The Aptly Named, Sam’s Blog [Moved]

Moving

13Dec07

This blog has been moved to http://samgrover.com/. All the posts (except this one) and comments have been imported into the new blog. Subscribe to the new feed!

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I’ve been sharing this video with friends since I first saw it some months ago. It’s informative and elegant and the music is cool too. It provokes my curiosity, especially with the way it ends. Take a look!

Filed under: Culture, Internet, Technology, Video, Web | Leave a Comment

Back

04Jul07

It’s been a while since I updated this blog. About ten months. I’ve been an intern at Intel during that period and I recently joined as an employee.

Also, now it’s been one year since I moved to the SE Portland. I like it here. I have a hour-or-so long commute each way on TriMet, which isn’t terribly bad as it gives me time to read. However, public transit doesn’t work too well when there are more things to do in a day, especially in different parts of town. Even though my schedule at work is quite flexible, public transit can become a bottleneck. That occurs when I want to do more than go to work in the morning and return home in the evening. I thought that was sufficient excuse for me to go in for a car ;-) and placed an order for a new Mini Cooper S in April. I expect to have delivery within a month and am looking forward to that. It will be my first car.

My photography has been up and down during this time. In January, I sold off my Nikon D70S digital SLR and bought a Voigtländer Bessa R2A film rangefinder. After playing with cameras and photography for a couple of years I had come to realize just the kind of camera that would work best for me. The Bessa fit that bill quite well. It was also quite affordable as compared to another option. My previous experience with a rangefinder was definitely a motivating factor. I will write more about my experiences with this camera in a future post.

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Stark Street

01Oct06

Russ wanted to recreate the cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover along with his wife, Patty and son, Riley. He planned the shot and scouted for locations, narrowing them down to two. So, on a Sunday morning we went out to take the shot. We were a bit early for the chosen locations. The light wasn’t right. After a brief time looking around, we decided to go get breakfast and then return to take the shots.

On our way to LaurelThirst, we spotted an intersection on Stark Street and as fate would have it, it was better than the others and just right for the shot. Russ parked his Bug on the wrong side of the road and we started taking shots. They walked through the intersection once and I took some sample shots. After correcting their spacing and rhythm, I took shots of a few more passes with digital and film cameras. About fifteen minutes later, accomodating for light traffic, we were done and headed for a tasty breakfast. I had never tried to recreate a photo before. This was fun, and hopefully I’ll do more in the future. We left out some details, like Paul’s cigarette, Ringo, etc.

After going through the photos, Russ and family selected this shot as their favorite. Click on the image to see the larger version on flickr. There you will also find a link to the exact location on a map.

Filed under: Music, Photo, Photography, flickr, pdx | 3 Comments

Downloadable media

27Sep06

Amazon started offering downloadable movies a couple of weeks ago. That’s great, especially since they offer rentals. I prefer to rent movies since I usually only see a movie once. If I feel like watching it again and again, I would buy it. In that case, I wouldn’t buy a restricted downloadable file and wouldn’t recommend it either, especially with draconian agreements. I’d rather just buy the physical DVD at an affordable price. You can’t just give a restricted file to a friend and say, “Hey, check this out. It’s cool”. The same is true for restricted music.

The hassle of maintaining my own digital store and backing up stuff is another deterrent. Hard disks will fail, so one needs a more comprehensive backup policy than just saving the data onto a second disk. With movies, that’s a lot of data. There’s no way I’m going to put money into a backup system for that.
Amazon’s videos won’t play on the Mac, so I can’t even rent it if I wanted to. That’s another side-effect of the restrictions. Apple is also offering movie downloads through their iTunes store, but they don’t offer rentals. So, I’m off to Movie Madness these days. If someone figures out a convenient way to offer downloadable movie rentals, I’ll sign on.