Photo Op

Here's some photos from yesterday. I got back from work and the sky was doing beautiful things and so I took the camera with when I went on errands.
The above shot was southwest, over Grant Park. Here's the south-eastern view:

The sky this way was gorgeous about 5 minutes before this picture. It's still neat here, but a lot of the orange color is gone.

After dark:
I must have moved the camera (was crossing the street), but I still think it looks very cool.
Final one:

I just like the way the building on the right looks like it's leaning over the road, and the streetlight masquerades as the moon. :)

Witty Comment

Just kidding! Instead, you get a zoomed in photo that I've already posted!

Maybe tomorrow there'll be a witty comment! Have I used too many !'s in this post? Maybe I've gone over quota! Oh no!

People Photos

Here's a few recent pictures of the people around here. Also, if you didn't see my (late) update for sunday, go scroll down some to see a bunch of rattie pictures. :)


L holding Lu Bu:
(Yep, that's a new computer in the background! That's not the only new thing, too. See if you can spot the others!)

Here's the basket of ratties:
I think only two or three are in the basket, but at one point I managed to get nearly all of them. However, it's really tough to actually get a picture of that when they're wiggling like crazy. Speaking of that, here's a picture of me holding the basket:
And there you have it, recent pictures!

Funny Ratties

Here's what happens when I try to take a picture of the ratties:

See? They love having their pictures taken so much that they just have to hop on my lap and try to help with it! This actually happens a whole lot, get too happy taking pictures and they run up and try to inspect the lens close up. Also, you may notice the rat-tail phenomenon in this picture: even your best pictures tend to end up with a random rat's tail in them. If you're trying to get a picture of just a single rat, it's usually just the tail that you got, so you know a good picture when you get something besides just that.

Here's what happens when you try to read a book in bed while the ratties are playing:

Actually, it's surprising they are so stationary in this picture. It's actually because they were each given a treat. It's amazing what that will do to a rat's mobility, they just stop and eat!

Speaking of mobility, here's Scotty, who loves to chew holes in towels. This time, he's discovered a possible issue with chewing a hole in the towel:

Uhoh! He got horribly stuck. I actually tried to help extricate him from it, but he wasn't very happy with me helping so I let him work out the problem. He eventually made it out, luckily:

Finally, there's a pose that the rats all use, but it's really tough to get a picture of. I finally got one tonight though, this only happens when they're resting, they just lie down and flatten out, it's terribly cute. Usually when you try to get a picture of it they perk up and come see what you were doing, but this time I happened to be right next to the camera and didn't alert Blue before taking the picture. I only got one try though, it's lucky it did turn out:

Sunset

I saw this today outside the apartment as I was walking home. I thought it deserved a picture. It rained today, our first in a long while, and so the rainy season has started.That's from the corner where we live, looking down Cordova to the west.
This is from the crosswalk shown in the previous photo, same direction. I tried some without the flash and they actually turned out a lot worse - everything looked really washed out. Sort of weird that it had the opposite effect. The flash did make the signs look a lot cooler in these, but it was really the colors on the horizon that I liked. Sadly, they'd faded a little by the time I grabbed the camera, and even as I was taking pictures the effect was vanishing.

Rattie Update!

Okay, time for an update on how the ratties are doing. First off, they are very sleepy. We've been told that rats should calm down and nap more as they get older. I'm not sure if it's just that these guys have a wider range of sleepiness or if they are actually just more relaxed. In any case, here's one of the better pictures of them sleeping:

Yes, that's Blue in the wheel, completely asleep. Cao Cao and Scotty are underneath the water bottle, also asleep. It's a favorite place to hang out. No, I don't know why. Could be the only place to get a drink in their town. In any case, I was hoping to get a better picture of Blue sleeping in the wheel, so naturally I opened the cage door:

Just fooling! We're not really asleep now that you've come to play with us! This ALWAYS happens, they can be the most adorable sleepy rats and I just want to sit one on my lap while I'm working on the computer, and BAM, full of energy soon as the cage door is opened. Oh well.

