Weekend Plans

It seems as though most weekends I don’t have a problem picking what to do. Most weekends I don’t have multiple options floating around. This weekend is a bit of an overload. I have been asked to go to my cousin’s softball tournament on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday it is roughly 9am until 12pm, on Sunday its closer to 1pm until 5pm. Also this weekend is the Schiele Museum’s Pirate Invasion. The invasion is 9am until 5pm on Saturday and 1pm until 5pm on Sunday. Really convenient, right? I would love to go to both days of both events, but changes of that happening are pretty much 0. Also, my sleep is screwed up again, so not much chance of being a stable early bird or being able to stay up late after the softball games. What shall I do? I’ve been to numerous softball games and tournaments, but this is the last tournament of the season, but also, its the last major presentation of the Pirates exhibit at the Schiele.

The third option is to sleep in both days.

Refining the Online Presence

I feel like I have been fighting with my digital identity for a long time now. I start on these little projects of integrating things and it just never seems to all come together. I was originally intending to work with SiteEngine to have a central place for all of the content related to me. Now, I’m not sure exactly what I want as an end result, but I do know that 1 central place is not something that has ever worked for me, no matter how good of an idea it may seem. I think the best I will be able to do is integrate my blog, status, and other RSS-compatible systems into a central site (probably under the www.icurtis.me address). I have decided that I would very much also like to have a less dynamic site that is more of a portfolio of my work, spanning the areas of ceramics, programming and photography. The site would focus a lot on my work, perhaps even some of my thoughts on my work, but no where near as detailed about me as the ClayMentality site. The problem with the portfolio idea is that I would have to take a lot of photos for the ceramics portion, do screenshots that show my programming projects in a flattering way and sort through my existing photos to showcase my best. Somewhere in all of this I also want to fit in room for my Curriculum Vitae and/or a resume. Every time it comes to developing something like this for myself I find myself getting distracted and moving on to other projects that don’t involve having to organize things that are from my complicated life.

New App: Match Maker Duplicate Finder

At some point over the last few hours I threw together this application, its a minor app. I needed a way to identify potentially duplicate files in a certain folder on my network, and I really didn’t want to do it manually, so here is a quick little program to take care of that task in a rather dirty fashion. I use the program to identify potentially duplicate videos that have been stored in dated folders after being downloaded.

The application is written in C# and requires .NET 3.5 to run (if you are on a modern Windows OS, you are ok). The program will take a folder you specify and treat it as the top of the tree, and from there recursively gather filenames. Once those names are gathered it compares all of the base file names as well as sizes. Not a fancy app, but thought it might be useful to someone.

For Download: http://users.pcfire.net/~curtis/software/DuplicateFinder.exe  [14KB]

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The Macro Lens is Good to Me

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I am seriously liking my new 60mm Macro lens. My only complaint so far is that I had to get way too close at 60mm to this creature to get this shot.

An Update: July 1, 2010

Hello Reader(s). It has been a while since I have blogged, over a month for any real entries.  I suppose you could say that I’ve been keeping to myself a bit lately. Not a major amount happening in my life. I have spent some time this month working on some stuff for my aunt and trying to help her get things ready for her big July 4th party that she does every year. For once it seems like other people are helping too, which means less for me to do, but also less time for Chris and myself to spend alone with my aunt. Other than that I’ve been spending a little more time working on ceramics, mostly developing ideas. I’ve thrown exactly one night in the last month. It didn’t go bad and I feel like I turned out some more creative things than I usually do in these middle of the night sessions.

I’ve found myself trying hopelessly to find meaning in my life. I need direction. I’m 25 years old and I have no clue what to do with my life. Shouldn’t I have developed more of an understanding of what I want to be by now? I’m pretty decent at photography and enjoy it, even the technical side of things, but yet there are many days when I look at the work Chris does and think how much better he is with it. I suppose its just a matter of practice and learning how to properly use available light. I have returned to being bored most of the time, resulting in me sleeping odd hours and not really knowing how to fill up my time. I need substance in my life to be happy. It also doesn’t help that this feels like the hottest summer ever, making it difficult to be outside.

I am lacking things to be excited about, and keep hoping that one day the so far fruitless quest will result in something that will make me long-term happy.

