Just popping on really quickly to let you know that I have a bunch more panoramas posted! Dad visited; we went to Tillamook, Fort Stevens, and Astoria. There are also pictures that I took in Peninsula Park.
Today I installed Google Page Speed (offsite) to see if I could make my site load faster. Sure enough, it had a few suggestions that I've implemented. The first is that the image tiles in the panorama viewer are now served from separate hosts, which eliminates the initial lag when a panorama has just begun to load. It also provides a few more lanes (12 on Firefox) of download to the browser, which shortens download queue depths and (hopefully) makes better use of internet bandwidth. The second improvement is that thumbnails in the photo albums are now saved at 90% quality instead of 100%, which shrank the files by about a third. The third improvement also applies to the thumbnails--I now run jpegoptim(1) on them, which removes EXIF data and optimizes the Huffman tables. This further shrinks the thumbnails to a third of the size that they were before. The fourth improvement was to reduce the quality of the panorama preview images to 75%, which cut the download size in half. Hope you enjoy the performance enhancements!
In honor of my 1,800th day as an Oregon resident, I went through all of my old photo albums, looking for panoramas that I hadn't yet put into the high-definition panorama viewer. Along the way, I remembered that most of the panoramas stitched prior to 2007 weren't in great shape (poor stitching software, white balance problems, inability of the 32-bit Windows stitching software that I used prior to hugin to process > 3GB photos, etc.). When all was done, I had rebuilt a few dozen panoramas and imported the stragglers into the viewer. Just for kicks, I added a preview mode to the viewer; click "See All" and it will load a (currently 9MB) thumbnail catalog of ever picture visible through the viewer.
Ever wonder what a head crash does to a hard disk? You'd best keep backups.
I can definitively say that I have never seen a drive do anything like this to itself before. Oh sure, I've powered a few of them on with the top case removed and made a mess before... but this is just flat out impressive.
Sure, but you probably didn't witness the drive fail and let it skid around for 3 more days after that! :)
It's April again, and that means that it's time for pictures of this year's flowers! I think it's largely the same variety of flowers that I had last year, only the tulips and daffodils seem to have propagated. Evidence that the flowers are working correctly, though if you could see the giant swarm of gnats, flies, bees and other critters that have been flying around the garden lately that much would be self-evident. :) (I'll post the tulips in a few days now that they're blooming.)
Last December, Portland received the heaviest snowfall that it had seen in forty years. The city, being woefully unprepared for this, was covered in snow for days (insufficient snowplows) and our (then Mayor-elect) proclaimed that it made no sense to be ready to handle a 100-year storm (every 40 years). Anyhow, this yielded many opportunities to stomp around in the snow and photograph various things. Why am I posting about this on a sunny day in April? Because I got lazy and never bothered to put together the album!
If you head east out of Portland on I-84, after about 75 miles you reach Rowena Crest, just outside the town of Rowena (= Cherries!). Above Rowena Crest is a sort of ugly spear of rock named Tom McCall Point, after the governor who got Harbor Drive in Portland turned into a park. I had started up this trail the last time I was out at Rowena Crest but it was hot that day and I never made it. Not so this time; for the price of a minor sunburn I hiked to the top and then further back into the trees until I reached some farmer's field. It was a good day for this sort of thing, as I had taken my camera and new tripod, and set about using them to record 360-degree panoramas. Regrettably it was a bit hazy, so the panoramas had to be cleaned up a bit before I could post them, but other than that I captured some marvelous views from the top of McCall point! After I was done with that trail I decided to follow the photography students who were embanked atop Rowena Plateau, and recorded some more pictures of green rocks and grey creeks. There was a girl there trying to take pictures with what looked like about a fifty year old camera that she had to peer into the top of to frame the picture. I sometimes wonder what I miss having forsaken the film age, but to be perfectly honest a digital SLR with hugin has enabled the sort of thing that is a major pain in the real world.
Jason and I headed to Las Vegas to make a second attempt at travelling to Racetrack Playa since we'd been turned back last year. Luckily the roads from Vegas are much better than the ones from California, so we made it there with only a single flat tire. The playa is indeed a big dried up lake bed with rocks that blow around when there's enough rain to turn the lake bed into mud. For the rest of the year the lake bed is a cracked mess like what you see in the "California's running out of water!" scare ads. I really like visiting the desert--seeing all the weird prickly trees, drinking in the dryness of the land, and generally getting away from the endless Western Oregon green. Also made some good to mediocre nighttime shots of the desert. Gallery. I'm hoping to get out to the Oregon desert a bit more this year for some practice; to enable that, I bought a tripod last week after I came back. We also got stuck in an elevator for half an hour after eating dinner in the Wynn buffet.
Panoramas in the albums now have links to the panorama viewer. I also found a bunch of panoramas that hadn't been stitched, or that weren't done well, or had other flaws, that have now been restitched and put into the panorama viewer. Most notably, the 2005 Yosemite trip panoramas are in now.
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