So a few days ago I got worried that Cao Cao managed to escape the cage, as he's been known to do so even with the doors closed and the top on. I thought this because I checked the cage and only saw the four rats pictured in this photo (taken around that time):
I ran around the house hunting him, called up L and asked if she'd seen him earlier, and finally went to get the yogurt drops as a last resort hunting method. I pull them off the shelf and shake a few times to make sure there are some left. Look over at the cage, the four rats are paying VERY close attention to me now, and then I see Cao Cao peek out of the hammock shown in the photo (on the right). What? I don't know, I saw the hammock but it looked like it was empty, and even looked in the sides (though not with the cage open). Anyways, he's in the hammock in the picture above, and the other four are shown in the picture. Yes. See that spot of grey-blue fur under Lu Bu's nose? That's Blue. He's being sat upon and was barely visible from any angle.

Another day recently, I got a mad gleam in my eye as I suggested that it was time to let the rats play (talking to L), while we were out in the living room. She immediately thought I had an Evil Plan (tm) to grab all the empty Dr Pepper 12-pack boxes and make a rattie fort. Actually, I'm not sure what I was thinking, but her plan was excellent, so I did that. Here it is:

It's got a total of four openings, the two you can see in the near area, and there are rattie heads poking out of the two in the back. The box on top is connected to the right side arm via a hole which the rats definately can use, which I was a bit worried about. They definitely like the castle, so it will stay around for a bit until it gets too chewed on, etc.

Anyways, that's about it for recent rat stories, so here's one last picture to finish up the post. This is Blue, being super-cute as usual:

Who's the...

... cutest rat to ever set foot in a Jamba Juice box? Blue is!
There's actually a great sequence of rats hopping in and out of this box, but this photo in particular I really like, for the expression on Blue's face. Here's a close-up version:

Super cute! Anyways, I actually copied photos off the camera, which is why I have this one. Still need to sort though, there were ~230 photos copied off, all new.

Whoa...

Are those photos? Thanks to Frances for these ones.

Here's one of me and Jonathan. For extra credit, spot the oddity(oddities?) in the picture:


And here's one of the bride:

Hide and Seek

Where's Scotty?

Lu Bu can't find him... or maybe he's hypnotized by the camera.


Where's the rest of the blog post? It's hiding!

A Random Assortment

A quick collection of things today: Some of you (most of you?) probably know I am a big fan of the Atlanta Braves. I got to catch the last few innings of the game today after the usual frisbee game, and got to see Chipper Jones break an Atlanta record: all-time home runs while playing for the Braves, which was previously held by Dale Murphy. I wonder if mom or dad remember how much I liked Dale Murphy when I was a kid, I remember I had a bunch of his baseball cards and always cheered for him and the Braves. Though I maybe wasn't so good with statistics then, I have a very faint recollection of thinking he had a .200 or so batting average one season and thinking that was great. In any case, he had 371 homers while with Atlanta, and I got to see Chipper Jones hit homers number 371 and 372 today. Another interesting thing about the home runs today was that they were hit while batting with different handedness: the first was while batting right-handed, and the second left-handed. And for a final interesting note about this, apparently Hank Aaron only hit 335 of his 755 homers while with Atlanta, and had 22 with the Milwaukee Brewers in his final two seasons. The interesting part is that the rest were with the Milwaukee Braves, and he holds the Braves franchise record with 733 homers. This was very confusing when I was looking up all the various statistics here, but I think it works out if you think of the franchise records and the Atlanta records as being seperate.

Ok, now, I know I was going to post about something else. Oh yeah! So, based on the interesting edge-detect photo editing a few days back, I was experimenting with some other similar things - I want to use the edge detection to create a layer which has a rough approximation of a rat's outline, and use that layer to make it look like there's a fuzzy brightness/halo around the rat. Some preliminary experiments sort of worked - they brighten up the area at the edge of Cao Cao's fur, but since he is already pretty bright, it doesn't show up too well. I found a decent solution by using the layer on the "only brighten" mode with some opacity, but it still doesn't quite achieve what I wanted. So going to mess with this some more, if anyone has suggestions, or other interesting effects to try, let me know.

Finally, I started writing a short story, because I had a decent opening line which led to the rest of the idea. But I have only gotten to write a line or two beyond that as I've been busy tonight. So maybe that will be posted later.

