random thoughts and ramblings
We just had a crazy blizzard rip through the Chicago area late afternoon yesterday, lasting until this morning. Check out some of the pictures I took while beginning the clean up process.
Here’s a shot from the front of my house taken from my driveway. Mine is on the right, neighbor’s is on the left.
Here is one of my buried car. That’s a lot of snow we need to move out of the way. My snow mounds are getting large already. I’m gonna have issues finding a place for all the snow.
As you may or may not know, Apple released iOS 4.1 last month. One of the new features added to the iPhone 4 was High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos. The basic rundown (as I understand it) of what happens is that the iPhone will take a picture 3 different ways in rapid succession, adjusting the exposure automatically for you. Then it tries to figure out which parts of the photos are the best from the 3 shots and then blends the best parts together into a single photo to give you an optimized shot. I’ve heard of this feature on high end DSLR cameras, but never on a mobile phone. I decided to try this out for myself to see how it looks.
Below you’ll see two photos, the left is the original shot and the one on the right is the HDR version. I took this photo outside my house during sundown.
You can see a huge difference between the photos. The sky is all washed out in the original photo. That’s just something you would have to deal with when taking pictures into the sun. Enter the HDR photo. The sky is fixed and looks blue like it’s supposed to be.
I’d have to say that this is a kick butt feature that I’m glad they added. This is one feature that I’ll definitely be using in the future.
So yesterday Robin and I had my sister and one of my brother’s and his girlfriend over for some pumpkin carving fun.
Here we all are (except for Robin who took the pic) digging out the seeds and guts from our respective pumpkins.
Here are two shots of the completed pumpkins. One with some lights on, and one with the lights off.
All in all we had lots of fun. Now I’ve got 5 pumpkins sitting outside in front of my house. I hope they don’t get eaten by animals are smashed up by crazy neighborhood kids.
Check out this bad ass car!
Now this is what I call a supercar! How did Porsche do it? They packed 3 electric motors and a 3.6-liter V8 in this 2 seat race car, that’s how.
I’m curious if this will ever come to production, and how much they would try to charge for it. Obviously out of my price range, but one can dream right?
Read the original article here.
So yesterday I went with some friends to Navy Pier in Chicago to check out the Tall Ships festival. I’ve never seen real life working sailing ships in person, so I thought it would be cool to check out. I learned lots of facts about these types of ships and it was fun to get to get on them and check them out.
From what I’ve seen in movies, the ships are actually much smaller than I imagined below deck. I was really hunched over down there trying to walk around. People back then (most of these ships date back at a least 100 years) must have been midgets. On one ship we toured (it was used during the battle of 1812), they told us the original crew would have been around 150 sailers. 50 working each shift, 3 shifts. I couldn’t figure out how in the heck they fit 100 people below deck to sleep while the workers were above deck. It was extremely tight quarters down there.
Overall it was a fun experience. I wish I could have foreseen the amount of people that were going to be there. As you can see from the shots I posted, it was very crowded. I wish we would have had more time there to get a chance to board more ships. Oh well, maybe next time.
