Taken with a PalmPix camera...

This photo was taken in low ambient light, with no flash, using a Kodak PalmPix camera, which hooks onto the sync port of a Palm III and uses the Palm's software and storage to turn the combo into a cheap digital camera.

I've resampled the image from 640 x 480 to 320 x 240 and saved it as a 70 dpi JPG with 25% compression.

The specifications on the unit are as follows: The lens on the unit is f/2.0, with a focal length of 6.1 mm and a focusing distance of from 36 inches to infinity. The shutter speed varies from 1/15 to 1/500 of a second.

The quality of the photo is not stellar, but neither is the price of the unit ($99 at the local Franklin Covey store). Futhermore, I suspect it would take better pictures given more light to play with.

The subject, BTW, is yours truly, at his position in the MCC, during a break in the action.

Cheers...

One more night...

...yeah, just one more night.

That tune keeps running through my mind as I prepare to go in for tonight's final shift for STS-98. Tomorrow, I have a physical scheduled at the NASA clinic early in the afternoon, and then I'm free until Sunday. I just have to remember to not eat anything after midnight; they expect me to show up fasted.

I finalized my order for the déjà vu software the other day, and the Airborne delivery left it on my doorstep this morning. I really didn't appreciate that, considering the package contains a dongle for the software, but it's done with and I have the device in my possession. The software is well built and helps increase translation productivity, without trying to actually do translations for you, but it is expensive, and the publisher goes to extraordinary lengths to copy-protect it.

After getting dressed, I went to pick up my glasses this morning, and am not really happy with the progressive lenses they cut for me, which combine distance viewing with reading glasses. The young thing who helped me swears it takes a couple of weeks to get used to, though, so I'm willing to give it a shot.

My only problem is that I proceeded to drop the glasses about an hour after putting them on, and wouldn't you know it: they made a precise two-point landing on unfinished concrete, said two points being on the lenses, thereby leaving a couple of pits in the surface of the center of each lens.

I went back to the store to see if they could somehow buff the pits out, but they say it can't be done (though I could ask for my one-time free lens replacement, which I declined). The pits are rather noticeable, so the store's reaction kind of left a poor taste in my mouth, but dropping the glasses was my fault, so I guess I don't have much of a basis to beef. In the final analysis, if the glasses don't do it for me, I have 30 days to take advantage of a money-back guarantee, and I'm at least 50% of the way toward asking for it right now.

To help take that bad taste out of my mouth, on the way home, I stopped at a place called Half Price Books, since they often have interesting buys on their foreign language shelf. No joy this time around, but right next to the language books, I spied a copy of the revised, expanded edition of The Codebreakers, by David Kahn, for $20, so I picked it up.

I've been trying to wrap my mind around a piece of software called SuperMemory. The name is a little hokey, maybe, but I've used the software for a couple of minor projects, including learning the Russian phonetic alphabet (Anna, Boris, Vladimir instead of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie) and a bunch of space-related terminology. Right now, I'm trying to find a better way of memorizing the part of Polonius in Hamlet than simply trying to repeat, repeat, and repeat until I'm blue in the face. (Though I must admit, ultimately, the repetition method works...though it is unpleasant.)

Ah, well. Off to some musing on the idea of a Web-based "memory palace," and then off to work.

Cheers...

On memory palaces...

WARNING: Musing alert! What follows is a freewheel that may not have any point...I won't know until after I finish it and maybe let it sit for a few days.

The concept of a "memory palace" continues to intrigue me. Such a palace is a mental construct that provides the owner with a set of "places" to associate things to. (The formulation 'In the first place..." is said to have originated with ancient orators who literally would go from the "first place" in their mental labyrinth on to the second, third, etc. and fetch the associations to the points they were going to speak about.)

I gave some thought the other day to creating a virtual, Web-based memory palace, say, using some sort of 3D rendering technology, or VRML, but my last look at such software told me that the available tools (at least the accessible ones) were not up to the job. Of course, I could simply just construct the palace as a group of HTML pages, too, and that would be easy. There's just one thing...

The whole idea of a memory palace is to be able to remember (store) quantities of information for later retrieval. Aside from the benefit of working with information while casting it in a form suitable for Web representation (this kind of interaction helps you learn the material), and the ability to review and reinforce memory links while revisiting the pages, what would be the point of the exercise?

Almost certainly, the pages would be completely personal in nature, for that is the only way for them to be useful. In other words, a visitor - assuming he or she were let in - would probably not understand much of what was being displayed. But then again, this is not a bad thing.

Another difficultly has to do with implementing visual sequences. For example, when Polonius tells Ophelia "'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late given private time to you," I recall the following sequence of images to recollect the words:

'Tis TOLD ME	a toll booth with the musical note "mi" paying to pass
he hath VERY OFT of LATE	the toll collector is a fairy (Tinkerbelle) spraying "OFF" insecticide on a bug shaped like the number 8
given PRIVATE TIME to you	the 8 becomes a running track, around which a recruit in boot camp (private) is running, festooned with wristwatches (time)

Yeah, I know, I'm probably one sick puppy to have thought of this particular series of images, but the point is that this silly sequence of pictures is part of a longer sequence that has helped me learn that whole passage.

How do I systematize that? I'm no artist, and I don't have time to scour the Internet for suitable images to create rebuses.

Then again, maybe a table such as the one above is adequate?

I have to give this more thought. The idea of a personalized Web-based "memory palace" is interesting, but would it be worth it, from the perspective of time invested? And regardless of the time invested, would it work?

Cheers...