_Mark_
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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03:11 am
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Continuing adventures
Since our last episode, I've upgraded cameras again - Canon finally came out with a 20x superzoom, and even after using the SP-550UZ and SP-570UZ for over a year, I'm still happier with the Canon UI. Also, Canon's autofocus algorithms work much better for me (I've gotten far more bird-in-tree shots without needing to resort to manual focus... only the catbird, and sometimes the cardinal, linger long enough for that to be worth the trouble :-)
More recently, that's gotten my shots of my first eagle (and eagle kit)  and closer to home, first moorhen and close shots of a tree swallow. (the latter was accessible because I'm still going out in  the Airis Kayak.)
I haven't entirely neglected my traditional hobbies - spent an afternoon touring the  Taza Chocolate factory in Somerville ("over by the junkyards and car shops" :-)
Went to Pycon in Chicago again this spring, but it looks like I didn't get around to posting those pictures; shooting 45 pictures/day (since 1 January - 55/day since 1 April, weather matters though the birdfeeders really helped this winter) it's sometimes difficult to keep up with the tagging - though maybe I have enough data to build a bird-recognizer now. (Working "near" NLP gives me a new appreciation for what computational modelling can do - heck, my camera can identify multiple human faces in a picture, and iPhoto (which I can't actually use) can match them... so it should be at least possible to do at the level of "hmm, you've got 300 heron pictures here, I bet this is another one"...)
Speaking of work, MetaCarta is still around; we've even got an open req (in Marketing, not engineering, sorry) and recent funding (as well as, of course, actual customers :-) Poking around on LinkedIn (while setting up my Google Profile) reminds me that I've been on this project for over 7 years now, which is an unusual level of attention span for me :-)
Tags: birds, chocolate, metacarta, photography, picture, scenery, travel, work
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10:28 pm
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Upgrades
Experience with the little packraft last year convinced me I wanted something that was a little more boat and a little less portable; thus the Airis Sport 11 above, full scale inflatable kayak - weighs as much as a fiberglass one, but fits in it's own custom backpack that fits the back seat of the Mini :-)
On the camera side, I'm still averaging a little under a hundred pictures a day (mostly weekend bursts but starting my weekdays dragonfly-hunting in the front yard helps too) and I've abused the SP-550UZ enough to need to get it repaired twice now; it's due for a third, Canon's photokina announcements disappointed me, so I'm now using the SP-570UZ. A little bulkier, so it has MORE BUTTONS which turned out to make things like manual focus easier to get to - but the 20x lens really provided enough additional "reach" (in terms of, for example, picking up a turtle in this  picture that I didn't notice in person) that I'm happy with the extra size, even if it is always on me.)
I've also settled into a comfortable shooting and captioning workflow with the EEEpc  with kphotoalbum for captioning and tagging, and a handful of python scripts to sort and upload. Yay cheap hard drives :-)
I've also gotten more adventurous about going places with picture taking specifically in mind; aside from the regular trips to local wildlife hotspots, this year I've been to Chicago  , Los Alamos  , the VLA  , and Camden, Maine  . (So also "yay cheap 16G SDHC cards"... everything else is getting more compact and portable/nomad-friendly - but not bandwidth...)
Of course, I haven't gotten any better at writing more often :-)
Current Location: all over the place!
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Wicked Soundtrack
Tags: computers, photography, scenery, toys
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02:01 am
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Summertime
Over a year with the SP550UZ and I'm still learning new tricks with it... or at least interesting ways to cheat :-) I'm also still more likely to spend any given Saturday taking 300 pictures than hacking - and yet I've actually built more personal code and tools in the last year than in many previous ones. Maybe I really am getting a bit more organized. A little. Riiiight...
(Yeah, yeah, organized hasn't included posting more than a couple of times a year, either :-)
Tags: photography, picture, weather
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01:31 am
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Hobbies
One of the reasons I've stuck with smaller cameras instead of going DSLR is that I've felt that the really interesting pictures are more a result of opportunity than hardware - and having a camera always on hand has more value than the extremes of shooting range.
This shot demonstrates that :-) This juvenile hawk was under an evergreen bush on my front sidewalk; I was eating breakfast and saw a pair of cardinals come screaming out of a bush, saw some movement below, and realized suddenly "that's not a squirrel..."