Interesting Effect

So, I was asked today about how to install the GIMP for Mac OSX, and I ran into the funny situation of trying to recall how I'd done it. I thought I was using the Gimp.app version, but after a quick check it appeared that I'd installed the basic source version via the utility fink. So I figured I should probably go try the Gimp.app version, as it was mentioned as being a lot easier to use, as well as a lot nicer. The only tricky thing about installing it was that the X11 window system needed to be installed - it's on one of the utilities discs that comes with the Mac, but isn't installed by default. After that it was just clicking the downloaded file, dragging the program in the resulting folder into the applications folder, and done. And wow, it looks a whole lot nicer, plus some of the confusing things about the previous version I was using are a lot better organized. I opened up an image of Cao Cao and fiddled around with some of the filters, and came up with a pretty cool looking image from what was a pretty crappy one:


That was made by running an edge detection filter, which I thought made Cao Cao look pretty cool, and it also hid the general blurriness of the photo.

Late postage!

So I am very late in posting an entry for thursday and friday. Uhoh! I think this is more a sign of having been busy these days, but maybe it's getting harder to write again? Time will tell. In any case, after you are done reading this post, you should scroll down one to read the photo-post about Emily's graduation.

This post also contains photos. In particular, I was experimenting with several ways of framing/cropping a shot, similar to how some of the rat photos earlier were brightness cropped (I didn't know that was what it was called, but it sounds right!).

Here's one variant of the brightness cropping that I really liked:
I think combining this with a change in brightness/contrast could be even more effective. It's also sorta neat to be able to change pictures into greyscale, as some things look a lot better that way.

Here's the next effect I fiddled with, but couldn't really find a place to use it effectively. Doing this conversion (called "posterize") on only an area of an image doesn't really work well, but on a whole image it can be pretty neat:
Here we have a comparison photo. I found an option which is supposed to enhance the colors in a picture:
The left one is raw from the camera, the right is with the colors enhanced. I think the right side version is actually more accurate to what my eye saw, I also did some comparisons with pictures of myself, and the color-enhanced version actually matches my skin tones a lot better than the raw camera version.

Finally, the following photo is from the set after Emily's graduation, and I haven't actually changed it, I just really like the picture and wanted to post it.
There you have it, some interesting effects, and I'm now caught up til saturday's post.

Graduation Photos

I have a selection of photos from Em's graduation to post. These were all taken by Frances during or after the graduation, so all the credit is hers.

Here we have the story of the graduation, in pictures:
Here we have two of the audience eagerly waiting for the ceremony to start. We found a good set of seats up in the bleachers and settled in and started reading the program. In this picture, Jonathan is smiling like crazy at the camera, because Frances is taking the picture (presumably? or maybe he's just always smiley!), and Mom is reading the program, probably looking for Em's name. The program was actually pretty interesting, I especially liked the section where it gives the names of all the doctoral thesises (thesii? theseses?), because it contained all of them, hard science ones and movie/theater ones, and so on.
Here we have L and myself before the ceremony started. I think L is playing Animal Crossing, and I'm reading the program as mentioned before. The waiting for the ceremony went on for a while, and then finally it began! Everyone stood up and there was in general a whole lot of noise. The entire row of us waited in anticipation as the graduates filed into the stadium, until this happened:
Emily appears! We were looking in the right spot and though it took a while, she shows up, walking in with Zev in front of her, and Margaret behind. Except in this picture, it's not really apparent that they're in that particular order, but it will soon be clear! Notice also that Emily has immediately spotted us in the stands, and is smiling like crazy, which is good cause we were smiling like crazy too and waving our arms, and hats, and there was even some jumping up and down. Emily, having spotted us, immediately decides to show her friends where we are sitting:
I'm told that this was pretty unsuccessful, even though we were wearing some memorable hats and waving and stuff, there were probably a lot of other people in the stands wearing memorable hats and waving and so on.
And now they have arrived at their seats! This is about ten or fifteen minutes into the ceremonial procession, and so they got to face the audience for a while, because no-one was up on the stage yet and so it would be pretty boring to face the opposite way. It took another fifteen minutes for the rest of the people to arrive in the stadium, during which time several of us got tired of standing up and sat down. Others of us went looking for other things to take pictures of. Like this one:
That is one huge ring! I'm not sure whose hand+ring+cell phone this is, but it's a great picture. Also during this time, we noticed that on one building adjacent to the field (I think it was the sports trainer's complex, or locker room building, or something like that), the following was going on:
Setting up for dinner! These waiters were bringing tables out, setting up tablecloths and stopping every once in a while to check out the commotion on the field adjacent to them. "What's this, a graduation going on? I hope they're done by the time our dinner guests are here."

