Common Root

Fully Eclectic Open Jam IV

2012-05-18T17:50:36Z

Well, another Fully Eclectic Open Jam is coming up on May 24 and will be hosted at the Little Bean Cafe across from the TD Bank near the Tannery. This open-mic event is a combination of exciting, entrancing and occasionally erotic poetry and spoken word.

Attendees pay what they can and can enjoy some cool merch when donating the suggested $5 or more.

The updated event page is on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/feojam and though there is an official blog for the event at http://fullyeclecticopenjam.blogspot.ca/, the organizers are putting all of their time and effort into making it the most fun an exciting event as possible.

As a attendee and photographer at the FEO Jam 3, I can heartily suggest heading out to enjoy the ambience.

Blood on the Mat

2012-05-12T17:27:16Z

I attended Syd Vanderpool's Golden Gloves Boxing at Kitchener-Waterloo's Delta Hotel. Shortly afterward, I saw professional wrestling over in Cambridge and last night, Muay Thai at the Element Nightclub. I do want to post a more complete entry, but I have a number of photos to go through that will take me over two weeks.

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The wrestlers were performing attacks with no gloves or padding that should deliver similar damage to each other; bruises, broken bones, bloody noses. My professional opinion is that there was no real combat; the entire thing was staged. That did not mean it wasn't entertaining. There certainly seemed a number of moments of true improvisation, and there were many times at which I did not know what would happen next. That didn't remove the feeling that the outcomes had already been decided. But is that any different from watching a movie?

The Muay Thai was by far the most brutal of the competitions. Welts and bruises formed on the sides of the fighters quickly and the referees, though very fair, broke fights far less frequently than during the traditional boxing matches I saw. It had an incredibly raw and realistic feeling to it, even though I was very aware of the structure of the event.

I have never seen professional fights live before, and generally have never watched them on television either. I consider myself to be completely fresh to this experience and therefore, coming at the topic unbiased. After I've had more time to form a proper opinion, I will be sure to post it online.

5 Steps to Great Music Storage

2012-01-18T01:26:29Z

Everyone's always asking me about bitrates for music, and what's appropriate. My advice in 5 easy steps.

1) Source should be a record, CD or DVD.

2) Choose FLAC, OOG first and VBR m4a or mp3 if you must.

3) When dealing with lossy formats like MP3, aim for VBR with an Average BitRate of 192-320, and turn off joint stereo to get full stereo.

4) When space needs to be considered, use short playlists with short songs and reduce to 96-160 at VBR or 160-256 CBR, and try joint stereo on.

5) Test your ears. Find out what you like and use it as a baseline.

Now for those who need a little bit more information about the who and the what, please look below:

1) Source should be a record, CD or DVD.

Secure the highest-quality version available for your digital archive, downloading versions online should be a last resort after your original copy has already been damaged if your artist has no physical copies avilable in your area, you should be wary of step 2 when downloading a digital copy.

2) Choose FLAC, OOG first and VBR m4a or mp3 if you must.

There is great variety in the amount of frequency of music complexity. Most music will build towards sections and then change greatly at a particular moment, so avoid formats like mp3 that allow people to encode in Constant Bit Rate without realizing it. If you are backing up your own music and prefer to use MP3, see step 3.

3) When dealing with lossy formats like MP3, aim for VBR with an Average BitRate of 192-320, and turn off joint stereo to get full stereo.

Avoiding Constant Bit Rate is already helping you out immensely in making sure that you have a high-end music library, and tests do demonstrate that quality levels above 160 are difficult to distinguish, depending on the quality of your equipment. However, for that time when you do purchase high-end studio headphones for the home, you'll want to be able to enjoy all of your tracks the way they were meant to be heard.

4) When space needs to be considered, use short playlists with short songs and reduce to 96-160 at VBR or 160-256 CBR, and try joint stereo on.

When exporting to a mobile device like an mp3 player, variety is generally the goal. Pick a maximum song length 6, 9, 12 minutes, and ensure your playlists are made up of less than 100 songs each shorter than that length. Several songs I love are excluded at the 12 min limit, but these songs often don't finish playing anyway. If your player is not VBR compatible, average stereos and earbuds will not demonstrate much loss in quality at 160-256. Invest in a deck or device that supports VBR if space is still an issue, or export at a variety of bitrates for different playlists.

