Wherein I declare "Mission Accomplished"....

Or, "Evil Bendy Gets Respectable". Being scenes from my Recent Adventures in Homebuying, as poorly reenacted with small toys.

Ok, "reenacted" is a bit of a stretch, actually. Regular readers of this humble blog (yes, both of you) might recall that Evil Bendy here is my occasional yellow rubbery alter ego. And the rock pictured here is a little token of appreciation from the title company you get on closing. So it's, like, symbolic, or whatever. Here's another one:

The rock, incidentally, has a little sticker on the bottom saying "Made in China". Wow. The social-commentary-on-modern-society angle pretty much writes itself. Come to think of it, Evil Bendy is probably made in China too. But I digress.

I should emphasize that the next photo is a "during" photo, not an "after" one, illustrating numerous scenes from the homebuying process. Honestly, I don't understand why you can't just buy online and cut out all the middle-persons. So many things to sign, so many dead trees. I suppose the process and its associated rituals have barely changed in decades. I mean, other than the fact that we found the place on Craigslist, and thus completely missed out on being herded around town by realtors, and all the rest of the house-hunting half of the experience. Still, the Craigslist ad ought to have included a "Click to Buy!" button. It would have simplified matters somewhat. That's all I'm saying.

So next we have the mellow "after" photo. I've been surprised by how much my general stress level has dropped since buying the place (at least so far). Ok, so now it's a simple matter of 30 years of mortgage payments (hence the "Mission Accomplished"), but that I can do. It's uncertainty that I can't stand, and there's definitely a lot less of that than before. So now that things are settled and we're officially Responsible Adults and all that, maybe now we'll get a cat, and this humble blog will devolve into an endless series of cute kitten photos.

Some might call that an improvement, actually.

b+w: bendy & beer

Top photo: My rubbery made-in-China alter ego, somewhat less colorful than usual. This and the next photo were taken with yet another old camera, this time a Mamiya/Sekor 500 DTL, which I picked up at Goodwill for $10. Unfortunately it seems to have some kind of shutter or mirror issue, and about 2/3 of the photos came out with a strange flare effect. I got the same effect with several different lenses, so I know it's not that, at least. It's kind of a shame really; this is the only old camera I've got where the light meter actually works.

Anyway... Bottom photo: A bottle of Red Thistle Ale from Golden Valley Brewing in McMinnville. I made a run all the way down there just to pick up a case of this, only to discover a few days later that Belmont Station has it too, right here in Portland. This was actually the same trip where I bought the camera. Also, note that the bottle is not full, and I seem to recall the bottle pictured wasn't the first of the evening. That fact may help explain why I took these two photos.

...wherein I get scanned...

I've been playing around with scanning 3D objects lately, using that crappy 10 year old flatbed scanner I got for free a while back.

When it came time to select test subject #1, the choice was obvious.

It turns out that my alter ego has a few siblings out there on the Series of Intarwebs. The travel adventures of one sibling are documented here, while another has a series of domestic escapades here. Others siblings have unusual adventures of their own, both animal and vegetable.

Sadly, not all Bendies have such a cushy life. The sad, fiery end of one such Bendy is documented here. Oh, the bendumanity!

...wherein I gain a superpower...

When I was a kid, I thought being able to see infrared and ultraviolet would be a great superpower. X-ray vision, not so much, because it'd be all skeletons all the time, and I've never been goth enough to find that appealing. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to learn that my camera detects near-IR light. Which got me wondering if there was a way to make it only see infrared. Hopefully without having to spend a lot of money or disassemble anything.

Turns out there's an extremely simple way to do just that. I rifled through my dusty old box of film photos, and looked through my negatives until I found a couple of unexposed end bits. Layer them together and add some tape to hold them in place, and you've got a homemade IR filter. If you try to look through it you'll notice that almost no visible light makes it through, so anything the camera sees has to be something else.

So here are a few preliminary attempts at taking IR photos.

The thing that really stands out in IR is foliage, and fortunately my general neighborhood is full of foliage. Leaves appear to glow, while the sky comes out rather dark. Here's that damn Leland One / Rusting Chunks No. 5 sculpture again. The trees in direct sunlight just then came out way overexposed. If I hadn't done that, I'm not sure the rest of the scene would've been visible.



Here are some subsequent and better attempts.







Here are a few pages with tons of info about IR photos, if you're interested, at Rochester Institute of Technology, dpfwiw, Photo tidbits, CoCam, and PhotoNotes.org


A funny thing about IR with digital cameras is that the more you spend, generally speaking, the less useful the camera is. Infrared is Considered Harmful for general camera usage, so you see IR-blocking filters fixed over cameras' image sensors. The more you spend, the "better" IR filtering you get. I think even mine does it to some degree, so you've got IR and anti-IR filters fighting each other, and you're detecting what little light makes it through both of those.

