...and team Holland is next

Couldn't watch the entire game today, Diddlbiker had to take his son to a birthday party. When I got back, Holland was trailing 1-0 from Portugal and an incredible bunch of red and yellow cards was handed out.
Portugal limped into the next round, decapitated and with most of their players vulnerable with yellow cards - they will not survive the encounter with England.

Team USA goes home

The USA team lost today in a crucial match at the world cup football (I refuse to call it soccer). Not unexpected, when in a poul together with Italy and the Czech republic, although the final ranking of the pool (Italy - Ghana - Czech - USA) was not completely expected.
The inexperience of the American press with the football and the role the USA team plays in it was fascinating to see. A lot of value was given to FIFA rankings. Rankings that work well in sports like tennis, golf and chess, since the players play a lot against each others, so their ratings are calibrated all the time. National teams, on the other hand, only play a handfull of matches each year, and that makes the ratings far from reliable.
So, going into 'Poule E' as the #5 team of the world looked like there would be a solid chance. To be honest, the team is good enough to consider it a serious chance for ending high in the poule. But some realism should be applied as well - both Czech and Italian teams are fearfull opponents, and African teams have proven over the years to be tough opponents as well.
So, the loss against Czech republic came as a total shock. Losing 3-0? Sadly, that was the only match that the Czech played really good, and the USA played really bad. Hence the result. So far, nothing shocking. Anybody can lose from the Czechs, there's nothing to be ashamed about.

What surprised me was the 'analysis' before the second game. Ghana absolutely kicks ass against the Czechs, and the reaction of the commentators: 'this is good news for team USA. They should get hope out of this game'. Basically, now 'all' that is needed is a draw against Italy, winning from Ghana and Italy beating the Czechs, putting the USA in second place. Let me repeat this: your previous opponent, who humiliated you, gets the crap kicked out of them by the team you will have to beat in the last round. And that is good news?

To be honest, I really hoped that the USA team would have advanced to the next round. Hopefully football will survive a blow like this - a lot of the enthusiasm for 'soccer' had to do with the good performance of the USA team so far. This moment had to come at one point; you can't progress forever, and hoping that team USA would be a serious contender for the world cup in the next ten years would be hopelessly optimistic. Any MLS game (and I've watched too many) will confirm that. Still, an 'honorfull' exit against Brazil would have been better than an early exit after two losses and a draw. But the agony of defeat makes the next succes taste better - something that team USA hopefully will learn now as well.

A trip to the terminal

Most terminals that Diddlbiker is visiting these days are airport terminals, but sometimes I get lucky. Last week Diddlbiker's department had its bi-annual meeting.
This year, the meeting took place at a container terminal, and included a tour as well! Now here is a place where I'd love to walk around for the entire day, taking pictures at will. Unfortunately, that will not happen for several reasons:

• Liability: chances that Diddlbiker gets run over by a truck and that the terminal has to pay a huge amount of money to Diddlinabiker and kid is fairly large
• Security: the usual vague reasons that are always given - anything that is worth photographing seems to be a potential terrorist target nowadays (remember, taking pictures of the GWB will get you arrested!)
• Competition - competitors of terminal X would love to know how many cranes there are on terminal Y, etc (after all, it's not like you can see those cranes from 5 miles distance...)

So, locked up in a van that rarely stopped, and of course sitting at the left (wrong) side of the van, I still managed to shoot some nice pictures. Worth a visit!

Back from Charleston

One day later than expected. My flight home on friday night was cancelled. I spent the night in the Embassy Suites hotel in Charleston, near the airport - I can recommend it to anyone!
The flight home brought me right over the house that Diddlbker lives in. Unfortunately, I couldn't see it - it was under the plane, not next to it...

Visiting Charleston

Diddlbiker is staying a couple of days in Charleston, for work. Since bringing your camera is always a good idea, I'm able to show some pictures as well.
The hotel is located on the bay in South Carolina, with a view on magnificent new bay bridge, and the USS Yorktown (an old aircraft carrier).
A few things to note about the hotel:

• There is no gym (kind of surprising for a resort)
• When going out for a walk in the nearby marshes, watch out for alligators!

Shooting pictures of the bridge is harder then I thought. But I won't be leaving without them!

How on earth do we fly in this country

Diddlbiker is writing today from his hotel room in Charleston, SC. The hotel room has free internet, which is nice, by the way. Anyway, my boss decided that we'd leave earlier - I didn't understand way, because the weather wasn't that severe. Just some rain.
Long story short: our 15:15 flight left at 17:45 - and that just for some rain?! No wonder airlines operate at a loss if a few drops of rain already ruin their schedules.

Interesting stuff to read: somebody decided to eat monkey food (as in dog food, but then for monkeys) for a week - after all, humans are primates. Hilarious!

Transcending into the next level

Diddlbiker got a little bit closer to Python-Zen today. Discovering that you have a folder with over two hundred files named '05????.txt' and '06????.txt' isn't really fun if they should be named 'm05????.txt' and 'm06?????.txt'. I surprised myself with conseriding this the easiest solution:

import os
myfolder = 'C:\\blablabla'
for myfile in os. listdir(myfolder):
__oldname = os.path.join(myfolder, myfile)
__newname = os.path.join(myfolder, 'm' + myfile)
__os.rename(oldname, newname)

(underscores used to indicate spaces; blogspot removes them no matter what I do, even nbsp's)
Time to write script: about 40 seconds - and done!

