Doug’s World

Slide Project: step 1 started, 2 years into it

For two years this month, since I went to digital with the Nikon D70, I’ve been saying I was going to scan my favorite slides and save hi-res digital copies of them. I have thousands of old slides in binders, and I’m thinking I could pare it down to a few hundred favorites on disk. Seemed like a good thing to do on lazy evenings around the house. Yeah, right. Who has those any more?

Anyway, tonight I decided to just get started on the slide project. No work in the evening, no email, no golf (sigh), just set things up and start a process. So I went through one binder. About 50 more to go. I pulled out one or two slides per page, scanned them, and saved them as hi-res TIFFs.

The series here shows 19 I particularly liked, including a few that seem cooler now than they did back then. I asked our driver Lama about the orange statue with a bell in front of it. He said “that is where they send email to God.”

Don’t you miss Lama and his little brown Starlett taxi, Mom? Remember how we sternly made him take more money than he wanted to charge us at the end of the week? Some of those guys, you just gotta be firm with them.

Non-golf photos

Bruce left me a voice mail this evening: “you need to post some pictures of something other than golf courses. Pictures of golf courses aren’t that interesting.”

Hmm.

I can’t compromise national security by going into any detail right now, but forces have conspired to send me to some new photo opportunities in other countries soon. One is a famous city that happens to be hosting a big international festival while I’m there; the other is home to one of the world’s most-photographed landmarks.

Meanwhile, here are a few shots from hikes around the Pacific Northwest, all taken far from golf courses:

Saturday Morning Wrap-Up

Selected items from today’s news and RSS feeds:

An article in today’s Washington Post provides some insight into how we’ve assembled a high-performance team to rebuild Iraq. Things are proceeding as might be expected.

Programming has changed since the days when I was punching cards for an IBM 370 at Boeing. In related developments, researchers say that watching NFL games can make you tough, and having a porn collection may someday be considered sexy.

This week IBM, Intel and Sun started a web site for developers working with Open Document Format, much like the web site I’ve been running for developers working with the Open XML formats. I’m signed up to their RSS feed and eagerly awaiting some content that will teach demonstrate details of working with ODF. So far I’ve just seen a bit of chest-beating, but with any luck some meaty technical content is sure to follow.

I was telling Megan last weekend the amusing story of a 260-pound nurse who came home to find a 180-pound burglar in her home and killed him with her bare hands. But wait, there’s more to this story: now it turns out he wasn’t a burglar, but rather a hit man hired to kill the nurse.

How did this guy miss his calling? With that kind of results-oriented approach, he should have been safely running some big-bucks governmental program in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Finally, here’s something I don’t understand: blog spam. Why have so many similar ads targeted this post on my blog?

Have a nice Saturday, everyone. I’ve got work to do, and if I get it done Megan’s going to let me go try out my new Nickent 3DX 4-hybrid.

My First Screencast

I’ve installed Camtasia this week, and started learning how to use it to make screencasts. I’ll be doing many screencasts in the next few weeks, both of myself and others, so I need to get up to speed.

Here’s my first attempt. WARNING: there is no useful content in this screencast. It’s only a test. And it may take a while to load — I’m still figuring out the optimization details. I’ve ordered a lapel mic for use in these recordings, but I think I like the way this big condenser mic turns my creaky morning voice into a rich smooth Barry White baritone.

Stay tuned for more screencasts on Open XML development, which I’ll be posting in a variety of places. Oh, and if you’d like to see how that empty presentation turns out, sign up for the webcast next Monday in which I’ll be covering Open XML for Architects. Everyone’s invited, although a bit of experience in C#, .NET, XML and related topics may make the presentation a little more interesting.

Mom, you don’t have to try to stay awake through this one. You’ve done that already.

It’s getting beta and beta

There will be an even closer-to-finished version of Office available for download tomorrow: Beta 2 Tech Refresh. I’m using it now, and it works great. I’ve crossed a line and completely trust it — I even use PowerPoint for presentations now, with no 2003 version on my hard drive at all. It’s like presenting without a net!

Anyway, if you’re interested in the details I have some info on my work blog. And I put together a lo-tech test drive of the differences between Beta 2 and Beta 2 Tech Refresh, which you can see here.

