April 30, 2007
Monday Antique Photos, Part 4.3
This one is a special present for my Mom. It's the only one I've got with any sort of fiber arts thing associated with it. I'm pretty sure the woman is holding a threaded needle. (Of course I might be totally wrong about that... Last week I got a photo where the seller swore there was a cat in the subject's lap, but I'm positive it's a feathered fan... so yea...)
Anyway, Happy Very Early Mother's Day Mom! ^_^
The 300 dpi version of this photo is linked off of it's page.
This is a beautiful outdoor shot. Everyone seems so very cheerful. I'd love to know what sort of outing they were on. ^_^
The 300 dpi version of this photo is linked off of it's page.
I love this photo! It seems to me to be the best of the beginning of more casual and pervasive use of cameras. Most people don't spend all their lives posed emotionlessly (at least I hope not or I'm doing some thing wrong). Also, the lady in the front has a lovely blouse. ^_^
The 300 dpi version of this photo is linked off of it's page.
There are three new photos for today! ^_^
I recently invested in a new scanner to handle these photos and my other period scans. After looking at what was available in my local area (not usually the best plan, but I wanted it sooner rather than later), I ended up with a CanoScan LiDE 600F. The physical scanner design is awesome. The origin is set next to the cover hinges. There are only raised edges on three sides, so you can drape materials off the other edge. It's very thin and light. It runs totally on USB power and supports USB 2.0 so it's just a bit faster to transmit data.
Then I started up the included software. Yes Canon, I certainly don't want you to save anything to disk for me. I definitely don't want to see my scan results before I quit your scanning UI. I absolutely don't want things named in order and I'm sure you don't need to worry about running out of memory while I scan 70 pages at 300 dpi. I don't really need to set the bit depth of my image in bits! Vague feel good terms are just fine! Naturally I just love using your proprietary photo editing software that was conceived as the bastard child of notepad and paint somewhere on the slow boat from China. ARGH!!!!
The only reason I'm not returning the scanner right now is because VueScan supports it. On the down side, I had to lay out $40 for VueScan. On the up side, VueScan is a great piece of software. It does everything I wanted and more than I would have asked for. It never should have gotten to that though, because Canon should have provided me with software that would actually allow me to use their scanner in a real life situation. I'm not a teenager who wants to scan one or two pictures of my emo unicorn poetry illustrations. I'm an adult who wants to do bulk scanning with strong and useful tools. Canon did not make much of an attempt to meet my needs.
No matter how nice the physical scanner design is I would not recommend the CanoScan LiDE 600F to others unless all they are going to be doing is occasional, small bouts of scanning.
April 28, 2007
I think it's finally really spring here! It's gotten a lot warmer and all the trees are finally starting to bud and flower. I'm so glad there will be leaves again soon!
When I first moved up here I didn't think the longer winters would be a big deal. After all I love snow and cold just requires more clothes, right? I noticed after the first year or two that the longer winter did weird things to my perception of the trees. In Maryland I know that even during the end of winter, I could remember what the trees looked like with leaves. The lack of leaves felt temporary.
But here, winter is too long. By the time that spring rolls around something in my mind has forgotten what the world looks like with leaves. It's always a sort of surprise when they are finally back again. I mean it's not that I can't imagine leaves, but my default mental picture of the world has become all brown and gray and leafless.
April 27, 2007
Some time in the last six months, an interesting sentence popped up in Wikipedia's article on H.P. Lovecraft:
Lovecraft's ideas have also sprung up as a manifestation in the character Morgan, a little girl in the ongoing webstory Mr Magnifico's Magnificent Murder Mystery Memories.
I actually thought this sounded interesting (if inappropriate for the article) so I went looking for this "webstory". Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it does not exist. The sentence has since been removed (rightly) from the article and I'm left to wonder. Was it just random vandalism or did this intriguing thing actually exist at some point?
The sentence is still showing up on a host of sites which pulled the article from Wikipedia, but I haven't been able to find any better info on what it might have been if indeed it was real at all.
April 23, 2007
This is the last one for today. I love this photo so much. I really want to do something with a similar quarter-cape over sleeve and velvet trimmings at some point. It also doesn't hurt that the young woman is quite lovely and sweet looking.
