Race Report: Get in Gear 10k 2008

Once again this is the first race of the year. I was going to race in a duathlon but decided to run the Get in Gear instead at the last minute. Unlike previous years I wasn't looking at the race as any kind of fitness indicator for the spring. I just wanted to run a race I really enjoy.

Or I should say usually enjoy. Saturday morning turned out to be cold and snowy of all things! The wind was also howling out of the west. Fun times.

The first part of the race I was mildly sore in the legs which took 2 miles to loosen up. I think I need to do more warm up in the future as this has happened in the past.

The only part of note was when we approached the Ford Parkway Bridge for the final leg to the finish line. The 25mph wind was coming right up the bridge so I scoped out a big guy to draft. It was working until the guy really started to slow as he climbed the rise of the bridge into the wind. So I decided I needed to pass him. As I stepped out of his wake I was hit by the wind like a hammer. No wonder he was slowing! I did my best to sprint up to the next person, then the next. It sorta worked but I was really tired once we were back in the trees in the park.

In the finishing chute I was at a sprint. Suddenly I'm being hit on the shoulder by someone I passed. Turned out to be my friend Dan Lund. What a surprise.

In the end I ran the race strong and felt fine. But my time was a full minute slower then last year. Part of that was because of the conditions but I was also simpler slower as well.

Finish time of 47:41. 438th out of 1800 cold crazy runners. My friend turned in a nice time of 46:37.

Paper Making Class

In honor of our 6th wedding anniversary, Linda and I took a Japanese paper making class at MCAD. As with a lot of Japanese things, there is a long history and tradition in paper making. We learned how to beat the fibers and screen out the gossamer thin sheets. We then explored various techniques of dying and coloring the sheets we made.




We made a lot of paper in the five Saturdays we attended. We also made a giant 4x6 foot sheet which took the help of the 6 people.



Probably the most interesting thing I learned is that rice paper is a complete myth. Rice actually is not fibrous enough to produce paper. Most all Japaneses paper is made from a few different plants similar to cat tails or reeds.

20 Years Ago Today...

Today is my birthday. Big deal, everyone has one. But what is neat is that I had recently discovered that a piece of artwork I've had since college was actually a birthday gift. It's hard to make out but in the upper part of this photo is the date 04/10/88. It was given to me by my dear friend Jackie while I was in my senior year at UND. We used to call her 'Bunnie'.



And this is the artwork itself. Jackie is still making art that can be seen here.

How To Decorate with Photoshop

We plan to use the hallway of our newly finished basement to show off vacation photos. The walls are about 12 feet on one side and 7 on the other. I've had trouble deciding how many frames to order and what color. Since the wood is all maple in the house I considered maple frames but I also thought black frames would look nice with photos.

So I turned to Photoshop to help me. First I photographed the hallway. Yes, that is the wall color!



Next I went to americanframe.com to get a framed photo. I have used American Frame many times for custom frames and have had great luck with then. Very inexpensive way to frame. The website has a neat ordering system where you can upload your artwork, then try out their frames so you can decide color as well as matting. Slick. After I picked out a frame I liked I simply did a screen snap into Photoshop as below.



In Photoshop I was able to position and copy the photos onto the wall. For those Photoshop users out there, I used the vanishing point tool to make sure they followed the perspective of the wall. Note that the farthest frame is smaller then the foremost. A slight emboss was added to give the frames their thickness and lastly a drop shadow behind to match the spotlight direction.



Here are the maple frames on the wall. It was pretty clear to me that the black frames were much better then the maple. The lighter wood on the green wall wasn't as striking.



As a final touch, just to see how realistic I could make it, I added some lighting to the otherwise flat black frames. Since the frames were added digitally they didn't get the same spotlight variation that the wall did. Not to mention the ambient green color bouncing off the other wall. The following images shows where the photos would be and the lighting that will fall on it. This was done by making a copy of the wall layer, masking out all but the frames then reducing the transparency of the new layer till there was a slight coloring on the frames. A very subtle effect but one that the eye would notice.



Here is the final composite. Note that the light and coloring on the frames is now more accurate.



Below is the Photoshop layers of the project. Each group was a different framing consideration.

My Web Anniversary

Today I had to check to see when a few DVDs from Amazon order would arrive. They make it very easy to do. The information is all very accessible and always a breeze to use. I love Amazon but I had no I idea just how long my love affair has been.

I found an area of my account that had a record of every purchase I've made. Curiosity sent me to the very first purchase which amazingly was 10 years ago today, March 19, 2008. What are the odds of finding that when I did!!



According to the order I bought a book on Sumo. But my memory is that the first thing I bought was a CD. More then likely this database was created around 1998. Amazon was founded in 1994 and went public the next year.

Lunar Eclipse

Tonight there was a total eclipse of the moon. They say it won't happen again, at least here in Minnesota, till 2010. I've never tried photography the moon so I figured I'd give this a shot. Ha! pun!.

It was a crystal clear night however it was also only 1 degree out so I decided to try shooting from a window. I did go to the trouble of opening the window for each shot thinking that I would avoid the distortion of the glass. But now I wonder if I just introduced distortion of all the heat waves I was letting out!

The experiment was so-so. None of the shots were very sharp but the exposures were fairly ok. The left most exposure was of the complete eclipse. I had to drop the shutter speed from 1/250 to 1/4 ofa second just to get anything. It was only then that you could see into the shadow. All the detail was always there in the previous shots but was overwhelmed by the bright side.

Shibuya Panorama Revisited

I just had to go back into this panorama. So much of what makes this corner so cool are all the huge video screens. I think there are 3-4. But the pano doesn't really show them. The overexposed one on the right, called Super Lisa, was kind of unavoidable but the monster one right in the middle, the Q-Front, is barely noticeable - and its 3 stories high! It was bad timing that there wasn't a feed when I snapped the 3 shots for the panorama.

But looking through all my photos of that evening I came across a shot with a decent exposure of both screens. So I just had to go back in. The Super Lisa monitor was simple. I cropped out the screen area on the original and scaled the image to fit. A little color correction and it was done. The Q-Front was a little more tricky because of the grid running through the image and the building. But actually the grid helped me register the 2 as I scaled down the image on a separate layer. Once in place I used a little math to do the combining. I set the image layer blend mode to Add which takes the pixel value of the top layer and adds it to the pixel value layer underneath. So white (256) + black(0) = 256 (white). So what happens is that all the black of the image at a value of 0 does not get added to the original wall color. No need to do a ton of erasing. Neat huh?
One last thing I had to do was to go into the added images and try to match the noise. It's a little weird to think about adding noise but if you looked really closely you would notice the videos being smoother then the surroundings. That can tell the brain that something funny is going on.

To me this now better captures my experience of Shibuya even thou it is not a photo of a real moment in time.