Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Geeking out

    In August, I attended an Usability Professionals’ Association Meeting “Obsession: the Sympathetic Heart of Design“, given by Tom Brinck. Among other things, his definition of “Web 2.0” was the ability for people to “geek out” about stuff they like. Geotagging photographs and now organizing my bookshelf and rating books online seem to be two shiny objects that have my attention.

    His site for organizing books was LibraryThing.com. When the inspiration struck, I couldn’t remember his site, and so I found and am fooling around with aNobii right now. aNobii hangs up a lot, and has fewer books on its shelf than LibraryThing (16K vs. 6 million), so for the networking potential/Metcalfe’s Law, I’m in the wrong pond…..but it’s oddly sticky, maybe it is just “sunk cost” of time spent.

  • Aerial photos

    So, another sunset joy ride. This time, I decided to try opening the window and sticking the camera out into the breeze. The wind pushed in the zoom lens, so I’d have to keep my hand on it to hold the zoom. The photos are better, of course, without the layer of plexiglass and reflection, but still somehow whiter and less vibrant than my memory. I played around with the sliders in Picasa and made them look more vivid, but I feel like I’m cheating. Any thoughts?

    Farm landscape photo as taken – kind of hazy/whitish

    aerial photo 1

    Farm landscape doctored photo – I moved the “shadows” slider to the right is this better?

    doctored aerial photo

    Lakes and trees original

    Lakes and forest original

    Lakes and trees – doctored

    Lakes and trees after fooling

  • Depressing

    Been dipping back into ecology recently, reading two pop-sci books: Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life. In response, I wrote a much longer post that was basically a bunch of whining about it all. Feel grateful there is a delete button.

    I am looking for something more constructive to do instead of whine online. Beyond upping my check to the Nature Conservancy, I am currently thinking of volunteering for the Sierra Club Inner City Outings as a way to get out of the house and do something concrete….

  • Virtual-virtual standup?

    From Stephen: another variant on remote standup from 37 signals. Want to try it?

  • Flight photos

    Eric took some fantastic photos on a flight Saturday.

  • Old West Side Write Up

    For interested and distant friends and family, here is the write-up on our house for the Old West Side Homes Tour. This story appeared in the September Old West Side News.

    The write-up gets my current profession wrong even after I corrected them, but otherwise it is a nice summary. Probably not a good idea to forward this to Dave’s grandparents…

    Old West Side News Write-Up