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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Sun, 31 Jan 2010My friend Melanie and I finally went out today, and shot some pictures with the 5x7 camera. I've only been getting ready and geared up for this moment since, oh, last summer. Tonight I spent a couple of hours prepping the darkroom area (my bathroom, with light-tight covers on the window and door). I located and washed out all the old chemical bottles and trays from the last time I did this -- 1999 or so. The chemicals contained in those bottles were... impressively full of crud. Lots of rinsing. Finally, it was time, and I turned out all the lights and processed my first sheet of 5x7 film in over a decade. It went pretty smoothly, but I clearly have some work to do. 
That's the first look at the negative (hanging in my shower stall, still drying, why do you ask?). I inverted the colors, dramatically upped the contrast, and that's the result. Obviously I'll be doing more with it than just photographing it hanging in the shower stall, but as it's still wet, that's all I can offer for the moment. The contrast is so low that I suspect my development time was way too short. This was 11 minutes with Microdol-X (itself about 10 years old, but freshly mixed), and it clearly needs more like 14-15. Fortunately, I took two exactly identical exposures, so I've got another one to play with. Working with 10 year old film and developer is a bit of a crapshoot, but it's a good way to do some initial checks, and make sure that I don't have light leaks in the camera, or any other really obvious operational problems before I go blow money on fresh film and chemicals. In any case, hooray for progress! Posted at 21:56 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 19 Jan 2010Alecto: Issue #1 opens on Friday. If I've been a bit quiet lately, that's why. Talk about a time suck. Anyway, one of the fun projects I'm doing as part of this is making a "comic book" drawing of them for their biography page. Last night, while I was getting pictures of folks, I got this entirely badass picture of the run crew (Regan, Noelle and Mike): 
I liked it so much that I wanted to share it. And I suppose it would be teasing if I didn't share the corresponding comic book image: 
Posted at 12:40 permanent link category: /theater Wed, 13 Jan 2010I work with a small theater in Seattle, Annex Theatre. Recently, we had an event where we needed to play a DVD. We have a really snazzy projector up, all HD and everything, and we were feeding it with a $60 flip-open travel DVD player. When this cranky piece of crap player refused to go beyond the first chapter on the DVD, I'd had enough. I talked to our managing director, and figured out how much we could spend, and started looking at options. I quickly settled on the Pioneer DVD-V5000 and DVD-V8000 models as being likely, but then, buried deep in the search results at B&H, I found the HHB UDP-89. This player looked like the answer to all my desires in a DVD player. It handles pretty much any format on a CD-sized disc with the notable exception of Blu-ray. It has highly reputable audio hardware, including balanced stereo out (which doesn't appear on any other DVD player I could find). It has the necessary front-panel buttons so it can be operated without a remote. It's only 1U high, which means it will take up less space in the equipment rack. Of course, it's also a $1000 player, but it looked like a good investment in the future, and would match our fancy projector well. It finally arrived yesterday, and I spent a few minutes plugging it in and getting it temporarily situated in the equipment stack (the rack is still a bit of a pipe dream, at least for the stuff we have to access frequently). When I pulled it out of the box, I had a very favorable first impression. This is a dense unit, and I suspect that if I open it up, I'm not going to find that density supplemented by weights (unlike some cheap consumer equipment I've seen). The front panel is very plainly a thick, milled piece of aluminum, very attractive and speaking favorably of the quality inside. Once I got it powered on and had spent a few minutes playing with it, though, that favorable impression evaporated somewhat. The buttons feel quite cheap and plasticky, although they emit a loud click when pressed, so at least there's no question of "Did I press that button or not?" The power-up process takes a shockingly long time, something like 10-20 seconds before it responds to any control inputs. It's not a big deal in the long run, but it's pretty surprising for something that's a new design. You have to wait for it to boot up before it will even stick out its tongue to accept a disc. The disc tray itself is thin and springy, which at first seems cheap, but then I realized that its springiness was its salvation -- it could be thin without being brittle and breakable. Once I got a disc in (a CD, as there was a rehearsal going on that I didn't want to disrupt with a video projection), it quickly read it and was ready to go. I was pleased to see that the auto pause function was given its own, clearly labeled button. This will make it the favored CD player for production use, almost certainly. I quickly realized why the auto pause button was so prominent: when you pause the playback, then skip to the next track, it will automatically start playing again, if auto pause is off! This is counter to every CD and MD player I've used in the last decade, and is going to screw up every first time operator of this player. The information display is pretty minimal, a small two-line dot-matrix display with a few dedicated icons (CD, auto pause, play triangle and pause bars were the ones I noticed, though