The 300 dpi version of this photo is linked off of it's page.
I know I should be able to date this photo. I have a fashion magazine with exactly that style of velvet trimming in it, but I haven't been able to find it yet. Ah well. I find it especially interesting to note that the photo has probably been retouched around the area of her waist (I mean the original was retouched, not the digital version).
The 300 dpi version of this photo is linked off of it's page.
I really love the hat in this photo. The skirt trimming is also pretty neat.
The 300 dpi version of this photo is linked off of it's page.
Because I've now have a back log of about 100 antique photos to post, I'm going to be putting up several every Monday rather than just one. I'm going to do separate posts so it's a tad less confusing. If only the things weren't so darn cheap (50 cents - 1 dollar on average) I wouldn't have collected so many. Grrrr... stupid pack-rat gene.
Anyway, now that I have a bunch, I really need to get proper supplies to store them so they won't be damaged. I'm thinking some acid free paper and an acid free storage box. Hopefully that will be cheap.
Just as a quick reminder, all of the photos are collected on my period photos page. This page also includes links to 300 dpi versions of the photos (suitable for printing!).
On a tangential note, I'm still trying to decide which of my period magazines I should scan next. I think I've narrowed it down to 6 or 7 of them by sorting them by length. I'd really rather do the thin ones first, since they will go faster and are easier to fold open. The reduced set of candidates still includes things from the 1860's up until the nineteen teens. I'm not sure if I want to go for a strategy of moving through time from one end or the other or just jump around randomly. I'm sort of leaning towards the nicest teens one right now, since it has some lovely Edwardian stuff in it including a bunch of photos of folks in Parisian fashions!
I'm debating doing some OCRing on my existing scans as well, since the 300 dpi pages have more than enough resolution for that. We'll see I guess. As much as I'd like to make the content available for folks who are sight impaired, I'm lazy and doing 70 pages of OCR checking sounds painful to me.
April 20, 2007
Yes, I read A Softer World.
I've been playing around with Comic Life for the last few days. It's rather more amusing that it deserves. I think I'm probably using the styles wrong. I don't quite understand how to make custom ones yet, but I'll figure it out eventually.
The photos used for this comic were taken by me. I really do collect period photos, though not for the creepy reason stated in the comic. ;P The pictures in the pictures in the comic are new acquisitions, so they'll be scanned and posted on my blog on subsequent Antique Photo Mondays, but probably not for a long while (since I have a back log of scans already).
April 18, 2007
I stumbled across the web comic Count Your Sheep a few days ago. In a sea of semi-adult drama comics, it makes me so happy that someone is making something cute, sweet, and child friendly.
Sometimes it's just nice to remember that I don't have to be a grown up all the time. Simple pleasures and childish joy can be very comforting.
April 16, 2007
So here's my second antique photo for my Monday series. I promise I'll stop being lazy, read the photo dating book I bought and actually put up estimated dates for these at some point. Really...
As a reminder, all the antique photos are going to be collected on this page, so you won't need to search around my blog to find them.
April 15, 2007
Alan plays in a long term D&D campaign on Sunday afternoon/evening. Since they start pretty early he usually has to bring dinner. Today I made up a bento for him. I think I did pretty well considering. He took some other snacks along just in case as well.
The brown rice balls didn't really work. They look nice, but they wouldn't stay together very well. I only barely got them into the box with out them falling apart. The white thing on the top is a molded hard boiled egg and the pastries are mushroom turnovers from Trader Joe's. They're quite tasty. I threw in a few grape tomatoes for color, but I expect Alan won't eat them since he's not a huge fan of tomatoes.
The whole box came out to almost exactly nine Weight Watchers points. It's a little more than I would normally have in one meal, but hopefully it will be about the right size for him. :)
Update: Alan wanted to note that one of the rice balls held together and the other did not. I'm not entirely sure why. My best guess right now is that the better one was more heavily compressed. I'll have to try to be more consistent in how much I put in the mold and see if that helps.
These pictures are a little old at this point, but I thought I'd share them anyway. :)
A few days ago I made some practice bento food. I finally got to try out my smaller triangular mold and it worked great. I like the triangular molds a lot more than the little star/triangle/heart/flower set. The rice balls come out much cleaner and more well formed. This set is not stuffed, but I did try out a couple of shapes of nori grips. Unfortunately I think the traditional strip is the best, but I'll keep trying.
