Purchase location: What the Duck
Purchase date: June 1, 2007.

Purchase location: Glarkware
Purchase date: June 10, 2008.

The name of this shirt is a little off. Floppy disks were not analog.

Purchase location: BustedTees
Purchase date: September 16, 2008.

Taken New Year’s Eve, 2008.

Finally got my order from Futurlec. Got a large assortment of things from their Value Packs page, including 300 LEDs.

Haven’t posted since November ended (with the exception of a few photoblog images that don’t count). Haven’t had much to say, and wasn’t trying to post every day this month. Still don’t have much to say, so here’s a couple of pictures I took in airports on my trip to NY for Thanksgiving.

LAX, mostly empty, the day before Thanksgiving:

Sky Harbor International at sunset:

Yes, yesterday’s Hello, World post counted as a post for the day, even if I didn’t even write anything.

I’ve been working on my Arduino interval timer project a lot. Got a bunch of parts and random electronics. Finally got a breadboard. Got the cheap knockoff cable releases for the camera. They’re very good, by the way. Only $6 or so on eBay instead of $45ish from Canon (on Amazon.. MSRP $70! Sick.) It’s just a simple switch inside a simple plastic case… with a proprietary connector.

Anyway, I got the Arduino actually controlling the camera. All that’s really left now is to work on the software, and that’s coming along nicely. Initially, I just set it up to take as many pictures as the number I pressed on the keypad. There’s a video of that below:

Now, I can set up some variables in the software and get it to take pictures at interval, and set the exposures. The next step is to be able to set those variables from the device. This picture was a 500 second exposure, timed by the Arduino. While the shutter was open, the LCD display was counting down the time left. The lights were off in the room.

This is a lot of fun.

You thought I’d miss today, didn’t you? Cutting it close, but getting my post in before midnight.

On the way back from the bay area yesterday, I was able to watch the sunset through the smoke from the wildfires. I don’t usually get to see much of anything on this stretch of highway because usually I’m the one driving, and I usually do it at night. The sunset was incredible, and I felt like I had to go back while there was still some smoke to shoot it. So I did.

I couldn’t find a place to stop on the side of the road where I really wanted to, but the place I ended up worked out just great.

There’s a few more from today, as well as some older sunset shots, in my Sunset Flickr set.

Deciding what to write about today became very easy last night. There’s a big fire burning in the mountains over Santa Barbara. When I drove home from work yesterday, everything was pretty much normal. A little less than 2 hours later, I left home for my softball game and something seemed a bit off. I couldn’t figure out what it was until I got on the highway towards the game, and then saw the fire in the mountains in front of me.

My reaction summed up on twitter: Holy crap big fire about 20 hours ago from TwitterBerry

I wasn’t the only one twittering about it. Twist is a website that will graph word usage on twitter, and track trends:

Got to the softball field, and unsurprisingly, the game was being postponed. Drove like a maniac home to get my camera, and then back towards downtown Santa Barbara to do some shooting. Taking pictures of a fire at night is hard. Even harder when you’re not really terribly close to it, though I suppose it’s a lot safer that way. Getting the exposures right is tricky. I got a few good shots.

About 10 minutes after I took this one, a police car drove by and announced that the area I was in was being evacuated. I wasn’t all that close to the fire, and didn’t feel like I was in any danger. I moved only about three blocks away, and stayed there for the next several hours.

The white line in there is a helicopter coming in for more water. This one was taken from the top of a parking garage. There were at least 5 other people up there with tripods and cameras doing the same thing.

You can see the rest in the flickr set: Tea Fire. I may go shoot more tonight.

The tubes are broken. I can’t get to Google, Yahoo, Flickr… http://internetpulse.net/ shows some connections slow or critical. Looks like some internet backbone is having problems. I can still get to my website, though, so no excuse for no post today.

I figured out what my first Arduino project is going to be: an intervalometer for my camera. Similar to this, but the 40D has a different connector than the Rebel line, so it’ll have to be slightly different. Shouldn’t be too hard, though. I ordered a few generic cable releases on eBay… four for $21 here. That should give me enough room to screw up one or two of them. I’m really not sure what I’ll do with it, but it’ll be a fun project that will at least have some chance of getting used.

Tubes seem to be unclogged, now.