Rusty

Teddy Mouse Picnic
Originally uploaded by Nostromoo

My name is Jamie, and I've had a teddy bear for the last 31 years.

That's what I imagine I'd say at a teddy-bears anonymous meeting. Do people use their names at such meetings, isn't it meant to be anonymous?

You see I'm a hoarder. I hoard everything. Just yesterday I was ruthlessly trying to sort out some paperwork and I discovered I have kept every insurance renewal form, every cover letter, for every policy I've ever had on any vehicle. Why?

And when you combine hoarding with anything that has sentimental value, however remote, it's really, really hard to get rid of it. So Rusty just lives on the shelf. I don't need him, I'm past the days when I lie awake scared of the dark, I just can't get rid of him.

Today I wanted to take a picture of him. Not actually this picture, this was probably my plan...hmm, F I suppose. For plan A I wanted to try something new.

I read about a technique called Focus-Shift on the Strobist blog today and it seemed quite interesting. To be honest I didn't really appreciate the cited example, I didn't really understand it and the lack of definition on the keys bothered me, but technically it is quite something. I had an idea for a shoot with Rusty, that's the Mouse's name by the way, sitting in a chair by the fire with a glass of whisky. Only Rusty is only about 16 inches high or so, and a normal chair would just look, well big. It would look like a teddy bear left on a chair. And I wanted something more realistic looking.

Oh who am I kidding, a stuffed mouse sitting on a chair by the fire drinking whisky? Perhaps I'm deluding myself that it could look like anything other than a teddy bear left on a chair.

Nevertheless, I thought that perhaps I could use perspective to make a closer to the camera Rusty look the right size for the chair. The focus shift technique could then be used to bridge the focal gap between the two objects. The chair and drink in the background, illuminated by the light from the fire, with Rusty somehow suspended closer to the camera lit briefly by a strobe pulse.

Okay it sounds stupid perhaps, but I had hoped it work work. Sadly however I couldn't get the first to light correctly, I think perhaps one of the gas valves is blocked so I had to think of a plan B. Plans B though E also proved to be problematic to implement so I just sat Rusty up on my desk and shot him from my chair.

Running

I started running again last week, and this morning I was out in the mist trying to get a few miles in. I "ran" a little over two miles, I was hoping for more, but it's definitely above the curve I'm trying for. My breathing felt much better, and managed to keep my heart rate over 170 without feeling like I wanted to die, but the problem was my legs. About half way I started getting really bad cramps and the lactic acid was really burning. I stretched a bit at the half way point and tried to recover a little before tuning back for home, but I had to do a large proportion of walking on the return trip.

Last year I was hoping to do the Taunton Half Marathon. I started my training last November and I think I was doing some quite respectable distances given the fact hippos don't normally run all that well. But at Christmas I had some awful illness which knocked me out, literally, for two months. After that I was never able to recover my fitness enough to be able to carry on training, so I just let it lapse.

Hopefully I can keep it up and join the running club (in what November?) and see if I can get some fitness and lose a bit of weight to boot. I think the Taunton Half is around April time next year so hopefully I can be ready for it.

Maximum Inefficiency

Pixie has joined a choir recently, so she decided it would be a good idea if she could have a piano to play some of the music she needs to sing. Play it in the right key and all that. I've always wanted to play myself actually, so I didn't object when she suggested. And indeed we both agreed upon a rather nice new Yamaha electric piano. It has graded keys, which are apparently like weighted keys but don't have weights in them so the whole thing is much lighter. And brand new it was only about £150 which is what we'd be happy to pay for a decent one on eBay. So we found the keyboard we wanted, added the mains power supply (because Yamaha don't actually include one with the keyboard), and added a book because we are complete novices when it comes to music. Well me more so because I am not the one in a choir.

The place we found it for sale was actually only in Bristol. At first I was quite happy to collect it myself if we ordered, but they only charged £6 for UPS which is probably cheaper than it would cost me to drive there and back anyway. So sure, let's have it delivered.

Trouble is, apparently the keyboard isn't in stock, so they have decided to part ship. On Tuesday, the mains power supply came in a small box. Via UPS. Today this arrived, again by UPS, in its own box. I'm half expecting them to ship the keyboard in parts too, maybe black keys in one box, white in another etc.

I don't really mind the wait, I'd happy to wait a week if the item is not in stock, I understand there is a certain cost implication for holding stock of electronic items that could be superceeded tomorrow. But surely there is a better way to ship it?

Holy Cow

Chase Jarvis and Kung Fu. Need I say anything else?


Okay I will. Some of the stills can be found on Chase's site.

Enjoy!

Oh by the way...

Random Vandals
Originally uploaded by Nostromoo

Don't you just love surprises? They are so, well unexpected.

Yesterday at work my Boss asked me if I'd shoot his son and friends for a magazine article being written which included them. I don't think it is going to be solely about them as such, but they are going to be mentioned in it. They have a band called Random Vandals, and evidentially their music had been discovered on MySpace and a couple of their tracks are going to be included on a compilation CD released by the magazine, so they need to supply a photograph to use with the article. I forget who they said the magazine was, the name meant nothing to me, but I'll try to find that out.

This was yesterday:

"Fred needs some pictures of his band. Can you take some?"

"Fine, when?"

"Uh, well they're just coming to the door now actually."

Okay, well I don't have my camera and personally I'd have preferred slightly more time to prepare. But okay. Let's try something.

