Archives novembre 2005

Yesterday evening I met a lady in white. At first glance she was kind of shy, distant and cold, but I eventually managed to go walking with her in the streets. Everything was so calm, so silent...
I could hardly hear her whisper at my frozen ears. Her voice was so soft, so choked, and she was laying there, on the pavement, on trees, on my shoulder...

Lady in White, come to me, talk to me, fall on me!
And please, follow me in my winter quest...

As seen from my desk

Funny commercial found... can't remember where, but download it! (wmv - 3.4 MB)

I have uploaded some black and white photos on Annecypix, done with the same camera as in the post entitled "Canon AE-1 pictures on Annecypix". Yes I like redundency.

What you will see there is only a tiny selection of the 36 exposures film, shot during a rainy day in Annecy, and you may notice the same problem as on the colour film: a light area in the middle of the pictures. I'll have to get that camera body repaired.

Feel free to have a look in the gallery!

Manuel Quinto and Nicolas Vion from Supinfocom Valenciennes have released this year a great short film called Grhaenpa. I think everyone should view it!

Download it (mov, 17 MB)

I find it really amazing how shit can happen with everything you touch sometimes...
Yesterday morning, I wanted to take a shower before going to work. I removed my cute pink dotted underwear, my 10 years old favourite t-shirt and jumped in the shower, praying God that I could open my eyes before getting at work. 2 minutes later, while I was enjoying the smelling of my marvelous Petit Marseillais soap, I smelled something unusual, almost stinky, until I eventually felt some ugly mud on my feet.

Jesus Christ (or something more vulgar), my drain is blocked!
At this very moment, an awful feeling of abandonment and fear grew in my mind... Ok, too late to clean it now, let's put half a litre of Destop in this stagnating water and let's see if it helps.
4 hours later: same problem. It seems I will need more than one bottle of Destop to get rid of this blocked pipe... Moreover, vapors of this toxic liquid affected my brain and now I'm almost sick. Yukk! Of course I tried the suction cup I won at a contest (yes, I know...), but this was worse than without it.

Since I am sure lots of people find this story very interesting, I may release a short movie about it, and why not a DVD that I will sell on eBay, to buy more Destop...

And did I mention I almost screwed our server at work?

On friday, 18th of november, I have shot an entire 36 exposures film during lunch pause and went to make it develop right after. The result is quite good, even if (as I said in a previous post) the camera body is not hermetic to light. You will notice red strokes in the middle of the images in the first image of the serie.
But something incredible happened to me: my uncle decided to lend me his Minolta Dynax 5 with 3 different lenses! This is a very good camera and I am going to test it right away. This is a stunning surprise for me, since all my experience with traditionnal cameras have somewhat led to technical problems. Now I'll be able to concentrate on art and composition, instead of technical issues. I am impatient to use this Dynax 5...

Check the new pictures

Last night I have dreamed that I was listening to France Inter, and I heard our President Jacques Chirac talk about blumaise, this website. And this is the shortest post I have ever made here.

Well the Canon camera I was talking about in a previous post almost works perfectly. The body itself does not appear to be light-proof, so on some pictures there is a large red / orange mark in the middle of the picture. This is quite annoying since I don't really know what I can do about that, but I'll try to make the body more hermetic. However, I managed to get some satisfying pictures yesterday and what you see in the image below is a sneak peak of the film I got developed (that I hope to scan & upload to annecypix very soon). Then you notice that the title of this post has absolutely nothing to do with photography and you're right!

Today I had lunch at my parents'. I saw a niece and an uncle of mine, it was a very pleasant moment. Particularily pleasant since I knew I did not have to get back to work afterwards. I'm lucky enough to be able to choose when I want to work or not. Oh don't think I really work when I want, but at least I can quite freely choose whenever I want one or two days or even one week off. This is definitely the most neat feature of my job. Plus the fact that I only have to walk one minute from home to get there. It's such a pity it is so damn boring!
When I think that some people spend up to 3 hours in common transportation, or in their car. I am not sure I would accept such sacrifice! This sounds so weird. Let's imagine you spend 3 hours per day in transportation. 3 x 5 x 4 = 60 hours in a month! For me this is nonsense, but surely because I never needed to spend that time in a car, or train.