5) Test your ears. Find out what you like and use it as a baseline. Known as an ABX test.

Take highly different styles of music export some different versions and listen to them with the best equipment you have. Find the qualty level where you notice a loss of quality and archive a step above. Then export to mobile devices at your baseline, or a step lower, depending on your personal desires for quality versus variety.

For additional reading, please look into the following sites:

http://gizmodo.com/5251247/the-great-mp3-bitrate-test-my-ears-versus-yours

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/12/variable-bit-rate-getting-the-best-bang-for-your-byte.html

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/do_higher_mp3_bit_rates_pay_off?page=0,3

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/sound-challenge/?selection=1&submit=Submit

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=a282bb8e7baba13f1ce3fba99b6d6abc&showtopic=30637&st=25

The Issue of Time

2011-05-30T04:03:03Z

Sometime in April, I had the really cool idea of posting one example of my archived work on Facebook each day to drive traffic towards my Image Gallery. I started this on April 18th with the goal of continuing to do this until June 30th, and I had chosen many great examples of my material to post. I had been able to keep it up falling behind by a day or two occasionally, but otherwise maintaining the average frequency of posts until around May 11th.

After getting really sick for two days and recovering, I fell behind in important legal, financial and personal matters, all of which I am nearly all done attending to, but that still need attention. One might suppose that though I work a 55-hour week, I still would be limited to pursuing many of these matters due to time of day. However, filing and organizing this information properly is of high priority as well. In addition, the few hours I have had for creative pursuits have been put towards designing a 4NF database with one table designed to store a Nested Neighbor-based Node Set.

The mySQL database I'm working on is by far the most advanced database I've designed to this point, and though the interface with the database still needs several hours of work before it is ready, my plans for it are ambitious. So my work on images has been delayed because I'm currently having too much fun working with raw data structures. The results of which should be very impressive when finished.
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The next few months may not see many updates, but that's just because I'm working on so many exciting projects. While working a full-time job. Can't think of a reason I'd want things any other way.

The Return of the Stupid Script Kiddies

2011-04-30T21:42:16Z

I mentioned in my much older blog that I do not like or respect script kiddies, the street urchins of cyberspace, the boy wonders to the Batman-like hackers that can actually penetrate systems. For the past month my website has been attacked by hackers, and that I do not like. For now, lets simply state that unethical hacking is like cheating in a board game. It is completely childish and only serves to demonstrate your lack of skill. Hackers attack random websites out of boredom, certainly, but also because they have no vision of creativity to offer to the world.

]]> Since we're on the topic of unethical hacking, I'd like to talk about a side story I wrote on April 13th but decided not to publish at that time. I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, one of my current favourite games and I joined the game of a friend that is currently playing. He's on a modded server with the perk system which allows you to choose upgrades, but the perks are fairly balanced.

After getting partway through the first portion of Dark Carnival (they got three of us but my friend got through to the saferoom), we switch sides and play as the infected. It's only a few minutes before they start claiming that we're hacking and so forth, to which we explain that we're not. The admin, one boom-boom-POW (but here's his steampage in case he changes his name) http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198036260068 decided to kill me and my teammates. Even though his team stopped most of us from getting to the safe room. He started using his admin powers pretty much straight away to spawn pills, shots, health kits and defibrillators to help his comrades and to do it super fast.

My team decided to go on, we had already beat them despite their methods, and their team really sucked. Knew nothing about sticking together or unit tactics at all. We play through the second portion of Dark Carnival as survivors and are doing quite well. So well in fact that they decide we are definitely cheating and kill me. We are unable to spawn the help they were, but soldier on, and once again, mostly are killed before making it to the saferoom. Their turn and after some brief scuffle at the front gates, two people run on as far ahead as possible leaving their friends behind. Our entire team converges on the two people back at the saferoom with a smoker and a hunter and a spitter to hit both. Two people are dead and immediately defibs are conjured up again. They get about halfway through the map, to where I spawn as a tank, and I run in, trapping one person inside a building, his friend at the corner, and another person at the merry-go-round. I get hit with bile but manage to hit the man since he's point blank. Guess that makes me a cheater, doesn't it?

