Tollef Fog Heen's blog

Recently, I added some photo related blogs to my reading list, amongst them strobist, and so I came across a post about the Open Source Wireless Trigger. Being interested in both electronics and free software, I read through most of the posts on the forum as well as the wiki. I also started experimenting a bit with an old Nikon SB-24 flash I had lying around since even if I managed to break it, it wouldn't be that bad. And it's old and robust.

So far, I've played around with how to make the flash go off. For the hot shoe, it's just shorting the ground and center pin (I just used a big resistor). For the PC connector, I had to apply a bit of voltage; I used an AA/LR06 battery and that worked splendidly. (Oh, and PC in this context has nothing to do with computers, it's an abbreviation of Prontor-Compur, two shutter manufacturers who decided on the design of the connector back in the 1950s.)

We went to a friend's moving-in party this Saturday, which was nice. Interesting people to talk with and I think Karianne enjoyed herself too. Not too many people I knew from before, but it's always nice to expand the circle of people I know. One of them even works one floor below from where I sit.

As we left the underground on our way home, I hear the sound of brakes being applied with force. A taxi is about past a zebra crossing and a guy is yelling. The driver comes out, yells back at the guy. They both continue yelling for a short while and it looks like the driver is about to punch the other guy. He hesitates, then moves as if he's about to get back into the car. Just out of a sudden, I see the taxi driver spit at the other guy. According to Karianne, the other guy spit first, but I can't remember seeing that. He then gets back into the car and the other guy goes in front of the car so his friend can take the licence number (or taxi licence number) before he can drive off. (It's A3397, by the way.) The driver then gets out again, and there's more yelling before the two pedestrians wander off and the taxi drives off. I give my business card to one of them in case they need a witness to what happened. (This is why I'm writing this too, so I have a fairly fresh account of what happened.)

Luckily, nobody actually got hurt, but I find it completely unacceptable for a taxi driver to a) almost run down a pedestrian, then yell at same, b) spit at a pedestrian, even if he spit first and c) try to run off when the person offended is trying to record his licence plate and taxi licence number.

Just like an infinite number of monkeys, given infinite time are likely to produce infinite copies of Hamlet, I knew that given an infinite number of blog postings by Clint, I had to find one which both made sense to me and which I agreed with.

Somebody please write a free syndicate (or syndicate wars) clone.

I just read Sun's announcement of "Project Hamburg". I am not sure what it is about, but that is not very important in this context. I have worked a bit with Intel lately and gotten introduced into a whole new world of code names such as Mccaslin, Menlow and so on. Up until now, most of them were obscure enough that I thought they were just random names picked from somewhere, but they are, like Sun's names of geographical features, be it towns, cities, rivers or something else. The reason for this naming is, like Sun's, that geographical names can't be trademarked, though in this particular case, Sun supplied a short list of "why Hamburg" with some references to Hamburg's history.