Luckily (I suppose) I didn't have my camera and the memory card in the work camera failed and the shots I'd taken were all lost. Not that I minded too much and the work camera is about 50 years old. It takes acceptable images, but it's a frig to use. And it only shoots JPEG. And I'd hate to have had to rely solely on those images. Okay so they only want one image and it's probably be printed at an inch square. But I have my own standards.

So today I brought my D80 and a couple lenses and was all set to try again. There was some graffiti in the park which has caught their eye, so we headed over there and I had them line up and tried a few different poses.

I've never done an assignment photoshoot like this before, but it was quite good fun actually. I read somewhere, or maybe it was on a video, that when you shoot portraits of normal people they can be intimidated by a camera so to get a more natural look you need to get them used to the camera and try almost to get them to ignore it. So I tried to talk to them about the band, what their roles were, stuff like that. And keep shooting while you're talking. Seemed to work quite well. Although they probably thought I was some crazy out of touch old man. They even tried to explain to me what MySpace was. Okay, I'm not that old okay?

They've played a few local gigs but the venue that they play at most often has closed down and since they've recently had exams they haven't played a gig for a while. I think I may keep my eye out for them in the future though.

So this is my first proper assignment. It was fun and I don't think the results are bad. And I'd like to try it again.

Making Visual C++ 6 apps look cool

Visual C++ 6 is what, 10 years old now? But there are a lot of good reasons to still develop software in Visual Studio 6 because it lets you do things that Visual Studio 2005 et al. cannot do. Or perhaps you just have an existing project you do not want to convert.

But one of the drawbacks to VS6 is the programs frankly look ugly. Sure you can still add a manifest if you like, but the default dialog font is MS Sans Serif (at least on US/English systems) which is hideous and doesn't lend itself well to supporting wide character sets. See, this looks gash. It works well enough for standard English programs but won't work if you try to use a non Roman character set (e.g. Kanji or Chinese). Sadly to fix this you need to edit the resources manually.

There are three main things to check and possibly change. First you need to load your resource script (.rc file) into your favourite text editor. Notepad works fine. Find the dialog resources. They should read something like this:

IDD_DIALOG1 DIALOG DISCARDABLE  0, 0, 186, 90
STYLE DS_MODALFRAME | WS_POPUP | WS_CAPTION | WS_SYSMENU
CAPTION "Dialog"
FONT 8, "MS Sans Serif"

The first things you need to do is change the dialog font from MS Sans Serif to MS Shell Dlg. MS Shell Dlg isn't a font, it's a mapping to the system font which is probably Tahoma. Now this value will actually be ignored unless two other conditions are met. Firstly, the dialog template must be DIALOGEX instead of DIALOG. Secondly, the dialog must have two additional styles, so you should add DS_FIXEDSYS which will include them both. So you should end up with:

IDD_DIALOG1 DIALOGEX DISCARDABLE  0, 0, 186, 90
STYLE DS_MODALFRAME | WS_POPUP | WS_CAPTION | WS_SYSMENU | DS_FIXEDSYS
CAPTION "Dialog"
FONT 8, "MS Shell Dlg"

Note that if you edit a dialog in the IDE it might lose the DIALOGEX template. It will keep the font and the styles, but you may need to re-edit the resources by hand then have the IDE reload them if you want to move controls about. Also the IDE won't render the font correctly so sometimes you have to "guess" how big a control needs to be to contain the text you need.

Then you can add your Common Control 6 manifest and your program will now look cool. Goodbye 1998, Hello 2008.

There are still sometimes that dialogs will look wrong, especially related to property sheets. Some types of MFC property sheets (and other MFC dialogs) use DIALOG templates so property pages may not always display correctly. And by using DIALOGEX you are effectively preventing your software from running on Win32s on Windows 3.x. But I think the benefits outweigh those limitations.

Google Chrome

Okay I don't know if this has been a secret until today, or if I am just completely out of the loop. Well I guess, how exciting can a browser really be? But OMG, this Google Chrome is freaking cool.

Download it now and use it.
Read the really cool comic to learn more.

Seriously it rocks. And it's fast. Download it!

I've always used Internet Explorer to be honest. It's easy to access, I'm familiar with the icon, and it starts faster than any other browser I tried on my system. I did at one point toy with Firefox after all the hype, but it starts slower than IE on my machine. And I use the internet for work, if I need to go to wiki to look something up, or more commonly visit MSDN or one of the Microsoft blogs I just want to go there. But IE7 is a bloat monster and it's hardly stable. And the fact IE7 screwed over the Google toolbar, which was the most convenient way to search pages, really pissed me off. I don't blame Google for wanting to write a browser just to get back at them. And there were so many things IE7 did that were stupid. But I can't deny, IE7 was always there when I clicked the button. And some things you have to live with. Don't you?

But I read the Chrome comic and I instantly though this sounded great. So I've been sitting here all night just hitting F5 waiting for the Chrome download to be brought live again. It installed in less than a minute. It looks uncluttered. It's blindingly fast. Okay there are a couple things that don't look quite right, My Ebay is barely readable as the text is too small and some other websites only rendered the toolbar and no page, which a refresh fixed. But there's only a couple of things it did a bit strange and so many things it does right. Straight out of the box.

Holy crap and it's spell checking in blogger for me, cos I don't spell too good always that's a mighty fine feature!

Did I mention incognito mode?

I tell you, IE8 will have to be pretty freaking good to compete with this.