Committing Myself to Macro

I have just done something that I don’t know if it is silly or not. I have just purchased a Nikon AF-S 60mm f/2.8 lens. The lens is intended for macro. Until now all of my macro shots have been done with my standard lenses using a close-up/macro conversion kit. Now I will have native macro in this lens. I can also go to the full range, going to infinity as well, but its all in one little lens. 60mm is hardly a normal focal length for me, but I assume I will adapt well to it. I haven’t been doing a lot of macro lately because of the difficulty with using the filters with the lenses (picking the right diopter, humidity causing them to fog, etc). I am hoping this will renew my interest in the topic and allow me to explore it further.

I will return to the world of the detailed and tiny, and perhaps remind myself how to actually manually focus (since I am too wobbly for AF to matter at that size).  This is the lens that I have been considered for a while now and I finally just decided to crack and get it, especially since yesterday I really wanted it in my aunt’s yard. Every decent flower photo of mine, macro or not, has been taken in her yard.

Tuesday I guess I will get the chance to see if I still enjoy macro as much as I think I do. Might just have to grab Chris’ SB-900 and see what the two do together 🙂

The Difference A Developer Makes

I have developed my 4th roll of film, but I have made a slight change in one aspect of the process, I have switched to Kodak’s D-76 developer from the generic Adorama developer. This developer takes longer to work (meaning also its less harsh and allows for more flexibility). From analyzing the negatives this time I feel like things are more evenly developed, there are no strange spots on the film and in general the contrast of the images is more pleasing. This certainly inspires me to continue shooting on film, at least in part. That being said, I reloaded my camera with Kodak Plus-X 125 film this time, not Neopan 400, so I am shaking things up a bit there as well.

Missing Handcuffs

A slight mystery has come about here. I am attempting to locate a pair of Galls Standard Handcuffs that I have not seen in a while. The cuffs are fairly cheap, but I was hoping to use them to make a more complex restraint (utilizing the cuffs, a connector chain and a pair of boot size leg cuffs). I recall the cuffs being placed in my under-bed toy box, but I have all but turned the box inside out looking for the cuffs, as well as other locations for storing of restraints. Where could they possibly be? A present theory is that I may have loaned/given them to a friend, but at the present time I don’t remember doing so. If I have loaned you a pair of cuffs resembling those below, please let me know, so that I may properly update my records. If you have my cuffs, you may keep them, I won’t ask for them back, but I would like to be able to update my records to properly indicate their status (given to____, lost, etc).

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Recommendations for the Future of Education

Almost all schools now have an “online learning platform”, whether it is Moodle, Blackboard, Blackboard Vista (previously WebCT) or some other means of providing students access to online course content. I believe that these platforms are underused in many institutions and should be expanded to support all classes.

While in-person courses are the traditional form of course administration, I feel that they could be supplemented by their “distance education” counterparts. I feel that there is much enhancement that online course platforms can offer traditional courses, and I believe that there was ways that online courses can be improved as well. I would love to see traditional courses use online platforms the what that distance courses presently do, and distance courses should be in a totally new class of learning.

First, I believe that all courses, no matter what delivery method, should have an securely accessible class site where at bare minimum there is access to a syllabus and grade sheet. That alone would allow students to stay better organized and on top of things. The addition of any paper documents handed out in class being added to the site would only add to the usefulness of the course site. For institutions utilizing SmartBoard technology, there is no reason to not provide electronic access to the instructor’s notes for the day. Students often spent a large amount of time taking notes in classes, usually writing what the instructor is saying as well as whatever they are writing on their boards, this is a step of redundancy for auditory learners. Absences from a course can often be disastrous, especially for classes that meet only once a week, but an enhanced web presence for a course could ease that disaster into an inconvenience. The web presence can not become a replacement for class attendance, but it can help keep students more connected to the material, and perhaps as a result, less likely to have a need to drop or withdraw.

Next, online courses have been allowed to fall to the level of a guided independent study. For undergraduate education, this is inadequate. There is a rich world of knowledge available online, and it would seem that such information would be the best place to start with building an online course. There should be more to online courses than reading the text, having discussion boards and taking tests. There is a lot of information that is not academically suited on the Internet, but that’s where the instructor comes in, to guide students to appropriate information. Online students should be held to a higher level of technical competence as well. It is possible to conduct elaborate projects and utilize information technology in far more ways than is being accomplished presently.

Also, and this is highly optimistic of me, I believe that instructors should post their syllabus at least 2 weeks before the semester is to begin, to allow students to plan accordingly. Most courses carry 3 hours, but that doesn’t mean they all carry the same amount of work. Additionally, it is quite possible for a student to have a conflict with an instructional style in use. Providing syllabi a few weeks ahead could save everyone some trouble, and also allow students some “inactive” time to prepare for the course.