Random Frames

I have some links that people might be interested in.

Chris Jordan has an entire website full of pictures of gigantic piles of discarded objects. It’s crazy. The above picture is a giant heap of discarded mobile phone chargers. Before seeing those pictures, I never really thought about how about how much waste the planned obsolescence of things like cell phones was creating. The link showed up on BoingBoing almost a week ago, but the site was getting too hammered to view.

There is a photoshop contest occurring on Worth1000 right now. The current theme is “Bizarrchitecture 5: The unique dream houses you’d like to own”. Some of the entries are really incredible photoshop jobs. The above picture is one of the entries. Also via BoingBoing.

Ok, after speaking privately with Barry, and in the absence of other suggestions, we have decided that the theme for the next week will be Vertical Lines.

I have to admit that I have NO IDEA what I am going to submit for this one. But I’m sure that we’re going to see some interesting submissions.

Feel free to be as creative as you want. Remember that if you want to submit more than one photo for any of the themes, go right ahead. It will be fun to see what everyone comes up with.

So I started a new category for random pictures. If you don’t like the name feel free to suggest a change or just change it yourself if the website will let you.

The above picture, which is not very high quality due to using my mobile phone, was sort of interesting. Its an ant hill that had this ring of colorful plants grown up around it. The ants had killed much of the plants near the ant hill creating a black ring between the plants and the ant hill. The plant themselves had turned to a rich shade of fall red. It’s a shame I did not have my good camera with me the colors were very striking in real live. The ant hill in the middle and the very stark rings around it were cool and stood out as I walked past.

Edit: d’oh! Terence has pointed out I orginal put this in the uncatergorized area. It should have been in the new category. Oops.

I think we need a category for random pictures. You know your see something cool, snap a picture of it and want to share it but it does not fit that week’s theme. If we had an open/random category it could be place for posts and pics that don’t fit in the other categories. Just and idea.

Call it ‘Random Pixelation’ or something like that. Just a suggestion.

So, the novelty of seeing a big picture of my tushy every time I go to this page is slowly wearing off. Maybe it’s time to pick the game/theme we will be playing for the next week. Anyone got any ideas?

I kind of like the idea of choosing a theme during the week (maybe by Thurs?), so that people have the weekend to screw around with their cameras. But I imagine that we’ll have to be flexible, and take into consideration how popular the game/theme for that week is.

Also, I only posted one picture for the last theme because I could only think of one creative picture to take. However, there is no reason that people couldn’t post more than one entry for any of the games/themes.

And if you are experimenting with a technique and want to post a picture to get feedback that is totally unrelated to that week’s theme, go ahead and do it. I would have already done it, but all of my experiments have not turned out as well as I have expectd.

I saw a link on Kottke.org to an album posted to Flickr from their trip to Iceland. Some are absolutely incredible.

It really makes me want to get out there and take pictures. But then again, I don’t think I could have taken a lot of those shots with the hardware I currently have. I think I would need a telephoto lens to get the shortened depth of field like in the above picture, and filters at least for all of the shots he took with slower shutter speeds.

Uh, or maybe I don’t even know what kind of hardware I would need… What do you think?

I need help, and I was wondering if any of you could give me a hand. I figured this might be the place to ask, since there are so many computer saavy people here. I am building a computer for my sister. It is an Athlon64 with an Asus K8N motherboard (nVidia nForce3 250 chipset). After I finished assembling it, I powered it up and it POST’ed, but would not fully boot. The following screen is displayed, and then the computer stops.

I had a variety of theories as to what is going wrong, but most possibilities have been eliminated. Below is a screenshot of the Boot Device Priority screen in the BIOS:

And below is a screenshot of the Boot Settings screen in the BIOS:

I first thought that the error message was being displayed off the bottom of the screen, but I have already eliminated that possibility, and have tried booting with a CRT and an LCD monitor (and still saw the same problem). I have tried booting without any optical or hard drives, thinking that I would see a “no operating system found” error, but did not see that error. The PC speaker is working (as evidenced by the single beep at POST, and because I can get beep codes to sound by disabling other hardware). I have tried booting off a SATA hard drive, an optical drive, and a PATA hard drive (all of the above screen shots were from that attempt). No matter what the device is that I am attempting to boot from, I see the same errors.

Anyone have any idea what is going on or what I can try?

Alright, I’ll go first with this week’s theme. Here’s one of my most attractive feature.

Anyone gotten the RSS feed to work? My RSS reader craps out everytime I try to add the feed. I read, like, 20 other feeds, and I’ve never had this problem before.

I was thinking that we could use the right panel of the front page of the weblog for an author list. It would make more sense if there was a thumbnail picture of each of the authors next to their nickname. So, maybe the first weekly theme should be “post a funny picture of yourself”. Then the pictures that everyone posts of themselves could be used for the author list. What do you think?