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Hairy HDR.

Posted 20:21 CET Sunday February 28th, 2010 (193 days ago). 460 views. 2 comments. Tagged with Personal, Photography.

As per popular demand, here are a few picture of me with two and a half weeks worth of facial hair. I have the impression that I might have created an illusion of actually having a massive beard, but, as you can see from the pictures, that is far from the truth. As you probably also notice, I’m not very comfortable in front of the camera, at least not when I have to take the pictures myself. Don’t I look all jolly and excited!?

Since I was going to force myself to take some portraits, I decided to try to take some high dynamic range, HDR, photos. It’s an interesting technique I’ve been sniffing at for some time, but I’ve never gotten around to try it until now. Done right, HDR can produce some stunning results. To create an HDR picture, you take several picture of the same scene with different exposure and magically (or “mathematically”, if you will) merge these pictures to create a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas in the resulting image. Continue reading "Hairy HDR." →

All Clear.

Posted 08:53 CET Sunday February 28th, 2010 (193 days ago). 290 views. No comments. Tagged with Internet, World News.

After watching the live coverage from Hawaii yesterday I think we can safely say that tsunami prediction is not an exact science yet. At some point in time, Mother Earth will fuck us up real good. We’re not capable of predicting any of the things she can throw at us without even breaking a sweat: Earthquakes, volcano eruptions, floods, tornadoes. We can’t even predict the weather correctly twelve hours in advance. That cute weather girl tells you the sun will shine the next day and you wake up to a blizzard. Of course it will all accumulate in December 2012 when everything is supposed to go to hell. I, for one, would really like to experience 2013 and the years to come after that, so I’m leaning towards the Wulfmorgenthaler explanation to the whole Mayan calendar thing. See the comic above. Click to enlarge or find a good magnifying glass.

In terms of technology and the internet, the last 24 hours have been very interesting. After the earthquake in Chile, land line and cell phone networks went black in many areas, while the internet continued working. Because of this, people were able to communicate with the outside world, send pictures, messages and even connect video calls through Skype and other voice over IP services. The same thing happened to some degree after the Haiti earthquake. Continue reading "All Clear." →

The Earth Shaketh.

Posted 10:08 CET Saturday February 27th, 2010 (194 days ago). 243 views. No comments. Tagged with World News.

Just weeks after the devastating Haiti earthquake, Chile has now been hit by an even larger quake. A tsunami warning has been sent out for Chile, Columbia, Peru, the Antarctic, Costa Rica, Panama and Japan. CNN is reporting that a 9 feet (3 meter) wave has been recorded. The epicenter of the earthquake was 117 kilometers from the city of Concepción, Chile’s second largest city with a population of about 200,000. I have not yet seen any news reports about the current situation is Concepción, which is probably a bad sign. From Santiago, 320 kilometers North of Concepción, reports are coming in about shattered windows and massive blackouts, but no structural damage.

To whom it might concern; Anniken and Pernille are currently in Panama, they were supposed to go back to Costa Rica yesterday, but were delayed because of bad weather. They are in the area of Bocas del Toro, in the North-West coastal part of the country – about as far away as you can be from Chile and still be in Panama. Internet connections are sketchy at best in the area, and they can’t receive incoming text messages. They can, however, send text messages.

Epic Beard Man.

Posted 19:22 CET Thursday February 25th, 2010 (196 days ago). 352 views. 4 comments. Tagged with Global Happiness, Personal.

Some days I’m a social being, some days I’m not. The last week I’ve mostly been the latter, spending my time outside of work and the gym at home where I’ve been watching TV, playing Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City on my soon-to-melt Xbox 360 and looking at the Twitter API documentation.

Am I stuck in an antisocial rot? Might sound like it. That I haven’t shaved in two weeks says “yes”. But the reason for my lack of shaving is Norway’s Chuck Norris¹, a.k.a. Lars Monsen. He once said that shaving when it is as cold as it’s been this winter was a really bad idea. He also mentioned that he thought the same thing about showering, but I’m not planning to follow up on that one. The no-shaving-thing works very well, though, -20 Celsius is not a challenge anymore. I should shave soon, though, because I’m starting to scare kids. True story. Continue reading "Epic Beard Man." →

Global Happiness.

Posted 20:23 CET Monday February 22nd, 2010 (199 days ago). 214 views. No comments. Tagged with Global Happiness.

After a little consideration I’ve decided to pursue the Global Happiness Index project I wrote about on Friday. I registered GlobalHappiness on Twitter, so I think I’ll just skip talking about “index” from now on. To be honest, I was a bit surprised that GlobalHappiness wasn’t already registered by someone else. What about starting to follow GlobalHappiness today? Great idea!

Of course, only collecting data from Twitter won’t actually show the actual global happiness. It will show the happiness among Twitter users, people with an internet connection and a sometimes unhealthy need to share. Take myself for instance. Still, with the massive amount of tweets that are coming in, it will at least give some indication of how people feel globally. Another good reason to use Twitter is how extremely easy they make it to access the public time line. It’s a simple GET request and everything I need is available. But what to do with all that data? Continue reading "Global Happiness." →