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Archive for June, 2008

End of Semester 1, 2008

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

And now, for my biannual end-of-semester summary. I have finished everything now, except I have an exam for my Compilers subject at the end of the month, and I am presenting my Photography work on Wednesday next week.

For my major work I have been taking photographs of industrial areas, particularly those related to supply of resources. I spent a lot of time trudging around in the bushes that surround the fences that keep people like me out of those sort of places, so I ended up taking a lot of photos of them, too. Below are the four that I’ve had lambda-printed to 70 x 70cm, and will present next week.

Skyline

Power

Plants

Cyclone

In unrelated news, I have installed OS X on my Core 2 Duo-based PC and it all seems to be running quite well. (It is much faster in Photoshop when using large files – it must be better at managing memory.) If it continues to perform well, I’ll nuke my Windows XP partition and pick up a couple more 500gb drives and set up an ZFS-based file store on this machine.

The only downside so far is that my external audio interface (ESI QuataFire 610) is unsupported. I think I’d rather get a new interface than keep running XP, though. Anyone have any suggestions?

Sunset on Mars

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

This photograph, taken by the Mars Exploration Rover a couple of years ago, just came to my attention. I find it absolutely amazing on so many levels. That we have been able to send a remote-controllable robot to another world is incredible. That it should send back such beautifully composed images is unexpected to say the least.