Compare and contrast...

Canon AE-1 Program, 50mm f/1.8, Kodak BW400CN.

Nikon P7000, in monochrome mode at ISO 400, with the yellow filter effect turned on.

Automotif XCVII...

There was a little car show going down in Alliance, Ohio on Sunday morning, and this dude was on his way there.

Those fins, doe. There're a lot of legends about the amount of rear end lift that particular styling cue caused at high speeds.
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Start.

There were worldwide midnight release parties, kids. For a version of Windows. Hand to god, I swear this is true. https://t.co/Nol68xVDHW

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 22, 2015

*stretch* *yawn*

Well. That was a full three-day weekend.

Whatever it is I was supposed to do this evening is going to have to keep 'til morning. Don't wake me unless the house is actually on fire.
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Almost home...

By the time this posts, I should be almost home. Ready to get there, too, after a weekend of sleeping in motels and twelve-hour days of drinking from the fire hose 'til midnight.

Pat Rogers briefing the next run using the model. Muffy has probably gone missing again. Some of the hallways in the shoot house could provide eye-opening reminders of just how long an "indoors" shot can be.

I've got a head full of stuff to unpack over the next few days, so I'll probably be bouncing it off you guys to help me process and remember it.

Check out the class schedule for Alliance Police Training* here; they've got every kind of class you could think of, from beginner handgun classes to pretty cool force-on-force carbine stuff, and it's within an honest day's drive of most places east of the Mississippi.

*Dig this: "Open Enrollment - citizens that are not law enforcement or military can participate in training. We believe that the good citizens that support us should have a training outlet and we are one of only a few agencies in the country where that is possible."
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Test Pattern

Having a bit of a busy weekend. I'll have the free ice cream machine up and running again tomorrow.

More complicated than it looks, as it turns out.

Note To Self:
Adding a second person makes things complicated in more ways than one. In addition to doubling the number of people you don't want to set on fire, you have to be able to convey information your eyeballs are taking in to the other person. I find that it's easy to use way too many words on things that aren't that important while not using enough words on things that are important.
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High Speed

Got the results from the roll of film I shot at the IMA Dream Cars exhibit, a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 in the Canon EOS 10S with the EF 50mm f/1.8 lens:

Overheard in Front of the Television...

Chattanooga was in the headlines this morning, as was a certain amount of dullardness and general lack of clue...

Savannah Guthrie: "We're gonna start with NBC's Gabe Gutierrez, there at the scene. Gabe, good morning to you."

Gabe Gutierrez: "Savannah, good morning. Today the search for a motive intensifies..."

Me: *waves raised hand frantically* "Ooh! Ooh! I know the motive! Pick me! Pick me!"

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Deep Dream explained.

There's a lot of chattering about Google's Deep Dream and deep learning in general. There's also a lot of wondering why Skynet seems obsessed with the images it does. Here is a simple visual explanation:

When you take this:

And you do this to it:

With an endless stream of this:

It's going to look at this:

And see this:

See?
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Still more proof that speciation is well underway.

OMG! You guys! That whole "Eloi and Morlocks" thing? It's coming true! If you know how to work a screwdriver, your descendents really are doomed to an underground life, eating the descendents of telephone sanitizers and TV news anchors.

As evidence, I present the following snippet of dialogue from a TODAY® show segment where investigative reporter Jeff Rossen learns how to deal with a kitchen fire. (I seem to recall this being covered in second grade by a cartoon dalmatian, but that's neither here nor there.)

I am including in the dialogue the parts where I was yelling at the television.

Savannah Guthrie: "A lot of us are intimidated though, like, by the idea of turning it on..." *makes gestures and facial expressions as though she's holding a well-greased and annoyed cobra at arms length*

Me: "Wut?" *tilts head on side like RCA Victor mascot*

Jeff Rossen: "I... I will tell you, I actually never used a fire extinguisher before and I thought there would be a kickback and I was afraid to use it..."

Me: (yelling) "OH. MY. GOD! It's a fire extinguisher, you sackless herbivore! What are you afraid of, you big girl's blouse?"

It had honestly never crossed my mind that a grown human being could feel an ounce of trepidation about a fire extinguisher. That's like... I don't know, being scared of pillows, or footstools, or filing cabinets. And whatever you call this bizarre phobia, two out of five Manhattanites on my TV screen just admitted to suffering from it!
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Automotif XCVI...

Running errands today on the bicycle, I saw this thing waft down Illinois, turn onto 56th, and pull into the CVS lot. I dropped what I was doing and ran over with the camera.

It was so big, it was hard to frame well.

 1972 Cadillac Eldorado.

Cadillac apparently wanted the nearly-19-foot long, two-and-a-half ton car to somehow seem exotic and European, and so that's how you spell "five hundred cubic inches" in places that have never put a man on the moon.
 

