Seb's weblog

I went to the Rennes Airshow yesterday, taking two cameras and lenses in order to grow my collection of aircraft pictures (and because I’m also an aircraft buff). The weather was a bit mixed, dark clouds with small patches of Sun (and a cold wind). As usual, the result with my Sigma 55-200 got ugly most of the time when the target was moving since this lens is slow (or I don’t know how to use it correctly, maybe), even though a few shots got ok (even if a bit soft). The 105mm was a bit short most of the time, and I wished I could reach a bit farther instead of having to crop most pictures, but it saved the day, as usual. My favorite would be the Spitfire Mk XIX, although the Red arrows offered me some timing exercises.

On the music side, I was recently pleasantly surprised by both Red Sparowes with their album The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer (which is not that heavy/loud), “Russian Circles” with Geneva (heavier/louder), Keelhaul with Keelhaul’s Triumphant Return to Obscurity and Animals as Leaders. It feels like there’s a trend here…

Sometimes, things are just a matter of not giving up. \o/

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