Of course all their abuse of the defibs has seriously affected their score by now since 5 have been used on one level alone, and so the chances of them catching up are slim to none. That's when they decide to spawn three tanks IN THE SAFEROOM OF THE NEXT LEVEL. Do yourself a favour. Do not play with this man. Do not play on his server. Spit in his eye if you see him on the street. That is what he deserves. If you are a hacker, of great skills far beyond and of my programming capabilities, go introduce him to the real power of he can only dream of wielding.

Banhammer Forces UW Students to Shift Gears

2011-04-13T13:46:48Z

It would appear that some University students will now no longer be allowed to race because they have brought shame to the institution. As the Record has already documented, the students shot a woman in a bikini with the UW Formula SAE car and are now suspended until June, which means they will not be participating in the May race. The suspension is due to "misuse of the student design centre space for an unauthorized photo shoot", which I can't help but find extremely strange, seeing as my photography class at UW encouraged us to find new and inventive ways to depict the University space. Throughout the class, several people would arrange to do photoshoots on University grounds without getting authorization of any sort.

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As a photographer, I can't help but notice all the ways they could've improved the photo, of course, but what ticks me off is that it's not anywhere close to as bad as what the University of Western Ontario did. Five years ago in 2006. Also, firefighters regularly sell racier calendars to raise funds for...um...saving the lives they save all the time. Next time you're in a burning building, are you going to refuse to go with them simply because they show skin and have fun occasionally?

My University is demonstrating once again that they are an excellent source of industrial know-how marred by an archaic management that cares too much about censorship and money. When the two goals come into conflict, they have this horrible tendency to clam up and make a decision that benefits them in no way whatsoever.

Good job, admins, we wouldn't want anyone possibly thinking of going to Waterloo that anyone might actually have fun there. Making rave lights the official school logo was just to embarrass as many students as possible and UW has no intention of actually updating their ideals, just their image.

Image Gallery Server

2011-04-12T18:30:32Z

The small server handling my image gallery had a minor failure last night. I have three theories as to what caused the issue, but before I explore those in depth to find out how the failure happened, I'm more interested in getting the replacement server up and running. Hardware seems to be fine, other than running a little hot, so the server will be placed a full meter closer to the ground, where the temperature is significantly cooler. At the same time, I see this not as a crisis, but as an opportunity; I had been hoping to double my drive space on this server for some time, and popping in a new hard drive and migrating the latest backup is the perfect method to do exactly that.

My apologies to anyone attempting to access the image gallery right now, it is temporarily down. [EDIT] The server is now back online and you can browse through the images, however, about 1/8 of the catalogue needs to be rebuilt, so only about 1000 images. The process has been started and should take less than an hour.

Design Project Symposium, Part 2

2011-03-29T19:10:02Z

When I attended the Nano Design Project Symposium at the University of Waterloo, I marveled at the many innovations currently under development and well on their way to market. I interviewed a great number of groups about their projects on video and even edited a video that was ready to be published on Monday, but I will not for some time.

]]> Some projects are still undergoing patent paperwork. If I were to publish the details of their projects, it may be possible to develop the project using other means and patent before the students - busy with end of term examinations - are able to. To protect the students behind these projects, I have to refrain from publishing anything that may include too much detail. CBC was on location, but I don't know if they've received a gag order, or a set amount of text to publish. My brief contact with the Managing Director of the Nanotech institute show me that they do want media coverage, but before I can go forward and publish anything further on the Symposium, I need to clear my releases with at least two other personnel.

Until then, enjoy the related photos in the image gallery, and only time will tell what I can and cannot publish. And when.

University of Waterloo Design Project Symposium, Part 1

2011-03-25T15:35:00Z

I'm attending the UW Design Project Symposium today, which features well over thirty student-initiated studies that could have serious impacts on fields of medicine, industry, education and social networking. Each group of four rotates personnel to manage the booth while the others presented their project in front of professors and department heads. The scope of each project is precisely defined and the level of dedication and effort in each one was clear right away. Many have live demonstrations, others could not, as such a demo may mean a fire hazard. That particular booth is coincidentally rather close to an extinguisher station, though no burner is present. That design is for auto-sintering fireproof tape, tape that among other applications, could prevent electrical fires. Seems the organizers had less faith in the effectiveness than the students. Or it could be just luck, the presentation right beside the extinguisher, WATICE, has a live demo that involved water.

