Ron's Log

Iced In The Desert

I didn't have high hopes when the Ice Garden opened in Cathedral City. They were, after all, hoping to introduce hockey to the desert. But now they are looking for a new, much larger location with two regulation size ice rinks, plus a roller skating rink, plus an Olympic size pool! If the pool will be indoors and air-conditioned, that might be the best place ever!

iPhone, Naked & Splayed

Who wants to look at lines of fools waiting to buy an iPhone. What you want to see are these photos of an iPhone taken apart and examined.

UPDATE: Or, you may wish to see this brief video of an iPhone owner popping open the box as soon as he gets outside the store, holding that box a good five feet above the concrete sidewalk. Documented hilarity ensues.

At The Other End Of The UFO-Sighting Scale

Mexican police are terrorized or attacked or something, and they speak on camera!

Appropriate, but poor quality bootleg background music can be downloaded here.

CVMVCD Movin' On Up

The Coachella Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District is really responding to the taxpaying public's concern about its sloppy budget process. First, it sues Desert Hot Springs for appointing the trustee who brought the budget into the limelight, and now it's hired a PR firm! The logical third step in this process of responding to the public is for Don Gomsi to declare himself Caesar. Then we'd all be happy.

The PR firm move is really interesting because the PR firm seems to be refusing to answer questions. They refer any questions to Don Gomsi, the General Director (soon to be Caesar), who hasn't responded to any requests for information from the Desert Sun since that very entertaining board meeting a few weeks ago. Even the District's public information officer refuses to answer questions.

The decision to hire a PR agency did not come before the board of trustees, and you can bet it wasn't in last year's budget, so one wonders how this new expense is being charged off. However much they're paying, it already seems to be a waste, since only additional bad PR has been generated.

UPDATE: Here's an opinion from the Desert Sun:

Vector control agency not transparent
It's getting good at the Coachella Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District. Earlier in the week, board president John Fuschetti called a meeting of the executive committee of the board of trustees to discuss who knows what. Fuschetti isn't telling, nor is he looping in some members of the district's trustees.

When questioned about the meeting by Desert Sun reporter Keith Matheny, Fuschetti said that as president of the board, he has the authority to form committees and appoint members to those committees as he sees fit. And no, he doesn't need to answer any more questions about this, including which trustees sit on the executive committee of his.

Great. So much for transparency by this particular public agency.

I think it's safe to assume that when we see Fuschetti's lips move, it's Lisa Copeland's words we hear.

Blatino Oasis

This past weekend was something called Blatino Oasis at the Helios Resort in Palm Springs. And I was away whitewater rafting with a bunch of white men. Fortunately, Flickr friends were there. You won't see many photos here if you are not a Flickr friend of PinkMafiaRadio, and any you do see are NSFW.

UPDATE: bwman7 is a bit late with his set of photos taken at Blatino Oasis. They are all marked private for friends only, so you'll want to be his friend.

Johnny

An article at Drum Corp International about my little brother Johnny who is their photographer. No, I don't know what that is on his head. Link includes a photo gallery and an interview [MP3].

For those with further interest, DCI World Championship Finals begin August 7 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

Great Amtrak Service

Roosevelt Sims was traveling by Amtrak to Los Angeles when train personnel misinterpreted his diabetic shock as drunkenness. Therefore, they did the only reasonable thing: they dropped him off after dark in a national forest five miles away from Williams, Arizona, at an elevation of 8,000 feet where there is no station, no water and no paved road. Now, the former passenger is missing.

UPDATE: Mr. Sims was found alive but dehydrated and disoriented on Thursday night.

New Twist At Salton Sea

The Desert Sun says pupfish have shown up at the Salton Sea "unexpectantly," which means, I think, that they are not pregnant. Fortunately for the California state budget, the pupfish are not actually in the sea itself, but are in test ponds at the south end of the sea and do not have access to the whole sea. The pupfish is endangered, and if somehow the Salton Sea turned out to be a wonderful environment for the fish, we might be obligated to preserve the sea as is.

PhotoAcute

Yesterday I got an email from PhotoAcute saying that their software was now available for Mac, so I downloaded their evaluation version to check it out. The idea is that you take multiple photos of the same scene, no tripod required, and then use PhotoAcute to combine the multiple images to reduce noise and correct for shakiness and chromatic aberrations, as well as producing higher dynamic range images and a higher resolution. What it would boil down to for me is the ability to crank my camera's sensitivity up to ISO 400 and take photos in dim light, then using PhotoAcute to correct for all the problems that crop up.

A test:

The three photos I shot are all obviously noisier than the PhotoAcute image. They are one, two and three.

You can see four other tests shot at dusk in Desert Hot Springs here. It does what it says it does.

The drawbacks are:

It's slow. Combining just three images (you can do more) takes about half an hour on my Mac. It does not, however, noticeably slow down other processes, so I can keep working while it churns in the background.

The user interface is a little confusing and has spelling errors, which led me to think this was a beta version. But no, this is version 2.50.2.

It does not support all cameras and, in fact, supports NONE of mine. They don't say, but I would guess that their different profiles for different cameras allow the software to correct for known errors on those cameras. My sample photos were shot on a Nikon 8400, and I selected the profile for a Nikon 8800 which has, I think, the same internals as the 8400, but the 8400 has a wider angle lens.

Registration (to get rid of that ugly imprint you see in my results) is $49 for ONE camera/lens model. It's $119 to get a license to use all their profiles. Here's the list of cameras and lenses they support.

They've also got a $19 version for cellphone cameras, which could benefit a LOT from this technology.

Clay Center?

I guess this Clay Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, is something built after I left Boston. I'm sure I'd remember seeing such a striking complex. Using a 25-inch telescope at the Clay Center, astronomers caught an amazingly clear photo of the International Space Station with Atlantis docking. They used "the simplest 'adaptive optics' (bendable mirrors, which correct for how the atmosphere warps the light)." Oh, yeah, the simplest - like the ones I've got in my binoculars from Sears.