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Name: David
Country: United States
State: Pennsylvania
Birthday: 8/26/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: Programming, art, designing, engineering, photography, snowboarding, rock-climbing, tennis, and more
Expertise: Computer/Art, design, origami, crafting, photography
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
4/10/2003
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| Stigma of One..."Hi, I'm here to check-in"
"Alright. *types on the computer* How many?"
"Just me."
"Ah, a 'single-servings guy.'"
"A what?"
"Single servings. You know, one bed, one toothbrush, one meal, one person."
"*laugh* I haven't heard that before."
Then I took my small bag and entered a small minimally furnished hotel room out in the middle of the desert last year. But that was the first time I've heard that term, and I couldn't help but laugh. I've heard countless number of times friends apologizing when I go out alone, whether to eat, buying something, or going to a movie theater, as if it was their fault I was doing this. I've eaten alone plenty of times and been to movie theaters by myself, and I know just by saying that, you're probably having a reaction of "that's sad." Why is it such a stigma to do things by yourself? Perhaps being alone also relates to silence, which people are always nervous about. Sure, it's more fun if there's one or more people with you, but that's not always a choice or something that can happen, so we eat by ourselves. Why fret over something as simple as being alone?
It is this stigma that causes people to try to find groups of people to join, clubs to go to, and any other social activity to the point that that's all they ever do. Social events from time to time are good, but to always look for one removes any time for yourself. Think of all the things a person can accomplish if they didn't care whether or not they're by themselves. I do all these crafts at home to learn and create more, and the majority of this can only be done by myself. However, this seems to be looked down upon by society as well. When someone dedicates so much time on a craft, whether photography, construction, sculptures, anything to the point they become extremely good, people start commenting that the person "has no life," which I've seen most with artists. Of course, there has to be a balance between being alone and always being with people, but many times, there's not much choice and we can only do one or the other.
It's the same stigma that seems to drive people to find dates and get a girlfriend/boyfriend to the point that sometimes it's all people ever obsess about. A high school friend of mine is already married for about 3 years now and has a son about 1.5 years old. I believe the majority of them are already married at my age, and I have yet to go on any dates (unless you count that one two years ago that everyone thought was one *ahem*). I have no reason to rush, and I don't care either way. I especially don't want people pushing their pace onto me, as my roommate has done several times trying to push me to get a girlfriend. We all walk our paths at different paces and reach the destination at different times. There is not some set rule or definitive milestones that everyone has to reach at the same time, nor are there any bragging rights for reaching it faster than others or penalties for reaching the destination at a later time. It is just life.
I will walk my path, you can run your's, and I'll see you when our paths cross again. Until then, I walk my path alone.
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| Weekend Haul...I didn't have any break for work. Instead, I worked both Sat and Sun to fix a problem on the robot and to make the video for the presentation today. The problem I was fixing wasn't related to my part of the project, but it wouldn't look good if I didn't try to help considering I'm still on the line. In the end, the presentation glazed over what I did and the video I worked so hard to make was barely shown as only a test during the break, and even then, the guys want me to redo it in higher resolution. It felt like the 16 hours of extra work was worth very little to me, not to mention I'm not paid for it. I guess I'm just ranting now. I'm tired, irritated, and drained, but I won't have a break until Saturday where hopefully I don't have to work again. To further compound it, my dog at home died over the weekend. My parents don't do a good job taking care of him since they're rarely home nor did they ever train him, so it was a sad way to go.
Pinhole Photography
I developed the second film I took with the pinhole camera I made a few weeks ago. The first film was messed up due to the back breaking and covering part of it, but I'm still developing it online since it's cheaper and there's no need to rush it. It's amazing how such a simple box can take pictures like this. I need to remake the pinhole since mine is probably still too big as the photos can be clearer. Need to grab a beading needle from a craft store later on. Here's three of my favorite out of the 14 that developed.
 This was actually the very first shot I wanted to try when making the pinhole. I had the image in my head and it came out pretty much how I thought it would.  Ah, tungsten light at Uno's.  The empty parking lot at work as I left around 7-7:30.
I forgot about color balance as I haven't used film in a long time, so after seeing the indoor shot, it was a realization of "oh yeah, this is film now." This is a fun change from digital photography. I'll be taking more shots as I go now that I know my box doesn't have a light leak.
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| I've caught a cold...
Fortunately, it's the plush variety. Isn't it cute? I've wanted to get giant microbes before, so I thought why not? I'll buy a few. My roommate thought it was odd since they're basically plush versions of viruses and bacteria, but I think they're cool. I don't think she appreciated them, haha. I want to get a heart organ plush as well, but that will be later.
 From left to right: White blood cell, the common cold, beer/bread yeast, and Cthulhu sitting on top of the cold virus.
I mainly wanted Cthulhu as I wanted to place the plush on top of my work computer since I named it after him. A fitting name really. From this, you can see I'm a dork, but that's a given with what I do. Also, it's nice having a roommate that cooks meals like I do. Here's a stir fry that she made before. She's planning on making her own personal cookbook and have pictures for each one. I'll probably make a personal one as well once I hit 50 recipes. I have 10 more to go.
The Workforce
A small update with the current situation at work. Perhaps after looking at it from an outside perspective and also because of the summer months where more and more projects are due, I've noticed that my workplace is understaffed and overcrowded. The recent influx of large robots has completely taken over the highbay. We used to have a ping pong table to play against each other, but now there's barely enough room to walk through without knocking tools off or running into a robot. The projects we're receiving are increasing in size and complexity and there's not enough people to work on them.
