Now posted here courtesy of Joe FitzPatrick.
Thanks to the Auto Stitch (offsite) program recommended to me by Joe FitzPatrick, I now have a (stinking Windows) program that does a decently good job of coalescing individual shots into a mostly coherent panorama. Last Sunday I went up on the roof and took pictures from the roof; I've also assembled the photos from Yosemite in 2005. Also see newly redone panoramas from the first trip to Rowena Crest.
Pictures of and around the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, to be imploded next Sunday morning.
My Linux usage graph program finally has a web page!
At the ripe hour of 4:00 in the morning, Adam from work, a couple of his friends and I piled into my car and we drove north back to the viewing place across the river from the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant that we'd scoped out last weekend to watch the implosion of the cooling tower. To my amazement, I could see the first rays of sunlight escaping past the clouds at 5:05am heading north on interstate 5. When we got to WA-99, there were already quite a few people parked and wandering around the road, trying to get a good viewing platform. We headed up into the hills, mildly worried about the clouds; our fears were unfounded, however, when we discovered our designated place mostly quiet and with ample parking.
We staked our claim--a 3'x3' square on which to place a tripod with camera and iSight, and park our laptops. The plan was to snap pictures with three cameras as fast as possible while recording the entire scene with the iSight at 30fps. I proceeded to waste nearly an hour fighting with the laptops to get ffmpeg to encode from a video4l device, only to conclude that we will simply have to test ext3's ability to create 30 files per second in a directory. With all the equipment finally in place at 6:50, we waited anxiously...
...and suddenly there was a loud bang! Something had been set off, but not the tower's explosives. Nearby there was a radio that had been tuned to the same frequency as the work crews; all of the sudden we hear them begin the sixty second countdown. With a bright flash, the implosion began at about 6:59:58. There appeared to be two large rings of explosives around the hyperbolic frame of the tower; as a large cloud of concrete dust engulfed the structure from the ground up, the tower lurched slightly southward and began its descent. Ten seconds after the flash, the red ring at the tower slipped beneath the cloud and it was all gone.
Well, not quite. A very loud BOOM followed fifteen seconds after that. We packed up our equipment and headed north to Longview in search of a logger breakfast to celebrate. Finding absolutely nothing there, we went to the Hot Cake House in Portland for a huge breakfast. The best movie that I've found so far is the one posted on OregonLive (offsite), though I will endeavour to post both Adam and my movie files. And yes, this is my first real photo blog post.
So I went home for Memorial Day weekend. I met Woodley's "new" girlfriend Elizabeth at last, did the usual family things, suffered from allergies, and hung out with Woodley and Steven a fair amount. It turns out that Mrs. Jeffers is retiring next year, and plans to travel the world and enjoy retired life. Fabulous! My family had the usual gathering, dinner, and computer fixing. All in all, a great time. Such a pity that I had to leave that whole life behind to start a totally new one in Portland, but such is life, I suppose.
Copyright ©1996-2024, Darrick Wong. All Rights Reserved. Send feedback.