One day, I'll be a real Pythonista.

There are no dumb questions...

But some of them... Diddlbiker was doing his regular workout during lunch: 30 minutes on the stationary bike ('Cascades', 30 min, level 15). The program involves two cascades of increasing and decreasing resistance. I like the program; most of the time you spend spinning with low resistance, but you also spend a couple of minutes at each of the two peaks at high resistance.
Anyway, as I was just past the second 'top', a coworker who is working out on the elliptical machine next to me asks me is it possible to get to a good workout on that bike? Well, let me see... My heartrate is racing at 172, sweat is literaly flowing down my face in rivers, and my shirt if soaking wet from top to bottom. But I stayed friendly, and instead of being sarcastic and answering 'no, it's like a walk in the park', I explained that it all depends on the resistance level and the pedal speed. The weird thing is, she took spinning classes in the past, so she should know better - maybe because it is a recumbent bike?

They canceled my radio show!

Diddlbikers morning commute is a 40 minute trip over Rt 80 and Rt 287. Listening to a decent radio station makes the trip feel shorter. Living in the NYC are means that there is a good selection of radio stations available. Adding a few reasonable constraints (decent music, English language, traffic information) cuts the list pretty short. The one I stuck with was KTU. I really liked the morning show with DJ's Goumba Johnny and Balthazar.
So, surprisingly, they weren't there on thursday morning. Just another DJ, presenting his records as if he always did. Co-hosts Speedy and Cindy where acting like it was the most normal thing in the world as well. Mmmh. Both hosts sick at the same time?
Friday, same story. Now I start to do some researching, but apart from learning that Goumba Johnny (real name John Sialiano) did six months of jail time early 2000 for tax evasion, at first I learn nothing. Then I find out that they fired the hosts of a succesful morning show to replace them with Whoopi Goldberg. Hopefully they'll move to another station. As for KTU - I don't think their morning show will survive this. Grr!

JPEG Myths

Today was a rainy day, so Diddlbiker decided to try something out. What I wanted to do was show how image quality deteriorates through subsequent saves as a JPEG file. After all, JPEG is a lossy format, so every time you save, you lose some image quality, right?
Wrong. It seems that the truth is slightly more complicated. Save a picture with exactly the same image quality over and over again, and the image data will be saved in exactly the same way. Here is an illustration:

This is the original picture.
This is the picture saved at a 25% quality level. Yes, it's pretty bad.
This is the previous picture opened, and saved again at a 25% quality level. You'd expect an even worse picture, but it looks exactly the same!
The process is repeated two more times (four times in total), but no difference with the first picture...

Amazingly, image quality doesn't degrade over consecutive saves. There is the loss of image quality due to the JPEG quality used, but that's about it. I'm figuring that once the JPEG compression has taken place, the end result will, when compressed again, yield the same file. Some caveats however:

• This only works if the picture stays the same (except for the parts that are changed, of course). Resize the picture, crop it, add border around, mirror, etc, and you'll get another round of quality degradation. Any part that is changed will suffer as well of course.
• There is of course the initial quality loss - and there's not a lot of difference in file size between 95% quality and 75% quality (more about that in another blog)
• JPEG supports rotation (at 90 degrees) as well. If you are using a good image editor, all that wil happen when you rotate the picture is that a rotation flag will be changed - the picture itself will still stay unchanged.
  

Lesson learned: never believe 'general knowledge' if you can check the results for yourself - happy experimenting!

Swabbing

Diddlbiker encountered the problem that most DSLR owners will encounter after some time: dust on the sensor. Now, this is the point where nitpickers want to point out that it is not the sensor, but a piece of glass covering the sensor (aka 'high pass filter'), but the end result is still the same: nasty blobs on the pictures.
Getting a brush didn't get the job done. I could still see that friggin' speck of dust sitting their at my sensor, taunting me! Turn out that Copper Hill sells high-quality sensor cleaning kits for very reasonable prices!
There's still some dust on the sensor, but those are really tiny specks and you'll really have to work hard in photoshop to see them. But that big black blob in the middle of my pictures is gone at least.

On photo expedition in the 'hood

With memorial day, nice weather has arrived. This looked like a good photo opportunity, so Diddlbiker set course to nearby Garfield, to take pictures of the Orthodox church. It is actually called the Three Saints Russian Orthodox Church. Originally built of wood in 1903, it burned down in 1915.
A new church was rebuilt at the same spot in 1916, made of brick this time. In the beginning, the interior of the church was very sparse (it almost went bankrupt because of the rebuilding cost) but eventually the inside became as rich as the outside with its golden cupolas.
Taking pictures of the church turned out to be tricky. My initial thought was to have the setting sun lighting up the gold, and putting the whole building in a warm orange glow. Well, I was right about lighting up the gold, but that warm glow never quite arrived, due to a lot of clouds and an upcoming thunder storm.
The alternative was to wait for the 'magic light' that appears after sunset. In this case, it took me about 45 minutes before the camera started to capture dramatic light as shown on the left!
The downside of the time exposure is blown out highlights; the center cupola and the light spots are just white spots without any details. But it was worth it, given the wonderful colors in the rest of the picture (there's no photo shop involved, this is just the way the camera saw it - reality was less spectaculair. Sometimes the camera wins it from Eyeball Mk I...