Seb's weblog

Dead Snow vs Black Sheep (more…)

I used this occasion to test some new toys.

The GPS was handy, and I can extract most informations to use them on a computer (well, truth be told, I haven’t used yet the track informations and I may well lose time related informations, and that sucks). But there aren’t that many libraries to edit (not just parse) EXIF information, and in the end I had to use the nice Image::ExifTool Perl library to do what I wanted to do. There’s gpsPhoto that does almost exactly what I wanted, but it seems to be based on a tracklog instead of waypoints, as I planned.

On the camera side, the 24mm is hard to use and get good results, while the 105mm is still quite wonderful. However, I didn’t find that many interesting subjects to explore (even though in my opinion, it seems that cats are always a good subject). Anyway, all published photos are now up.

Maybe I shouldn’t trust Google spreadsheet about any kind of financial number handling.

1988—2008

I haven’t posted much those last weeks (yes, this is almost this kind of post), but as people reading this (but not from the rss feeds, obviously) may have seen recently, I have been busy (re)creating the theme used by this blog from scratch (or almost). It looks almost the same at first, but a few things have moved around, and there is even — gasp — an image.

The paint is still fresh, but there are also a few things left: the flickr badge is a bit loose — I probably need to either fix things (not smart) or add some javascript to make it smooth (smart), and some pages may still have a weird “borrowed” look. However, the “design” is still table-free (yay!) and even almost compatible with Internet Explorer (almost double-yay!).

I can say that I like music. I listen to my collection at home, at work, and while moving around, in town or in public transports. At home, I have decent speakers and when I don’t want to traumatize my neighbors, I have a good set of hifi Sennheiser headphones. However, at work or outside, I used to use almost only the headphones shipped with my music players.
Recently, the pair I used at work lost an half. My iPod headphones seemed to be less efficient (since I had to raise the volume limit although it didn’t sound much louder than before) and moreover they feel “open” and I don’t want to share that much with people around me. But I don’t want canalphones, because they seem harder to put or remove quickly (as I use to do in the big blue room, when I have to — gasp — talk to people) and I don’t really want to get my ears to get completely sore for wearing those all day. And I don’t want to wear a boombox around my neck.

So I settled on the Sennheiser PX200. My conclusions:

• Don’t expect much if you have to endure a lot of wind when using them;
• Don’t expect much if you try to say, run or some kind of sport. That’s not what they are for;
• Don’t expect your head to blow out with the bass sound. Well, even though for many people, this was the main problem for them, I didn’t expect that, so that’s ok;
• They’re not as pocket-friendly as earbuds;
• There’s a good but not full isolation. I can hear the cars around me (and this way, I expect to live for a few more years without an accident when crossing the street), maybe some people talking, but I don’t have to raise the volume to hear my music;

• The sound is really good: during the past week, I have discovered sounds I hadn’t heard before on some songs. Even “bad” music feels better.

Overall, I’m satisfied. I can listen to my music and enjoy it with a pretty good quality, while not disturbing people or getting my ears sore.

I spent my Saturday afternoon at the Rennes airshow 2007 (and I found out why I used to say that I don’t like people—-special thanks to those two muppet-show style old guys in the queue). I took a few photos. I thought it was already a large number (about 250), but since I heard a few people say they took more than a thousand, I may think again.

At first I had a bad feeling, since I had to use my lens extended to its maximum I thought most would be blurry (well, many are indeed blurry), but since the weather was almost fine (sunny with a few clouds) I was able to use a fast shutter speed. But maybe I shouldn’t have used it so much, since some photos are a bit darker than they should have been. And when I see pictures taken by others at almost the same time of the same planes, I wonder what I missed. I don’t think that at this point, the equipment matters that much.

Sigh, so much work yet to do…

Cycle Facility of the Month

Ok, I was wrong. There’s a little something about the Year Zero as a physical object and not just a sticker. Thanks to Kwyxz for pointing this one out.

Yes, that’s true. After being heated, the CD changes color. <private joke>So no, this isn’t a technology used only to check if the beer isn’t too cold</private>.

Some people tend to say that this is the end of the CD as a distribution media for music. And once upon a time, I used to be a fan of Nine inch Nails physical records. The packaging of Broken and (still) The Fragile were somewhat disruptive and interesting. But it feels like they are going away from this kind of difference. With Teeth was one the most simple packaging. Year Zero isn’ that much better (although we can note the come back of the booklet) and doesn’t differ much from other CD except for the Bureau of Morality sticker (this is a bit more funnier, but still conventional).

However, some bands still conceive original packaging. The perfect example is Tool with 10,000 days which is just also a pretty nice physical toy.

Sometimes, this isn’t just physical. I have recently purchased Die Warzau’s album, Convenience. Well the packaging isn’t so much original, but it is still interesting (apparently, it would be called a super jewel case). But reading the small notes is also an interesting thing to do. I won’t talk about the political standout which can be found inside, although it can be resumed by two phrases after the track listing:

No Christians have been harmed in the making of this record. This won’t stop them from killing, raping and destroying, however.

But what is the most interesting, in fact, is the “rights” declaration (and I hope they won’t sue me for quoting it in its entirety):

All rights reserved to the extent that it does not interfere with fair use of the music by the consumer. Purchase of this recording constitutes an implicit understanding on the part of the consumer, the label and the artist that the consumer has perpetual rights to possession of the music in its digital format. The songs on this album may be freely exchanged on file sharing networks under the condition that no premium is charged, they are not altered in any way and a link to www.pulseblack.com is provided. The songs on this album are available for non-commercial use. Please contact Pulseblack for commercial use. Pulseblack does not recognize and is not bound by any RIAA negotiations.

Compare this to the disclaimers found in most DVD’s (or other media) which almost assume that most people are just robbers and pirates.
I may look forward buying more stuffs from Die Warzau (and probably Pulseblack) just for talking to me, as a consumer, this way.