If you consider that I'm currently working on two projects and I'm the only one active in both, you can imagine everyone else also has the same workload. I've also noticed most people don't leave at the late 6pm (the usual work hours for me are 10-6) and instead, are staying later. Even I'm staying later as I leave at 7:30pm now, and there's still people working. We can't hire more people either because there's no space left. There's been some conflicts of position as well with tasks assigned to people who really shouldn't be doing it (a person interested in helicopters not assigned to the helicopter project, mechanic assigned to program, etc.). I also find it harder to ask for help as everyone's so busy they barely have time to look anywhere else. This is the transition period so a lot of things are getting messed up, so I say there's a year before we finally move to a bigger building and settle... hopefully Until then, I have to do what I can and hope I can at least get home by 7 instead of 8 or 9.
This really cuts into my free time to do anything else.
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| Bulgarian 4th of July...I went with my summer roommate to celebrate 4th of July with her friends as I didn't have any plans other than the possible fireworks later on. Since she's studying Cyrillic for the summer, her friends are also in the same type of program, and it was an interesting mix of people. The person hosting it is prepared Bulgarian food and the people who came were studying either Russian, Cyrillic, or Bulgarian. As some of them were just learning, they practiced with an actual Bulgarian there and tried out what they knew, which was cool to watch. They attempted to do barbecue on the roof, but the down pour of rain stopped that as we moved inside to eat. We went to see fireworks at night, but it was quite disappointing. The fireworks were too far away and the clouds added a slight fog to everything. I couldn't take any photos at all.
Afterward, they went over to another friend's place, and his apartment is insanely huge. He had a nice setup at the front with a computer running off the TV and MythTV installed to record shows and play music. It was a perfect party setup. Down two floors, there was a basement area with speakers and a mixer board for music and dancing, like an underground club of sorts. Definitely not my type of place to be, but it was cool to see how the house was setup.
In the Opposite Direction
Everyone is so focused on the latest cameras, trying to see which one has better frames per second, more megapixels, better lenses, image stabilization, and other technical aspects of the camera that they tend to ignore the basics: how to take a photo. So what happens when you strip all of the unnecessary details out? You get this.
 The bare basics for a pinhole camera.  The outside enclosure to make it look prettier. I'll decorate it at another time.
I built this in an hour and a half using the plans that Corbis provided (http://www.corbis.readymech.com/) to make my very own pinhole camera. If you want to go into specifics, this thing shoots at about 1 frame per... 10 seconds or so, has a fixed f-stop of about f/200, no image stabilization, no focus, only shoots 24-36 shots, 25 megapixels (or whatever you believe the 35mm film equivalent is), and takes a week or two before you even see your photos. This is for me to try out a different type of photography and to have fun with it as I've wanted to do this for awhile. I already shot a roll of film, but it turns out a part inside broke, which messed up the exposure. I'll develop it anyway and see what it shot. It's repaired now with a thinner cardboard so it won't jam the film canisters.
Also, I'm sure most digital photographers have never heard of the term reciprocity failure. Unlike digital sensors that are relatively consistent at any exposure time (except for 3+ minutes where the sensor starts heating up and produces pink edges and hot pixels, so I guess that could be considered "reciprocity failure"), film is analog and reacts differently depending on exposure time. For most normal use, digital and film will act the same. For long or short exposures (over 1 second or faster than 1/10,000), the film starts behaving differently. For long exposures, you actually have to shoot longer than the normal as the film starts reacting less and less. A 4 second shot may actually take 6 seconds, and a 10 second shot may take 20 instead. Each film is different though, so the time varies. This also allows room for error with pinholes as you don't have to be exact in order to get a decent exposure since most shots take at least 2 seconds to take.
I'm reminded of an Einstein quote: Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and
more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to
move in the opposite direction. Though pinhole photography isn't very practical, it'll be fun to shoot for the sake of shooting.
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| Perhaps It's Luck...So my boss had a meeting with me today to discuss what will happen to me. They immediately started by saying they're not going to fire me. That's the good news. The bad news is basically I'm at the bottom of the employees there, which is what I thought would happen. I'm on "probation" in a sense that any further mistake I make will result in immediate termination, so I'm still at risk of being fired, but slightly less. They also verified and stated several other things I've thought about while trying not to lose my job. One of them is they don't care about how many hours I work or how long it takes. If the product isn't finished, I'll be fired. As I've noted before, most people in life only care about the finished product, and most of the time, they don't care if you were sick or the robot broke down unexpectedly or the forces of nature completely destroy everything. If the product isn't finished, then you didn't do anything.
It also helped that one of the bugs I solved in software related to another major project I didn't know about. When out in the test site, we were both testing the same pieces of code and having similar problems. It turns out the other coworker took a few days before looking over the code to no avail, while I took a look at it for a day and solved the problem to his disbelief. The fix resulted in both our robots working near perfectly today, so that looked extremely good on me. My project near finished as well, though I have to meet the hard deadline next week.
However, I'm am getting somewhat tired of working on the robots. As my coworker said before, most of the work we do never see the light of day. We work for months on a robot and most likely it'll be tossed away as most of them are only for research purposes. Since the work is government related, of the few that actually do continue, most people will never see it. Combine this with the large changes from the merger and half the original people leaving including two more in the next month, it changes the workplace quite a bit since I started. It's still fun to work on them, but I think it's time I try something else. Perhaps in a year, I'll switch... if I don't get fired first.
While out in the test site, we found a field mouse running around.
Food Challenge #40 - Blueberry Shortcake
I made the strawberry version before, so this version is slightly different. However, I didn't realize my roommate's flour was old, so the bread I made came out a disaster. It didn't rise and tasted salty. The blueberry filling came out fine and I added too much vanilla to the whipped cream, but it was still decent. I have to throw out the flour and buy another bag if I want to try this again.
Maybe it's time I go back to basics with art now that I have some time to breathe. | | |
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