Dale Miller

Earlier this evening, I decided to fix some angel hair pasta to eat with the incredibly tasty sauce that Emilie gave me. When I took the package out of the cabinet, I didn’t realize it had already been opened, and spilled most of it into the floor. Since my floor was not at its cleanest, I thought throwing it out would be prudent. Unfortunately, since I was in front of the sink, I just threw it into the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. What I did not take into account was exactly how fast pasta absorbs water. It completely plugged my drain pipe, requiring me to disassemble it and clean it out with a knife. I was fortunate that the clog was still under the sink rather than further down the pipe.

The moral of this story? Don’t put uncooked pasta down the drain in any quantity.

I just had one of the most pleasant evenings in recent memory. I had dinner with a beautiful woman, and we sat and talked for a couple of hours. It’s unfortunate for me that a) she has a boyfriend, and b) she’s moving to Australia next month. Nonetheless, it was very nice to be able to get out of the house and not be by myself.

I’m bored and lonely. I sort of want to get out of the house and go to dinner somewhere, but sort of don’t. Having dinner out means that I (usually) eat better and I don’t have to cook, but eating out alone got old long ago. It’s also far more expensive to go out. So… do I want to leave the house badly enough to actually get ready and go out? Anyone want to meet me for dinner?

There are two major problems with taking pictures of the moon. The first is exposure. Typical moon shots are at night. You think to yourself “it’s really dark, so I’m going to have to use a long exposure and wide aperture to have enough light”. If you have a camera with automatic exposure, it tends to think so as well. However, that’s wrong. Consider that the exposure you actually need is that of a mostly-white object in direct sunlight. That calls for a short exposure and small aperture. That’s why automatic cameras almost always overexpose the moon. The second is the size of the moon. Your mind thinks of it as large. When you start looking through the lens, however, you realize that isn’t the case. The moon viewed from earth is just about 1/2 degree or arc. The “typical” camera lens provides ~ 50° field of view, rendering the moon only 1/100th of the width of the photo, probably not what you had in mind. A good telephoto lens alleviates that problem, but at the cost of being harder to focus and more prone to jitter.

A photograph such as the one I shot a few evenings ago is a nice compromise. With the sky backlit by the sunset, and the moon low on the horizon (thus dimmed by atmosphere), the illumination difference is reduced, allowing the camera’s built-in metering to do a reasonable job in calculating the exposure. By setting the moon against the horizon and having other elements in the photo, it’s not as obvious that the moon itself occupies very little of the frame.

Oh, and I just thought it was a pretty shot.

I had expected to spend Christmas Day at home alone. I was both surprised and pleased when Mark called me up to see if he could bring out a turducken dinner. It was delicious. While he was here we walked to the back of my property. He had never been to the back property line, and I hadn’t been in many months. It would be nice to clean out enough undergrowth to allow that to be an easy trek. It’s a rather nice view from the crest of the hill.

Mark is excited about his new job. He’s starting off at a very nice salary for a first job. The title is (I think) “systems development specialist”. He starts on January 2nd.

Originally uploaded by 單車王子(ay2000)

This looks like the sort of trade show I would enjoy attending.

Dream Fudgesicles are the best! They have zero calories!

I don’t remember why I was dreaming about eating Fudgesicles, but I awoke with that thought,

Sometime this evening I realized that it’s been exactly two years since I last had my hair cut. Happy anniversary, hair. I had hoped it would be a bit longer by this point, but I can’t change its growth rate. Let’s see if I make it through a third year.

The road less traveled

There have been a number of times in my life that I have literally or figuratively taken the road less traveled. While not all of my choices have been good ones, certainly not all have been bad ones.

I have now spent far too many hours working on a new Wordpress theme for dale-miller.com. I’m still not thrilled with it, but I like it better than the previous theme. I have learned quite a bit about css, a bit more php, some of the internals of Wordpress (not yet expressed in this theme, a plugin is coming, though), and I’m still not any good at web design. I think I can now implement many things, I just can’t design them.

I’m now on my third day of my 2-week break, and I haven’t gone crazy yet. That’s a good sign. I probably do need to get out of the house sometime soon, though.