Tax Return Camera

I was saving for a new camera. The nikon Coolpix 960 was just not cutting it. I had promised myself a new camera as a reward for not loosing my mind in grad school. That had been put off for quite a while do to the expenses of moving and wedding planning.

You have your priorities. Work before pleasure.

If you want to make art, have your camera fight you every step of the way will inspire you to not make art. You want the image, not weird colors that no one understands (except nikon engineers). The 960 was definitely falling down on the job. It wouldn't turn on. It couldn't focus. It ate batteries. It was really slow. It worked surprisingly well for a 13 (14?) year old camera. But it felt like a relic when compared to everything else I had used, except of course, the Apple Quicktake.

Fortunately, I screwed up my tax return for the 3rd year in a row, and that somehow translated in the IRS giving me more money than I figured they owed me. I find this to be a prime example of the need for our tax-code to be re-written. It is so dense that the IRS has to tell us about the forms that we should have filled out, had we known they were there.

So, I left a pile of money at Adorama and purchased a Canon s95.


Holy Cow.

This camera wants to take pictures. Especially technically amazing pictures. It wants it very, very, very badly. I have never used a point and shoot that made camera control so quick and easy. It can handle low light decently. The controls are easy to get at, plentiful, and mostly self explanitory. The color rendition really nice. The (relatively!) large sensor gives some since of depth of field.... it's hard to find an excuse not to like this camera. It does feel a little cramped for shooting a lot of pictures (it's smaller than my wallet). But, I think it would save you from lugging an SLR on a hike where your goal was hiking, not photography.


I really like this one.

Time to go make art.

Not that kind of Doctor....

Nature Magazine recently published a special section examining one of the current crises facing the scientific community: the over-abundance of doctorate holding researchers. I think this is one of the more involved surveys of the issues available, although one can find little bits here and there in the literature and online. There is some dissent on the scale of the probleme, there are other people saying that physical scientists are more or less at the same level of demand as they always have been (http://cenblog.org/). There are some pretty profound arguments that research scientists are doing fine and well.


My experience lands somewhere between golden tickets and the poorhouse. I did get a Ph.D. in a physical science, and ultimately landed a job there. But, I did have to mostly abandon the field where I did my dissertation research and move to a location that has little to offer beyond its simple being. Most of my colleagues have not had the same success either, so I have a nagging feeling of being lucky. The forces that be certainly seemed to be against me in my job search.

My current opinion of the degree distills to a profound determination that it is over-rated. People who deeply love the material, will not be deterred. However, I think someone should make a decent attempt to try. From my own experience, I had no clue that it was going to be hard to land work until I was nearly done. I harbor a theory that a large number of them are their simply because they were in school to start with, and the graduate office was the path of least resistance.

Those seeking job stability and a degree of independence should consider other routes first. A smart, driven individual will likely encounter opportunities to establish their goals, and greater freedom working outside the acadame. This view is represented by the vast number of people who appear to successfully live their lives without a higher degree.

Lotus Notes is the tar in the gears of progress.

The annoying thing about the flies in my office is that they are surprisingly noisy when mating.

The Other Rust Belt

I found a map on wikipedia that depicted New England as part of the Rust Belt. It had a special blue color to denote it was recovered rust belt. Old money has a way of making anything quaint, I suppose. The old mills and warehouses are becoming apartments, offices, shops, and light industrial. The humidity and the salty ocean air make anything iron bleed accross the landscape. I get it.

For a while, I spent a lot of time with The Dog wandering abandoned areas of the old Pease Air Force base. Maybe just dis-used. Commercial flights have always been touch and go there. The last airline to provide regular service, Skybus, left when the economy collapsed. Since then, the parking lots have been barricaded. The terminal is locked. The area is littered with old military footings and the hulks of failed enterprises.

What wasn't growing was rusting.

Ew.

Ramming Speed: n. The velocity attained when slidding across a freshly mopped floor, just before slamming into the urinal. alt. The event that occurs when the janitors do not put yellow cones up in the bathroom after mopping.

Squirrel attack staved off using whole wheat and almonds.

"I'm not crazy, I'm just yelling at the squirrels."

Hit in the Where‽ with a What‽

I went to my nieghbors house to return a large stack of maps and books that comprise a (more or less) compendium of the glaciers in Greenland. When I arrived in their driveway, I found them milling about the garden with a screwdriver, making menasing gestures towards the bird house.

A slight correct: the blue bird house.

The were about to take a peek to see if there were (maybe) some baby bluebirds in the house.

I neglected to ask what made the house so appealling to blue birds. To me, it was just another bird house.


Of the many things that were in the house, blue birds were not on the list. There was a large ant nest, a bird nest on top, and baby sparrows on top of that. The baby sparrows were trying hard to appear dead and boring. My irstwhile nieghbor decide that everything not a blue bird in the blue bird house would have to go. With a gloved hand, she evactuated the bird house. Baby sparrows went in all directions. One hit me in the chest before landing and running off into the bushes.

I have never been hit in the chest with a sparrow before.





Sidenote to PETA people: The apparent cruelty toward sparrows in this discussion is not my own, and not along the course of action I would follow in my nieghbors situation. While evacuating the bird house, I was politely informed that sparrows abuse blue birds at every turn, and that if you want blue birds, you must be vicious towards sparrows. Given that the young ones were nearly flying, and there is a fox is trying to feed a litter of kits (and won't shut up until she's done, another story), please do not be too upset about the plight of the sparrows. They have an even chance.

