I know it shouldn’t be shocking, but it turns out that Sydney Uni is a hotbed of left wing sentiment. With the upcoming election and a few recent tea times thick with political gossip have cemented this cliché in my mind.

Unrelated: a little research on the interwebs and I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to vote in my first Australian federal election.

Many people hate having their photographs taken. They don’t like how they are going to come up and as a result, they tense up insuring that they look uncomfortable, thus making the photograph of them look even worse than the real thing. Being a good portrait photographer is as much about making people feel comfortable as it as about knowing f-stops and shutter speeds. I am not particularly good at it, my solution to this used to be to concentrate on (semi-)candid photography, not giving people time to make themselves feel uncomfortable.

I don’t like having my picture taken, because I hate how they come out, but I’ve realized the above and so I just sort of let photographs happen and as a result they come out a little less bad. Ironically, this meant that when I took that lighting class at Dutchess, everyone thought that I loved having my picture taken (we generally used each other for models in that class). I explained this approach to a friend of mine also taking the class, but (unsurprisingly I suppose) it made it even worse for her.

Today I went to Sydney Uni to take pictures of staff and equipment for the website that I am putting together for the Structural Biology Group (MMB). Obviously I had the usual cross section of ease-in-front-of-the-camera-ish-ness. The most photogenic people were, naturally enough, the ones that didn’t really care that their picture was being taken. Every once and a while I would get someone who hated having their picture to feel natural for just long enough (a second or two) to take a nice picture of them.



So forever ago, Smitha wrote in her LJ something about spelling alphabets and never being able to think of countries to associate with certain letters. What do you use for X? Anyway, that got me to think that defunct empires would be a good spelling alphabet to use, not because it would be easy to understand, but because I suspected that I could design it to be pretty hard to decipher. For example, when I got to H I chose “Holy Roman Empire” and for R I chose “Roman Empire.” Although it isn’t ambiguous, unless you were paying attention you might get lost.

So I finally wrote a little web app to give you the spelling alphabet spelling for a number of different alphabets. Some of them (NATO, LAPD) are actually in use. Some of the others (defunct empire, etc) I just made up for fun. I made defunct empire the default because it seemed to be the least useful.

• www.wdlabs.com/twilight/lingua/alphabet

(btw- if you can think of a country that starts with X let me know. I will accept historical, currently nonexistent countries, but not fictional countries, as I am currently using the fictional country Xanth for X because I couldn’t think of anything else. I also need defunct empires for W X and Y; the current X is actually the capitol of an Empire, not the Empire itself)

I also have a new management policy for my website, so make sure you read that and agree to all of the terms before using my website. It is also available in latin if you English isn’t very good.

I came by this T-Shirt on the Internet today:

http://www.bustedtees.com/product.php?name=dysentery

which probably doesn't mean much to you if you didn't go through the American education system in the late 80s early 90s like Tyler and I did, but we both found it hilarious. I then proceeded to download the latest version of The Oregon Trail, which they are still apparently making, but of course the new version left something to be desired, namely the nostalgia, which only the original could provide. This is really the only thing that it has going for it.

I've been mucking about with nameservers... I was still using belmont as my DNS server, and I'm only now starting to do the switchover to nullray (DNS is/was the last service on belmont). Some of my websites may be temporarily mucked up. I will be doing nullray soon. For those of you who logon, you may want to remember that the IP address is 64.38.18.2 or add it to your hosts file. Shouldn't need it, but just in case.

I like journals with pretty pictures.

Is that wrong?

I am thinking about moving The Twilight Report to LiveJournal. The new URL is/will be:

twilight.wdlabs.com

There are a number of advantages to this, including, but not limited to:

1. It will be more reliable, and will contain no advertising.
2. When I post entries to my blog at funny hours of the night it won't screw up the dates of existing entries because of a bug in the time zone compensation code.(*)
3. It has security features which allows my friends to read protected entries, while keeping all you stalkers out.(**)
4. My blog won't invariably turn into a game of PacMan.(***)

The truth is, however, I can't ask you guys to setup a LiveJournal just to read my random musings, because they are random, and only somewhat amusing, and if you are anything like me you are busy people. If, however, you already happen to have a LiveJournal account, add me as a friend there, and I will more thank likely add you back. My user name is plicease and once again, the URL is:

twilight.wdlabs.com

One other thing: If you are reading this rubbish and you still haven't said hi, please do so. I don't bite.

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(*) I just made up the name of this bug, but it seems like a good explanation for it.
(**) Not that I've even had any stalkers since college, and even then they were more like pet stalkers.
(***) I do have to admit that I do enjoy playing the classics, but PacMan is not a mail client.