Phone

This picture was taken with my cell phone. I think it might be the best photograph I have ever taken. I even edited it in the -phone before I sent it over here to 3d world headquarters to brag it up on. There was one, taken with a film camera,  back in the day of the shrimp boats coming into Rockport Harbor on the Texas Gulf Coast at sunset that was pretty good. But it is long lost so there's no way, really, of knowing.
This version, edited in the HTC MyTouch 4g Slide, lost 90% of it pixels in the one edit, going from 900k plus to just 91k in that one edit.

This second copy I sent to my computer in the first phone version and cropped it a little bit to center things up same as before and it is 851,000 pixels. Now, I dojn't know how you feel about such things, but I like me some pixel density. You can compare and see how you feel about it.

Then I really lost my shit and cropped it again. It only has 251k pixels left but I think it is the better for the reduction in excess verbiage.

Not bad for a cell phone photo

Bad RAM; (UPDATE)

UPDATE: There was a note in my mailbox Tuesday when I got home from my trip to the South Coast with Maggi over the weekend. We took an early holiday to go to an NA convention at the Red Lion in Coos Bay and fuck around camping and driving around farther south. We even took the two-rivers tour to Glide but that is another story. Anyway I finally figured out it must be my new RAM back from the mfg and sure enough it was.
It was easy enough to install once I got my nerves to calm down, and for good measure I put the CMOS jumper back where it is supposed to go, which was the hardest thing, I had to look it up slowly and carefully you do not want to put that little fucker on the wrong 2 of the 3 available pins.
It is weird, though, not having any blue-screen crashes at all. I got kind of used to it, I guess.



Eventually I got plenty tired of rebooting from the frequent and inevitably inconvenient blue screen crashes of my new computer. Pissed me off.
So I started trying to find out why the fuck this brand new $900 machine just would not stay lit.
I learned how to access the event viewer, and what the results mean, and I found a program called blue screen viewer which kind of analyzes the crash dump and summarizes the findings. Crash dump, when the machine crashes it remembers what it was doing at the time so folks who know more than me can go in there and find out why it had to shut itself down. Interestingly, crashing is what it does so it doesn't hurt itself by trying impossible things or doing two things at once or really breaking anything, so it stops working and reports what happened.
Result being that it said the problem wasn't something the user (me)  did, or what the software did, but something in the lizard-brain wasn't adding up. They call it the kernel. Fine.
Blue screen viewer said it probably was a matter of bad memory storage.

The red part of the screen is the record of bad sectors in the memory module. It can run into the thousands of bad ones. I had 42 bad in this pass, while that's not a lot it is far too many. Your rig won't run with any at all.

So I learned another diagnostic, Memtest86, which is a weird program you load onto a DVD and reboot, so the system loads a simple operating program which writes a string of coded numbers into your RAM and then goes  back and reads the numbers in comparison to what it wrote  so you can tell if the memory is storing the right shit and reading the same shit it wrote.
Turns out, yes and no. I have 8 g of RAM, two 4g sticks. I took one out and ran Memtest86 on the other one. Bad. I ran 3 passes, and they all said there were bad sectors the first had 42 bad, the second 65 bad and the third got to a hundred even.
The other stick, to my surprise,  was OK.
G Skill makes a lot of memory devices, including this RAM, and they have a bit of a reputation for spotty quality control. On the upside, they were perfectly fine issuing me a RMA number, so I sent on the bad one and hopeful soon I will have a replacement. This computer runs fine on 4g of RAM but it is kind of weird not ever crashing. I am eager to get the new module in there, though, editing HD video takes lots of RAM so my video projects are all on hold. Pity, because I just got some new software, Sony Vegas Pro, and I'd like to try it out.

Trending Now

Laying in bed trying to sleep because I had to get up at 4:30 to go to Salem I was wondering what the bitchen new video, HD by the way, would look like on here, the blogness of it all. So I got up at 310 or so, not to Yuma.
Turns out between the viciously unstable Graphics processor and the size of hd video files I'm pretty much out of luck and so are you.
But I assure y ou here at 3d world headquarters we take this shit seriously and are working night and day to fix this fucker.

Last year when I painted the bottom I didn't have the energy to fuck around getting the waterline. So I took the easy way out. Painted the bottom strake and called it good.

So here are a couple of stills to tide you over. They are twice as densely pixellated as the other photos from my phone camera, and more than twice the pixel density of my other Sony.
Alas, they are not 1080P HD video.
I know, thin gruel indeed.

SO I used my brother's Bushnell Laser level to strike the waterline. Hanging masking tape on a curve is a motherfucker. I have yet to decide if it was worth it. Popoular opinion seems to be trending yes.

My Obsessions Develop An Expensive New Twist

OK, so a year ago I got a new phone because it had a bitchin 8 MP camera. I paid way too much for the phone but I had to have such a high-end camera.
Then, because I am an ignorant slob, this bitchen high-end developed a quirk, the fucker wouldn't focus where I wanted it to. You are supposed to tap the touch-screen where you want it to focus and voila whirrr le focus. Not.