So now, what should I do? Be happy with my life and try to convince myself that "This is the best for you" or try to find a more stimulating job?
Bleh, this is not the right season to think about that. Winter is almost here, and ski resorts open at the beginning of december, so let's consider such serious thoughts should be deferred to may, 2006.

Yeah, let's do that.

Here is my new friend Bjà¸rn, he has a new videogame. See how he looks happy.

Some months ago, I had the chance to get a Kodak Retina Reflex III that I got from my father, who got it from his father also... The camera was almost not working, so I decided I should get another one from eBay, which I did. I bought one at a very modest price, and it worked perfectly during 5 months, letting me shoot almost 10 films. Now the mechanism that triggers the shutter is broken. I did not even try to repair it, and it seems it will be quite complicated and very expensive also to have it repaired by a professionnal. So if anyone here has any clue on how to get it fixed, I would be infinitely grateful.

Here are some sample shots taken with that Kodak body:

                

Now the last camera I have recovered from my father is a Canon AE-1 (pictured below), first introduced back in 1976. I have managed to load an BW Ilford film inside, and started to take some shots. But the shuttering sync does not look right so I may get surprising results. This won't prevent me from shooting the whole film and prey to get clean pictures.

Why am I interested by old cameras, while I started photography with a simple digital camera? Maybe because I felt the need to discover the origins of this technique. And surely because so far I could not play with depth of field, and it is very pleasant to know that you still can get pretty pictures with 50 years old camera bodies. I will update here as soon as I have news concerning the Kodak & Canon camera. Hey, what do I see outside? Rain? This will be perfect to make a photo session during lunch time. More news later...

Last night, I have dreamed that I was a scientist studying ants, and I wondered approximatively how many ants there was on Earth. Then I woke up. I really found this question interesting (what, are you surprised?) and then decided to start my inquire.
This morning, before checking if the VPN I am setting up those days was working, I decided that getting an answear to that important question was essential, so I sent several emails to famous science magazines such as Science, Nature and La Recherche.

Let's see if they will consider this request seriously or not.
This won't prevent me from counting them anyway...

I am a cyclist. I do not own a car, I do own legs and wheels. I live in a country where there is not much respect for bicycles and people riding them... If you don't pay attention to every little detail, then nasty things are going to happen to you. You have to be extremely careful with car / truck drivers, and always think that the worse can happen, always think that "this stupid blind a**ole" driver did not even see you. Or at least that's what he pretends...

One day, I was passing a topless Mercedes with a rather brainless pseudo-fashion-bimbo riding her cellphone instead of her car. I was passing her quite legally, but this brainless person did not even notice me (hey what do you think, why would it be necessary to check my rear view mirrors since I own a Mercedes and I am blond!!!) and started to deviate my side without any notice (no blinking lights and so on). The car touched my right knee and eventually pushed my bicycle to the left. So I shout on her with something kind like:

- Please remove that f***ing phone from your ear and PAY ATTENTION to bicycles!!!

What she answeared let me without voice:
- Oh f***ing bicycles, annoying us all the time

Since that day (and some other very stressful situations), I feed my fear of car drivers that hate bicycles that hate drivers.

Each time I grab my bicycle and ride more than 10 minutes in Annecy - France, I can be pretty sure that I will face a surprising situation. Most people don't give a fuck about cyclists here, and they are totally unaware that they can cause extremely bad injuries. Since they are protected in their 50,000 € steel box, they do NOT consider it's important to pay attention to others.

And THIS TOTALLY SUCKS! So as of today, I will be a militant in my own town. I don't really know how at the moment, but I think that I will start with putting stupid stickers on every car that hits me, that is parked where it's not supposed to be.