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I peruse a number of interesting projects from pourable bandages for burn wounds to a course organization software that looks much better than what I remember my tuition paying another University for. Silly conflicts of interest and all that garbage. There are two projects on vehicle automation, one of which has a fairly impressive live demonstration where a robot avoids incoming projectiles almost every single time. The wall detection needs some significant refinement, and the team did mention some of their plans for remedies. One project was working on making solar panels more efficient, a desire close to my own heart, and had a fun name to boot.
"Nanostructured diffuse reflector for thin-film silicon solar cells." I read the heading aloud as I raise an eyebrow.
"It's a fancy way of saying paint." Replies the student, explaining that it is a type of paint which is designed with nanite-sized precision to scatter light in a very specific pattern. There is also a group there with an idea called the Flux Capacitor, I kid you not.

I happen to notice a number of projects that are using a phenomena known as hydrophobicity to improve on a number of existing products. I look over projects that intend to make water goggles fog less easily and refrigerator coils more efficient and easily maintainable. WATICE intends to protect our power lines, and they explained the phenomena best.
"...[hydrophobicity] causes the water to form more of a drop-like shape in order to minimize its contact with the surface [...water droplets] will just roll off the surface very easily" explains Drew of the visually impressive WATICE booth. The have short lengths of bare cable lines that they let guests pour water onto. The water seeps into the untreated cable fairly easily, but on the demonstration power line, the water simply bounces off like tiny basketballs in a gymnasium. This backs up the video they have playing which shows sheets of aluminum taken from a freezer. Ice has stuck to the normal sample, but little ice balls slide off the aluminum sheet with the slightest tap.
"[...] the water runs off really easily, only smaller drops stay on the surface because they're not heavy enough to slide off under their own weight, but once more raindrops hit that, they slide off just as easily."

There are simply too many great projects to go over them all in detail here, and after the large number of interviews I had, I will need to make this a multipart series. Therefore, this is a brief overview and only a taste of some of the content that will be here in no time!

Next Projects, Nanoblogging, Concerts

2011-03-10T07:20:29Z

I recently took many pictures of a number of great bands at the Hive in Kitchener including Third District, the Johnnies and Rough House. Though some have been developed and entered into my photo gallery, many of the 900 digital negatives are still unfiltered at this time. I explained the ‘curse of the photographer’ to a friend at the Hive and said that “Really good photographers have a hard time getting a good photo of themselves”, which is a gross generality, but generally true. Well it looks like that won’t be a problem for much longer as my recent work in Toronto put me right in a mosh pit where I was captured by many other photographers whilst…well…moshing.

]]> I’m a little disappointed with my own lack of updated on the blog here, so I will be henceforth decreasing the size of the posts in order to ensure higher regularity. As an example the concerts that I’ve been attending at the Toronto Music Festival have featured many great bands that play with an amazing amount of passion and technical capability. Usually I would write a very long post and accompany it with photos.

In this case I took no photos, but I do have some important wisdom to pass on to others and my future self. It’s been passed onto me by many others but was reinforced tonight. If you are going to concerts, these are some things to keep in mind.

Even if you listen to loud music often, the volume will be too much to get full enjoyment out of. It will still be fun, but not as fun as if you took earplugs. You’ll still hear the concert just fine with them, and you’ll give your ear drums an extra year or two to live.
Even if you’re not shooting photos and do not have a heavy DSLR around your neck, you are still responsible for the weight of your muscles and skeleton. Taking that last drink faster than you know you should will not assist you in manoeuvring that weight effectively.
Even if you’ve got a great memory, write about your experience at or immediately after the event at all times that it is possible. Gonzo writing is king and is achieved most easily and faithfully when one takes the time in the moment to express the moment.

Emikos Mini Convention and the Rollercoaster Week

2011-02-07T03:09:40Z

The last two weeks have had many ups and downs. Some of the biggest disappointments of the last eight months have had their edge blunted somewhat by some fantastic events. I will only voice one frustration and be done with it. I really wish Gallery3 had permanent image hotlinking built in. Since it does not, I will be taking the "Externals" plugin and modifying it to suit my nefarious purposes.