My dinky little $14.99 VuPoint camera, however, doesn't seem to do any IR-blocking at all, based on the experimenting I've done so far. I didn't bring the right cable with me so I can't pull today's photos off of it right now, but here are a couple of silly ones from earlier. First, my alter ego in mid-transmogrification into IR superhero mode, film sprocket holes and everything:



The completed transformation, FWIW:



Incidentally, I've noticed the VuPoint is better suited to talking to Macs than it is to Windows, which is kind of surprising. The desktop software on Windows is clunky and cartoonish, while on OSX it just talks to iPhoto like a good camera should. The resulting images are BMP files on OSX, but JPG on Windows, even though BMP is a Windows-centric format. I figure that means BMP is the camera's "RAW" format, or the closest thing to it. Apparently if you leave compression off on the camera, the desktop software applies it on that end, so there's really no advantage to turning it off in that case. I don't really see the point of that; the BMP files come out at around 360k instead of the ~50k compressed size. 360k is still pretty tiny, so I'm not sure why they went to the trouble.

The Painted Hills

Today's mini-roadtrip photos are from Eastern Oregon's Painted Hills, about 50 miles east of Prineville. You've seen photos of the place before, no doubt, and no doubt those photos were better than mine. But that's never stopped me before.

The Painted Hills are part of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which is part of the national park system. Technically there are some fossils here, but the hills are the main event, with those weird multicolored bands.

The Wikipedia article on the hills describes them thusly:

Painted Hills is one of the three units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, located in Wheeler County, Oregon It totals 3,132 acres (12.7 km²) and is located 9 miles (14 km) northwest of Mitchell, Oregon and 75 miles east of Bend. Painted Hills is named after the colorful layers of its hills corresponding to various geological eras, formed when the area was an ancient river floodplain. The black soil is lignite that was vegetative matter that grew along the floodplain. The grey coloring is mudstone, siltstone, and shale. The red coloring is laterite soil that formed by floodplain deposits when the area was warm and humid.

Lignite is very low-grade, low-value coal, and laterite is basically what's left after rainfall leaches all the soluble minerals out of soil. As you can see, not much grows on the hills. They're surrounded by forests and farms, so it's not for lack of water. It's just the soil, three kinds of bad so far as plant life goes. Here and there you see a spot where there's a layer of different soil above the Painted Hills material:

The photo above also shows footprints from where some idiot decided to climb the hill. It should be clear why you're not supposed to do that.

If you look closely, you'll notice the surface of the hills is dry, cracked mud. That sort of dents the mystique of the place a little, but it's kind of fascinating in its own way:

A nearby farm, with the hills in the background. Makes for an interesting contrast.

Naturally I had to bring my alter ego along for the ride:

I don't know why it is that barren, badland-like places like this capture the human imagination. Not to get all touchy-feely about it, but you get the feeling you're in a very simple place, with the bones of the earth laid bare, and only the essentials remaining. I don't know if it resonates with some sort of deep-seated desert nomadic impulse, or what. It feels compelling, but I can't put my finger on exactly why.

If you want to see more of the place, or, hypothetically speaking, you found my photos unsatisfying, here are a few other sites with photos:

• Ragged Cloth Cafe, with paintings as well as photos. Very cool.
• Golden Gate Photo
• Enigmaterial
• Two pages at Webshots.com
• A photo on Flickr
• Panoramio
• Northwest Pages
• GalleryPlayer
• Oregon Icons
• Max Lyons Forums
• Southeast Main

And if you just can't get enough of the hills themselves, the Nature Conservancy owns a chunk of similar terrain at their Juniper Hills preserve. FWIW.

monday image-o-rama

So we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of our wintry drabness and grimness. Or at least it's the beginning of the beginning of the end. It's not quite prime photo season yet, but here are a few anyway....




Detail of the hat sculpture in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I can't find a lot of info on this thing (understandable, since it's really tiny), but someone else has a photo of it on this page.




A weird sunset in downtown Portland, taken about a month ago.




Did I mention it was almost spring? Here's more evidence.




Me, kicking it with my Argonath homies...

...wherein I continue battling that pesky cold...

This pic tries to show what it's like to have this cold. For accuracy, I'd need to add swirls of some of those garish colors on the far side of octarine, but the JPEG format doesn't support those, so this really and truly is the best I can do. So anyway, avoid this cold, if you can. If you don't own any venetian blinds that can support your weight, you're in for a long, long drop.

...wherein I conquer the moon...

It's true. I've conquered the moon. This photo should be all the proof you need.

I'll be off surveying my newly acquired realm for a couple of days, so don't be surprised if there aren't any new posts here until next week some time. I mean, I technically could, probably, but I expect my time will be consumed by assorted toadies and flunkies and grand viziers and other minions, along with the rest of the moon's vast population, all turning out to welcome their new Colossal Yellow Overlord. (If they know what's good for them, I mean.)