Several associations and events gather people that want to protect their right to ride a bicycle in the most secure way. A strange event occured in New York, and a little bit everywhere on the Earth, Critical Mass is a monthly bicycle ride to celebrate cycling and to assert cyclists' right to the road. Local authorities are not supposed to be aware of this gathering, and this might be considered illegal. In august 2005, New York Police decided such events could not happen and they arrested 49 persons.

April 12, 2005. The New York Times reported on how police were caught lying about how protesters were resisting arrest, when videotape evidence showed otherwise. Another scandal was that the police doctored their own tapes, removing parts that showed the suspects' innocence. This behavior on the part of the police is outrageous and, of course, illegal -- ironically enough.
The Times reports that of the 1,670 cyclist cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial.

Bleh this sounds like an interesting thing to develop, I think there has been no Critical Mass event in Annecy so far... this gives me ideas...

Now some links:
History of bicycle on wikipedia
Rights and duties of a cyclist (french):
Check this page containing a lot of information about the risks of riding a bicycle in town (french)

Activism:
Critical Mass
Bicycle defense fund
Vélorution ! (french)

ps: I have not even talked about the benefits of using a bike instead of a car...

Such a title would have been immediately considered as science-fiction some years ago, but knowledge and technology rapidly evolve. Edward T. Lu & Stanley G. Love have written a paper where they expose a method to get rid of nasty asteroids:

We present a concept for a spacecraft that can controllably alter the trajectory of an Earth threatening asteroid using gravity as a towline. The spacecraft hovers near the asteroid with thrusters angled outward so the exhaust does not impinge on the surface. This deflection method is insensitive to the structure, surface properties, and rotation state of the asteroid.

Read this paper (pdf - to be published in Nature).

Oh and the asteroid shown in the image below is 25143 Itokawa as seen from Hayabusa, a japanese spacecraft launched in may of 2003 that is supposed to collect a sample of material from this asteroid and bring it back to Earth for analysis. On november 7, Hayabusa was 7.5 km from Itokawa. You can follow almost in real time the state of the mission on this page.

25143 Itokawa on wikipedia
Hayabusa on wikipedia
Hayabusa arrived at Itokawa - sept. 14th, 2005 (pdf)
Proximity operations + beautiful pictures of the asteroid

pifpafteam is the name of a ski / snowboard team I am part of, and is the extreme sports division of Blumaise.org
After one year and a half of existence, pifpafteam website has now its own domain name : www.pifpafteam.org

The website was created on the 29th of march, 2004.
31 GigaBytes of data have been transfered since the very beginning, the site got 88805 hits, and 105 people added it to their favorites. It is not enormous but since there are something like 10 members, I think it's pretty reasonable.

Oh, and by the way, a new teaser of the upcoming movie pifpafteam in Slovenia is available on the homepage. Movie is scheduled to hit theatres at the end of the month.

And I thought it was the perfect moment to link the source of the name of this team, a text to speech wav file sent by Pistols to me some years ago... Listen to it!

What human beings can do with their brain, hands and imagination can sometimes overtake what you thought was possible. Some people have a forum for those who love to make things but who are not inspired by scrapbooking with die-cut teddy bears, cross-stitched home sweet home plaques, wooden boxes with ducks in bonnets painted on...

Beware, there are 45121 of those dangerous people, and their home is simply called www.crafters.org. But what you will find on this website will not be the regular knitting tip, or a tutorial on creating a cutting edge "Winnie the Poo" pull-over for your nephew. No, you will find digestive tubes, knitted Zelda top or a pimped lawnmower...

Perfect for rainy days.

Knitted digestive tube
Halloween Star Wars hat
Pimped kid car

As seen on slashdot, an article talking about singing mice. This post can be related to previous one, but is not directly linked. It seems that male mice really sing in the presence of females. The sounds it produces almost look like some birds' songs, but are in the ultrasonic range. This article is quite long and full of information.

Read the full article
Listen to those recorded sounds!