Apart from that, I focus on the positive events of the week, including the photoshoots, celebration with a newly inducted engineer and my fantastic time at Emiko's Mini Convention. Emiko's Mini Convention is a anime, sci-fi, fantasy and gaming convention happening in the heart of Waterloo and easily accessable from Kitchener, Cambridge, Guelph, St. Jacobs and the surrounding areas of Ontario.

I attended two days of the three day event, and I can say that it was completely amazing. I have already uploaded an interview with the primary Administrator Ron Hoppe to Youtube, so please watch that in lieu of the photos for the time being. As per my usual timeframe, I anticipated having the photos online this weekend, but I instead opted to reorganized important paperwork into three main categories. Important, immediately important, and shredder food. I anticipate that the photos should be uploaded in the next 48 hours.

]]> After some time to digest the events that have been happening, I'm going to go ahead and write about my experiences at the convention. First of all, I will start by promising to not compare it to the conventions I have attended in Toronto, Anime North, or any of those events. To do so would be to demean both, and I will not perform such a disservice to either.

This convention was hosted at a University, and was less distance for me to travel. It also was more focused on individual interactions and there was less of the hustle and bustle I experienced in Toronto. Things seemed more personal, and there was a generous amount of anime, manga, video games, tabletop gaming and general all-around fun. There were numerous video game tournaments that I participated in and I did quite well in Soul Calibur 2 and Super Smash Brothers Melee despite the years since playing it last. I did measurably worse in the Street Fighter 4 event, since I have not kept up with the series since Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES.

I had a great deal of fun in a Settlers of Catan game and I wish I had entered into the large-scale version of Settlers of Catan. The robber game piece is about belt-height and the hextiles are large enough for a player to stand on and survey their domain. There were also Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 games that went on. As I know less about the series I did not participate and cannot comment on it. There were fewer vendors than I expected, but for me this was a good thing. I came with little money and did not want to part with it. At previous conventions I've arrived with what I thought would be more than enough and unhappily gazed into an empty wallet halfway through the day.

If I was to describe the whole occasion I would call it "Fun without Guilt", and there are policies in place to make sure the event is exactly that. When I spoke with the people behind the events, they all said that fun was primary goal. These are people who want you to have a good time and will bend over backwards to make it happen. I'm going to show up to their 2012 event which will be hosted at the Delta. You should too, to see how a different approach can completely change the entire experience.

Latest Works in Progress - Video in Full Post!

2011-01-14T17:35:50Z

Last weekend I collected more concert footage and managed to fill up all of my storage cards again, even after buying an additional 8gb over the Christmas holidays. The first few have been processed and uploaded. I want to avoid filler in an album like this, so I've taken the liberty of uploading my personal favourites. I'd like to give a big thank you to the bands, and I invite them to browse the pictures, and to even use the concert pictures of your own band on myspace as you want, provided that the watermark is not removed. Minor layering and obscuring is fine, so long as it is still easily legible. Some photos will be available at much higher resolutions for printing and so forth, so please just contact me with the filenames you're interested in to inquire about pricing.

Also, for the final band that night, Kitchener's "Remembering Apollo", I'd like to say thanks for coming on up, I know it's a little further than the Gig Theatre or the Lancaster. You gave a good show and I'd like to pass along my thanks in the form of videography. I recorded 8 songs and I've uploaded the first early drafts of 4, 5, and 6 to YouTube. Enjoy!

]]> This work covers a large variety of angles, zoom levels and I'm very happy about they turned out. Most of my portfolio prior to the last year has been focused on very smooth, well-lit still-life work, but in the last 6-8 months, I've stepped up the ISO again and again to take pictures in darker and darker areas without flash.

I typically prefer to work without flashes because they reduce or negate the environmental lighting to such a great degree, and they have a long rise time. In the time it takes to take a single flash picture, I can take 5 pictures and each one will have greater authenticity. With that said, I may be using them much more in the future, when in the appropriate conditions. Flash can save what would've been a horrible picture, or can ruin a shot that could've been great. Its a powerful tool to take pictures in dark conditions while avoiding film grain, but too powerful for my tastes right now.

