man & nature # 94 ~ sitting here hoping
Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 08:39AM 
Moon Valley Farm, Au Sable Forks ~ Scottish Highland cattle • click to embiggenIt was sunny and quite pleasant yesterday with temperatures in the 20s. A good day for getting out and making some not-very-cold pictures. This morning I'm sitting here with bated breath and crossed fingers hoping for the 16-20 inches of snow predicted for today.
The wife was scheduled to leave this AM for 6 day tour of NYC and New Jersey: Weds.-Sat., Brooklyn to visit her new nephew; Sat., Monclair, NJ. for her brother's 50th b-day party; Sun.-Tues, south Jersey to visit her mom. However, due to severe winter storm warnings posted for this AM, she got out of town last evening.
In any event, here's hoping for a severe winter storm. The light snowfall that is suppose to be the leading edge of the big storm has already started.
FYI, maybe you've read about this - it's making the rounds of blogs - and I just thought I'd pass it along for your viewing pleasure. It's a single picture titled, We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence. The 100 meter long picture is the culmination of 17 months of work by Simon Hoegsberg.
And speaking of big, in a weird kind of way this picture surfacing at this time comes right on the heels of my discovery of this little gem - the GigaPan Epic. This amazing (and very inexpensive) device together with its companion software GigaPan Sticher automatically pictures and seamlessly merges up to thousands of overlapping images into one gigantic one-gigapixel (or larger) panoramic picture.
Check out this 6.2 gigapixel picture by Julian Kalmar. Or go to gigapan.org and check out the Obama Inaugural Address pano and zoom right in on the president. This picture is made from 220 separate images.
This stuff is really neat. I have always been a fan of panoramic pictures and have made plenty in my day using a variety of equipment; 35mm Widelux, 120 Widelux, 35mm Roundshot, and, most recently, just about any camera I own by stitching multiple overlapping images together with software - the same technique that The Cinemascapist uses to create his Cinemascapes.
The GigaPan Epic is so inexpensive that it's hard for me to resist, but .... it does require a computer upgrade to an Intel-based Mac. That's something I have been studiously avoiding for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that all of computer/software stuff is working just fine, thank you very much. I am extremely loath to get myself into the upgrade black hole. However, I do need(?) a new laptop ....
Speaking of the upgrade black hole, I have had to dump using Firefox. The latest version (3.0.2) that automatically downloaded and install is a real piece of work. It's a bloated memory hog and has proven to be very unstable - it crashes all the time. I am not alone - a simple google of "firefox sucks" will point you to host of users with similar issues. It's just another example of a good product gone bad. It's so loaded with "features" that it has, IMO, become useless.
So, it's back to Safari for me (which seems to be working just fine).
A pox on all I'm-doing-it-because-I-can software developers, with a special spot in Hell for cell phone software developers - it's a phone you morons. Why can't I just buy a f**king phone - you know, one that doesn't have little tiny exterior buttons that take a picture every time I try to get it out of my pocket or turn off (or on) the ringer at the same time?
Although I must admit that I like the idea of a twitter enabled cell phone so I can use it for the sole purpose of asking those software morons, "What are you doing in Hell?"
Reader Comments (6)
Firefox 3.0.5 works just fine on my pentium whatever (2 year old box). Whatever don't you like about the program?
You know, the iPhone doesn't have al of those silly little buttons. And, for a smartphone, it's a damn good "phone".
Mike - the damn thing just keeps crashing - I presume from what I have read that most of the crashes are memory related. That said, I may be taxing FF's memory requirements by having too many windows open at one time (I prefer windows to tabs), but that said, i can open 2x as many windows with Safari with no ill effects.
Scott - I am an Apple Man (my father was a Studebaker Man) through and through. I would love an iPhone in that I really like my iPod Touch (same as the iPhone but without the phone) but, quite literally, until just a week or two ago, the iPhone was not available in our neck of the woods - no AT&T service was available.
And, unfortunately, we are currently "locked" into a service plan with another carrier - another bit of delightful "free-market" bulls**t.
All I use is a Mac laptop. Close it, connect a nice new Mac keyboard and mouse, and your monitor and you've got a desktop. The newer Mac laptops are almost as fast as a Mac pro, and certainly fast enough for any thing I do. I use mine connected to an external monitor for color critical work and it still goes on the road with me. I can work from home, Florida, or Germany.
Can't comment on your FF problems in the MacWorld. I prefer tabs to multiple windows, though - for the same reason I can't abide pop-ups. And I seem to have no problems in opening and closing many tabs in a single session. System crashes I get are when Windows can't write to the hard drive and throws up the blue screen and reboots. There seems to be a glitch somewhere every now and then. And I'm too broke right now to buy another drive.
The firefox thing is kind of funny, given the origins. Firefox started life as a branch on the memory hogging, unwieldy Mozilla codebase, with the original idea to keep the browser lean and mean and enable everything else via plugins of one sort or another.
That seems to have gotten lost along the way.