Mar
5
Stupid TurboTax
March 5, 2010 | 1 Comment
Once in a while, the idiots over at Turbo Tax work on kinks in their software.
Heres my favorite example of a kink they are unwilling to fix.
Feb
1
Office cleaning
February 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I spent today… from 9:30AM til 4:30PM, cleaning my office.
Unfortunately, the biggest thing I did will not show up in the pictures. I was able to remove an entire drawer out of my filing cabinet. Found some fun stuff, 100Mbit Netgear card, PCI/AGP video cards, apple phone cords from Apple iBook g3’s, USB-> Serial adapter, Treo 650, BB 7130e.
I removed probably 8 cubic foot of crap. Files from 2003, old hardware, boxes, and most importantly, old worn out posters.
Before and after of my shelves.
Rearranged my desk to face the door, and give me a little more privacy, in addition to a new layout. Change is important to me.
Oh, and the pictures…
Lake Tahoe got replaced by a 6ft long panorama of the Rose Bowl. I augmented that with a 8×10 of the cabin in the snow, a 6×10 pan of Autzen stadium, a 4×10 of the central Oregon, E at Eagle Crest, and a collage of Ben, E, Cam, Shane, Snow, Beach, and my Mom.
And of course, I had to put back up one of the Tahoe pictures, because the wall is torn and beat up there, and I had forgot about the damage my desk had been covering up.
But I like the improvement of the working environment.
Jan
26
UO Jaqua building is fascinating.
January 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment
(Left Photo from KVAL) (Right Photo from OregonLive)
This morning I took a tour of the new UO Athlete Learning Services building. Or whatever the official title of the Jaqua building is.
This building. How do I put it. Creates a fair share of controversy on our campus. OregonLive, UO Matters , Register Guard
One of my student employees is a leader in the “facebook group” effort to open the building to non-athletic students.
Another student admires the architectural details in the building, especially the lighting features.
Humor can be found in that searching for “John Jaqua” images on the internet reveals images of the Taj Mahal.
Anyways, I got a private tour of it today. It was a nice in depth behind the scenes look at how things worked, what purposes it had, how glass and wall were used as writing surfaces, how TV’s were inset at printing stations with long term planning, how printers and labs were built without wired networking!?!?!?, and how the glass in the bathroom was etched with an artistic form rumored to be Phil’s wife.
What I came away with… It’s pretty, its eccentric, and its a decent use of technology. And they clearly had limited advise from anyone with a technological background when designing and planning the building.
Images to remember:
The TV above is located in one of their study rooms. The wall is glass, as is the frame around the TV. The entire wall is a writing surface, allowing tutors to write notes and document whatever they are presenting on their laptop. Apparently also, the students occasionally mistake the TV for a writing surface.
The above image also shows the challenges with the blinds. You can’t manually control the blinds in the rooms. So the glare from the glass exterior shows up on everything in the building.
One of the things highlighted in the controversy of this building are it’s laptops. As demonstrated below, they are laser engraved with a bunch of O’s forming the larger “O” symbol of Oregon. This image is from the Engraver’s flickr gallery.
In my behind the scenes tour, I got to see the closet of “spares”. A pool of 50 is actively being used for daily checkout. A large pool are used by students for “term long” checkout. And the IT department has a few extras they have not yet put into use. They are 100% ready to go, but … this was quite the visual, shelving COVERED with laptops!
There is a staff lounge on the North East corner of the second floor. It looks out over the lawn, and the new basketball arena. It contains two bathrooms, a 52″ LCD TV, comfortable seating, a table, personnel lockers, and a kitchen. I mean, a beautiful appliance filled kitchen. Oh, and the bathrooms? Oh yeah, they have showers in them. Beautiful dark tiled showers. I’m pretty certain the staff lounge has convinced me to find a way to get hired in this building.
IT staff wise, I’m informed the building has 1.5FTE. They have two people! And 550 MacBook Pro’s, in addition to the 50 iMacs in the dedicated labs, and the 50-100 iMacs scattered around the building in offices and advising spaces. 1.5 FTE, running nearly 700 computers. Somethings wrong with that ratio. So yeah, when the job comes up, I’ll be there.
FYI, the best images of the Jaqua building are available from someone’s flickr gallery here
Jan
25
Truck goes to pasture
January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I finally took some time to wash the truck this weekend.
I’ve been thinking it over for a few months you see, and I have decided to sell it.
Unfortunately, I have been out of town for 9 of the last 11 weekends. This left very little time to actually focus on this goal. This weekend afforded me one cleaning day. I took Saturday and detailed the outside of the truck. This only took about four hours! But in the end, the truck came out looking pretty good. To think I don’t wash it very often.
Anyways, the final glamour shots of the exterior. Next weekend, the interior gets the same treatment, so I can put together a classified ad.
But if you know anyone interested in buying a 2004 Ford F-350 Superduty, let me know.
It’s a 2004 Ford Superduty F-350 Diesel Lariat Fx4 Crewcab LWB, with 154000 miles. It has a 4″ Revtek lift kit, on 33″ BFG All-Terrain tires. It has aftermarket chrome cab steps, a paint-matched flush tonneau cover, and tailgate and bumper of a 2008. I’m hoping to get 18,000 dollars for it. Willing to entertain reasonable offers near that point.
And to answer the million dollar questions, I have no idea what I will drive next.
Jan
18
Rose Bowl in 3d
January 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I took a lot of pictures at the Rose Bowl.
My goal, well one of them, was to try and create a panorama image of the facility.
I tried three times. Well, like 10, and this is the culmination of roughly 15 hours of work and testing.
I created a panorama in Photoshop via the automatic Batch Stitching tool. It came out ok, but lacked the detail when I zoomed in on it completely. That bugged me. But it looks decent. Below is a small preview of it. You can also download a larger (10MB) version of the file here. I may print out a poster of it for my house.
One of the things that really frustrated me with Photoshop is that I could not get it to do a 360 degree view. The big screen in the Rose Bowl was right behind us. This made us have to turn around to see it. But I had taken pictures of all the way around the bowl. Or so I thought, turns out I missed like 10 degrees to the right of the screen, but it wasnt important. I wanted an image which contained the scoreboard in the bowl. And I could not get photoshop to do it. Or at least, not joined with the main image. SO I have this piece, of what the stadium looked like behind us. Also available larger here.
I asked around, amidst my frustration with Photoshop, and was told of a piece of software called PTGUI. This software is designed for combining images. It can make a fancy stitch. The trial version lets you create an image, but not save your work, and uses a watermark. I used it to create a stitch manually, which isnt blended well, and but which has more of the detail I was longing for in the previous image. Unfortunately, I never could get a decent looking image including the stuff behind us. The field is rich, the stands can be zoomed, and its, well, ugly. But it was a fun learning experience. And if I wanted to spend a little more time, I could blend the edges, match the colors, and make it fit together as the automatically created version does. Again, a full download is available in jpg, if someone cares enough to click on it, its 11MB. Here.
But the really cool thing that came out of this playing, is PTGUI. It can make Quicktime VR files. A Quicktime VR file is a 3d image, allowing you to do a full pan of something, and scale up, down, right left, zoom in, its rad. I was able to create one, including the rear images, to encompass our view at the stadium. For size reasons, I’ve attached the small one below. You can go get to the full resolution one here beware, its 57MB. So yeah, you can in small form here, scroll around and see the 3d picture of the bowl.