I'm sure there are others). There is no time button on the front panel, most likely in the interests of clarity, although I'd expect to find one on a pro CD or MD player. Still, a time button (for switching between at least elapsed track time and remaining track time) would be a welcome addition, even if it is a bit useless for a DVD player. I suspect the function is available via the remote control, although I didn't check. Fortunately, the player is quicker to respond once it's playing a disc, as compared to start-up, but it's still a bit sluggish. I pressed a track skip button and it took a second to catch up -- a potentially fatal flaw when you need to skip several tracks quickly, particularly in a tense production moment. You'd better be counting button presses, because the display lags. I suspect Sony avoids this by making sure that the display is always quick to respond, even if the underlying system and mechanism is taking a moment to catch up. Granted, this first impression doesn't actually say anything about the UDP-89 as a DVD player, but I was interested to see my own reaction to it. As there's little out there in terms of user review, I figured I'd share my reactions. I expect I'll have more to say later. Just to ensure that I'm not leaving you with the wrong impression, I was overall quite favorably impressed. The build quality, with the exception of the plastic front panel buttons, seems to be top notch. The slow UI is something that could easily be corrected with a firmware update, which is a procedure clearly outlined in the manual, although no updates are currently available. I'm looking forward to powering up the projector and putting the UDP-89 through its paces with a couple of different DVDs. If I can scrounge together enough cables, it'll be fun to hook up to the theater's 5.1 system and get real surround sound going. I'll try to come back to this topic in the future, and keep you updated on our snazzy new DVD player. Posted at 10:45 permanent link category: /gadgets Thu, 07 Jan 2010I think the mountains came out for my brother's birthday. Of course, he's in LA and couldn't possibly have seen them, but it seemed likely in any case: 
Posted at 10:37 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 05 Jan 2010This morning, I came across some coupons from Silence Heart Nest, a restaurant in Fremont, which took over the space from the Longshoreman's Daughter restaurant. It's a new-agey-feeling place, with all the servers in saris, and a menu heavy on the happy/hippie food. I looked at the coupon, saw that it was from this place, and scoffed to myself: "Yeah right, you won't catch me going in there again." This is the story of that reaction. In the early planning of SketchFest Seattle last year, we were having meetings about once a month, and we found ourselves generally meeting for brunch on our meeting days. It was a nice way to get together and discuss the pressing issues while taking our time and being leisurely about it. One time, we decided to stop in at Silence Heart Nest, having heard that it was a good place. They seemed to be doing a brisk trade that morning, but we were able to find a corner table for four, and sat down to our discussion. Food was ordered, and consumed. It was pretty good, and reasonably priced. We had our discussion, and ended up sitting at the table for a couple of hours, deeply embroiled in the issues of putting on a quality sketch comedy festival. This was our usual mode of meeting, and we'd done it at many restaurants. I remember looking over occasionally to see if we were sucking up table space unnecessarily, but there was never much of a line at the door, and the servers didn't seem anxious to get rid of us. So we stayed, and we discussed. Eventually, two hours after we'd gotten there (having ordered a full round of breakfast for everyone), we flagged a server and got our check. "You know," said the server (I must necessarily paraphrase, my memory's not that good), "you guys have been sitting here for a really long time, and you've been taking up a perfectly good table, costing us a lot of income. It was really quite inconsiderate of you, and maybe next time you have a meeting like this, you could take it somewhere else after you eat, like a local coffee shop or something." We four sat there, stunned. Glances were exchanged across the table. There were sotto voce conversations affirming that each of us had been looking out to see if we were being an inconvenience to the restaurant. We paid our bill and left, much more quickly than we might otherwise have done. There was still nothing like a line at the door -- there might have been two people waiting for a table. As we walked down the sidewalk away from the the restaurant, it was generally agreed: that was about the worst possible way for our server to handle that situation, short of actually screaming or producing weaponry. In a normal restaurant, it wouldn't have even come up. SHN is arguably a small space with relatively few tables, and could be excused for being anxious for high table turnover. It would have been acceptable, if a bit weird, if someone had come over and politely asked us to clear out after we were obviously done eating. Laying a heavy guilt trip on us after we were done left us feeling like we'd just transgressed, without having any indication it was a problem during the transgression itself. So, congratulations, Silence Heart Nest. Your ill-timed scolding has not only guaranteed that I'll never be back, it has also produced this journal entry, which will be read by at least a half-dozen people, who might even have the same reaction. The durable power of infamy, indeed. Posted at 10:18 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |