I’m in ur Mephisto, hackin ur pluginz

I spent several hours tonight correcting and fixing the way I was pulling a lot of data from various places like twitter, last.fm and flickr for my dynamic sidebar. A lot of the old stuff was lame javascript stuff and flash applets, and it was making the page load pretty craptastic.

I tracked down some simple plugins for twitter and last.fm that pull data from the rest apis and display it as simple text. And, I think they worked pretty good, with a little hacking. Since Mephisto is a rails app I was able to dive in and correct a few things, like the fact that the last.fm plugin caches for 24 hours, and I wanted it to display my recent tracks, as well as that the twitter plugin was way out of whack and needed some updates from when twitter phased out the relative_time from it’s API etc.

As a result of my work my page looks better (in my opinion) and the load time has dropped from ~10s to ~1s given a cache of the page. So that makes me happy.

Rails.

On the subject of rails learning, I’m moving right along. Things seem to be coming a little more naturally. I’m far from being able to realistically code something complex on my own, but little by little. I’m still working through Agile Rails Dev, albeit slower than I would have liked. I took a lot of Resting time over break.

Home work

We spent a few days tearing down Jenn’s bathroom so we could paint it quick the other day. Jenn did most of the work when it came to tearing down and painting, but I sure hand stuff to painters well!

During the tear down, we noticed that in lieu of electrical boxes (those metal boxes that you can mount switches and lights upon) they had just punched a hole in the wall and pulled an electrical line through the wall. Then they attached the fixture with some random screws into the wall (studs are for wusses), wired that shit up and called it a day.

So when we went to replace them with something that’s not ugly as sin, we were kind of SOL. as we have nothing to actually mount it to. My bathroom is even better, in Jenn’s the random hole is in the center of the wall, but in mine they punched a hole off center, and then cut a hole in the back of the fixture to jury rig that shit right up.

So painful. I’ll post pics later. We’re having a guy come give an estimate on some electrical boxes for mounting this weekend.

Camera.

So the saga of the camera continues.

I put in an order for my lenses (AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR and AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8D ) last month because when I went to buy them the first time they didn’t have any. So I put in the order and asked if I needed to worry about the camera, “Oh no, we always have D80s” was the response to that. So, I ordered my lenses and I moved on, not worrying about the camera itself.

However, last week I went in since one of the lenses had come in, and found that both had been in for a week+ which kind of annoyed me, but whatever. So, I ask for a D80 (body only) (I’m after a body only because the lens that comes with the camera ( AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED is not Vibration Reduction, and so is not really worth the $300+ it tacks onto the price of the camera, IMO. The lens I ordered is VR, but it doesn’t work w/o a camera! :P) and they don’t have one. Ok, that’s fine, when will you get one? Should be Saturday. Ok, fine, I can wait 3 days or so.

Saturday comes and goes, and no camera. I call today three times (so far) trying to get an answer from someone, with no luck. And, no call back, how rude (they did call back before now)! It’s beginning to get really frustrating. It should not be this hard to give business to local merchants! :(

One of the very few traditional hobbies I’ve ever enjoyed has been photography.

When i was a kid, my Dad got me this crappy point and shoot Kodak camera. It was all manual with no options or features. I used the hell out of it for a long time, and took some really shitty photos. One day a friend tossed me his old Samsung zoom film camera, and I was so excited. I mean this baby had 2x ZOOM! And, sweet merciful christ, it advanced and loaded film with a motor… very high tech shit right here, let me tell you.

I took a decent amount of photography in High School, and while I loved it and kicked ass at it (well, enough to get As every semester with little work), the hassle, and materials and the general overwhelming cost of actually getting into doing real photography was enough to chase me off… Hated film, hated developing film, hated the developing chemicals. And I wasn’t even doing color prints, this was fairly painless B&W stuff.

So, I gave it up and instead picked up… well… I guess video games and staring at the internet to keep my mind busy for the next few years.

I was working at UITS and I rounded up enough spare cash to purchase a Kodak DX3900. A crappy little point and shoot camera that worked well enough. It had a lousy range, and wasn’t very flexible. But, I got a few good shots off like this, this, or this. But nothing I ever felt too impressed with… I got good feedback, and general encouragement to learn more and get better. But, my camera started limping, the battery stopped holding a charge, and the viewfinder is about 20% off center of the final photo.. so I stopped using it.

I was considering getting a new Point and Shoot like Jenn’s Canon PowerShot A710 that I’ve been borrowing, but every time I borrow it I feel frustrated. It’s like I have to fight the camera to take any real pictures. I see friends taking photos in the same settings with the same light, with amazing differences in the outcome.

I’m not saying that I don’t get a few good shots, I pulled a few decent shots out of my ass, but comparing to pictures a friend/coworker took there’s really no comparison, especially at lower light levels.

I tend to take pictures candidly with no flash, which leads to a lot of blurring and frustration for me. It’s obnoxious to take close to 200 pictures and having only like 5-10 clear enough for me to post process them at all.

So, camera envy, coupled with feeling like I wanted a non computer centric hobby lead me to start looking into getting a nicerany camera. I decided that I wanted a DSLR, because the pictures I was seeing from those cameras were just generally on a higher level. The larger sensor, combined with better ranges, lenses and features make these the only really attractive cameras to me. Plus DSLRs excel in rapid burst shooting and instant on, the prospect of a camera going from cold to ready to shoot in less than a second is very intriguing.

So I figured I’d take the easy route and just see what people on Flickr used. Flickr has a neat chart of camera usage and I took the first few camers off the list, and looked into them.

First up was the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. The XTi is Canon’s entry level DSLR camera. It’s small, uncomplicated, self cleaning, and a really decent camera. It runs about 600-700 and is a pretty popular camera. I was pretty set on getting one until I got my hands on one. I have rather big hands, and the XTi is a tiny camera. Well, it’s not that tiny, it’s just too small for me to get a comfortable grip while holding it. I have to really pinch it to keep a grip on the body. I wish my hands were smaller, but what can you do.

I took a look at the D80 that had been recommended to me by a friend, it’s a lot more expensive, breaching the 900 mark, but not quite passing into the 1k territory. The difference was apparent immediately. The D80 was larger, more solid, fit in my hand better, and had a much more usable interface. Top mounted Status LCD, a hud in the viewfinder, higher ISO/ranges.

So I’ve been leaning towards the D80, but I’m a little gun shy. On the one hand, I can afford it without that much trouble. But on the other hand it’s hard to justify getting a Camera on this level when all I’ve ever owned were shitty Point and Shooters. Plus, whenever I buy anything this expensive that’s not a computer I always worry that I’m just going to not use it either out of fear of breaking it, or out of indifference. There’s also the nagging fear that I may just suck, and I don’t want to pay 1k just to find out I suck.

Although, I guess that if I decide to get rid of it I’ll be able to get a decent price for it around town or on eBay to some journalism student or something. I also worry about whether I’m going to like the fact that it’s noisy, unlike P&S cameras, and I also worry about how much more it weighs. If I think it’s too big I fear I might just leave it home all the time.

I’ve still got a lot of reading to do, and I plan to go handle the cameras a few more times before I make a decision. But, I wanted to brain dump a little. Found a good comparison between the XTi and the D80 I need to read in detail.

Oh! Before I forget, Roberts, the camera store down on Kirkwood, is amazing. Their prices are excellent, their staff is polite and knowledgeable, and I look forward to giving them more business. LocalBusinesses++