(I am looking forward to the actual return of spring, but the birds in my yard seem convinced that it's already here :-)
Tags: birds, photography, picture, spring
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12:09 am
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Insert New Hobby Here (alternate title: I CAN HAS BOAT)
I was reminded by catching up with people at the cider party that I haven't updated in rather a while... so:
  
Finally got ahold of a boat! Just a tiny little one, but it's enough to get me out on the calm bodies of water around here so I can get at the marshes and photograph things that I can't otherwise reach via land. (This will include the Sudbury River, which is often described as "a long narrow lake" by boaters looking for more excitement...) It's nice having an alternate mode of transportation that, including all safety gear, packs easily in the trunk of the Mini :-)
The improved "reach" of the little Olympus has really gotten me to shoot more. Significantly more. As in, about a hundred pictures a day (skewed towards the weekends, but I rarely take fewer than 25 pictures on a random weekday.) Passed the twelve thousand picture mark some time last week...
As usual, MetaCarta is hiring - my second "spinoff" (full time release engineer) is succeeding well enough that I'm spending more than half of my time actually coding now - but we are growing in many other areas, not just "stuff Mark used to do" :-) (And as you can see from flickr I've had my weekends free for rather a long time now...)
Current Location: sploosh!
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11:34 pm
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road trip! (mmm chocolate)
Off to scenic New Hampshire... L. A. Burdick's original cafe/restaurant is in Walpole, NH (where Larry Burdick himself lives and works :-) Then off to a fun Suzanne Vega concert (even if she didn't play my favorite song, she made the fans in the audience pretty happy... sadly, it being a benefit concert, there seemed to be a lot of people who were there because it was the thing to do, and she seemed a little nervous about that. But she still has The Voice :-)
Current Music: Zephyr and I
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11:40 pm
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Hiring again!
MetaCarta is growing and needs more engineers! Formal job descriptions are elsewhere, but my version of the details is behind the cut (since posting here has turned up people before...)
( job descriptions )
Send me email at work if you're interested in any of these; if you include a resume, make it plain text - PDF is ok but will annoy me a little; any other binary format will be discarded unread :-)
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01:12 am
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European Vacation
I'm back and just about over the jetlag... and since I'm now a year behind on Iceland stories, I figure I should at least get some of the Spain stories down now...
Instead of going to EuroPython this year (it's next week, in Vilnius) I arranged my habitual two weeks in Sweden to overlap with Jesse and Kaia's "elopement". That's a fascinating story told elsewhere and a few hundred pictures over on flickr. Barcelona seems to be a nice and well-behaved city; even the less pleasant parts merely reminded me of Brooklyn :-)
Since I don't actually like cities to start with, Laura found a British couple who do casual bird-watching tours of the Ebro Delta. I've only posted about a dozen of the nearly seven hundred pictures I took that day (mmm, eyestrain... and when I was back in the hotel with a cold facerag over my eyes, I *still* saw flapping wings in various configurations :-) The delta has a fascinating collision of ecosystems - on the one hand, you have the Mediterranean and the brackish mixture of that with the mouth of Ebro river; on the other hand, you have vast rice paddies irrigated with fresh water drawn by canal from far upstream on the Ebro. In between, lagoons and marshes, and a range of nature preserves easily reachable over the course of the day. Sightings included night heron, coot, flamingo, swallow (nesting *in* one of the bird-viewing blinds :-) tern nests, bittern, purple heron, avocet (and chicks), various ducks and ducklings, egret, mundane and exotic gulls, and some fish. Plenty of long-lens work, as well as occasional closeups (the night heron seemed pretty fearless, as well as entirely uncamouflaged.)
Also of minor note, I didn't bring a laptop to Spain, just a somewhat-obsolete Archos PMA430 "image tank" with wifi. This served pretty well, running OpenPMA but that wasn't much of a challenge - all that actually needed was USB Host support and rsync, I didn't do any captioning until I was back in Sweden (and much of it I deferred until the flight back to the US.)
Current Location: home at last
Tags: photography, spain, sweden, toys, travel, wedding
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02:55 am
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Birds and Snakes and Airplanes...
    
New toy - Olympus SP-550UZ. 18x zoom. I'm now a lot closer to "if I can see it I can shoot it" while still having a camera that I can have on me most of the time... only two downsides: xD cards are evil and I've been enjoying it so much that I've been spending time with the camera that I probably should be spending on other things... I tried to read the first few chapters of RESTful Web Services, enjoyed the introduction, got a few pages in to chapter one - and then went for a 3 mile hike in the rain, and found it to be a better choice, simply due to finding this and this in the middle of nowhere. This is more than just new-toy-glow, I'm averaging 80 pictures a day and far more of them make it to flickr than before.
