Matthew Botos

A weekend full of rain finally gave way to sunshine Sunday afternoon, so I dashed out with my new camera. Every day driving home I pass the Lubin Studio buildings sandwiched between the Betzwood side of Valley Forge Park and the new Riverside apartments and remind myself that it’d be a great place to shoot. It certainly was, and kept me busy for an hour and a half.

The camera did well, though the display does get a bit washed out in the sun and is tough to view in odd positions. Though I didn’t use it much, the swivel display on my old Pentax was occasionally handy. The side near the controls is also a fingerprint magnet! The battery drops off a pretty steep cliff once the warning indicator comes on; it was good for about 150 shots and 1.5 hours of the camera being on pretty much continuously. Most of these shots looked good straight off the camera, though I made adjustments to the color tone. I was too early for the golden evening light, so some have been “warmified”, and a few cast to black and white.

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The site statistics so far for this month reveal some interesting facts:

• The biggest external referrers by far are Google image search and MySpace
• “Flowers” has managed to sneak into the list of popular search terms, which is mostly car audio related
• IE and Netscape still dominate the browser pie, but Firefox and Safari are well represented
• Suprisingly, photos from past years are more popular than the recent ones
• Godzilla is still really popular, as is the entire Sandia section

I’ve noticed a lot of hits from MySpace the last several months, and finally wrote a script to pull out those referrers and see what was being linked. I was mildly flattered to find that several of my scenic photos were being used as backgrounds, and some of the more odd ones people found amusing enough to stand alone as comments.

However, not a one credited myself or this site as the source, and all of them hotlinked the images. Also, since I use the logs to figure out which of my photos are most popular, this greatly skews the results. (Hence why the Hot Truck, refried beans, and Flavor Flav have been rocking the rankings.) What really irritated me, though, was how ugly every single one of these pages was! They almost make Geocities look good! So in a nod to photographers and graphic designers everywhere, I’ve blocked hotlinking.

Since it was a rainy day not good for much else, I finally went to check out Crate and Barrel and made an interesting discovery: they sell Frontera salsas! My college roommate Brian introduced me to it, and he and Merle took me to Rick Bayless’s restaurant the last time I was in Chicago. A very cool find, which was unfortunately lost on the uninpressed woman standing next to me.

I was also looking for a liquor cabinet/wine rack to replace the trusty one I built in college, but $1000 was a little rich for my blood. (That’s a lot of Finger Lakes reisling!) A woman from work summed up the predicament well a few years ago while furnishing her first place out of school: “I have Crate and Barrel tastes, but an Ikea budget.”

I finally gave in and bought a new camera: a Canon SD630. My previous Pentax Optio 33L was feeling a bit bulky and slow, two problems that are now definitely solved. This new camera is very slim, quick to power up, and pretty quick shot-to-shot, as the clock series shows. Nearly the entire back of the camera is a 3-inch LCD, which makes for a very nice display that’s just a bit tricky to hold.

The controls are well laid out; I particularly like how accessible the exposure compensation (flash level) is. The flash is overpowering for close shots, so most of the indoor night ones here are with a lower level. Normally, I’d finish fine tuning them in Picasa, but these are raw as they came from the camera. Getting these onto the computer brought back deja vu from my last Canon camera, which required gphoto. I actually still have my shell script from those days, and it even reminded me that the camera needed to be set on play!

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I’ve gone through a number of brands of hydration packs for biking and snowboarding over the years, but you can’t beat Camelbak’s customer service. Twice I’ve contacted them needing some odd part that isn’t sold in stores, and both times they’ve cheerfully sent me the parts for free. Outstanding!

Shopping for a new digital camera recently has brought back an old debate: proprietary batteries or standard AA’s? My current Pentax Optio 33L uses that later, which is great for quick resupplies and laying in extra stocks of NiMH recharagables for long trips. The price is better, too, with additional proprietary batteries commanding $40-50.

The market finally caught up with the need, though, and other manufacturers are offering equivalent replacement batteries at less than half the brand name cost. This opens up many more compact cameras for consideration, and is as easy as searching for the battery type as you shop.

Wayne: “If we ran the networks, we’d have the show Battlestar Metallica!”

Garth: “Yeah, it’d be just like the original, only with better haircuts and cooler music!”

Everytime I put in a DVD of season 1 of the new Battlestar Galactica, I can’t help but think of that bit. Of course, as soon as the episode gets going, my thoughts change to what a great show it is. The reason is as simple as the show’s focus on drama and characters, which just happen to be in a traditional science fiction setting. Along with Firefly, Galactica has really proved that you can make a different, deeper, dramatic type of science fiction that I look forward to seeing more often.

I’ve always been a proponent of keeping car audio installations clean and preferrably out of site. The NYC bomb squad (link to article) apparently feels the same way; they blew out the windows of a car to investigate a box “with a digital display of changing numbers and some loose wires visible”.

Hanging behind me are two pieces of paper that should make me very proud: my undergraduate degree from Cornell and a master’s from Penn State. The first I worked hard for and really consider an accomplishment; the second prompts mixed feelings.

Being a book-smart kind of guy, an advanced degree was always in the back of my mind, even as I took a job after Cornell. It took a while for that job to pick up steam, though, so I looked to solve my boredom by doing a master’s on the company’s dime.

Financially it was a great deal, career-wise it was a moderate booster, but I just wasn’t that passionate about the material. The electives were great - robotics, neural networks, genetic algorithms - but the bulk of the material was dull but necessary systems engineering and math. In hindsight, it was worth doing, though I would’ve preferred all those hours to be infused with more of a spark.

Several years ago, when online dating was really going mainstream, every magazine on the newstands had an article on it with their own set of rules. In fact, half the people on these sites were probably writers working on stories! Most of the rules were common sense, particularly for the first date: a quick meeting somewhere public. I blantantly ignored these and still had some great times:

My first online date was actually a real leap of faith: a woman I hadn’t even seen a picture of picked me up for dinner. She drove stick, which was a hopeful sign, and we ended up having a wonderful conversation over a long dinner. To this day, it’s still the best date I’ve had.

Deb and I had a similarly adventurous start: we went rockclimbing. Letting someone you just met hold the other end of the rope while your sweaty fingertips cling to a miniscule hold is a pretty quick trust-building exercise. Over drinks at the nearby off-track betting bar (romantic!), we found out we had both swam at the same Maryland pool as kids.

Over the years I have come up with some of my own rules and grown a little more cautious, but they’re still interlaced with that adventurous streak.