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On call...
Oct. 30th, 2006 08:07 pmAside from one call that took me to Hall 111 to support the second half of some electrical tests, it was a quiet day, one of those days where you look back and wonder how so much time went into accomplishing so little. It would have been an ideal day to have an outside project, but I don't control such things, so my options were limited.
Over dinner, I tried to recall the opening paragraph to Raymond Chandler's Red Wind, which for me is one of the most compact and telling openings to a short story I've ever read, and certainly the most memorable, in the sense that I remember the effect and the general theme, but not the wording, which I quoted in a post from, coincidentally, exactly three years ago. Hmmm.
Among the various observations that have been bobbing up and down like bones in a stew was the fact that while a schooner of beer costs 20 rubles at most places in town (80 cents, roughly), it costs 5 rubles to use the public toilet (aka, "beer rental return facility"), which brings the total "cost of rental" to about a buck. Interestingly, standard 60-watt light bulbs go for just 8 rubles at the market. Go figure.
Some of the pictures I took yesterday didn't come out so well because after shooting one scene at different exposures (for yet another experiment in HDR photography), I forgot to reset the exposure to "normal," so that all of the photos taken afterward are one stop overexposed. I also experienced a sort of mini-epiphany about HDR images when I noticed that what appeared to be a pure white area on a processed image actually does exhibit detail (in a side window that displays a small portion of the image under the mouse), which graphically explains the concept of "the screen is not capable of displaying the 96-bit gradation of color in the HDR image," and practially explains why saving a screen shot is of limited value.
I got a copy of the recently shot Master and Margarita during the previous campaign but never quite found the time to watch it, either during the campaign or at home (it's something like 8 hours of video). I'm two episodes into a copy I got from Raphael and have no idea what's going to happen, despite the fact that I did read the book, because I read the book a very long time ago.
From time to time, I envy people who have excellent recall of things they've read or seen or heard years ago. It doesn't work like that for me. Then again, the poor memory is a blessing in disguise from time to time, as when I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's A Catskill Eagle in the "library" downstairs a couple of weeks ago.
There was a time when I plowed through the Spenser books like a steamroller though a cornfield, and I remember some books better than others. As I began to read this one, I recalled only that I had read it, but had no earthly recollection of the story line, so I ended up enjoying the book again.
Anyway, I remember I read Master back in college, if memory serves, so as to be better able to take part in the "intellectual" discussions we had in those days about life, the universe and so on, and I recall that I actually had a strong reaction to the book at the time, but honestly, none of it has resurfaced to this point in the story; in fact, I'm having difficulty figuring out the point, though such difficulty, aside from being noticeable, isn't making me lose any sleep.
I've been introduced to a yet another document format, Déjà Vu (file extension .djvu), which seems to do at least as good a job as PDF and appears to be a bit more compact. Considering that I really don't need all of the bells and whistles of Acrobat, I might eventually decide to invest in the software to create djvu documents (readers are available gratis as browser plugins).
Off to drink some tea and socialize.
Cheers...
Over dinner, I tried to recall the opening paragraph to Raymond Chandler's Red Wind, which for me is one of the most compact and telling openings to a short story I've ever read, and certainly the most memorable, in the sense that I remember the effect and the general theme, but not the wording, which I quoted in a post from, coincidentally, exactly three years ago. Hmmm.
Among the various observations that have been bobbing up and down like bones in a stew was the fact that while a schooner of beer costs 20 rubles at most places in town (80 cents, roughly), it costs 5 rubles to use the public toilet (aka, "beer rental return facility"), which brings the total "cost of rental" to about a buck. Interestingly, standard 60-watt light bulbs go for just 8 rubles at the market. Go figure.
Some of the pictures I took yesterday didn't come out so well because after shooting one scene at different exposures (for yet another experiment in HDR photography), I forgot to reset the exposure to "normal," so that all of the photos taken afterward are one stop overexposed. I also experienced a sort of mini-epiphany about HDR images when I noticed that what appeared to be a pure white area on a processed image actually does exhibit detail (in a side window that displays a small portion of the image under the mouse), which graphically explains the concept of "the screen is not capable of displaying the 96-bit gradation of color in the HDR image," and practially explains why saving a screen shot is of limited value.
I got a copy of the recently shot Master and Margarita during the previous campaign but never quite found the time to watch it, either during the campaign or at home (it's something like 8 hours of video). I'm two episodes into a copy I got from Raphael and have no idea what's going to happen, despite the fact that I did read the book, because I read the book a very long time ago.
From time to time, I envy people who have excellent recall of things they've read or seen or heard years ago. It doesn't work like that for me. Then again, the poor memory is a blessing in disguise from time to time, as when I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's A Catskill Eagle in the "library" downstairs a couple of weeks ago.
There was a time when I plowed through the Spenser books like a steamroller though a cornfield, and I remember some books better than others. As I began to read this one, I recalled only that I had read it, but had no earthly recollection of the story line, so I ended up enjoying the book again.
Anyway, I remember I read Master back in college, if memory serves, so as to be better able to take part in the "intellectual" discussions we had in those days about life, the universe and so on, and I recall that I actually had a strong reaction to the book at the time, but honestly, none of it has resurfaced to this point in the story; in fact, I'm having difficulty figuring out the point, though such difficulty, aside from being noticeable, isn't making me lose any sleep.
I've been introduced to a yet another document format, Déjà Vu (file extension .djvu), which seems to do at least as good a job as PDF and appears to be a bit more compact. Considering that I really don't need all of the bells and whistles of Acrobat, I might eventually decide to invest in the software to create djvu documents (readers are available gratis as browser plugins).
Off to drink some tea and socialize.
Cheers...
