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From the teh-w33K3nd department:

PHOTOGRAPHY STUFF
I pretty much blew the whole weekend being obsessed with, and failing to properly finish, a 360° panoramic photo of my living room.

*** WARNING WARNING WARNING ***
Extreme photo-geekspeak ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Control points / stitching / nodal point / tripod / exposure / white balance / focal length / focus lock / blah blah / yada yada / shutter up already!

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then I did that panorama of my office, and *THEN* I discovered PTViewer, and *NOW* I’m obsessed with doing panoramas. This weekend, I started by spending a lot of time reading about panorama tutorials and learning cool ways to use PTViewer (the cool Java thing I used in the interactive office, see previous blogpost).

After that, I got into, and became frustrated with, trying to find the right software for finding control points. Control points are how you tell your panorama stitching program to connect photo A with its neighbour, photo B. You can choose them yourself, but when you have 18 photos that make up 360° you don’t want to spend a lot of time finding 200 control points or you’ll get carpal tunnel syndrome or something. You want software to do it for you.

After I found some decent software, things still weren’t working so I experimented with finding the right way to take the photos. Everybody knows that you want to lock zoom, focus, exposure and whitebalance before you take a set of panoramic photos so that nothing changes between each shot. The part I was working on was how much overlap to take between shots. I took a set of 12 photos (30° between, landscape orientation, just under 50% overlap), a set of 18 (20°), and a set of 36 (10° in portrait orientation).

Photo stitching and image manipulation requires lots of memory and disk space and CPU cycles and power, in general. I set some records this weekend. For the first time, I ran an application that used up all my memory (1 GB) and then crashed. I also crashed a program (on the 35th file of 36, BTW, which is frikkin’ annoying) by running out of disk space. I maxxed my processor (2.8GHz) at 100% CPU usage for over 20 minutes, causing not only my CPU fan to go max speed and stay there the whole time, but also to get my *power supply’s* fan to turn on, which has never happened before. I was all like, “WTF is that noise?” I probably took two years off of my computer’s life. Stitching 360° panoramas is like “The Machine” in The Princess Bride for your computer.

I’m still goofing around with it. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with the photos themselves, it’s the stitching software that’s kicking my ass. I’ve got a few ideas, though.

*** END PHOTOGEEKSPEAK ***
Enough talk about panoramas and photography. Just let me say that I got so into it that when I went out driving, everywhere I looked I imagined control points. Now I’ll put down the camera and tripod and get back to my regular geekiness.

OTHER WEEKEND NEWS
I had to wake up frikkin’ early on Saturday morning to go and get my winter tires. Out in frikkin’ Orleans. And my alarm didn’t go off (I adjusted it for the right *time* the night before, but forgot to change the “weekdays only” switch). And my gas tank was too low to make it to Orleans. So in the end, I rushed through my wakeup routine, rushed through getting gas, and pulled into the OKTire store one minute after my appointed time.

Boy, what a difference with the winter tires compared to my old half-bald set of all-seasons. What with the long drive to work and the incredibly crappy conditions I saw on the Queensway after a recent snowfall, I’m willing to bet that I just spent $360 to save my life. But we’ll never know. (and that’s the point, isn’t it?)

On the way back I stopped at Canadian tire to pick up a box of wiper juice and some new wiper blades. I think my car is good to go for the winter now. Yeehaw! I think I’m gonna take a bucket and fill the bottom of it with wiper juice, and leave it in my driveway with a squeegee in it and a lid on it. Winter is the only season where I have to squeegeeclean all my windows *every time* I stop for gas.

Oh, and then, on Saturday while I’m geeking out with my photo panorama stuff, one of my clients from work calls me on the weekend for help. Now, technically, I’m *always* on call, and I don’t get paid for any of it, but normally hardly anybody ever calls up (this week is special ’cause we just launched the latest version of our product) so it’s all good. I just wanna know why they always call at *lunch* on the weekends?! It’s like they know exactly when I’ll have three different pots and pans cooking on the stove and that’s when they call.

I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Sunday evening. You don’t need me to tell you to go see it. There’s a reason Joanne Rowling, who had barely two shillings to scrape together, living on welfare while writing in a cafe, is now the wealthies woman in the U.K. (including the Queen, although nobody can say for sure) and also first person ever to become a USD$ billionaire by writing books.

Here’s the fun part: after the show, I went to get the free no-extra-cost refill on my drink and popcorn. Then I went out to the parking lot. Covered in ice! Did I slip? Yeah, a few times. Did I look like a fool doing the icy-sidewalk-waddle? You bet. Did I ever fall on my ass? No. Did I spill my drink? No.

I make it to my car, and I put my drink and popcorn on the icy roof while I go inside the car to start it and get out the scraper. Does the drink fall? No.

After spending 5 minutes joining the ice-scraper’s orchestra (like the ice-waddle, a uniquely Canadian experience, I’m sure) in the parking lot, I got in my car, secured the popcorn and drink in the driver’s seat, and headed for home. As usual, I tested the road conditions (icy as all hell) in the parking lot by attempting a sudden stop. What happens? a) my new winter tires kick ass, find grip where none is to be found, and b) my drink goes flying forward, my hand arrives on the scene about one quarter of a second too late to stop the plastic lid from coming off in spectacular spring-loaded explosive fashion and dousing my passenger seat with cola.

So I drove across the street to the gas station, tossed the drink, got a big sheet of cloth out of the trunk (why do I have three big sheets of cloth in the trunk of my car?), and put it on the seat with some weight on it (I used the big jug of laundry degergent I bought at Loblaws before the movie) to try and absorb some of the nasty juice from the seat I had steam cleaned less than 3 months ago.

Oh, well.

At least I have chicken popcorn.^[1]

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