thedude.com

Last night I met with Andrew and his friend Jeff Johnson, the goal being to shoot and perfect the process of creating Gigapan Images with the awesome Gigapan robotic camera head. Luckily Jeff knows everything about this device, and no doubt saved me a lot of time on the learning curve. Our first Gigapan image is a bit shaky (we kept bumping the table during the 15 minute process), but the results hint at what can be created with this combination of a consumer-grade digital camera (Canon G9) and the Gigapan head. Wow!

Having had a chance to learn a bit about this amazing process has me very excited about our trip to Burma. My next goal is to produce the highest resolution images of Burma ever shot.

Fans of the best movie of all-time will surely appreciate this Dude Action Figure - complete with a rug and a White Russian. I’m thinking a pair of Achievers would be just the thing for my desk. Better order soon - it seems Dude action figures go fast!

This reminds me - Lebowski Fest is being held in San Francisco this year! Maybe I can finally make it! There is a potential conflict, though, as the Fest takes place during Burningman. Hmm… Bowling and White Russians or dust storms and half-naked chicks. Tough call…

Thanks to all of you for pointing out that the Smart Car was recently shown to perform quite well in crash tests. I’m happy to hear it, but safety was never much of an issue when I made the decision to purchase the car. After all, I drove a far more dangerous motorcycle for 15 of my wildest years and survived.

In this shot, you can see Jeff and me screaming down highway 36 at over 100 miles per hour. The speedometer is pegged. Look closely at the rear-view mirror, and you’ll see that our shirts are wide open, and we’re not wearing helmets. I’ll bet we’re both in shorts, too. I remember how difficult it was to keep the camera from blowing out of my hands when I leaned over to take this shot. Crazy? Yes.

My point is that I/we take risks every day. Just riding a bicycle or walking across the street in Oakland could be fatal. If I was really concerned about my health and safety, I might try harder to lose the twenty fifty extra pounds I’m carrying around, or drink less than a bottle of wine per day. So, I’ll continue to drive my little car with a huge smile on my face not worrying too much about safety - especially after the encouraging crash test results!

My new car is so much fun to drive, she may never give me the keys!

As one of the 30,000 people who put $99 down on a Smart Car in advance of their U.S. debut, I never thought I’d actually buy one. But then it showed up at the dealership, configured exactly as I had ordered it on line, I figured, what the heck, I’ll go check it out. Well, it just took one look and I was hooked. Not only is it hilariously cute, but it’s a blast to drive - especially with the top down! The car is still rare enough to cause a sensation everywhere it goes. I spend almost as much time describing the car to strangers as I do driving it. What fun!

Thanks, Kelly and Bailey, for modeling so obligingly. Now, can I have my keys back - please? :)

I would not normally recommend a browser plugin. I prefer to keep things simple. I want everyone to experience thedude.com without glitches on their OS and browser of choice. However, I have to recommend PicLens. I recommend you install the plugin and come back to this page and click on one of the little buttons that appears in the lower left corner when you hover over an image below. Incredibly cool!

Now try the same thing on flickr or on a Google image search or even a Picasa Web Album. Fantastic!

This is my first PicLens gallery. It took about one minute to create with the easy-to-use software. I’d guess that there’s an excellent chance you’ll see more PicLens-enhanced galleries on this blog soon!

At least two of my friends told me that my life would be better if I started using Jott. Yeah yeah, I thought. Another toy no one needs. Well, it turns out they were right! I’m already hooked!

Jott uses an amazingly accurate voice-to-text processor to convert up to a 30 second voice message into a neatly-formatted e-mail. Now, I can easily send an e-mail to one or many people directly from my Crackberry without typing on its teensy keyboard. And of course, Jott is free! There are even tools to allow bloggers to publish entries from a phone. Hmm… Interesting!

Wow. We had a terrific weekend, and I have a throbbing headache this morning to prove it.

Our friends Grant and Sandy are lucky enough to have one of the world’s greatest musicians in their family. Grant’s cousin Jon has a new CD out, and Grant was kind enough to have one signed and then hand-delivered the disk to us before a fantastic dinner at Downtown Restaurant in Berkeley. I’m listening to the disk now, and it’s great. Thanks, guys!

On a totally unrelated topic, I never thought it made sense to buy a photo printer, given that it takes just a few mouse-clicks and very little money to order real photographic prints on line. Well, all that changed this weekend, when I attached an Epson Stylus 1400 Photo Printer to Kelly’s iMac. This printer produces some of the best-looking prints I have ever seen. the six-color inks deliver a wider gamut than is possible using photographic paper, and 5760×1440 ink droplets per inch means sharper images as well. The very first print I made on Epson Ultra-Premium Luster Paper was perfect! The images this printer produces more closely resemble what I see on the LCD display than I imagined possible. The printer is super quiet, and fast enough. It spits out a gorgeous full bleed 8 x 10 in about two minutes. Epson offers a $75 mail-in rebate through September 8th. Highly recommended!

I had so much fun on Wednesday at the Fire Festival, that I went back for more on Saturday. I just had to see the incredible Dance, Dance, Immolation again, where one misstep on the digital dance floor can cost contestants dearly, as seen below. What fun!!

If you’d like to see more of my pictures from the Fire Arts Festival, just click here!

We made a promise to ourselves that we’d never miss another Fire Festival at the Crucible. The sights and sounds are just so cool, er, hot. So flaming-hot-stainless-pneumatic-alien-stilt-walker strange. So smack-you-in-the-face with a white-hot-stove-pipe cool. A billion BTU’s of climate-changing fun. You jus’ hafta see it to believe it.

More pictures coming soon.

I finally found a way to get my wife more involved with thedude.com. Sure, she’s already the number one subject on this site, but I always wanted her to contribute a little more than just her beautiful smile. Now she can!

See the little image in the upper-right? That’s her most recently uploaded iPhone image. Kelly put this image here - all by herself. How? Well, I created a private e-mail address on my server which, when e-mailed, strips out the attached image - resizes, sharpens and compresses it, then creates a thumbnail with a link to the full-size image. A little modification to the blog’s main page template, and the uploaded image and text appear “automagically” on this page. The script even uses the message body as a caption for the image. Cool! Instant publishing from a cell phone!

Now Kelly can upload an image with an optional caption to the blog at any time. She loves that fact that she can participate in the publishing process without any input or oversight from thedude.

I plan to emulate my pal Jason and use all of the uploaded phone-cam images to create some sort of collage page or something, (reload page for random phone images.) but that’ll have to wait for now. I’m very happy just to have this working.

By the way, it was fairly easy to implement all of this on my server using procmail, ripmime and ImageMagick. If you’re interested in such things, have a look at my procmail recipe.

I had hoped by now to have something to say about my new Nikon D40x, but so far it has only made me very happy to also own a D2X. I suppose I should not be surprised that there is such a huge difference between the two cameras when you consider the equally huge price difference.

That said, can you see a meaningful difference in the two pictures - shot with the same lens - a Nikkor 14mm, manually focused, 1/5 second at f4.5 - one with the D2X and the other with the D40x? (Disclaimer: The D2X image was imported in its native NEF (RAW) format, the other began as a JPEG - thanks to the inability to import D40x NEF format into CS2. ARGH!!! Also, both images were squeezed through my usual “blogerize” action and some color and level adjustments were made to at least one of the images to get it to more closely match the other.)

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It’s been a long time since I put anything on my wish list, so here it is. A lens to die for. Or at least to die lugging around. “No news on price, availability or weight yet.”