Winter View

winter view smallWe’ve had a very snowy winter this year in Massachusetts. This animated image shows the view from my bedroom window looking out down our driveway. The pictures were taken sporadically since we had a big snow in early December. Click the picture for a full version (a large 2MB file).

Since I’m sure to forget how I made this, here is what I did using the Imagemagick program:

  • convert -delay 100 -loop 0 IMG*.jpg output.gif —– 1 second delay between fames, loops forever, uses all files like IMG_XXX.jpg to make the image
  • convert output.gif -resize 20% small.gif —– resizes the image to 20%

Winter Cabining

Last weekend eight of us went camping at the Nunnemacher cabin in New Hampshire, run by the Dartmouth Outdoors Club. The cabin is nestled between some of the ski trails of the Dartmouth Ski Way. We spent two nights with no electricity or running water, and nothing but a drafty, ice cold privy. It was great. Continue reading

My First Book – a blurb.com review

Update 12/31/08: Since writing this I have also had another hardbound and a paperback book published by blurb.  In all cases I have been very happy with the quality.  Other family members have had good luck as well, although we have noticed that different print batches of the same book can come back with fairly significant differences in color. If you are looking for 100% color accuracy you may be slightly disappointed, but for most people blurb is a great deal and makes very nice products.

As a grad student I’ve had a few publications in conferences, but I recently published my first book. Unlike my previous work which was mostly technical giberish, my latest piece goes back to nature, and the backpacking trip that my dad, brother, and I took up Katahdin, an amazing mountain in Maine. Although the first print run was only two copies, it was very well received, and I’m planning to order a third copy soon. I made the book using software from Blurb.com, a site which makes it easy to create publish your own photo books. Continue reading

Free Learning

I just heard of Lecturefox, a site which provides listings of publicly available courses from not only MIT’s Open Courseware, but a number of other schools ranging from UC Berkeley and Kent State to Oxford. It is great to see so much information being made available freely online, I just wish I had a bit more time to actually go through some of the videos. Lecturefox primarily emphasizes courses from scientific fields (it is run by a pair of self-trained German computer scientists), but they also have listings from other fields like economics and philosophy. Some of the offerings are full blown courses with video or audio and lecture notes, while others are recorded lectures from visiting speakers.

I don’t have any sense of the quality of the different offerings–there are certainly some courses I’ve taken in the past which would be extremely boring to watch on video, so it’s not clear to me how useful many of these full lecture series courses would really be. On the other hand, some of the shorter “guest lecture” style talks might be more self contained and accessible.

A few that sounded interesting:

In Black and White

I’m a big fan of Google’s Picasa application. Its primary use is as a photo organizer, but it also has some photo touch up features that work pretty well. I was recently trying to turn some of my photos into black and whites, but wasn’t getting the results I was hoping for simply by transforming the image to gray scale in photoshop. Then I read a bit about how Ansel Adams made many of his images so impressive by applying red filters to his lenses. Using colored filters makes it so that different colors turn into different shades of gray. In many of his images, the red filter makes the sky much darker, providing greater contrast against snowy rocks and mountains. I knew I could do this kind of filtering in photoshop, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could also do it in Picasa with just a few easy clicks. Here are my results.

The Grand Canyon

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Thanksgiving 2007

We hosted a pot luck thanksgiving dinner at our house this year with a bunch of friends from our department. In total, we had ten people: Megan, Gal, Stefan, Bobby, Brandon, Laura, Marek, Jana, Philipp, and myself. As you’d expect, we had a lot of good food: biscuits, pumpkin bread, spinach spread on toast, cubed beets and turnips, mixed vegies, potatoes au gratin, sweet potato soup, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, and apple pie. Oh, and a turkey too.

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Straight Man: A Novel

I just finished reading Richard Russo’s Straight Man, a hilarious story of an extremely dysfunctional academic department. Over the course of a long weekend, the narrator, William Henry Devereaux , Jr, manages to be charged as a duck murdering terrorist, cry for joy from wetting his pants, and (almost) play in a donkey basketball game. While the storyline alone is comical enough, it is told with a sarcastic humor that shows up even when the tale turns more serious to deal with relationships both between parents and children and husbands and wives. Continue reading

BHD #8 – Spanish Tapas

On my dinner night I made two spanish dishes for Megan and Filip. The first was Patatas Bravas, the quintessential spanish appetizer of fried potatoes in a spicy sauce. This was accompanied by grilled pork on a stick, marinated in a mix of Spanish and Arabic spices.

I had made Patatas Bravas twice over the summer with a different recipe which had a separate, mayonnaise based sauce. The new recipe instead had you cook up the potatoes in spices and hot peppers, which was good, but I don’t think my sauce to potato ratio was quite right. I also had trouble getting the potatoes to brown while frying… I think in the past I’ve had better luck using vegetable oil rather than olive oil.

The second dish of grilled (actually broiled) pork skewers were marinated in a nice mix of coriander and cumin seeds, garlic, and paprika. Just like the potatoes, I’d like to try these again, but make more sauce and marinate the meat for longer.

I need a bit more practice before I can compete with some of the tapas places we visited on our trip to spain last spring, but it was still pretty good. Having the food with Este, one of the better Spanish red wine’s I’ve tried lately ($9 at Whole Foods), didn’t hurt either.

BHD #7 – Megan’s Chili

After turning in an assignment for one of our classes, Filip, Gal and I decided that we should take the night easy and make ask Megan nicely if she would cook dinner for us. Luckily she agreed, so the rest of us went out to buy her ingredients and restock the wine cellar. She made an excellent chili with beef, black beans, tomatoes, lots of spices, and pasta shells. We were all starving, but the food was really hot, so we either dipped our bread in it or received third degree burns on our tongues (or more likely both). We had two dessert courses as well, the first was butternut squash and apples which I baked up with brown sugar, butter, and a little salt. I’m not sure how I feel about butternut squash–it didn’t have much flavor. Filip felt it grew on you, but next time I’ll try something different with it. This was followed by fruit salad. It was the first time I’d had fresh berries in a few months, so it should ward off scurvy for the time being.

After dinner we watched Prairie Home Companion (the movie) which was pretty funny, if a bit strange. They had some hilarious songs and it makes me want to listen to the full radio show again. Lately I’ve been downloading the podcasts of the show, but they only include the “News from Lake Woebegone” portion (which is arguably the best part).