It was definitely worth not waiting for the Canon S5-IS (the announcement of which was why I was open to looking at a larger camera.) I've even changed some of my summer plans to be more photo-oriented (not entirely because of this, but it was a real influence.)
Great Meadows NWR turns out to be a pretty good place to watch planes going into Hanscom (BED) while also observing nature; the Piaggio "pusher" above is probably more unusual and distinctive than most of the critters I saw that day :-)
Current Mood: enthusiastic
Current Music: R.E.M.
Tags: photography, picture, toys
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11:13 pm
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Even gloomy days can have adventures...
Last weekend, it was raining... and had been raining for a long time... classic gloomy New England winter-isn't-quite-done spring weather (though the last weekend in April is pretty late in the year for this kind of thing.)
Saturday, stayed inside and hacked. Sunday, decided I'd had enough of this, it wasn't raining all that much and I should at least get out and have lunch. Did my usual trip over to Ice House Pond (got some good reflection pictures, a cloudy sky is interesting for that, but nothing exciting.) Couldn't get up the motivation to do one of the farther-away hikes, so I went over to Great Meadows instead, to see if it was less flooded. Turned out it was, and that meant I got pictures of a Blue Heron and some muskrats up close, along with a nesting goose. I think that was pretty successful, for a visit to an otherwise inaccessible park.
On the way home, I realized that there was still some light, and that it was gloomy and wet enough that the Old North Bridge, the biggest non-shopping tourist destination in Concord, would probably be empty, and that the bridge might be good for getting more wildlife pictures (I've seen ducks and turtles there before.) Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly empty and partly flooded. I waited out a brief "real" downpour, and headed in to the park. Lots of flooding, mostly geese in the river, not that many people around so I got some good angles on the bridge itself.
If you look carefully along the left edge of that picture, you'll see a person standing next to the Minuteman Statue. He saw me taking pictures, and walked over with a camcorder on a tripod, and said roughly "I'm shooting a music video - just a little thing to put up on youtube, I'm an aspiring country singer from Boston - could you take some shots of me with this?"
After pointing out that while I knew the equipment, I didn't actually have any real experience shooting video, I took the camera and did some angles, some zooming, some closeups... listening to the singing and the lyrics (mostly the word "despair" :-) he'd certainly chosen a suitable setting for it. I figured at least he'd be able to use some of the guitar-strumming closeups.
Turns out that, behold the power of modern video editing, a fair bit of it turned out to be useful (it's also up on the artists' own site.) Basically the entire section with him walking onto the bridge, up to the four-frame dancing insert (except for the little reflected-goose interlude) was my shooting.
Conclusions:
- Depressing and gloomy days can still hold adventures
- On days when only crazy people would go out - sometimes you find other interesting crazy people... :-)
- Music videos have gotten a lot easier to produce...
Tags: birds, photography, picture
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03:27 am
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Another Month
The rain finally stopped and we had a perfect day for taking pictures of wildlife (see here, and surrounding pictures over on flickr.)
Work has been busy but much less stressful - we hired a sufficiently experienced release engineer that I've been able to "let go with both hands" and focus on long overdue design projects (a good reminder that I'm actually pretty good at those... if I can focus all of my attention on them; I really can't be doing anything else in parallel...)
Best Recent License Plate: N2D. (Took me about a quarter mile additional driving to realize that it could be NERD in I18N-speak :-)
Best Recent Music: soundtrack to Wicked, especially track 4.
("What is this feeling, so sudden and new...")
Best Recent Scientific Factoid: Canadian Geese exist in sweden, but the entire population is so inbred that DNA testing fails to be able to determine parentage.
Most Surreal Fortune Cookie (royal east, 2007-04-17): "Now is the time to make circles with
mints, do not haste any longer."
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04:24 pm
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Våffeldagen!
Don't forget, today is waffle day!
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02:41 am
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Mmmm Chocolate
St. Ek-Chuah's day party went well; the fountain was a huge success, and turns out to be pretty easy to clean up after. Got to meet some new people, and see some old friends I only seem to see at this party, so I'd better keep having it :-)
Best thing to dip in the fountain: Stroopwaffles!
Worst thing to dip in the fountain: sharp cheddar
Most popular non-chocolate item: flex-shaft screwdriver
Most wrong use of chocolate: Hershey's white chocolate "confetti bar"
Biggest culinary oops: forgetting to put the 2lbs of ricotta in the ziti
Sleep would be good now...
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01:48 am
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Food Geekery
- Harold McGee has a weblog!