Incidentally, the crater I'm sitting on is either Thornton or Pythagoras. It's hard to tell which, because I'm sitting on it, and I can't see the label from here. (Ok, so the first one is only sort-of named "Thornton", technically speaking.) Here's a recent photo of Pythagoras by the dearly departed SMART-1 probe. As you can see, it's not really the most comfortable thing to sit on, but hey, it's the moon, it's not like there's a wide variety of seating options. You don't even get a good choice of colors, unless you're a big fan of grey. Well, whatever. I conquered it fair and square, and it's mine now, warts and all.

...wherein I finish my beer...

Photo #1: A nice big glass of beer. Cranberry Éphémère, if you're curious.



Photo #2: Moi, not long after taking photo #1. Did I mention it was a nice, big glass of beer?

Mmmmm..... beeeeerrrr.....

---

Speaking of beer, a piece at Rooftop Brewing about homebrewing with fresh hops. Sounds ambitious. Tasty, and ambitious.

Meanwhile, Beervana points us (well, those of us who remember the original) at an ancient Ranier Beer commercial on YouTube. You know, the one with the motorcycle. You know the one.

Blogriculture has a couple of recent beer-related posts: The aforementioned Rainier commercial gets a mention, and the point is made that while the commercial is great, the beer wasn't then and isn't now. There was a time when people called it the "Green Death", if that gives you some idea. The other post discusses the impact of beer on Oregon's economy. Our stats page at BeerServesAmerica.org is here, but as the post notes, the numbers here are probably understated, since it just looks at the brewing & retail angle, and ignores the agricultural side of things. And we grow a hell of a lot of tasty, tasty hops here.

...wherein I climb the Empire State Building...

This is me, climbing the Empire State Building. Ok, technically I'm just climbing a bookend made to look sort of like the Empire State Building, and technically it's not really me. But I did buy the bookends in Manhattan when I was there for a trade show back in the summer of 2000. And I have been to the top of the building in real life. I have photos of myself, standing on the south side of the observation deck, with the Twin Towers clearly visible over my shoulder. My coworkers and I were going to catch a cab down to the financial district and visit the WTC observation deck on the same day, but we decided to have a bite to eat first, and wandered down to Little Italy, and whiled away the hours over a delicious lunch, and a few bottles of wine, and a bit of grappa, and dessert -- please recall this was during the dot-com era, and we were on an expense account -- and we just didn't get around to it. So I figured, ok, I'll just go see the WTC next time I'm here...

I have a close friend who had reservations at the hotel inside the WTC for the first week of October '01, but only because the business trip had been delayed a couple of weeks by silly bizdev concerns. An aunt and uncle were in New York and visited the WTC a week before 9/11. A coworker of mine lost a childhood friend on 9/11. Of the people I've mentioned, none of them believes Saddam, or Iraq generally, had anything to do with the attacks. And why would they? All the arguments for believing so have turned out to have been fabricated, cynically and deliberately. Fabricated by people who desperately wanted a war with Iraq, and shamelessly exploited the memory of a few thousand good, innocent people in order to get the war they wanted. Even if it meant neglecting the hunt for Bin Laden and his allies, the people who really did attack us.

We're coming up on the 5 year anniversary of 9/11 in just a few weeks, and I have a feeling we're in for a bunch of wingnutty lets-bomb-Iran rhetoric between now and then, and between then and whenever we actually bomb Iran. Bill Kristol & Co. are convinced we'll be greeted as liberators this time around, and Cheney just plain loves killing people, whatever the excuse happens to be, and none of these people are very big on consulting public opinion or basic common sense, so I'm afraid this is probably a done deal. And probably they'll wait until after the election, so they can use the fear issue yet again. Plus, even now, I'm still idealistic enough to believe that the voters would not look favorably on a party whose president had just committed an unprovoked nuclear attack and killed millions of innocent people. I have to believe that. I cling to that. Karl Rove probably believes that too, and therefore the attack will come after the election, just like with Iraq.

Naturally, we'll be an international pariah afterwards. Nobody will want to have anything to do with us. The neocons will be all bewildered about how even nuclear war didn't create Utopia, and didn't make everyone want to be just like us, but they'll shrug it off; like Iraq, it's just an inconsequential speedbump on the way to a thrilling new war, maybe with China, or possibly Russia, or France, or Mexico, or all of the above, or who knows? Whatever happens, Dubya and friends won't bat an eye about the global condemnation. The international reaction will play right into the ridiculous siege mentality they've cultivated so carefully over the last few years. It won't bother them at all. Hell, they'll take it as a mark of pride. And then they'll nuke someone else on a whim. It's so much easier the second time around. And throughout all this, the Democrats in Congress will do just as they did with Iraq, desperately chasing the warmobile, barking "Me too! Me too!". In 2008 we'll get the usual sad spectacle of Democrats again trying to steer to the right of Republicans in foreign policy (regardless of how the general public feels about the whole debacle), demanding to know why we didn't just nuke a bunch of unrelated "bad" countries while we were at it. Hillary, or one of the Joes (Biden or Lieberman) will be on TV demanding to know why we didn't nuke North Korea and/or Zimbabwe and/or Belarus and/or Venezuela while we were at it.

Our grandchildren will think us savages, and madmen.