Adam Schabtach's Blog
What do geeks do when they go on vacation? They play with their new gadgets. Here’s a video I just shot out of the window of our hotel, using the fake-miniature effect in my new camera:
Cute, huh? You can get a somewhat bigger version by going to the non-embedded version here.
I took some photos of the Sky Tree also, which I’ll post shortly.
It’s about 7:45AM here in Tokyo. We just returned to our room after breakfast, where we’ll pause for a bit before heading out into the shopping area in Asakusa. Among other things, I want to look at pots for making gyokuro at a shop from which I purchased a pot two years ago; the trick will be to find the shop again in the maze of narrow streets densely lined with other shops. I think it’s not far from the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Also, Tracie needs some socks, so we’ll stop at a department store called Rox, on the theory that there are socks in Rox.
I can haz ramen?, originally uploaded by Adam Schabtach.
If you hit google.com today, you’ll see that their logo is a photo of origami. I’m going to take the liberty of posting a screenshot here, since it’s probably a one-day event (although I’m sure that all of their Doodles end up in an online museum somewhere):
It was created in honor of Akira Yoshizawa, who would have been 101 today. Mr. Yoshizawa is recognized as the father of modern origami. He invented the notation system that’s used worldwide to create instructions for folding origami models. He also invented wet-folding, a technique which adds a sculptural aspect to origami. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he’s the person who transformed origami from a relatively simple craft to the complex art form it is today.
I bought a new camera recently–a Canon PowerShot S100–and have been taking lots of pictures in an attempt to learn how to use it. I put a set of photos with a winter theme on my flickr site here. I took all of these between mid-January and now, which means they span three substantial snowfalls.
The third snowfall happened recently during a very cold night. It deposited large, perfectly formed crystals in fluffy drifts. This kind of snow doesn’t happen very often, and it’s beautiful. It almost looks fake, like a CGI demonstration of Pixar’s new Winter Phantasy rendering engine or something. It’s also a difficult photographic subject, in no small part because of the difficulties inherent in operating a compact camera in an ambient temperature of 10F. Next time it happens I’ll try again with a tripod.
Okay, I freely admit that I’ve been neglecting this blog even more than usual recently. I think this may be an unfortunate side-effect of having a presence on Twitter: things that I might blog about I instead tweet about.
In any case, after a lengthy stretch of sunny weather, it snowed here this morning. As luck would have it, we had an appointment in town and hence had to drive through the thickest part of the snowfall. I took this opportunity to shoot some video with my iPod–actually Tracie shot the video since I was driving–and play with the current version of iMovie, etc. Here it is:
IMG_5652, originally uploaded by Adam Schabtach.
Boulder got dumped on last night and this morning. There are drifts well over a foot deep here at the house. I put up some photos from the morning’s excavation on my Flickr page here.
Looks like we’re in for a good snowstorm tonight. It’s just before 9:00PM, we’ve already received a couple of inches, and it’s still snowing steadily. There’s a Winter Storm Warning in effect with snowfall rates predicted to be up to one inch or more per hour, with a total accumulation of up to 12 inches here at Boulder. I dashed outside to take a couple of snapshots of the lights on the house and the snow. They’re not great–my camera just isn’t up to low-light photography–but it’s kind of neat how the flash caught the flakes in the air.
The temperature hit a low of 4F (that’s -15C if you live in a country with a sane measurement system) last night, and the high today was barely above 10F/-12C. This makes it easily the coldest day so far this season. We happened to have our monthly delivery of bottled water today, and it was partly frozen:
According to the readers of MusicRadar.com, “the No. 1 website for musicians,” Phosphor is the 20th best VST plug-in synth in the world today. Thanks, folks!
