This morning me and J booked our spring vacation. Two weeks at the ” Phi Phi Island Village Beach Resort & Spa” in Thailand. We leave on January 23 2004 and we will get 12 nights on site.
My week
This week has been filled with my management education and many long meetings. During the management course we worked with sociograms revealing good and bad about ourselves and our projections about others in the group. This, once again gave me new insights about myself and how I work. “What you see in others, you must have within yourself to recognize.” I think that is very true.
When I was cycling home from Brändön (in shorts with rain and HEAVY wind) I made a rather substantial decision that hopefully will make me happier in the future. I cannot share it with you (yet) but I will as soon as possible. Some things have to get settled first. Just taking the decision has lifted a big stone from my chest.
I haven’t had time to write very much on my blog this week and that is something I really miss. I have instead chosen to prioritize sleep and my family,, which I think is rather important 🙂
Now Tovah is asleep and I am going to watch the second half of “The Ring” together with my lovely wife, some candles and crackers with cheese.
Bugs do not exists in PHPBugTracker
A problem&solution for my own record.
Two bugs disappeared in PHPBugTracker and the reason was that the status_id field was set to a value that did no longer exist. The following sql solved it the problem but the bug is still there.
update phpbt_bug set status_id=’8′ where bug_id =31;
update phpbt_bug set status_id=’8′ where bug_id =32;
select * from phpbt_bug where bug_id=’31’ or bug_id=’32’;
[Written while listening to: En till som jag]
Service is at its best when it is not seen, right?
Shouldn’t service be something that is provided as a service for the user, not a hinder? Right a very very minor thing happened but it still annoys me. I requested the sysadmin to remove the DHCP service for my laptop so I could provide it from my own server instead, but they refuse with the argument that they cannot keep track of the computers otherwise. Wonder how they managed for the last 8.5 years which is when I started working at Systemteknik and I already had my own DHCP server running. I guess I better not tell them that I have 17 other hosts handled by my own DHCP server.
Argh, why do I get upset about such minor issues. I just block the DHCP traffic from their server and be happy. Quicker than asking them to remove it in the first place :-/
Tovah Self Portrait
Tovah drew her first self portrait today! Isn’t it nice?!
Away and Anxiety
I will be gone Monday until Wednesday evening on a seminar in Brändön. It is the final seminar with sleep over in my management education course, but I cannot really say that I want to go 🙁 I would rather sit under my corkoak and program on my SIP prototype. It is like all the work related issues are washing over me. Issues I am not really interested in or care for. Being a researcher is very fun. Being a research leader with the financial responsibility is rather boring and creates a lot of anxiety (for me). For me getting funding for research feels like begging and I don’t like doing that. In the industry it can be compared with living of stock money but the main difference there is that eventually the goal is to live of the profit. I.e. do something good that the market want then you don’t have to beg anymore. That is unfortunately not the case in the research world. The individual researchers can get rich (spinoff companies, patents etc.) but that doesn’t make the situation easier for the research group (unless personal profit is put back into the research). The latter is really a Swedish problem where the inventor owns the results, whereas in the USA the university owns the results. The Swedish academic system is a bit strange where if a researcher is successful that only creates envy instead of admiration and the researcher doesn’t really get anything “for it” (unless s/he commercializes the results on their own).
Anybody interested in hiring an assistant professor in Media Technology and Chief Science Officer at Marratech?
KISS Tuning
Kiss Tuning contains a number of cool tips on how to modify your Kiss player!
Monday first in the MT Calendar
Raven found out how to change the MT calendar to show Monday as the first day of the week (as we Swedes like it).
[Written while listening to: Chris de Burgh – Shine On]
Outing to Hägnan
Today we went on a picknick with the children’s playgroup at Hägnan. It was about 10-15 children in all ages and we had a very good time. We grilled chicken, sausages and ate it together with breadsticks and melon. It was very delightful. It is the kind of place where you can just let the children run around on their own. No strange places where they can fall down, no cars, no high speed bicycles and just tons of fun things to do. In the beginning I was a bid of a protective dad and followed Tovah around but I got over that after lunch but that unfortunately proved not to be to good as Tovah for the first time in her life got lost. She was on her own about one house away but it was still very scary for her.
They also had straw barn where the children (and adults 🙂 could jump into the dried straw. Tovah was a bit scared, but she jumped nicely when she held my hand. Later there was an unfortunate accident 🙁 Tovah and another girl were supposed to jump together. They held hands and Tovah started counting to three and the other girl jumped immediately, pulling Tovah with here. Tovah landed on top of the other girl. It must have hurt quite a bit as they both cried for some time and I couldn’t get Tovah to jump again.
When we got home I was really tired, and found myself just sitting in front of the computer for a while. Some the and chickpeas helped my mood back to happiness. Played with my photos for the rest of the day and learned tons of new things about Photoshop and the most misnamed filter, Unsharp mask which is actually a tool for making the image look sharper.
During the evening I also made IP-telephony experiment. I used Marratech Pro as a SIP client towards DigiSip and called my mother using it as a phone replacement. After a while Tovah wanted to speak with her as well so I called the Pingtel phone as well and included that into the conversation using Pro as a mixer and gateway. It worked very well and the only real problem was sound levels as my speech came out much louder in the Pingtel than my mother.
It is my mother’s birthday today! Happy Birthday, mom!!
Today was also Dick’s funeral. Tina was there. I couldn’t go as I was giving an exam today and honestly I didn’t feel like going.
Now I am just waiting for Tovah to fall asleep so I can get into bed with my lovely wife.
Scanning Experiences
I have now been playing with scanning my photos for a while and I have come to some conclusions. For the record, the scanner is a Canon Canoscan 9900F and I have connected it using USB2.0. My target is publishing them online but also saving them is original PSD (I use Photoshop) for later editing. The source is all negative film.
As you can imagine, the settings you use when scanning a photo affects the result and I have currently found that the following produces the best result.
* Resolution 1600: This produces files of about 2288×1464 pixels and each raw file is 9.56MB in PSD format which in turn can be compressed non-lossy to 7.2MB using Winzip with maximum compression. The resulting JPEG as created with Adobe ImageReady using JPEG quality 90 is 1.35MB. For comparison the PSD file becomes 34MB if the resolution is increased to 3200.
* Remove Dust and Scratches (FARE) Hard: FARE is a technique that uses infrared light to detect dust and scratches on the source and does a VERY good job in removing them. This features as I understand it is unique for Canon scanners. Most of my old negatives have been stored badly and are a bit damaged.
* Fading correction Normal: This makes the colors a bit more saturated.
* Grain correction: Normal This was actually the hardest one to decide on. If I set it on soft you can see the grains on e.g. white walls but if I set it to hard then the image gets to blurry. I decided to use normal.
* Quality High Quality: This just means that it scans in higher quality than normal.
* Not using Unsharp Mask: The unsharp mask is very important but Photoshop makes a much better job than the scanner software. More about this later.
Using these settings scanning on negative takes 5 minutes 20 seconds.
The scanner can scan 24 negatives at one time but that requires that the negatives are cut in sheets of 6 which most Swedish negatives aren’t (they are cut in sheets of 4).
That was the scanning part and I will post more details about handling tomorrow.
[Written while listening to: Chris de Burgh – Carry Me 03 – and talking with my mother using SIP.]
Update: changed the text about Fading correction.