Exercise in backstraction

I finally made it until late July 2010 in the Dissertation induced photo backlog. There's another 5 gigs of free disk space in the universe thanks to my efforts.

Between May and July I caught an abstraction bug that yielded some photos I find to be very intriguing. There is a certain spice to a photo that is well composed and exposed, possesses interesting colors and patterns, and yet somehow manages to be unidentifiable.

Things should be downhill in the filling work. In my memory, I started writing more and shooting less about this point in the archive. However, I just took a peak ahead... there are several days where I shot a lot. Stay tuned for abandoned airport photos.

I'm quite eager to get all these sorted and put away. It's hard to feel creative when every time I pull out the camera, I have twinges reminding me of the thousands of photos I've taken that I haven't even seen.

That's bad.

This is the new Wiswall bridge. June, 2010.

Spring in Dover, NH

The digital equivalent of memories.

Old Rag Mountain

We tried to go rock climbing at Old Rag last weekend. Really, we did.

There are somethings you should know about Old Rag before you try to go rock climbing there.

The first thing to know is that dogs are not allowed on the trails leading to the cliffs. The reason for this is that the up the South East side of the mountain is quite dangerous (Class 4+ scramble) and not suitable for four legged oafs. It is quite possible for a dog to make it to the cliffs, however, they are effectively forbidden.

Which brings us to the second point, Old Rag mountain is an extremely popular hike. On a nice day, you will likely encounter hundreds of people hiking on Old Rag. In spite of the scenic, lonely drive to the parking lot, expect it to be jammed with busses and cars, and the trail a solid line of people. With respect to your dog, it will greatly delay your accent to have to introduce and protect your dog from the human onslaught. Carrying 40+ lbs of climbing gear will mean that you are taking the easy trail up, while everyone is taking it down.

Give your self plenty of time to explore the cliffs to find the climbing areas, as they are not well marked or easy to identify from the trail or the guidebook. Access to the bottom of the cliffs is via bushwhack and scrambles along faint trails and cairns.

On the bright side, we did have a nice, scenic hike. The Volvo 740 wagon proved it's metal, as we were able to haul four adults, climbing gear, and a dog in relative comfort to the trail head. The approach was clearly pushing the limits of what one can expect from a 100 hp/120 ft-lb 4 cylinder engine, however, with it seriously laboring up the steep hills in second gear.

It is always nice to be somewhere other than this city.

"Oh no. Not again."

It was somewhere between 00:00 and 01:30. I had just finished a Borderlands bender and collapsed in bed. About the time my consiousness was starting to drift from my body, like a plastic bag leaving a throny tree, the dog lept up and tore out of the bedroom. Organic noices eminated from the living room.

"Did the dog just puke?" The Girly asked.

"No." I said, hoping that the certainty in my denial would cover whatever was now certainly all over the floor.

We drug ourselves out of bed to examine the damage.

I am always amazed at the volume a dog is able to puke in a single motion. Actually, the disconnect between the dog stomach and the dog head is just as amazing. The first thought after a good purging is clearly the joy and delight of having a large pile of warm food suddenly appear out of nowhere. Also, the dog has been known to wander the house, violently heaving, torso shaking with each convulsion, clearly indicating that the dog stomach has given up all attempts at digesting it's contents, while the dog head has clearly not gotten the message, and seems somewhere between apathetic and confused about the messages that the round thing back there is trying to send it. If the stomach wants empty, it has to push through the head to get its point of view recognized. Compare this, for example, to someone with a raging hangover. Just pass them the bucket.

"It looked like he puked up his brain, which would explain alot." The Girly would later muse about the event.

Having the dog keep you up all night on monday puts a damper on the whole week.

Having learned our lesson the first time the dog exploded, we scheduled a vet appointment first thing in the morning. Vetrinary care is a lot like what you'd hope human care would be: we bagged a 0930 appointment, put down $200, and walked out with a diagnosis and a perscription for some medication to kill all the alien bacteria in the dog.

Alien bacteria introduced by eating alien poop.

So, for the next week, he's been getting ant-acid (OTC from walgreens!), a pro-biotic (to encourage dog bacteria in his dog stomach) and, ironically, an anti-biotic to kill the alien bacteria in his dog stomach.

Spent ~$51.00 on 12 gallons of gas. Wow.

Accidental Record Keeping

In piecing through the piles of photos I took but didn't archive while I was writing my dissertation, I've come accross quite a few repeats, leading to accidental and interesting studies in the evolution of things.

Building the new Wiswall Bridge (New Market, NH). December 2009:

Flood at Wiswall Bridge, April 2010:

The Chive: Early January 2010:

The Chive: March 2010:

The Chive: April 2010:

I found the chive growing the bottom of my refrigerator after a two week trip to Colorado and California. Notably, where I would take an amazing backpacking trip with, and fall head over heals for, my future wife.

After several weeks of hiding in the cool darkness of the ice cabnet, I found several chives not rotton, but thriving. I ate two and put the third one in a spare pot, which it quickly outgrew. After 3 years of re-potting, it flowered. After 4, I gave it to my friend Rachel when we were moving, along with our TV and a irstwhile cactus. I am under the impression she ate it.