Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Month: March 2012

Having a break cycling

I’ve spent the last three weeks working in a project that:

  • if successful, will provide quite a bit of interesting data and a few papers coming from it but
  • if a flop, may also end up as a huge waste of paper (at least will keep the forestry industry going for a while).

So, I was really tired and took Newton for a walk. Actually he was walking/running on the leash while I was cycling. And we have sprints on the sidewalk and hope that there are no cars leaving the driveway, because our chances of stopping on time are minimal. Avonhead cemetery is not far from home and I’m a sucker for cemeteries; they are such a great way to see history in action. We stopped when the sun was very low in the horizon and I wanted to capture the spinning movement of the two windmills. Low speed, neutral graduated filter and split tone.

Windmills in Avonhead cemetery (21 March 2012).

There are a few areas that went white because of the slow shutter speed, but I think it represents quite well what I had in mind at the time.

Early-March flotsam

It has been a strange last ten days since we unexpectedly entered grant writing mode. I was looking forward to work on this issue near the end of the year but a likely change on funding agency priorities requires applying in a few weeks; unfortunately, it means that all this is happening at the same time I am teaching.

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The weirdness of ebooks

A couple of weeks ago I got a Sony Reader PRS-T1 through the use of Flybuys (a loyalty card scheme available in New Zealand). I had been thinking about buying an Amazon Kindle but then we got the Flybuys catalogue and I could not see the point of shelling out cash for something that I could get much more cheaply.

The device is quite nice and my only hardware quibble is the front frame of the screen, which is too reflective. In contrast, the Sony software to synchronize ebook reader and computer (a mac in my case) is a piece of junk. Therefore, the first thing I did was to install Calibre, which is not pretty but quite effective as a book manager.

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