Robot Dreams

Today has been a busy day for me. But perhaps not as busy as Daniel Biss who had four parades to attend. First I went to the Democratic Party of Evanston (DPoE) picnic. Then right afterwards, went to my first Evanston 4th parade. I was helping hold a big banner, with the rest of the DPoE Board members:

I must say being in the parade, as opposed to watching it from the sidewalks, is much fun! Certainly something everyone should try once. Being whom I am, I took pictures along the way. And at night went to the lake beach, yes on the sand next to the water, to watch the fireworks.

If I haven't mentioned it before, Evanston is full of churches. This one I pass every day on my usual cycling route. But this Summer it's undergoing some construction. This is another example of using Autostitch to combine, in this case six photos. For the photo experts out there, you might ask why bother with multiple images after all it seems easy enough to take that as a single wide angle shot. Well, it's not. The spire is tall enough that even with 8-24mm lens of the FinePix F31fd I would have had to stand on the roof of the building across the street. Autostitch is proving to solve the rather numerous problems of taking architecture pictures in a city environment.

A few days ago I posted a panorama of the Toronto skyline. It turns out it was done by hand by loading up the images, doing some blending between them, aligning them, and brightness+contrast adjustments. And today, while trying to do the same to another set of images I failed. And I thought maybe someone has written some software to make such things easy. Well they have, somewhat. It turns out panorama stitching is not exactly easy and just about all the solutions out there are manual in more ways than one. Except one tool, which comes from the AI lab at the University of British Columbia, Autostitch. So I decided to run it through some of the multi-shot panorama images I have, really only three sets since I'm not a panorama fan. Below are two of the results. The first from the same set of images as that previous Toronto skyline post (warning this image is even larger than before), and the second from an earlier set of phone images taken at Kauai. But it figures that the set of two images that started this endeavor, Autostitch failed to put together. Neither man nor AI could solve the problem, maybe I just need to wait for some extraterrestrial intelligence.

When someone asks what it means to design a building to fit it's surroundings. This is the example I would show them.

Just a quick update since I've been silent for some time now. Usual stuff is going on, which essentially means a bunch of stuff at once. Most recently John and I took a trip to Toronto to attend part of the C++ Committee meeting being held at the IBM campus. We drove from Chicago, up around Detroit, and across to Toronto. Well, OK, John did all the driving and I did most of the navigation. Since this is the first I attend such a meeting I mostly listened, being clueless as to the details of what was going on. But the conversations during lunch and dinner where highly informative and fun. As usual I took pictures, but I don't have much time to post them right now... For now here's a stitched panorama of the Toronto skyline from the point of view of the Centre Island.

And no you aren't seeing double, Toronto seems fond of erecting buildings in pairs. 

Well, BoostCon07 is over. And I have even less time available than before. Between starting new jobs, continuing some old ones, trying to start up new C++ library ideas, and trying to make arrangements to attend a C++ comity meeting, it's been a very busy week. But one of my ways of relaxing is with pictures so here are two equally busy occupants of Earth. First, from the rest stop on the way to Aspen, two insects getting busy with procreation. And following it, one of the abundant birds in Evanston. The birds are a challenge my mother proposed to try and capture some of the multitude of birds that inhabit Evanston's numerous trees.

And if you are starving for more pictures of BoostCon07, I also uploaded a bunch more. But this time to the BoostCon gallery.

Needless to say, there are many doors in Evanston. Here are two more from todays walking about.

Those two are from the same street I lived on now for about a decade. Most of the houses in this street fall into one of the historical districts of Evanston. Which means that you see houses that have been around since the founding of the city. And in some cases, have only been sold once! I'm still getting accustomed to the camera, which you can see as a flash artifact above. As I was using it for fill illumination as it's been a somewhat overcast day, and foggy morning, around here close to Lake Michigan.

Once upon a time, I took a trip to Costa Rica... And I intend to go back, solely for the purpose of taking pictures of home doors. As it turns out, because of their abundance of wood, it is a tradition to build intricately carved doors for your home there. And I saw, what so far is, the most beautiful door art. But while I wait for that return trip, I can content myself with the door art in Evanston.

Another aspect of Evanston, is the high church to person ratio in the city. Grant you, it's not as high as that of Spain. But I'm guessing that one could fit Evanston's population inside the churches, at once. Here's a view into the courtyard of the church on my block.

And if you didn't already notice, Evanston has some amazing architecture. So I have plenty of samples to show, and hence expect to see many more of Evanston's door, entries, buildings, churches, parks, etc. in the future.

Carrying my new camera around all the time, it's clipped to my belt now, you start noticing all kinds of stuff you want to take a picture of. It's been a while since I had that view of the world, last being during college while taking the photo classes. So I'm in the strange situation of having to restrain myself from taking too many pictures, as otherwise I would spend all my time posting them. Time I can't spare since I have a bunch of work to do. So for today I have two different perspectives. My usual lunch schedule is to do a working meeting, and I eat lunch and talk about work. The usual lunch location is Bagel Art. They have a running child art wall for the kids that frequent the place. It's always fun trying to understand that lost perspective of being that young:

The Chicagoland area is currently in it's Spring peak. Which for Evanston, which prides itself in an abundance of trees, means there are many flowers, birds, and small mammals. There is a large variety of trees here, but I found one that I found rather strange:

So, what's strange? Take a close look at the scale of that plant. At the bottom right is one of the many birds, which makes that tree, about 2.5 feet tall. All I can think of is "open ground Bonsai tree."

Being the photo-traditionalist I am, I've resisted buying a digital camera for a long time. But, there are situations when my film SLR just isn't convenient enough. So a few days ago I got new compact digital camera. Yea I know, going from a totally old-style manual SLR, to a totally automatic compact digital is a drastic move. But I wanted something very convenient seeing as I needed something I can carry everywhere. I did have to make some compromises, the biggest being that the "manual" mode the new camera has is not really manual. Which means I'll be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince the camera to focus correctly. Yesterday in my usual walking about in Evanston I took a few pictures...

The camera that took those is a FujiFilm FinePix F31fd. It's one of the best compact cameras around, in that it's SuperCCD sensor does a very good job of capturing detail at a wide range of ISOs. That wide range of ISOs is the one aspect I didn't want to give up from my SLR accustomed picture taking.