The Reverend and Doctor Omed’s 9-11

Much as been written about 9-11 the last few days. Here’s something I especially liked, a vivid memoir of a mother who died in a motorcycle accident on 9/11/78.

Marsha’s first day at bartender school

From: Marsha
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 7:25 PM
Subject: my first night of class: hiLAR ious

I hooped and hollered all the way through, making a fool of myself and feeling like an absolute idiot! Naturally, I was 80 yrs. older than anyone else in the class and hey! WHO SAID THERE WAS NO MATH INVOLVED IN BARTENDING?! I have to learn to “free pour”—not using the jiggers but counting the pour. I was the first person he asked, “So, if I want to pour 2 oz, Marsha, what is my count?”

DUH. DUH AND ONE MORE DUH FOR THE RECORD. WAS A COMPLETE BLANK.

Couldn’t remember a THING –NOTHING. He had us behind the bar after maybe one hour of in-depth note taking and recipe reading and copying and lecture!

WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS I THINKING—taking an accelerated class??? 40 hrs! I need a month to learn what I am supposed to know by TOMORROW! when was the last time I went to school? 1946? I must be certifiable.

I got behind the bar and my partner said, “I’d like a dry martini, please.”

TWO INGREDIENTS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! TWO—AND I COULDN’T COME UP WITH ANYTHING BUT THE ICE.(not an ingredient).

I KEPT TELLING THE TEACHER, “LOOK. IF YOU WILL SIMPLY LET ME FIX ONE FOR MYSELF—THIS WILL GO A WHOLE LOT EASIER. FOR ALL OF US.” ALAS, ALAS…. IT’S ALL WATER…SIGH.

BUT, MY BAR IS REAL!!!! THANK GOD. GLUB, BUBBLE,POP…

NITE NITE! (NEXT WEEK, SALSA LESSONS, BTW)

Reliving 9/11

OK, I managed to not watch the made-for-TV stuff. But this morning we couldn’t resist watching the re-run of the Today Show from 9/11/2001. And not just a few minutes, either — we wound up watching two full hours of it, and now I need to get to work!

A few things we found interesting, from the perspective of five years later:

• The rumors of other types of attacks: a car bomb outside the State Department, a bomb in a Manhattan school, “several more” planes unaccounted for after the first four.
• The overall calmness of the commentators. There has been so much hype and drama since then, it’s sort of weird to hear Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw calmly discussing the events as they’re unfolding.
• A London reporter who was the first to say that it was clearly the work of Osama Bin Laden.
• Donald Rumsfeld refusing to leave the Pentagon.
• When the first tower collapsed, the reporters kept saying “a piece” of it had fallen off.

Cheaper gas for fall road trips

You know, I don’t really care what price gas is selling for. As long as the oil companies are making record profits, I think that tells us that the price is set just right.

9/11 needs to be dramatized?

Maybe you’ve heard all the talk about “The Path to 9/11″ and all the outraged reactions to it before it even airs. It’s a $40 million docu-drama mini-series that ABC and Disney will foist on the public Sunday and Monday. Apparently 9/11 wasn’t a good enough story, so they’ve made up a bunch of scenes that never happened, to add some color to the drab predictable tale of some cave-dwellers taking down the World Trade Center towers and getting away with it, still snickering in their caves five years later.

I say “apparently” because, of course, most of us haven’t seen the movie yet. But a few folks have.

One person who has seen “The Path to 9/11″ is Ray Richmond. His column in the Hollywood Reporter entitled “Five Years Later, 9/11 Is Reduced To Just Another Edition of ‘Artistic License Theater’” is a classic. Here’s a quote, thanks to DailyKos:

On Thursday, ABC actually released a statement that read in part, “No one has seen the final version of the film because the editing process is not yet complete, so criticism of film specifics are premature and irresponsible.”

Huh? Now that’s kind of interesting. If this is the case, then I wonder what the network expected me to do with that “Path to 9/11″ review copy it supplied me with a few weeks back. Was I not supposed to review it? Nothing on the DVD said it was incomplete or something less than critique quality. Yet somehow, if I level criticism based on viewing said screener, I’m doing something that’s “irresponsible”? I’ve been a TV critic for the better part of 22 years, and that’s a new one on me.

Big companies like ABC and Disney love to talk about transparency. Hey ABC execs, here comes some transparency the next few days. Enjoy!