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Mary and I spent the 4th of July weekend in San Francisco, where we saw a fireworks show unlike any I’d ever seen: Fireworks through fog. Actually, we couldn’t even see most of the good stuff. But when it got really loud and the clouds got really bright, you knew it was a good part. The crowd didn’t seem too put off. Neither were we. San Francisco is an awesome city! We rented bikes on Saturday and went on a nice long ride around the city, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding through Golden Gate Park.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.

A few more pictures after the jump…

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I had my first Disney theme park experience recently. Mary finally took me after talking about it forever! All in all, I’d have to say I was pretty impressed. Nothing like the roller coasters of Busch Gardens or Kings Dominions, that’s for sure. In fact, there were only really two rides that qualify as roller-coasters as far as I’m concerned. But they definitely go all out on the immersion factor. Whether it is the stars flying by in the dark and the music of Space Mountain, holographic ghosts on haunted house, or images projected on sheets of dry ice smoke, I spent a lot of time going, “Wow that’s cool! How’d they do that?”.

They also really know how to run a theme park. Compared to others I’ve been to, it is way cleaner, people are nicer, and they amazingly efficient at moving a line through a ride. I mean, they run double loading stations, have non stop loading on conveyor belts, and have a “Fastpass” system, so you can get a certain number of bypass the line passes per hour, and can then come back at a future time (marked on the pass, depending on demand) and bypass most of the line. Also cool: Interactive rides. On Astroblaster, you get to go through the ride shooting targets with a laser, competing for a high score. Nothing like competition to make the ride more fun :). The California Tower Hotel (Tower of Terror) was also pretty cool. I can almost see why people would want to travel across the world to visit the place. For a young disney fan at the right age, I think it would seem downright magical. Pictures can be found here. Also, this girl was going crazy on a rope on the Lion King float in the parade!

What’s better than that, right?

If you know me, you could well be asking, “shouldn’t you be doing something more productive than playing with the Gimp?” The answer, of course, is yes. There are several more important things I should be accomplishing tonight. None the less, here I am. I was playing with the rapid fire mode on my camera a couple weeks ago, so I had the material. I thought it’d be cool in a filmstrip.

Supposed to have great weather in Southern California, right? To be fair, that is usually true. But recently, we get rain, rain, rain. And my office (next to lots of windows) has been freezing. On a clear day, there is a great view across the valley that is Moorpark on the drive down the hill…not this week.

This is cool!

One of the things I love about my new state is the large number of really great recreational areas. We’ve got mountains everywhere, beaches everywhere, and the weather tends to be great for enjoying them most of the time. In response to this and the fact that I don’t have much else to do when I’m not working, I’ve started mountain biking. I mean, it’s like hiking I suppose, but you get a lot farther and it is a lot more fun (The downhill in particular). A couple weekends ago, I even took to the time to learn some bike maintenance. With some help from this site, mostly, and after a couple trips to one of the local bike shop, I got rid of the wobbly, rubbing tires, cleaned the chains, got some nice tight brakes, and got my derailleurs adjusted so that I could reliably shift through all gears. The biggest thing I learned was that I could fix a bent wheel by adjusting the spoke tension! I suppose I should have known this, but I never did. No more embarrassing rubbing noises every rotation, and I don’t have to watch the front tire wobble in front of me!

Anyway, onto the point. Today I went for a ride at Point Mugu State Park off of the PCH and I thought I’d post some of the pictures I took. You can see some trail maps of the park here, or google map it (no trails though). You can see the pictures in this gallery. I’m just experimenting with plogger for the gallery, so it may not be integrated quite right yet…

View the whole gallery

I got a new camera last week, and have been having fun playing with it. I’ve already taken a few series of pictures with the intent of stitching them into a panorama, and tonight I started to figure out how to do it.

I found this linux.com article that talks about some open source tools for image stitching. It recommended an application called Hugin as “the reigning champ”, so I figured I’d give it a try. I haven’t tried much else, and I don’t think I will, because in about ten minutes with almost no effort I’ve got a pretty decent result. You’ve got to get some other tools for it to work (such as enblend, and autopano). I definitely recommend the autopano-sift control point search program, as it doesn’t have the limited functionality of the autopano (which requires a license for the sift feature), and worked great for me.

I’ve got some experimenting to do to figure out all of the possibilities, but I put together this quick panorama of part of Simi Valley from four photos taken from the hill where I work.