August 15, 2008

More about reCAPTCHA

Here's a nice article I spotted today in my RSS feeds that gives some insight into reCAPTCHA, the system I implemented here on the blog last week.

Enjoy!
- Aaron

P.S. Screw you, spammers. :)

August 5, 2008

halfpress.com Update

This is just a quick note to let everyone know that I've upgraded MovableType today to the latest version. The version I was running before was quite old and it's been on my "to do" list for ages now.

There are new features I'll try to utilize once I have time to explore them, but my goal for now was to not destroy the current site while gaining the ability to implement captchas on the comment system. Comment spammers have been hammering me to death for years and I finally hit my frustration limit. I'd call spammers the sub-human scum of the earth, but that would be an insult to scum. Scum serves more of a purpose and, as little as I appreciate scum, I respect it infinitely more than I respect spammers.

But I digress...

Anyway, I've implemented reCaptcha on the comment forms, so if you take a moment to leave comments on here, you'll also be helping digitize books! As a Kindle owner, I appreciate your efforts. :)

More to come...

- Aaron

June 18, 2008

Dumb Luck 101: My First "Organic" 3D Modo Project on History Channel

I'm planning to write more about this when I have some time, but I figured I'd link to a local news item about my first "organic" Modo project ending up in a nationally broadcast documentary.

Understand that this is not a suggestion that I have any great 3D modeling experience (I don't)... it was kind of "dumb luck" to be perfectly honest. :)

Mahler's Venus on History Channel

Frankly, the model isn't completely finished yet and, I've had my hands so full with work, TWiP, forthcoming TWiM producing and photo gigs that I've not had much time in Modo recently. I've got a pile of projects I want to do with it soon since the app is just insanely cool.

I'm working on a few things combining Modo models with textures I shoot digitally and equirectangular HDR panos (most recent one here) that I shoot and assemble to use for real-world lighting.

This is the model I started after spending part of Christmas screwing around in Modo and modeling an AMF bowling pin I had sitting on my desk.

June 17, 2008

Of Local Interest: Waterstone Finally Open

I'm pleased to say that a restaurant we've been eagerly awaiting here in Lynchburg is finally open and, more importantly, it doesn't suck. In fact, it's really quite excellent! :)

There wasn't an official Google Maps entry yet, so I just added one for the meantime.

It was last year sometime that I first heard about the plans to open Waterstone, a wood-fired, brick oven pizza restaurant attached to a brewery. It's located on Jefferson Street and is part of the larger Bluffwalk Center / Cradock Terry Hotel complex which also includes Shoemaker's restaurant and The Jefferson Street Brewery.

My remark that it "doesn't suck" is just my general semi-negative attitude about the Lynchburg restaurant scene. Yes, we have some very good restaurants here. We also have a lot of mediocre crap, the worst of which make a play at being creative (surprisingly few make even that effort) and fall miserably short. My wife calls me a pessimist (I'm truly not), but I've found it safer to assume mediocrity around here and to be pleasantly surprised (and very supportive as a customer) when they pull it off. :) Waterstone pulled it off VERY well.

We visited with a couple of friends during the restaurant's first hour of being open to the public and found the whole operation to be very polished. The waiter was comfortable and engaging, the atmosphere was attractive and tastefully designed and, above all, the pizza was superb. As a group, we ordered four ten-inch pizzas including the Waterstone White, Greek, Wild Mushroom and a Sicilian (the most traditional of the four). All had a superb flavor, were not at all oily, heavy or greasy, and each was true to its theme with fresh ingredients and distinct flavors. The Sicilian, with its various sausages, was at the greatest risk of being overly heavy but managed to be just as "light" as the others.

