brainwagon

It is with a sense of deep sadness that I heard of the passing of Ray Harryhausen this morning. If I were to pick two things which influenced me as a kid growing up in the 1960s, it would have been the Apollo Space Program and the films of Ray Harryhausen, although at no time [...]

Here in the Bay Area, the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a victory lap, passing over Sacramento, the Golden Gate and many other Bay Area locations. Pixar Animation Studios is in Emeryville, quite close to the Bay Bridge, so I thought we had a pretty good chance of getting a good view. Sadly, all my good [...]

Carmen and I just got back from a trip to London, and we had a blast. One of the geekiest things we did while there was to take a day trip by train out to Bletchley Park to see the site of the codebreaking efforts by the British during WWII. As any long time reader [...]

I don’t spend much time talking about my day job here on the blog, but every once in a while, I have to take time out and crow a bit about Pixar and what a great place it is to work. Tonight, Wall-E picked up a Golden Globe for Best Animated Film. It was also [...]

My wife noticed a mommy and daddy quail at our fence, with a whole bunch of babies squabbling around in the grass at the bottom. Couldn’t get any good pictures of the babies, but shot this video of the parents: Not sure the autofocus got the quails as well as they could have, here is [...]

As a break from my amateur radio posts, here’s a photography one! Most of my photographs are cool largely by accident. This is no exception. Well, that’s not quite true, I was sort of trying for this effect, but it turned out much better than I could have expected. It’s shot with the Night Portrait [...]

A while ago, I wrote about how you could unlock a PAP2 and use it on Free World Dialup as a simple, cheap VOIP adapter.  Unfortunately, while playing around with Asterisk this morning, my adapter reset itself, promptly redownloaded some new firmware, and now is back to being locked with Vonage, this time, without the [...]

Using the multi-shot capability of my nikon, I grabbed sixteen small exposures of the frog croaking, extracted them, aligned them by hand, and made the (rather large, sorry for the dialup users) images on the right. Technorati Tags: My Photos

Well, this evening I was staring out the door into the darkness to see if our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy wanted to be let in for some additional kitty chow, and I found this little guy peering in instead. He’s a good sized frog, probably three or four inches in length (just the body, not the [...]

Well, the tulip bulbs that I planted last October are finally blooming, and I grabbed my little Nikon 4500 and shot this photo just to have something colorful in my background. I really need to get a new camera. Technorati Tags: Flowers, Photo

I upgraded my Gallery to version 2.0. It seems really slick, and is supposedly more themable than the older version. Check it out.

While looking for an entirely different CD full of image, I uncovered the original PhotoCD that my friend Jeff Eaton and I made when we went to Australia. It has thirty four images that we took while we were at Grove Greek Observatory. I spent an embarrassing amount of time getting them converted into JPEG [...]

I took one of the infrared photos that I took on my recent Sonoma trip and tried tweaking it a bit in gimp to make it appear more dramatic. Check out my photo gallery to see both my after and before pictures. Basically, I took the original and stretched the contrast, then applied some color [...]

Oh yeah, while at Disneyland, we gave a shot at the new Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride. At the end, rather than trying to convince you to spend $12.95 to get a photo of yourself, they just have a bunch of terminals where you can mail your picture to yourself. Like the one on the [...]

Every year Pixar has a small auto show. People who work here bring in some of their classic cars, and a couple of local dealers usually bring out some top of the line dream cars. We have a picnic and lots of people show up. It’s kind of fun. I snapped a bunch of pictures, [...]