wiredfool

Due to the lack of coffee at PyCon that was deemed acceptable to my Seattleite palate, I have attempted to find said coffee at Starbucks the last two days.

And failed miserably.

<rant>

Yesterday, I went to the Starbucks at ~2100 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC for my normal double short latte. (No, it’s not on the menu. It’s not normally a problem at Starbucks due to their supportive attitude towards people who know what kind of coffee they like. More on that later.) The short was good, although I did get charged for a double tall, which is generally ok so long as the coffee is decent, which this wasn’t. It was flat, stale tasting, and somewhat scalded. I believe that this was due to the 32 oz pitcher of milk that was kept hot and used for the ‘steamed’ milk portion of the latte. I don’t believe that this is an acceptable practice at Starbucks, but I’m not 100% certain of that. I do know that it destroys the mouthfeel and taste of the drink.

So in a burst of optimism, I tried the Starbucks in the ground floor of the 800 J Street, Washington DC building. They had a problem with a short latte, and couldn’t figure out how to add 6 oz of milk to 2 oz of espresso. But that’s not the real problem of why the coffee tasted so bad. As I was standing there, I noticed two shots of espresso just sitting under the outlet of their fully automatic push button espresso machine. And sitting. And sitting. All crema gone. Cooling off. Then she started two more shots on the other side, and emptied the old ones into my drink before the milk was mildly heated up again and added.

Starbucks employees, called partners, were indoctrinated with 25 hours of course work that imprinted company rules. Among them: Thou shalt brew a double espresso shot between 18 and 23 seconds and serve within 10 seconds of brewing it, or throw it out.

cite

<strong rant>

The attendant (can’t call her a barista) was so lazy she had to destroy the coffee rather than spend the time to press the button specifically for me on a fully automatic machine. A machine that would make George Jetson feel at home. No grinding, no loading, no emptying. Self service would have been more effective.

</strong rant>

</rant>

This may be funny now–

In 15 years, I’m not going to be laughing.

The fish tail is from a toy called “what’s sitting on my head”. No, I’m not joking.

The little noticed live action sequel to Finding Nemo — Eating Nemo.

A cat, handheld at 1/4 sec. I’m surprised that the cat stayed still for that long. Especially since this was the third in a sequence.

We’ve had this new camera (digital rebel) for about a month and a half now and taken somewhere north of 3000 pictures in that time. Even with the low end zoom that comes with it, (f3.5-5.5, 18-55mm, plastic) we’re getting good natural light shots of Ben.

It’s taken a while to get the hang of the focus point selection, and to make sure that it’s matching the composition of the picture. Typically for portraits that means that one eye needs to have the focus spot. Quite a challenge with a moving baby. I’ve found that the focus seems to be a little to the front of where I would think that it should be, but it’s hard to really tell without seeing images at full size, and by then I’ve sometimes forgotten exactly where I had the focus point. Perhaps I can hack something up with the exif data.

I’ve also noticed that the auto white balance for tungsten is leaving images distinctly warm. That may be an issue with the interior colors in the house (shades of terracotta, wheat, cream, and yellow) overwhelming the color bias and shoving it farther into the warm range. Or it may just be something that I need to figure out in custom white balance or post production.

I’m pretty impressed with the image quality at ISO 1600. Of course, I’d prefer less noise, but that’s pretty much a given. I suspect that one of the things that Moore’s law is going to help is to lower noise at high sensitivity, maybe in 5 years we’ll see usable 3200 or 6400 settings. I think the next outlay with this camera is to get a 50mm prime lens, since that’s going to give me another stop to play with in far less than the 5 years it will take to get an upgraded sensor. I will note that I think I’ve developed a pretty steady hand after years of trying to take lo light pictures with an Elph that only does ISO 100.

One thing that’s straining under the load is my image workflow. Sometime next month, we’ll pass the total number of images that I took with my old camera over it’s 4 year lifetime to date. I need better image archive/photo browsing software, and file system folders and imagemagick don’t do it anymore. (well, at least without a week or two of additional hacking). The trickiest thing is that there needs to be centralized storage (on the media server, the fancy name for a 4yr old debian box that now has another big drive on it, and space for 2 more) and mac laptop control and image posting. I have seen something that might work, I think it was livejournal’s photo management software.

Very Green.

Not so green.

White Christmas

This is a large percentage of the non-Ben related pictures from the vacation.