- In his latest post he points out that there's a Google Book Search page for On Food And Cooking which can help find the many references to chocolate without having to thumb through the whole thing (not that that's a bad pastime, of course :-)
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12:44 pm
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Work
The new release engineer didn't work out, so either I need a new minion, or I need to figure out a way for us to do a lot less release engineering. ("custom appliance" isn't a solved problem yet, though it looks like rpath is trying...)
We're also hiring a "content manager", and still need a hardcore-systems "support" person.
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11:29 pm
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Pendulum Clock Calibration?
Any ideas how to calibrate one of these? This one is gaining at least 10 minutes a day. 8.01 is too long ago for me to remember the relationship between the mass on a pendulum and its period, but that is something that is adjustable here.
(I'm also pondering ways to automate it; right now it needs winding about once a week. But I don't want to modify it significantly...)
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01:43 pm
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Huh, another patent...
Apparently the owner of the wreckage of Arepa managed to flog through the third patent application this spring, so after 6 years, Patent 7,017,188 got issued, with my name on it. I'm pretty sure that was the last of the applications.
Other than the flashbacks from reading the attached drawings (RAFT, ARFSD, Activators... it looks like "Briq" got mangled into "brig" though) there isn't really anything useful to get out of this... other than the anecdotal point that every time I ego-surf a new search engine, I actually learn something, which I really didn't expect this time :-)
Current Music: Party like it's 1999
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01:37 pm
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More Jobs!
We're still trying to find a support engineer. This is tricky because so many people with support on their resumes are good at regurgitating training and (more usefully) "giving good phone" - our support people need to be able to diagnose complex systems issues, often over the phone (though you've got all the local systems you need to duplicate and root-cause the problem); work closely with engineering; figure out the system from manuals and stories - if you're motivated enough you can put time into *building* training programs, but we don't have formal training yet... customers are actually reasonably sophisticated early-adopter types, but the problems run from network/install issues, integration issues, all the way to linguistic questions. Talk to me directly, or email me at work...
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12:25 am
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My Next Car
I've mentioned this before, but the Tesla Electric Sportscar has gotten a bunch of new press lately, reaffirming for me that, once they open the New York sales and service office and I can drive one home from there, that I'm getting one.
- Paul Boutin (anyone here remember him? Media Lab dude in the late 80's, famous at the time for answering the question "What's the biggest technological challenge of the next decade?" with "There are only seventeen thousand three letter acronyms" :-) got a chance to test drive one, and wrote it up for Slate.
- Wired has a Tesla photodismantlement - shots of the motor, batteries, and conventional parts.
An interesting he brings up in the article is shifting - like the electric Wrightspeed X1, there isn't any. The article points out something I'd never really understood before - "shifting" really is a kludge, an artifact not of driving, but of "primitive" internal combustion engines...
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08:12 pm
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Things happen
Missed October, but I have been writing - just not here. I finally got a technical blog together... or rather, turned my README files into blog entries (easier to code around than to change habits, of course :-) The RSS feed is here but there isn't yet a matching HTML page; the individual projects already have their own renderings (and individual feeds, if you only want the Rants page and not the rest of the coding projects.
Update: The RSS feed for everything is probably more interesting than just the python one, though it's still overall a highly technical space.
As part of putting the tech blog together, I realized that I'd actually managed to write code and prose combined at about half the rate expected from NaNoWriMo without particularly trying. There are threshholds of course and technical material is pretty much entirely unlike novel writing, but it does mean that if I ever getting around to writing a technical book, it's not unreasonable to get it started in a few months of spare time. (Not that I particularly want to write a book, though I have gotten a kick out of getting published in the past - but if there's ever (again) something I'm uniquely suited to write, I intend to do so. The time for a kerberos or zephyr book was about 10 years ago, though, and "Startup Infrastructure and Culture Building" is more of a howto or a "hire me to do this on the side while I'm solving hard engineering problems too", and it'll be kind of boring to read unless you're in the middle of putting something together... and most of the tools are changing in real time, especially if you're not paranoid and buy into using lightweight web1.9999 services instead of infrastructure.)
Hmm, I still haven't written up Iceland stories. There's a chance of another (shorter) trip to Iceland (or possibly Stockholm or even Rome) before the end of the year. And then there's this "Interesting python job in Stockholm" note that I just got (but it doesn't sound like short-term consulting so it's not a real option - it's just that usually, when I'm not looking, things like this don't fall in my lap, so it was a bit of a surprise. And one problem with being a "startup specialist" is that Europe (except perhaps for Ireland?) is startup-hostile, even with other reasons to spend time there.) Two words: "tiramisu shake" :-)
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eichin's journal