The eggs still aren't coming out quite to my satisfaction. I think most of the problem is size issue and that's not being helped by the inability to cage free egg producers to grade their egg sizes with any stringency. I'm all for being nicer to chickens, but it's damn annoying that they aren't even trying to get the same sized ones in a package. They were tasty anyway. We cut them open and Alan made them into deviled eggs, which is surprisingly not too bad for you with Miracle Whip instead of Mayo.
April 14, 2007
After a hard and long battle I've finally managed to figure out how to do Next and Back buttons in IceFrog. Now all my gallery pages have next and back buttons on their pictures. Whee!
I also added this "super exciting functionality" into the Ganglands page and Shoe's Pinchpot Studios page.
April 12, 2007
This link came around today at work. Looking back, I think I entered the workforce after most companies moved to primarily digital records. I gather that some older and less progressive companies still use a lot of paper, but I bet it's come down some even for them.
Looking around my own cube at work today (just after reading that article), I thought it was rather hilarious that out of 5 large desk drawers only one has paper in it. Most of the rest are full of food I've squirreled away so I don't have to bring in lunch often. :P
April 11, 2007
So yesterday, for dinner, I packed up a bento box. I've been trying to take lots of food with me to gaming, since that seems like the most dangerous snack time. I'm thinking of my food as a sort of preemptive counter assault. Something like that anyway.
The bento I made yesterday had rice balls stuffed with miso tuna, grapes, some tasty Havarti cheese, and a weight watcher's 1pt bar (it's hiding under the cheese). I also brought a strawberry smoothie (in a rather inglorious plastic tub since I don't have a good thermos right now) to drink.
The rice balls were amusing to make. I followed the cooking cute tutorial and the filling was just a can of tuna with a table spoon of miracle whip and a table spoon of shiro miso paste. I'm not sure the miso added much. I haven't been able to find sources for any other kinds of miso though, so I guess that's what I've got for now. I used nori to make "grips" for the rice balls, although I didn't do a very good job. Hopefully next time I'll do a slightly better job of that.
Note: Since I figured other folks on Weight Watchers might be interested, I thought I'd add in information with the point values of my bento. The stuffed rice balls are 2 points each (so 4 points for both), the cheese is 2 points worth, the one point bar is one point (:P), and the grapes are a 1/2 cup, so 1/2 point. So over all it's 7.5 points worth of bento. I've been able to plan bento from about six points up to about ten, so you've got some options, even in such a little box. ;)
I've discovered that I can't eat two cups of grapes in one sitting anymore. By about one and a half cups I'm feeling sort of uncomfortable and not at all interested in more food. I know I was able to happily eat two full cups of grapes as of three weeks ago, because I have records of everything I ate since joining Weight Watchers.
On one hand, it's good that my stomach is shrinking, since my current breadth suggests that it did not need to be as big as it was. On the other hand it is highly creepy to have empirical evidence of organ change. At least it seems creepy to me.
I'm going to try dropping to one cup of grapes and see if that makes me more happy. In general I've been having a difficult time eating as much food as I should for the last week or so. At the beginning, right after I joined Weight Watchers, it was more like, "can I find enough low point food to make me happy?" Now it's like, "oh crap, I can't eat enough low point food to use up my points." Alan says I should just not use my points, but that seems like a bad idea to me, because I know I will be hungrier the next day (as I was several times when I didn't use my points).
All of this is very much complicated by the fact that I can't feel most of the middle range of the "how hungry/full are you" scale that Weight Watchers encourages you to pay attention to. I can tell when I'm very hungry. I can tell when I'm stuffed to the point of being nearly sick. Everything else feels the same to me (this is due to medication side effects, not a defect in my body). I'm trying to just stay somewhere in that zone, but I have a lot fewer cues to go by.
I've been trying to gain some ground by just having a better idea of how much I should eat, and then spacing that out evenly as rather small meals or snacks across the day. Up until the last week or so this was working just fine. I guess I'm going to need to re-take the points-calculating test and rethink the list of foods I'll eat regularly.