We focused on the pizza last night, but the menu was fairly extensive and there is a lot left we'd like to try. I'm all for anything that brings quality to downtown Lynchburg and can say with certainty that we'll be repeat customers. They have plans for a two-level outside seating area as well as other refinements and their location on that part of Jefferson Street provides a lot of promise for community engagement. Here's hoping Waterstone is the beginning of a positive trend in the local dining scene and a little less having to flee to Charlottesville for a really great meal! :)

In closing, I will mention three other local restaurants of note. There are more, yes, but I want to mention these three right now: Machu Picchu, Grace and Main Street Eatery. Main Street has history and remains a Lynchburg institution, Machu Picchu is simply fantastic for those desiring Peruvian dishes (Elsa is passionate about her cooking) and Grace is probably the single most creative, elegant restaurant in the area and absolutely worth the visit.

June 15, 2008

Photos from Newport Trip

Newport, RI

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I've finally had a chance to put up a set of images from our trip to Newport, RI. We spent four days there starting June 7th and thoroughly enjoyed this fascinating island.

For those not familiar, Newport was the turn of the century summering location of the American "aristocracy". I provide some additional background on Newport in my previous post with a QTVR of a massive weeping beech tree, so check there and the wikipedia link above.

Average temperatures in Newport are in the 60's and 70's this time of year, so I was pretty thrilled to be leaving the 100 degree heat wave of Virginia for the trip. Understand that I despise hot, humid weather. Well, the heat wave followed us to New England and hit around 90 degrees and humid a good bit of the time. This sucked the total life out of my photographic endeavors since I spent the mornings feeling like I was wearing a greasy washcloth instead of a shirt. Yuck. I can't say the photos here are particularly stellar, but they should at least give you a taste of some of the Newport mansions and surroundings.

There are a couple of HDR images in here, though they need some more tweaking. Also, I geocoded most of my shooting using my AMOD AGL-3080 (look for some posts soon detailing this process). Until I get some good geo-coded linking worked into my halfpress.com workflow, I'm making use of Flickr for mapping. To see these images placed on a map, go here and be sure to note the slider along the bottom to see the full set.

Newport, RI

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June 13, 2008

The Weeping Beech of Chateau-sur-Mer

I'm planning to put together a full gallery, including some HDRs, but wanted to go ahead and post this 360 VR that I made during our trip to Newport, Rhode Island.

I'll save a more extensive write-up on Newport for the full gallery entry, but I will take a moment here to say that I highly recommend making the trek there if you haven't been before. I was unfamiliar with Newport and its history until just recently when we received an invitation to visit some friends in their final weeks before they relocate to Maryland. Suffice it to say, I'm glad we took the opportunity while we had it... both to visit our friends and to see this rather unique piece of American history.

Newport, in a nutshell, was the oceanside summer playground of the American aristocracy in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Names like Vanderbilt, Berwind, Oelrichs and Wetmore are synonymous with the area. These insanely wealthy, status-driven families built monstrous mansions here that they often used for only seven weeks out of the year. The most elite of the New York social scene migrated, en masse, to Newport for several weeks of nightly entertaining and continuous attempts to outdo one another throwing the most lavish parties and balls. Naturally, they took their staffs (often numbering 30 or more) of maids and liveried footmen with them to tend to their every need.

The rest of the year, the houses generally sat empty and were maintained by a caretaker with a small staff that looked after the place and readied it for the next summer season of over-the-top entertaining.

For a sense of the sheer number of estates, have a look at this Google Maps satellite view centered on Chateau-sur-Mer and the bulk of the mansions on Bellevue Avenue.

Anyway, as I said, I'll write more about the trip in a separate post with a wider array of photos. This entry is all about the Weeping Beech tree that sits outside of one of the more unique mansions on the island: Chateau-sur-Mer. After touring the home and on our way back to our car, I happened to step through the curtain of branches to see what the tree looked like "inside". Needless to say, it was pretty amazing and also pleasantly cool since we hit Newport in a bizarre, 90+ degree heat and humidity wave.

I've prepared an HDR version of this pano as well, but it needs a little more tweaking. In the meantime, this mid-tone (0 EV, 7 fisheye shots) set from the five exposure HDR spread (-4EV to +4 EV in 2 EV increments: 35 shots) does a decent job of representing the scene. This file is about 12 MB in size and retains a good deal of its resolution, so give it a moment to load if you're on a slow connection.

