Movies, revisited

Transformers (2007) - Decent enough action flick. A little bit of something for many age ranges, but totally special for none. It's wonderful how commercialized movies have become. F/X suffer from the common affliction of not enough choreographed detail, sure it's closeup, but that's just to cover all the flaws. I don't remember any of the actors. 6/10 overall, 7/10 in genre.

The Omega Man - Wonderful post-apocalyptic take on the Evils of Communism. Plot is similar to 28 Days Later, and these two have differences similar to the two Dawns. Heston does a decent job proving he's always been a little wacky, and the script writers leave me wondering if today's meaningless movies are simply a reaction to 60's and 70's preachiness. 6/10 overall, 7/10 in genre.

Anyone remember the name of the post-apocalyptic flick where the protagonist wields a golf club as his main weapon?

Light Reading

In conclusion: persons under nuclear attack should make considerable effort to protect themselves from beta radiation.

If you enjoy reading such sentences, then i highly recommend Nuclear War Survival Skills. Among other topics covered:

• how to build your own radiation detector
• how to build various fallout/blast shelters
• why nuclear winter is survivable

It's quite an informative book and is set in a decidedly hopeful tone, that, given the melancholy material, makes for a wonderfully seesawing read.

Africa Photos

For lunch i had one of my favourite pitas and rewrote my script to make the montages more circular. Here is a comparison of various stages:




This montage is made up of 1502 photographs which is all i took on my last vacation. The center is photos of mountain gorillas, the edges are mostly birds around lakes. Now you've seen what i saw in east Africa.

I haven't sorted them yet, will do that over the weekend and then begin editing some 1000 photos from my last 3 trips.

Peru Montage, Take II

Ok, figuring out a simplistic spiral wasn't that tough, fit well into lunchtime:


The pattern (and the problems with the algo) becomes more apparent the smaller you go:


The images also need to be sorted better - using the mean instead of average of the pixel values should help a lot. Next time. And the time after that, maybe recognize the pattern inside each image.

Photos from Peru

Remember Christmas? I started looking through my photos from my Winter vacation.



Sure, same boring montage of the selected images as i did with the Mongolia photos. If my brain were up to it i'd montage them in a spiral fashion after some other Peruvian relics; for now the simplistic algorithm rules the night.

Either i've misplaced my photos from back in Lima or i didn't take any, who knows. Again as with the Mongolia photos, i'll get around to editing them Later.

Mongolia, revisited

Finally sorted through the images i took during my summer vacation in 2006 and made a montage from the unedited images. Sometime Later i'll get around to editing them all as well. I think i'm missing some, but maybe my memory is sketchy.

My Other Job

What i was working on before i left:


It's a two-sided picture frame, took me a few months (ideas come quick, real work is tough) but finished it before i left. The outside is a simple red oak with an inside groove wide enough to hold a piece of glass, white matte board, newspaper, black matte board, and the cut wood (also red oak veneer). The Japanese girls i met while traveling in Kenya said the characters were indeed very legible.


What i'm working on now:


Yes that's me, and from the length of the hair, the Cass beer in my hand and the dry, rocky plains surounding me, you can tell i'm in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. Figured it was time i went through some of those old travel photos, not to mention i have a Plan for some of them.

(so the French guy we were travelling with says to me, "Why do you Americans feel the need to wear shirts and caps proclaiming where you're from?" I look at his Quechua brand jacket and bag and respond, "Why do you feel the need to advertise a native language from my home country?")