Without the butter, my phone takes gorgeous photographs does it not?

So I wanted a camera you could manual focus. Expensive. The guy downtown tat the camera store was all "Oh this Canon is only $300 dirt cheap but obviously you are too ignorant or too poor to see that get the fuck out of my store."
Ebay, DSLR Cameras, drool all over the keyboard. Older 10 MP DSLR Sony Alpha with 2 lenses around $200. There's a 14.2 MP alpha a hundred bucks more, nice stuff. I have a Sony cyber-shot 7 MP point-and-shoot, but you can't tap the screen and tell it where, and you can't manually focus. But I like Sony stuff it is cool and strong and well-thought-out. Old-fashioned brand loyalty. I have it.

When I saw the DSC-HX100V with  a 30x zoom and manual focus for 200 plus change I jumped on that shit mos' skosh' as David Haysbert used to say in the CBS drama "The Unit" which they dropped after 9/11 but to this day my favorite military drama ever. I digress. ( He's the Allstate guy with the comforting voice.
Let me say one more thing about this camera: 16.2 MP. And 1080p video at 30 fps. That's two things. So what? Because fuck you, that's what.

Today I got the tripod of all tripods off of Craigslist, Bausch and Lomb Masters, the big one, you can't even buy them any more and I stole it from a farmer in the throes of grief etc nice deal Oh pipe down!
 I like to take high-resolution photographs with my high-resolution camera and look at them on the high-resolution monitor of my brand new high-performance computer with the dedicated 2G  AMD 6670 graphics processor.

It is springtime here in Northwest Portland. All the ornamental fruit trees that line all the streets are in beautiful burgeoning full-throated bloom.

And now I can photograph the shit out of the best time of year. And then summer which is also the best time of year.

I still use the auto-focus. I have learned that much

And if you have an expensive high-end android phone with an expensive camera built-in, don't eat toast dripping with butter and then drip the melted butter on your tee-shirt, especially if you are going to try and clean the tiny little lens of your expensive high-resolution phone-camera with the part of your tee-shirt covered by a big blob of cold congealing butter. No camera in the world will focus through that shit, and you might spend hundreds of dollars on new camera gear before you figure it out.

All Winter Long

Boy do I feel weird right now. The sail is finished.

 All done. I still have shit to do to set up the sailing rig but the sail making is over, the canvas work is all done, the mast hoops are bent and seized with marline to seven of the fifty grommets, the reefing patches, cringles and crow's-foot points are all on there, and all the earrings are where and how they are supposed to be, with keckling all complete.

First I bent the shaved-down-flat cedar branch a little then I boiled it in a stew-pot on the stove and then put on my gloves and hot-bent it some more and then when it was like I wanted it I  seized the ends with fine copper picture wire. Out of the twelve I bent, only one broke.

There were 48 grommets when I started marling the mast hoops.  You would think they would be pretty much everywhere you could possibly need them. You would think. #s 49 and 50 hold the uppermost and lowest hoops. Oh well.

I fitted the mast to the sail, and it fits. I was worried last fall that the sail would be too big but it is not, every step it shrank, all the folding and seaming and hemming let alone three hot washes and two  boilings in the big galvanized tanning washtub.

To think I was worried the mast would prove too short. Hah.

The snotter I made last fall is way too short, but I have some 6 strand round sinnet that will do just fine once I seize an eye into one end. The halyard is the one I dipped in the pine-tar/linseed oil last fall. It smells really nice now and it happily is no longer sticky at all;. Nice stuff, and this summer I may treat more of the little ropes with that stuff.

I think I could have got away with the 10 footer for the sprit. However I really like how this one made from a 12 foot  #2 KD  Doug Fir 2x4 came out so fuck it. The sprit is the smaller pole angled off to the right to hold up the upper outer corner of the sail. The snotter is a little rope that holds the sprit and ties it loosely to the mast.

I marked out where the halyard cleat goes, as well as the down-haul thumb-cleat, and the two snotter thumb-cleats  one on the mast and one on the sprit.

Supposedly the pattern I painstakingly made out of cardboard will ensure that this thing snaps right into place so I can slide the mast into its receiver. We shall see.

I have still a couple of things to do like arranging for a steering oar, and possible some sort of a lee board, but that is another project altogether. I'm done with this one. Its a good thing, too. I'm bout half sick of sail making and all that type of nit-picky bullshit and especially:
 fuck grommets.
I'm very happy but like I said before, I do feel weird.

More Movie Please!

This took a while. Figuring out the movie maker in Windows 7 was annoying at best, but it works OK I guess. I don't like it though, there are things you can't do in this one that made the Vista movie maker more versatile. But I have VLC and maybe at some point I will get into it.

One thing, though, don't bother with the fullscreen option. There's not that many pixels and you really don't want to spread them out.

After All

Here's some raw video the day after I finally got my new computer working.

 Warning:Excessive Camera Movement!