On a tangentially related note, my triangle shaped rice ball molds finally came in the mail, so now I can try making stuffed onigiri. Yay!
April 09, 2007
To match my various Victorian and Edwardian magazines, I also collected a number of period photos. Most of them were much cheaper than I would have expected given their age. I haven't had the patience yet to go through them and actually try to date them. I think many of them shouldn't be too hard to date, since they have many and varied details in them.
Since I'm feeling lazy, I'm just going to post them on my blog, one at a time, on Mondays. I've also made a section in the Period Resources section where they can hang out (and I can add dating details when I become less lazy). If you want to try to date them in the comments for each post that would be spiffy, since it means less work for me. ~_^
April 06, 2007
I don't often pick up new comics based on Internet suggestions. Well, to be fair, I don't often pick up new comics that aren't web comics at all. I have about half a dozen normal print comics that I follow regularly (usually in collections, since I don't much like the actual comic book format) and that's about it.
On the suggestion of Amazon I decided to take a look at Pure Trance. The reviews looked so overwhelmingly positive that I thought I'd just take the chance and try it. Naturally I ordered it through my local comic shop rather than Amazon. In some ways Pure Trance was the bastard step child of a genre that I hate (the gross out/mutilation/nothing is sacred genre is how I think of it... it includes stuff like Ren and Stimpy as well as more adult works), but somehow Pure Trance was brilliant in my eyes. There was drug abuse. There was torture. There were very disturbing eating disorders. There were grown in a jar, depraved artificial people... but there was also interesting plot, a disturbingly compelling world, beautiful art, complex characters (certainly much less 2D than expected), and a far more satisfying ending than I could have imagined.
Pure Trance puts me in mind of sugar coated arsenic. It's full of good and bad people doing good and bad things, but despite the fact that the plot careens around wildly including characters on and off, seemingly at random, somehow Ms. Mizuno manages to tie it all together. In some ways it reminds me of Berlin, except that at the end of Pure Trance I felt like the world was improving rather than dreading what was to come.
One of the things I loved about Pure Trance is that the world is developed rather than just the story. The bottoms and tops of pages are often used to discuss various people, animals, or objects that are only details of marginal importance on the page. As individual characters are introduced they are given descriptions that are sort of like bios and pretty splash pictures that don't always relate to the story. I wasn't always sure what the characters are going to do, but the bios helped me to remember who they were(on a deeper level than just their names). The future of Pure Trance is weird, but it is full of realistic people and intriguing details.
I've only managed to get my hands on one other work by Ms. Mizuno so far. Princess Mermaid is a retelling of the little mermaid, in a much more modern but Grimm cast. It's more of a conventional comic with a simpler format and fewer characters. I didn't find it as compelling as Pure Trance, but it was still very good. I'm definitely going to start collecting the rest of Ms. Mizuno's works, since she's done a number of other fairy tales that have been translated into English. I would recommend her comics to anyone who is interested in dark but compelling stories only slightly disguised by a thin veneer of candy coated artwork.
April 03, 2007
Last night included the most impressive set of thunderstorms I've ever seen. Most of the counties surrounding ours had severe thunderstorm warnings and a series of thunders cells passed just south of our apartment complex. Fortunately we have south-facing windows.
From about 8pm until after midnight there were huge lightening strikes across the sky every 5 to 30 seconds. For about a half hour after one of the storms passed over head (around 11 - 12ish) there was near constant thunder. Alan was reading at that point, so I opened up my bedroom windows and just watched the storm for a while. It was glorious.
I can never get over how much nature fascinates me. You can't call down a thunderstorm or save up sunshine for a rainy day. You can't bottle the smell of rain (well you can, not very well) or the sound of rain beating on the windows. Weather doesn't last, but it will eventually be back again. On one level I'm sad that global warming is going to cause so many painful climate related problems, but on the other I'm thrilled that I'll get to see things I never had a chance to before.
On an unrelated note, I want to mention that my laptop is now burnt or dead. My current guess is that there's an issue with my video card, but it's out of warranty and I don't think there's much I can do about it. The hard drive is probably okay, but some surgery might be required to get the hard drive and my data out.
This really hasn't been a good evening for me.
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