Well. Finally we took possession of our new house in Royal Oak this Friday, Aug 13th, 2004. We finished signing things around noon on Friday and then some of our friends showed up to help us move (thanks Doug, Scott, Ryan for lugging all our stuff, and thank you Candice and Pam for baby-sitting). We had way more stuff than we had thought and it took solid work until about 10pm to get most of the stuff moved over. We have too much junk. While the guys were hauling the ladies were unpacking so we’ve got a decent start at unpacking done.
I’ve already had some fun with home upgrades. Saturday night I wired our basement for electrical so we had something for our TV the plug-in. I changed an outlet on the island to something less ugly, I installed a dimmer, painted our railing black, and a few other assorted things. It’s fun having stuff like this to do.
Anyways. I better get back to work 
Supposedly we are taking possession of our house on Friday this week. We find it highly unlikely that it will be done, the finishing work at least. So far we are still missing eves troughs, lots of paint, many appliances, an electrical outlet, light valences, and undoubtedly more stuff. We also have one damaged window frame, a painted door frame that shouldn’t be, paint all over the oak window trim, damaged fireplace hearth, and lots of poorly installed electrical outlets. Seems like a lot to get resolved in four working days. Hopefully they will just get it done because we don’t really want to take time off work to sit at home while trades come back and fix these things.
Aside from that we are really looking forward to moving into our new house. It’ll be so nice having space!
Jared, David and I were playing around w/ the A75, my blue photon micro light, and my old shoe mount flash unit and took quite a few “interesting” photos like these ones. They are all unedited. All 15 sec at f8 and ISO50.
On Thursday evening Anji and I cashed in a tonne of VISA points and bought a Canon Powershot A75. So far we’re pretty happy with the unit. It’s low light performance is pretty decent (although slow as a noise reduction algorithm is turned on for long exposures). It’s auto-focus is also a bit slow but seems to be sharp. It comes with quite a few preset shooting modes as well as neat effects like vivid colors, sepia, black and white, soft focus, neutral colors. It also has partial and full manual controls of shutter speed and aperture (f2.8 – f8) and focus. Manual focus is a bit tough since pretty much everything looks in focus when you are looking at it on a 1.5″ screen and you can’t zoom in while focusing. Linking the camera with Linux isn’t as slick as the old camera was. Using the USB cable I have to use gphoto2 and the USB PTP Camera driver. It can’t delete images but it downloads them well enough.
I was having problems with the images after downloading them to my computer. The camera sets an EXIF flag for vertical images which some software honors and some does not. This was really annoying because when I’d look at the images in Kuickshow they would be the proper orientation but in Mozilla and Gimp they would be wrong. I found a cool project called jhead that looks at these flags, rotates the image and clears the flag so that it’ll just work in all programs. Syntax is simple:
$ jhead -autorot *.jpg
Even cooler jhead can rename the images to something useful and update the lastmod time to the date/time in the EXIF header. Here is the command I run to fix my images direct from the camera.
$ jhead -n"%Y%m%d-%H%M%S" -autorot -ft *.JPG
Found a really awesome project Tor which is “an anonymizing overlay network for TCP”. It’s something along the lines of a low latency mix-master for interactive protocols. I live crypto / anonymity stuff so I gave it a try at work. It basically acts as a socks proxy and routes traffic through a random selection of Tor servers on the Internet using lots of encryption and magic to ensure no one compromised node can determine the source / dest of the traffic. It’s still early development but it works quite well. I was able to browse sites like Hotmail from work which usually are banned during office hours. The installation is the coolest part. For windows just download the EXE, run it and configure your app to use it as a socks proxy. Very slick.
