thedude.com

This topic of cubicles vs. open floor plans has been debated to death, so I won’t bore you with my thoughts on the subject. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Here’s a sneek peek inside Oakland’s Cathedral of Christ the Light. Although the 190 million dollar addition to the Lake Merrit skyline will not be open to the public until 2:00 PM this afternoon, I was able to sneak in yesterday and shoot a quick panorama.

After scratching my head about the outside of the cathedral for months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the interior is quite nice. The sparsely decorated cathedral is flooded with a diffuse light warmed by the wood louvers. The cavernous space produces the expected acoustics - you know you’re in church with your eyes closed.

The odd feature though is the ginormous Jesus hovering above the altar. The image seems to be created by light passing through a drilled sheet of aluminum. To my eye, the points of light resemble LED’s on an outdoor advertising display or some kind of giant black and white TV, making the effect seem sorta cheesy. Now, imagine that space filled with a colorful stained-glass window. Yes, that would look better.

We don’t see many squirrels in our concrete jungle, so we were pleasantly surprised to spot this little fellow out our second floor window.

Like many of you, I have been putting off upgrading to Vista for years due to its less-than-stellar reputation. Well, my ancient Windows XP install was seriously busted, so I finally took the plunge, and guess what. I love it.

I was able to get everything I absolutely need up and running in about three hours. My essential tools - Chrome, Firefox, PhotoShop, Irfanview, Winamp, FreeHand, AutoPano Pro and WinSCP - all worked perfectly. I had to use “Compatibility Mode” to get the software for my Nikon Scanner and Flix to work, but that’s a minor issue I can live with.

I had only one hardware compatibility issue. My antiquated Creative Extigy USB sound device was not recognized. So, I bought a Creative X-FI 5.0 USB audio device for 59 bucks, and it works and sounds better than the old device.

Of course, I turned off almost all of Aero’s incredibly annoying features and disabled UAC. Now, my humble machine runs great! Certainly faster than the badly broken XP installation I had been using. It was well worth 119 bucks to make my machine usable again.

I thought I’d share the thoughtful birthday card I received from my ever-lovin’ wife this year. I think it’s hilarious.

Kelly always finds the best cards. Her secret? The card racks at the car wash. Who knew?

These images were shot on the roof on May 7, 2000. A lot has changed since then.

Rendered with AutoPano Pro - this pano never looked so good.

We’ve been spending a lot of time with our neighbors Jack Tres and Olive lately. That’s a good thing. I shot this picture at Flora on Thursday night. The light was provided by a single candle on the table in front of Tres. I used my old manual-focus f1.4 Nikkor wide open, at 1/15th of a second with the Magic Camera set to ISO 3200. This image is to me, nothing short of amazing. It’s as if the camera added light to the scene. I could not see her this well with my naked eye!

Then, I added the neat little border and drop-shadow to the above thumbnail without ever opening any image editor. Instead of PhotoShop, I used ImageMagick on my Linux server to create the effect at the command line! The command I used to do this:

convert image.jpg -resize 605x \
-unsharp 0.5x1.2+0.5+0.1 -matte \
-bordercolor white -border 8 \
-bordercolor grey85 -border 1 \
\( +clone -background grey60 -shadow 80x3+6+6 \) +swap \
-background white -mosaic image-thumb.jpg

Why would I do this? A few reasons.

1. It’s very fast - it takes just 2 seconds to create this nice effect.
2. I can create this effect form anywhere without any special tools.
3. The effect can be applied very quickly to a whole directory of images.
4. I can add a “create pretty thumbnail” option to Wordpress.

I have a lot to learn before I have item 4 working, but the challenge is half the fun of it!

Embedded streaming video!

 
I found an inexpensive MOV to FLV converter which produces pretty decent results. The files are much smaller that the source Quicktime files, and still have much of the quality - even at large sizes. This means I can now stream video like this time-lapse of my commute to work directly from thedude.com. New possibilities!

Olive said she wanted a shot of her jumping in the air, and I had in mind what I thought was a cool way to frame the shot. Olive braved frigid temperatures at sunset tonight, but the wind and the light conspired against us. And though none of the pictures turned out exactly as I had hoped, we both had fun during our 20 minute shoot.

Need I say more?

thedude and Kelly joined about 1,000 others last night to show our respect for His Dudeness at the first San Francisco Lebowski Fest.

Yes, there were plenty of Jeff Lebowski and Karl Hungus look-alikes. Music was provided by the hilarious Meshugga Beach Party. Primal drum beats and sexual energy came by way of the fabulous Extra Action Marching Band. NEW! Now with Video!

We tried our best to get close to Jeff Dowd, to get a shot of thedude with thedude, but no luck. Perhaps we’d have been able to better focus if we hadn’t consumed those last two caucasions. “Hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here!”