May 16, 2008

TWiP: This Week in Photography

I've been a fan of the various This Week in [insert topic here] podcasts for years. The podfather namesake of this family, so to speak, is This Week in Tech. Recorded every Sunday, TWiT is Leo Laporte's baby that evolved from a post-TechTV recorded get together a few years back. Fast forward a bit and it has become a podcast network with several of the shows being among the most popular, cornerstone shows of the entire podcasting scene. Hell, Leo has just set up a whole studio and is gunning for about 25 hours a week of content, much of it streamed live by video now, too.

A core player in the TWiT scene is Alex Lindsay, founder and chief architect of The Pixel Corps. I became a fast fan of Alex's work through a number of his appearances in various podcasts and, most directly, when I got hooked on This Week in Media, a podcast that he hosts with a great team of regular contributors and guests. I also found The Pixel Corps fascinating and, thanks to Alex's generosity when I met him at MacWorld in 2007, I was given an opportunity to become a member of that awesome community. Things I'm learning there feed straight into other projects I'll blog about later.

I started listening to Scott Bourne, too, through his various guest appearances in Leo and Alex's shows (MacBreak Weekly being a TWiT/PixelCorps podcast as well). Scott has also become a major source of podcasts including The Apple Phone Show which was born in the run-up to Apple's iPhone release. It is -the- show about all things iPhone. Scott is a renowned wildlife photographer, former radio host and author of quite a number of books on photography and Apple's Aperture.

A few months ago, Scott and Alex teamed up to create a new podcast, This Week in Photography. Needless to say, this is a rather ideal combination of hosts and topic for my particular interests. :)

I responded to Scott's call one day for a volunteer show note writer. In the podcasting scene, show notes are the written, web-based guides to each show that include a summary of the discussion and provide links for many of the topics (and sites) discussed in the course of a show.

After several episodes and many zillions of show note lines later (I have a bit of a reputation now for writing detailed notes), I started tossing out some guest ideas and took it upon myself to try to line one up: legendary photographer and author, Joe McNally. Joe graciously obliged, hooked up with us on Skype and did a fantastic interview. Somewhere around that time, I was very flattered (and startled) to be asked to become the producer for TWiP and help manage the guest wrangling, topics, and schedule for the show itself. I'm about eight shows into working with them now, enjoying the heck out of it and starting to get into more of a groove with the process.

The first thing I did was build an internal, private wiki that we use within TWiP. It's evolving quickly now as our central organizing resource for each show and provides the schedule from which the hosts work as each episode is recorded. By design, a wiki provides a growing, searchable database of content and, more importantly, is by its very nature collaborative. The hosts and our regular contributors, Ron Brinkmann, Frederick Johnson and Steve Simon can all directly add notes, content, etc., throughout the week in the run-up to each show.

That's some of the "technical" side of the process. The other side, though, is the fun of working with everyone. Getting a chance to chat with the various guests, such as Joe McNally, Rick Smolan, Richard Harrington, Christian Bloch, Bill Crow and others has been a real treat. Beyond that, it's tremendous fun gaining insight into the production process via the show and The Pixel Corps, especially after listening to Alex detail much of the evolution of the process in other shows such as This Week in Media and Gear Media Tech.

I'm always connected via Skype during the show to chat a bit before and after with the gang and listen in on the live recording. They are also brave enough to let me pipe in once in a while during some of the episodes. It's never been my goal to be "on air", but I'm glad if I can bring something to the table once in a while that might be of use to listeners.

If you've not already, be sure to try TWiP. You can subscribe via iTunes, stream it from Pixelcorps.tv and follow the other half of the show's content via the TWiP Blog. If you're truly into photography, be sure to check out TWiP's Flickr Group which has discussions and photo sharing along with a critique forum and bi-weekly contests that, yes, include prizes. :)

You can also interact with everyone involved via Twitter: Scott Bourne, Alex Lindsay, Ron Brinkmann, Fred Johnson (we're still pestering Steve to get into the Twitter scene), and me.