…The Rus­sians Are Com­ing The Rus­sians Are Com­ing.

Walt Whit­taker: Look, can I give you some advice? You’ll never make it down to the har­bor. Why don’t you all give your­selves up? Either you’ll kill some­body, or you’ll get killed. Either way — you could start a war!
Lieu­tenant Rozanov: What is your name?
Walt Whit­taker: Whit­taker. Walt …
Lieu­tenant Rozanov: Remark to this, Whit­taker Walt. We must have boat. Even now may be too late. This is your island, I make your respon­si­bil­ity you help us get boat quickly, oth­er­wise there is World War III, and every­body is blam­ing YOU!

Cute lit­tle Cold War para­ble from 1966. Very funny in spots and kind of lame (in 60’s sort of way), but we watched the whole darn thing on TCM tonight which is more than I can say or a lot of the newer movies I’ve been get­ting from Net­flix lately.

My first atempt at an HDR image. Because I only had two expo­sures, not nec­es­sar­ily shot with this process in mind, and one was really washed out (more of an acci­den­tal wrong expo­sure) there is no detail in the sky. I’m sure things will improve when I shoot 3 expo­sures 2 stops apart either way from nor­mal with the cam­era on a tripod.

Did ya know that point­ing your cam­era directly at the sun can make it go all out of focus? Nei­ther did I, until yes­ter­day. I kind of like the effect, even if it does look like I for­got to focus. That’s the Hard­eeville Post Office if you are curi­ous. Worked fine for the sunrise…

Never did walk on the beach this week­end. Jaded?

Got up this morn­ing and drove right home. There are no more post offices that could be remotely con­sid­ered on the way anymore.

Fake It ‘Til You Make It or mak­ing an High Dynamic Range (HDR) image from just one expo­sure. I have been play­ing with three dif­fer­ent pro­grams for cre­at­ing HDR images and one of them, Dynamic Photo has a way to FITYMI, so I gave it a try. I used a recent Post Office pic­ture that really could have benifited from the process, but I didn’t take the three required exposure.

	The orig­i­nal expo­sure with the cam­era set on auto.
	The photo after post-processing in Paint Shop Pro.
	FITYMI using Dynamic Photo.

In my unsci­en­tific selec­tion process I’m lean­ing towards get­ting the Dynamic Photo soft­ware for a cou­ple of rea­sons, one of which is this abil­ity to fake an HDR image from one pic­ture, the other is the cost $39. I need to try a real test image first — the same scene shot with 3 expo­sures 2EV apart — before tak­ing the plunge.

This morn­ing the Emperor and I went out to buy a paper. We stopped get­ting home deliv­ery of the Aiken Stan­dard the other week because they weren’t get­ting here in time for our break­fast read­ing, so on the week­ends I drive over to a local con­ve­nience store and buy a copy. Today was my lucky day and pos­si­bly some­one else’s unlucky day. Sit­ting on top of the paper box was a copy of the Stan­dard. No one was any­where to be seen, so not want­ing the wind to scat­ter all that newsprint around I picked up my com­pli­men­tary copy. And see­ing as my pocket was laden with quar­ters I light­ened the load by buy­ing a copy of The State. Other than stand­ing on the thresh­old of the garage door, Donna hasn’t been out­side at all.

What did I learn from all this news­pa­per read­ing? Hillary Clin­ton is com­ing to town. Do you want to know why? It’s the Aiken Fac­tor — who­ever vis­its town takes over as the Demo­c­rat front runner.

Her closet com­peti­tor, Sen. Barack Obama, who appeared in Aiken last month, just recently pulled ahead of Clin­ton by four points in the lat­est Wash­ing­ton Post/ABC News poll for Iowa.

Watched another Kissy-Poo Movie™ this after­noon, About A Boy, do I even have to tell you the kind of char­ac­ter Hugh Grant played? Didn’t think so. He, like Vince Vaughan, play only one char­ac­ter in every movie they are in. The only change is the character’s name. That’s it. If I was writ­ing an entry for Wikipedia I would be hard pressed to choose which one’s pic­ture should go next to the entry for “One Dimen­sional.” That said, Hugh is not as annoy­ing to me as Vince is, so I slightly enjoyed the movie.

A movie I did enjoy this after­noon, even though I came in at about 1/4 in mark:

Eliz­a­beth: Par­lay. I invoke the right of par­lay. Accord­ing to the Code of the brethren, set down by the pirates Mor­gan and Bartholomew, you have to take me to your Captain.

That’s right, the Scifi Chan­nel was show­ing TDPM.

Went over to a co-worker of Donna’s tonight to hook up her DSL. To start, I’m not too sure the DVD that they sent was 100%, as it would hang each time the Next but­ton was clicked. The only way to get it to advance was to eject the CD and then rein­sert it. Then when it did get to the next page the dis­play was gar­bled in the install win­dow — some blank spots and new text over some of the last page’s text.

At step 5 when you are to choose the modem to install I was greeted with 6 square but­tons and only one had a pic­ture in it, the rest were blank. By (the slow) process of elim­i­na­tion I found the but­ton for a Netopia modem. Unfor­tu­nately it wasn’t the same model as the Netopia modem she had. I sol­diered on installing that one as it was the only one remotely correct..

After hook­ing up all the cables the DSL Sync light was still blink­ing. Crap. I then swapped off the Cat5 cable and tried hook­ing up to the PC with the USB cable. Same results. Rebooted modem. Still blink­ing. Rebooted PC and modem. Blink — blink– blink.

Gave up and called tech sup­port. I had to go through a trou­bleshoot­ing song and dance with an auto­mated help sys­tem. “Yes.” “No.” “Con­tinue.” “Con­tinue.” When the com­puter was sat­is­fied I really had a prob­lem I was handed to a per­son. Richard was prob­a­bly his Amer­i­can name, but his Eng­lish was bet­ter than quite a few peo­ple I deal with on a daily basis at ASCO. He ran line tests and told me there was a prob­lem and that a tech­ni­cian need to come out, so Lisa sched­uled one for this Saturday.

She only had one phone in a jack and I placed a fil­ter on that one. I tested the long phone cord I brought with me with her phone to make sure it was OK. I plugged her phone in the jack the DSL line was plugged in to make sure the jack was OK. I fig­ure it has to be a bad modem, because even if I didn’t have the exact cor­rect dri­ver from the CD I would still get a sync light if the line was good.