The Battle continues on the 16th and the 23rd, but I'm going to be busy enjoying a walk in the woods on the 16th and communing with nature. Hope everyone enjoys the first great concerts of 2011!

Rocking at the Gig

2010-12-15T20:04:54Z

There was an awesome concert two weeks ago on the 27th at the Gig Theater in downtown Kitchener. I understand the grand internet rule of 'pictures or it didn't happen', and therefore I made sure I got some stills of the pure awesomeness that was displayed.

The level of awesome is well over 9000.

]]> Most of the genres were not to my personal tastes, but some of the bands played well enough and were excited enough about their music that they electrified the crowds. Of particular note was Long Way Down, who rocked out hardcore. For full disclosure, I was at the concert specifically to record them, as I had photographed them a year ago at the Lancaster, when I had significantly lower-end hardware.

You could say my old camera simply captured their true form.

The desired end result this time was a video of the concert. A technical malfunction and bad lighting were two difficulties that I encountered, but good planning in advance allowed me to capture hundreds of excellent photos and over an hour of footage. After editing, I have 18 minutes between three songs, with average to excellent video footage throughout. The audio from each camera was combined and filtered to clean up the signal, since capture from the soundboard did not work.

No one played Peter Gabriels' "Signal to Noise", so I included this picture of a band covering "Rock and Roll", since at least three bands totally kicked for their entire setlist.

Long Way Down played a short but very satisfying setlist of original songs, rocking out so hard that everybody who stayed behind finally had their faces utterly melted. If there are any other bands that want to see their name on here, let me know, I've already gotten in contact with Avery regarding their photos, and I am very much looking forward to hooking up everyone else with theirs.

An Awesome Weekend in Concert

2010-11-29T20:43:51Z

This weekend I had a whole bunch of fun recording video for local Kitchener band Long Way Down.

Long Way Down @ The Gig Theatre Nov 2010 from Adam T. Reis Lunde on Vimeo.

I'll add a few more words later, but for now, enjoy the rough second draft of the video, which was edited and uploaded within 36 hours of the concert ending.

Image Gallery With Style

2010-11-28T01:09:00Z

For most of September, I challenged myself to develop a number of hypothetical web design mockups, as well as the early D'Archangel logo work. I'd like to follow that up by demonstrating a prototype version of a working website. This gallery showcases some of my best photography since I picked my new camera, and in fact, one of these images was taken on the same day as buying the camera. All these images are tonemapped jpeg outputs of RAW picture data, but feature only the most minor touchups. Of these images, only one has been altered significantly to the point that I would consider it a photomanipulated image.

Truly, the editing process for a photo begins when it is initially taken, the photographer choose the zoom, aperture size, the sensitivity of the film or digital sensor, the exposure time, and all those obvious settings. However, in addition to that, they choose the angle, the moment to take the picture - as well as the moment to end the exposure in the case of bulb photography - and the subject itself. The photographer may even set the stage for the picture with props or lighting, perhaps enhance the subject with makeup, wigs or accessories. These make up the original photo, and are all subject to the photographers whims.

]]> So too then are highlights and shadows of the picture. Perhaps the photographer would put the negative on the enlarger naked, perhaps the photographer would expose the print to the negative through a filter. A photographer may choose to leave the print then in any of the chemicals for too long, and until he uses stop on the print, could burn and dodge print by exposing it again and again. Photomanipulations are present throughout the media, even in journalistic articles, where integrity is closely guarded.

So when you take a look at the small 15-picture gallery, try to determine which ones are the 10 untouched pictures, which are cropped to shift the focus. Which one was taken on the first day of having the camera, and which one was altered so subtly that no difference is apparent, but would be obvious if viewed beside the original? Oh, this is not for the faint of heart, or those on dial-up. As a prototype, my first concern was with proof of concept, the meat of the idea, the important factor that makes efficiency, optimization and compression actually matter. After all, we made giant phonographs, records and CDs long before we developed 16gb memory cards. But no one who purchased records, or even continues to do so in an era that has forgotten them, has ever complained loudly about the size. Only perhaps the weight, when too many are carried. Then dropped.