Between the HVAC vents there, on the passenger dash? That's a mechanical digital clock. Pretty 2001: A Space Odyssey stuff on an auto dash in 1972.
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Summertime in SoBro, 2015 Edition...

Finally, yesterday afternoon, a hole in the clouds appeared...
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We get signal. Main screen turn on.

After pedaling up to the tiny Broad Ripple Kroger for necessaries, I bicycled back into the alley toward the garage to find my path blocked by an AT&T engineering truck and a guy just heading up in the boom. I resisted the urge to smile and wave and say "Oh, hi! I was fixin' to email your CEO!" For all I knew, this was the last dude battling entropy at the Death Star and, besides, one should always be nice to anyone who is in a position to spit in one's food.

We are now pulling pages on the Uverse intertubes connection and have successfully transacted incoming and outgoing phone calls on the POTS line. Cautious optimism prevails in the halls of Roseholme Cottage.
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Things that make you go "Hmmm"...

Wait... does this mean we have to ride the roller coasters at Five Flags Over Georgia now?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 15, 2015

Customer Disservice.

Roseholme Cottage held hostage, day thirty-one.
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Seeing red.

Still no intertubes. Fantastic stream of excuses from AT&T.

Further, POTS has been down since this time last month. The problem is the line from the pole to the house. AT&T has known this since the guy who set us up with the faster intertubes last year slapped some bubble gum on the line and promised to send a fixit notice upstream.

Obviously he never did, and so the line tech who was out on Saturday said he'd send a lineman to fix things. The lineman claims he was here on Sunday, but he must have been wearing his cloak of invisibility. So then they send out a data guy today who can't fix anything. He says he's put in for a lineman who'll be here tomorrow. I hope it's not the invisible guy from Sunday.

EDIT: Oh, bonus! Mister Super Second Level Tech, the one who was invisible on Sunday, apparently came back today invisibly again, and marked our problem as resolved. We found this out when AT&T called Bobbi on her cell phone and asked her to rate her service. I guess they had to reach her on the cellie because the land line kept ringing busy... since, you know, it was never actually #$&@ing FIXED.

This is insane. You call some script drone in a cubicle who knows nothing. They dispatch some guy who is capable of doing diddly little fixes around the house. He can't fix it so he calls the bigger guy. The bigger guy just %^&#ing blows you off and marks the problem solved and when you call to complain, who do you call? The same script drone in a cubicle who knows nothing who was in on step one of the whole mess which just starts the vicious circle again.

I need to rattle the biggest cage I can find there. When AT&T can't successfully get an analog signal from a pole across some twisted pair to a telephone handset a hundred feet away, they have completely failed at their core competency. They knew how to do this stuff in Eighteen hundred and blankety-bleeping eighty-five, for bleedin' Alexander Graham Bell's sake!

Overheard in the Office...

.@netanyahu @instapundit If you like your Tel Aviv, you can keep your Tel Aviv.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 14, 2015

Me: "Dammit!"

RX: "What?"

Me: "The internet just $#!+ the bed again. DSL's totally hosed."

RX: "Well, you did just tweet to Netanyahu. Mossad never sleeps."

(Thing is, that was her joke, in response to my initial "If you like your terrorist nuclear weapon, you can keep your terrorist nuclear weapon." I just stole it and put it on Twitter.)
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "I was doing an image search for 'panzer acropolis'..." RX: "Panzer Acropolis... Great name for a group!"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 14, 2015

Somebody or another on NPR recently casually used a throwaway line about how the Greek bailout deal negotiations were putting... I believe the phrase was "unprecedented strains" or something close ...on relations between the countries. I nearly drove into a ditch at the mind-boggling ahistoricity of such a statement.  

"Ve are chust here to see ze tourist sights, ja."

Round Two

The line of storms that rolled through at lunch yesterday was just the warmup act, as it turned out. The main attraction didn't roll through until late last night. I was playing World of Warcrack when the phone rang.

Shootin' Buddy: "I'm okay. I didn't get hit by the tornado."

Me: "By the what, now?"

Lafayette being about an hour as the derecho blows from Indy, that was the cue for the sound effects to start up outside Roseholme Cottage. Not five minutes after I was off the phone with Shootin' Buddy, it sounded like we were taking shellfire outside, complete with flickering lights.

Local TeeWee news reports:

Power Outages: IPL 35,871; Duke: 19,953; South Central REMC: 5,567
TOTAL: 61,391

So that was a pretty good wallop we took. Indy is quite well tree-covered for a major city, which means there's a lot of stuff to fall on power lines.
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Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening

As Bobbi left for work today, she reminded me to be on the lookout for the DSL tech and the tree guy.

Just before noon, it got dark outside. Then the sky lightened some, but to an ugly shade of green. The sky dumped an inch of standing water on the sidewalk in the back yard, pretty much all at once.

I don't think we'll be seeing the tree guy today. Not a good day to be up in trees.
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