythm. Go buy it, if you don't already own it. (You do buy music don't you? :) )

I find tropical cyclones to be fascinating. Perhaps this is because I live in a part of the world that hasn't experienced one in 2.8 million years.

This picture is fascinating. It's an aggregate of all the tropical storm tracks from the last several years. Notice only two have hit South America. Notice that none get vary far up the California coast (the water is too cold). Notice how many there are in the north Atlantic.

Newfoundland has actually had more tropical cyclones (two) this year than has Florida (one), although when they hit Florida they're usually a lot stronger. Newfoundland can get hurricanes, but usually the storms are undergoing extratropical transition by the time they get to Newfoundland.

I'm surprised at how few people know that we have VoIP in 306-land (Saskatchewan). I've had VoIP for almost a year, but if you believe what you read online I'm probably still using a cranked phone and asking the operator to place all my calls.

In case you were wondering, we have Primus Talk Broadband and SaskTel Webcall. Primus has only Regina numbers in Saskatchewan, but has numbers in much of Canada. Webcall has numbers in Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert, as well as in other major western Canadian centres. Each has some advantages over the other, so do your research ... and if you're good I might comment more on the issue here eventually.

I'm not sure VoIP is for everyone yet, but it's certainly getting more and more usable.

Why is it that whenever I see those signs in the fall that say "Sprinkler Blowout!" that I figure there should be a screaming sale on sprinkler systems?

I spent much of the day working on various computer projects. (I always seem to have a few of them to work on.) Unfortunately, the projects never seem to go as well as I expect they will, either.

One of my DVD burners died, and I had an old, slow spare, so I moved burners around so that the best one was in my main desktop machine instead of in my server. I put the slow one in the server, but I'd already put it in another machine that I hadn't finished setting up yet. Blah, blah.

Anyway, all is well now but it was a lot of work to basically put me back to a little behind where I was before. Such is the nature of computing. :)