Schierer Space

Most of you who read this blog probably know that my most famous alter ego is “Lentil McBean”. For some reason today I decided to search for “McBean”. Here’s what I found:

• The official website of the Clan MacBean. Apologies for the quality of the website, but at least the link to the left doesn’t go to their title page, which ought to make Jenn pretty much scream in anguish. Random Clan MacBean fact: Cmdr. Alan Bean (Apollo XII) left a piece of the MacBean tartan on the moon.
• Gladding, McBean is a major manufacturer of ceramic household goods. Random ceramic roofing fact: A single piece of straight barrel mission style ceramic roofing weighs 5.6 pounds. No wonder Ben Hur was arrested.^[1]
• McBean.net is a reserved domain name. This person has a very odd sense of humor which I appreciate. I wish his taste in website style was better though. Random McBean.net quote of a quote: “YES, she knows it’s a multipass!!! Anyways we’re in love.” : Corbin Dallas, The Fifth Element

1. In the movie of the same name, Ben Hur is arrested for supposedly attempting to assassinate the Roman governor when an errant piece of tile startles the Governor’s horse causing the Governor to be thrown. I actually thought the Governor was killed, but IMDB and Wikipedia agree that he was not. [↩]

Our website has experienced a truly ridiculous spike in traffic in the last day or so in no small part due to the traffic the yip-yip costume has generated throughout the inter-tubes. So to thank all the good citizens of the net, here is a set of shout-outs to the folks putting us on the map.

The top five hits on Google for “Dragoncon yip yip” are all directly attributable to K’s mindbogglingly amazing costume creation.

#1: Special credit to the Bad Astronomer for being as HAWSOME as it comes with this posting.
#2: PASTE Magazine Atlanta: 20 Things I learned at DragonCon (a rather amusing read from a D*C NooB).
#3: Dragoncon: The Something Awful Forums. Special credit to AstroZamboni, the writer of this comment:

By all that is good and holy in the world, [the costume] must not be mocked. This is awesomeness in its purest form made tangible, boiled down into a thick syrupy reduction and cooled and congealed into machine guns that fire laser powered rockets. It is like looking at the face of god himself.

And before I forget: AstroZamboni would make a great name for a rock band.
#4: The Bad Astronomer’s Dragon*Con Flickr set. Lesson: Tag your images to generate more traffic!
#5: Once Upon A Geek’s DragonCon posting (The yip-yip apparently ranks with IronMan and a rather scantily clad super-girl)

This very blog comes in #7.

Don’t worry, I’ll come down from this high sooner or later… maybe when the bandwidth bill comes in.

Oh the first set of images are currently uploading… this should be the pics from Friday and Saturday. Sunday will follow in the next day or so.

I’m sort-of anal when it comes to having standards compliant markup. So it annoys me to find out that YouTube’s default code for embedding videos is not compliant. Thanks to Bernie Zimmermann (and the commentors) for figuring out how to do this better.

You’ll need to change this*:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed>
</object>


To this:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/b3nodga6qmU&hl=en&fs=1" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
</object>


Or copy the second block of code and paste the URL of the video of interest into the “data” and “value” fields. Also verify that the height and width are correct.

Some You Tube video of the kid’s awesome Transformer costume:

He obviously practiced, because by Masquerade he did the transform almost instantly.

Another angle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGhDgtBe1lo

I have just added Vincent Laforet’s blog to the links below because I have so enjoyed reading the Olympics photography blog he has produced with Newsweek.

If you have interest in photography, or the impact of new media on traditional media (newspaper, magazines), you’ll find his blog interesting. He’s just getting started as a blogger, but it looks like he’s on the right track to explore an interesting niche. He seems to recognize that while opportunities seem to be fading for the traditional ’staff photographer’, considerably more freedom and opportunity is available working directly for your audience (us!).

To share one tidbit, in a posting after his return from Beijing he posts:

In Beijing, with a total of 6 cameras, I shot: 28,444 files for a total of a whopping 480 Gigabytes of Images! That’s INSANE! Even I am shocked.

I thought my photography archive was getting out of control. I’m just pushing that many images in my entire career at a third of the storage space.

Wow.

If you haven’t been following the adventures of Newsweek photographers Vincent Laforet, Donald Miralle ad Mike Powell at the Olympics, you’re missing a great opportunity. As all of you readers know, I’m an amateur photographer with aspirations for a few great shots. These guys are the best in the world shooting in a two week marathon of photography moments. They talk about the technical, physical and emotional challenges involved in capturing emotionally and literally dynamic events in still frames.
I posted about Vincent’s packing exploits to start off the series, but I think the posts have gotten even better as we’ve gone along.
They’re sharing a unique perspective on what it takes to get unique perspectives on this media circus of a sporting event: the technically strategic challenge of being in the right place (or several places) at the right time after hours (days!) of planning the perfect shot, the emotion of ‘discovering’ a new sport, the catharsis of introspection… it’s just been a great ride so far.

Keep it up guys!!

With NBC providing thousands of hours of Olympic coverage with broadcast, cable and online viewing available there is an overwhelming amount of viewing available. Now I hate watching the 45 second highlight clips intermixed with 45 minute human interest stories that make the prime-time Olympic magazine show. I want to sit down and watch some event to see what it is, or how it works and become an armchair judge (or in the case of Laser sailing… maybe learn something).

So I’m VERY disappointed in the NBC broadcast listings on their website. At first glance it seems like a lot of thought went into organizing the event and broadcast information, but extracting useful information from the NBC broadcast megaplex is nearly impossible.
(more…)

Vincent Laforet, who is shooting the Olympics for Newsweek, is running a blog documenting his experiences. I’m not sure if I will follow this throughout the games, but his post about packing for the trip is pretty interesting.

If you can’t be bothered to read the post, at least flip through the image gallery of his packing.

All I can say is: “Mmmmm….. gear.”

Thanks Robert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDA9NbPAK8o

Some of you may have heard about a related study on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, but for those that haven’t, here’s a brief overview.

Some people are neurologically tone-deaf (and these people are generally known as flute players*), such that they can not distinguish between one musical phrase and a different slightly altered one.

I know I have a particularly musical audience, so check out an online tone deafness ‘test’.

For the record I was 80.6% correct. It seems I’m pretty accurate on positively identifying the errors, but I seem to have a high false alarm rate also (this was true in the rhythm test also.).

Check out the other tests too:

• Adaptive tone test: 2.1Hz
• Rhythm test: 80.0%
• Associative Musical Visual Intelligence test: 90% (87,88,94,86,87.6)

It would seem that I’m musically above average. Maybe that trombone playing did do something permanent to my brain.

* Please do not flame me on the woodwind jab. I am a trombone player (even if I haven’t touched it in over a year) and it is my sworn duty to bust on the musical ability of woodwinds. No matter how stereotypical or inappropriate…