Meanwhile, everyone is still entering the stadium, and it has become a lot harder to actually spot Emily in the crowd, even though we know where she is standing. Luckily, Frances is really good at this:
Yep, there she is! It really looks like Zev and Margaret have just vanished, though.

I now arrive at the point in the story where a very important point must be made. Remember when I said that we were all standing up and cheering as Emily entered the stadium? And then after a while, some of us got tired and sat down? Well, even as it rolled along to minute 30 of the processional entering the stadium, this one was still cheering:
Yep. The whole 30 minutes. I'm really surprised Mom still had a voice after that was done. :)


Next we have the really important part: people gave speeches, the speaker talked, groups of students stood up as the head honcho read out the degrees they were awarded. All this, however, really doesn't lend itself to my telling the story in pictures though, and so I will refer you back to my previous post about the graduation speaker if you want to get a better idea for this part. Frances did take pictures here, so ask her for them if you're really dying to see some pictures of the speaker, and so on.

The next part, however, is VERY important, because it is at the end of the ceremony, and Emily is so very happy that it is now bubble time!
During the ceremony, it looked like a bunch of people in the school of communication had bubble stuff, because there were huge amounts of soap bubbles floating up above them. It was only at this point, when people were departing, that we find out that Em is one of the ones blowing bubbles!
I especially like this picture, as it appears that Zev is blowing imaginary bubbles, and the guy in the same row on the far right is looking really jealously at the bubble blowing fun.
Finally, the whole thing is over and we spent a while trying to find everyone in the crowd. Luckily, we do, and there are two more great pictures:
Mom and Dad and Emily!

The kids! No, I'm not sure why we are balancing the tall people on the left side and the short ones on the right. Maybe we were trying to balance the hats, one on the far left, and one on the far right? Anyways, there you have it, a picture-version of Emily's graduation.

Rat Guide

This is a quick guide to our new rats, with a photo of each, plus special bonus pictures at the end!

This is Barrick:
He has found a quiet place to hide where none of the other ratties would dare bother him. Unfortunately, it is in the clothes hamper, and thus the humans have found him and are hoping he did not chew on any towels.

Next we have Blue:
He is checking our router settings and all the cables, making sure none of them are chewed on or otherwise rendered unusable.

Next we have Cao Cao:
Cao Cao is being a good photo-rat and is posing on my shoulder as I take his picture in the mirror. This photo shoot turned out so well that it inspired one of the later pictures.

Here we have Lu Bu:
He is clearly exhausted from keeping the other rats in line, and thus is laying down for a nap. Conveniently, this is right next to the door, so if someone should come in or out he will have a perfect chance to scoot out the door after them.

Finally, Scotty:
"It's a mirror! If I jump high enough I can see myself!" For some reason the rats really liked the mirror, I sat down near it and that caused them to investigate. While doing so, several of them tried jumping up into the mirror, as I'm guessing it looked like a ledge they could hang on to. I have no idea how I got lucky enough to take this picture.

Finally, we have some bonus pictures. These were inspired by my earlier attempts to photograph ratties in the mirror. First we have Cao Cao, who was actually quite calm and interested in that rat he saw in the mirror.

Lu Bu decided to investigate the mirror as well, but he didn't get a lift, so his view was a lot worse. Great shot of all his whiskers, though!
And finally we have a group photo, all the ratties clustered around my toes while I was working on taking pictures in the mirror. This one turned out really well, I'm not sure how I got the lighting to work, as the tones are very nice and non-flashy, but the rats are very in focus which isn't very common when not using the flash.

And that's it. I did some cropping on most of these photos, and on the first five there's obviously some changing of brightness, I was experimenting to see if it would draw attention better to the rats, while still giving an idea of their surroundings. I'm happy with some of those ones, but I'm not as sure about others, I think the effect is better used on only a few (Cao Cao, Barrick, Blue's turned out well. Not as sure about Lu Bu or Scotty's). The last ones were only cropped, they turned out good.