It is decided. I am really awful at blogging.

Yo,

See title. Look at post history for explanation.

I have a lot of ideas for things to blog about though! I just never seem to have time to get it done. I’m only posting now because I seem to have gotten lucky: all my psets have been pushed back to next week. I did some work on two of them just so I can get a jump ahead, but I have a feeling that won’t be enough, haha.

My spare time is spent looking up photography/warhammer/housing stuff. I’m trying to actually buy a house (parents as co-signer, I don’t have that much money by myself) and rent it out to fellow grad students. Figured it’d be better than living in apartments all the time and would make me some money (hopefully). Apparently, the landlord experience is good to have too…although everyone has told me what a bad idea it is…we’ll see.

I haven’t even really had time to go through my photos. I’ve successfully caught up with “facebook” quality photos…but that means I need to go back and edit for something that matches my definition of quality.

Lately, I’ve been using the enblend plugin with Lightroom to make quasi-HDR (high dynamic range) photos. Personally, I hate most HDR photos because they tend to make everything look cartoonish (almost like a hyper-high dynamic range), but enblend does a much better job of approximating what the human eye sees. Apparently, we can have a 90 dB range in eyesight but Taya can only capture 11.9 stops. That’s a huge difference, and can make it difficult to capture what you actually see. HDR/enblend take multiple exposures of the same object and try to combine all the visual information to show more data.

The problem is that I’m getting tired of this technique, haha. Last time I was in Ithaca, I took ~130 pictures of the waterfall near Gun Hill. On a good day, I think 1/10 of the shots I take are keepers (on a great day, more like 1/6). Since doing enblend requires many shots of the same scene, it cuts significantly into my actual number of photos taken. After editing for facebook and making blended photos, I really only liked maybe 2-3 photos. That is shitty productivity. And it ate into my hard drive a lot.

I miss taking photos of people. I miss taking photos of events. There isn’t really a whole lot of that going on here in Amherst. I miss photo challenges, I guess. We had a department bbq and I forced myself to only use my 50mm prime lens. It was fantastic and I felt like it brought back a lot of the things that I had missed. My ratio still wasn’t as good as normal (shitty light), but I was surprised that I was mentally calculating what would be needed in each situation to get the shot I actually wanted every time I looked through the lens. This wasn’t always “oh man, I wish I had xx lens”, it was mixed with “my tele at 135mm would be really nice here” or “if I had set up a flash here, a reflector there, maybe another flash here, the shot would’ve been perfect”…lots of more “critical” photographic thinking in measurements, apertures, exposure levels, etc. Math, haha.

I had been thinking for a while to keep myself to “themes” every week (Digital Photography School does this and I liked the idea) to keep myself challenged, but I seem to be lost without having actual challenges to do. I know near Columbus Day, I’ll be on a nature theme (colors change, rented lenses!), but I need more, haha.

Kim, when you have themes, let me know, I’ll try to follow them. Also, I liked your description of this blog (Aaron’s new yet still defunct blog).

I’ll try to make more regular posts to this and the “ChemE blog”. There may be some shared content. I’m passing the mantle of Stan to someone new, so that blog may see some updates too

One thing I wanted to try was videos! I have two webcams (laptop and desktop) and Taya, figured I’d give it a shot, right?

I guess stay tuned while I test things and figure out how to embed video and such.

In the mean time, here is a pic of me and my super-long hair.

OH WAIT, no i have to try a collage…no nevermind, i can’t get the timing down in PhotoBooth

Pic of me and my long hair

Yeah. Actually that isn’t too bad, lemme try again.

I’m in my cube/office right now. This place is freezing.

And I end with a lolcat.

Intern Stories

Yo!

I’ll be discussing 2 different interns here today.

The Racist/Sexist One:

1. Apparently, P&G is willing to cross many boundaries in their diversity goal. Especially when Hispanic engineers are involved. This kid, on his first ever internship, apparently walked up to a technician who was working on a machine with a wrench and said “If you’re not going to tighten the bolts correctly, then I’ll just do it” and PUSHED a 20 year tech out of the way and began tightening the bolts himself. Afterwards, the plant manager called him in to his office and said “Listen, you are NEVER to touch ANYTHING in this plant unless specifically told to.”

A week later, the kid grabbed some tools and worked on a different piece of equipment. And was promptly sent home.

2. One female new hire was carrying some tools around and ran into said intern. The intern looked at her and said “Are you sure you should even be carrying all that stuff? I mean, it looks like it might be kinda heavy and you ARE a woman.”

No one recommended him for a full-time position. Except HR needed Hispanic engineer numbers for their quota and got him a full-time offer at a different site.

The Violent One:

A different intern a few years ago wanted to go see a movie. He tried to park in an awesome spot near an elevator, but someone took it from him. Words were exchanged, intern got out of his car, things got physical. Then the intern pulled a knife and stabbed the other guy. Intern left the victim on the ground and went to watch the movie. Obviously, shit like that gets reported. Intern never bothered to move his car or anything so police waited for him. Movie ends, intern calmly walks back to his car like nothing happened and gets arrested. He still had like 3 weeks left to work and P&G couldn’t fire him since the stabbing didn’t happen at/during work. Luckily, this kid did not get a return offer.

I’ll have other stuff to talk about later, lots of unpacking/repacking/fixing equipment going on.