“Later in the afternoon, the President and the First Lady will attend a reception with the National Newspaper Publisher Association in the State Dining Room, where they will be presented the Newsmaker of the Year award. This event is closed press.”
— President Obama meets the PressTales From The Dog Side
Presented without comment. It just sort of popped into my head while driving to work…
Apologize to your physics teacher!
No, seriously, that’s the title of this novel:
Yes, that’s Akihabara underneath her, which means the camera shops just tripled the price on all telephoto lenses.
[first novel, came out about a month ago, turned up as a “people who liked Hashire, ute! also liked…”]
Portal 2+2
Scott and I ran through the co-op storyline today. Lots of fun, although we got stuck good and hard twice, once because we simply couldn’t figure out how to combine the available portal surfaces to get the second player across, and the second time because the solution we came up with was so complicated that we knew we had to be overthinking it and missing something simple (“no, that really is how you do it”).
As usual, it was a lot easier with tablespeak than it would have been with any manner of chat session.
Pity they couldn’t come up with a way to work more Cave Johnson dialog into it…
[Update: belatedly, it occurred to me that the people who are claiming they solved the co-op puzzles alone, only needing a partner to satisfy the “both present at the exit” requirement, are full of shit. For some of the puzzles, getting one player to the exit is relatively easy; the actual challenge is getting the second one across. That was the exact situation that stumped us: I made it to the exit, and could no longer create the portals that Scott would need to use the same method; we had to figure out a different path to the top, using both sets of portals.]
Sprint, shoot!
The author of Asobi ni Iku Yo! has another active series of novels, Hashire, ute!, which has a manga adaptation running, and given the subject matter, likely an anime series in the works. Judging from the cover art (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), the genre is “military moeblob”.
Book five has a “look inside” link, and the random page it selected for me featured a phrase glossed with the katakana マジノ・ライン …
His most recent release looks to be the start of Yet Another series, Cattail Output!, the cover of which features two schoolgirls with very short skirts, one with glasses, the other with a handgun.
Reasons to stay out of New York City, #551
Being arrested because a cop thought you might be carrying a pocket knife. Not brandishing it, not openly using a clearly-illegal type of knife, but having a slight bulge in your front pocket suggesting that there’s a knife clipped there.
All part of an ambitious District Attorney’s plan to crack down on the scourge of modern pocket knives purchased at major retailers by law-abiding citizens. Because if it looks scarier than a butter knife, it must be a criminal tool that no normal person would own. This may sound familiar to anyone who’s seen the laundry list of cosmetic features used to define “assault weapons”.
Personally, I carry a 555 and a 710, so no Big Apple for me!
Now for the real question. Is this District Attorney:
A. running for re-election.
B. pretending to be "tough on crime".
C. raising revenue with easy arrests.
D. improving cops' personal knife collections.
E. ruining lives with bullshit convictions.
F. diverting police resources from actual crime.
G. all of the above
Change
...the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any time-line --- the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well.
Last Enemy, H. Beam Piper, August, 1950
Abstraction
I was doing some lens-testing around the house this morning, and one shot in particular struck me as interesting for laptop wallpaper.
Sadly, the result of the testing was that my 35/1.4 is busted; mechanically functional, but severe circular aberration wide open, and horrible back focus. My camera’s micro-AF adjustment can compensate for the back focus, but unless I want to shoot dreamy soft-focus landscape and architecture photos, it needs fixed or replaced. Sony’s current 35/1.4 lists for $1,369, or I can send it to the last remaining authorized service center for Minolta lenses, Precision Camera, for $250. If I don’t want to eventually pitch it, I might as well get it fixed now, while there’s still someone willing to do the work.
I originally bought it used, and it never seemed quite right, but most of the time I prefer to shoot with much longer lenses, so it didn’t bother me too much. Testing it with my newly-acquired LensAlign MkII allowed me to quantify the focus issue, and direct comparison to my other f/1.4 lenses made the CA flaringly obvious. Some of my other lenses benefited from a small micro-AF adjustment, but that was 1-3 units of tuning; the 35 was so far out of spec that it needed -18 units, and the scale only goes to 20.
My previous uses had been at f/8-f/16 at 20+ feet, which mostly masked the defects, but the LensAlign test was done wide-open at 2.9 feet, with only an inch of depth of field on each side of the focus point. And it was off by nearly an inch.
The picture above wasn’t shot with the bad lens, by the way. It was done with my Tamron 90/2.8 Macro (which, I discovered, falsely identifies itself as a Minolta 100/2.8 Macro!), and the lack of focus was deliberate. It’s a dusty old compact disc that was sitting on a shelf, reflecting the blinds from the nearby window.
