DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Fourteen months ago I set four goals for the year. Two involved music, and two involved business. About a month after that, I set another music goal. And about a month after that, I found out my wife and I were going to have a baby; I charitably considered this a sixth goal in light of the amount of time and attention it would take.

Goal #1 was to get back into music. This is what I wrote at the time:

I’m going to get my drums back onstage this year. I will find a band and start gigging again.

And that’s what I did: I found a band. I got my drums onstage three times. One was a headliner at a local outdoor concert series, and another was at a Kerry fundraiser. Both were highlights of last year.

When I set my goals, I didn’t account for the time it would take to be in a band. Rehearsals ate up a couple evenings a week for much of the year. I ended up punting one of the business goals in May, and the other last Fall, even though I’d made some progress toward both. The alternative would have been to quit the band, but that seemed counter-productive. I work enough already.

The second music goal was to learn to play the hammer dulcimer. I didn’t do this. But I did learn enough to write a song, which amazes me still. On balance, I’ll call this one a partial success.

Goal #5 was to get ready for the recording session I’d scheduled for Thanksgiving. I spent a month recording drum tracks, then two days engineering the tracking of guitar and vocals, and now I’m about a quarter of the way through mixdown. I’ve learned a thousand things about recording and mixing music, and in a month I’ll have learned a thousand more. This project is kicking off a total lifestyle change, which I guess is the point of setting big scary goals.

Goal #6, prepping for the munchkin, was an unqualified success. We got all the pre-delivery stuff done as planned, even though it meant installing a diaper-rinsing device on the toilet the night before the early-morning drive to the hospital, regardless of the fact that we wouldn’t actually need to rinse diapers for six-plus months. (Plan the work, work the plan, and don’t argue with extremely pregnant women.)

All in all I had set six goals, which considering their time requirements was too many by half. Even so, I achieved 3.5 of them. But as I think back, the score is irrelevant. 2004 brought some great events and spawned many wonderful memories. I achieved goals I’m ecstatic about. And I have a new hobby that is totally compelling, and a new baby who is all that and more. I’m not necessarily where I projected I’d be, but once again, that’s probably the point.

First post in 9 days. I guess I could say I’ve been busy, but in fact I’ve been sitting here for 9 days with the most horrific case of writer’s block.

[another 2 hours go by]

See what I mean?

Newborns are endlessly cute. I have 1000 pictures to prove it.

Some of the close-ups suffer from uneven lighting. The built-in flash units on most consumer cameras have a limited range of use. In the case of my old Coolpix, arm’s-length “Speedlight” shots are rarely exposed well.

The image pictured here is underexposed in the area of interest. However, the baby’s sleeve is well-lit, and risks getting blown out if we correct the whole frame based on the lighting in the top half. Also, the image suffers from a red cast that is unfortunately typical of this camera.

Gradient masking provides a quick solution to the exposure problem: it allows me to apply a curve correction progressively across the image. In this case, a simple full-range gradient from top to bottom is adequate.

Note that no selections were made: this entire correction took about 60 seconds.

The exposure-correction curve is extreme. To allow for easy tweaking, I created it in an Adjustment Layer. To limit it to the top half of the image, I accessed the Curves layer’s “Layer Mask” by option-clicking on the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers palette. After selecting the Gradient tool and setting foreground and background colors to white and black (respectively), I dragged the mouse top-to-bottom to draw the gradient.

A second Adjustment Layer lets me pull the Red back in the highlights, to strip away the cast.

The resulting Layers palette shows both correction layers (although they’re disabled in this screenshot).

The resulting image can be seen in the right half of this before-and-after composite. Notice how the sleeve no longer competes with the face for your attention — yet there is no visible transition from the areas where a correction was applied to areas where no correction was necessary. Also, you’ll notice that the clothing is no longer pink.

For more Photoshop image-correction techniques, see the Photoshop channel.

After a few more nights of futzing with it, I settled on a solution to my phasing problem. Pictured is the current recording setup: two AKG C1000S mics centered above the middle of the dulcimer’s soundboard in a “coincident pair” arrangement.

It’s a compromise. I can get a better tone with different mic placement, but this is the only way I could get a phase-coherent signal. It seemed like a sensible compromise because tone is subjective, and transparent to the listener. In contrast, the phase problem would be apparent just by walking around the room.

So, yesterday I recorded approximately 500 notes*, or about half of my song. In sight: the end!

^*On a recent horrific commute, I held off brain death by a few minutes by counting the number of eighth notes in my song. This activity would be stupefyingly boring for most people, but I’d been stuck in traffic for five hours. Stupefyingly boring was a huge improvement. You could have re-leveled the blades of your planer with my EKG at that moment.

In a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, researchers announced compelling new evidence that human industrial activity is responsible for global warming.

The Chronicle’s Science Editor, David Perlman, who is such a legend that he has journalism awards named after him, summarized the findings in a piece headlined New global warming evidence presented Scientists say their observations prove industry is to blame:

But records show that for the past 50 years or so, the warming trend has sped up — due, researchers said, to the atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases produced by everything industrial, from power plants burning fossil fuels to gas-guzzling cars — and the effects are clear.

“We were stunned by the similarities between the observations that have been recorded at sea worldwide and the models that climatologists made,” said Tim Barnett of the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “The debate is over, at least for rational people. And for those who insist that the uncertainties remain too great, their argument is no longer tenable. We’ve nailed it.”

The Bush administration responded immediately by re-queuing its broken record: “The science of global climate change is uncertain,” said Bill Holbrook, spokesman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

I could have predicted this round of denials. Just two months ago, the U.S. delegation at the U.N.-sponsored International Conference on Global Warming “executed perhaps its most astonishing act of denial:”

Besides blocking all efforts to conduct substantive discussions, the U.S. allied itself with none other than Saudi Arabia in obstructing efforts to create a system of payments to help poor, low-lying island nations cope with the cost of mitigating damage related to global warming, such as rising sea levels, land erosion and increased storm damage.

A quote from Paula Dobriansky, the head of the U.S. delegation, illustrates just how far up its collective ass the Bush administration’s head is:

“Science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”

Most kids learn by age three not to touch the stove. They don’t know how hot it is. They can’t say with certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of heat. But they manage their uncertainty much more effectively than Bill Holbrook, Paula Dobriansky or George W. Bush.