Sunday, April 30, 2006 9:42 AM | rahel luethy | 0 comment(s)
this whole guitarshredshow thing as well as the boxing of my old photo prints got me thinking about my guitar hero years. as a teenager, I spent most of my spare time playing the guitar. I played in several bands (with such cool names as "fulminant", "headache", "abbots bromely horn dance", "bb crew", and "point of view") and rehearsed every free minute. my rehearsing location was in a costume storage room (very good for acoustics) which in turn was in a former slaughterhouse (very bad for ambiance).
I mostly rehearsed two-handed tapping. not because this is something anyone would actually want to listen to, but because jennifer batten was my superhero and jennifer is miss-two-handed-tapping. for non-guitarreros, jennifer was jacko's-big-haired-guitar-player:
in the early 90ties, michael jackson was still famous for his music, and jennifer rocking the superbowl in 1993 was among 100 greatest moments in guitar history:
so jennifer batten was my guitar hero role model. luckily, she wasn't my webdesign role model.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 7:14 PM | rahel luethy | 1 comment(s)
jonas thinks that my previous post was too harsh. he blames my sleep deprivation. even though that's a nice idea (it wouldn't be me then, would it?) I think that is too simplistic. probably I'm just aggressive by nature *grrrr* ;-)
qui s'excuse s'accuse
I can handle this.
<ablenkungsmanöver>thanks to nicole and markus, we actually got the flat we've applied for and will be moving in by the beginning of june. so the problem remains the same, I own a lot of unnecessary stuff (not only kitchen utensils). for example: one four room flat (available by the end of may), 100+ LPs (but no turntable), 200+ CDs (I hardly ever listen to because I mostly use mp3s), a heartrate monitor (without batteries), an analog SLR camera (nikon f601), another analog camera (contax t3), 3 bikes, and 4 guitars. most of this will appear on ebay soon (drop me a line if you'd like to save me the publishing hassle). however, after laughing about the guitarshredshow this afternoon (thanks, sala), I'll definitely keep my yellow steve vai guitar.
</ablenkungsmanöver>
Monday, April 24, 2006 2:30 PM | rahel luethy | 0 comment(s)
there's probably nothing as swiss as the adjective "praktisch" (convenient). and there's probably nothing I hate more than those ugly kitchen utensils which sneak into your flat in disguise, wrapped as presents. these uninspired thingies are usually very praktisch at solving problems you hardly ever encounter, like crack-opening a breakfast egg, serving wine without spilling, storing postcards, you name it.
in the words of marcel duchamp:
there is no solution, because there is no problem.
the reason behind this rant is our intention to move into a new flat at some point (hopefully rather sooner than later). you can't imagine how different you look at your belongings in the context of an upcoming relocation. I already apologize to the donors of all the presents I'll have to give away.
Sunday, April 23, 2006 8:52 AM | rahel luethy | 5 comment(s)
compared to how much I love taking pictures, I know very little about the physics of photography. impressively little. I know that I like blurred backgrounds on portraits, thus I usually set the camera to aperture priority, choose a big aperture (i.e. one with a small number) and let the camera worry about exposure time. quite in contrast to my usual approach to almost anything (browsing/reading/discussing for hours) I never really worried about the meaning of these numbers. until a recent discussion about depth of field with olivier lead me to read a bit on wikipedia.
so here's a short recap of the quite cool system that some smart guys have come up with to facilitate life of photographers: as you probably know (unless you are even more oblivious than I am), the aperture number is a measure for the diameter of the entrance pupil. what I've just found out is that the numbers actually indicate fractions, namely, the ratio between the focal length and the diameter of the opening. for example, choosing f/16 with an 80 mm lens means that light is entering the camera body through a 5 mm hole.
theoretically, the opening can be changed gradually, so why the artificial f-numbers f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32, etc.? this is a geometric progression, where each stop indicates another halving of the opening area (i.e. the diameter is multiplied by the square root of 2; numbers are rounded for convenience).
the smart thing is that shutter speeds (which determine exposure time) are arranged similarly. from wikipedia:
Opening up a lens by one stop allows twice as much light to fall on the film in a given period of time, therefore to have the same exposure, you must have a shutter speed twice as fast (shutter open half as long)
even smarter, the film (read: chip) sensitivity is also arranged in simliar steps. thus changing any of these three (aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity) parameters can be compensated by stepping the other two up/down, respectively.
this fundamental law is called reciprocity.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 6:14 PM | rahel luethy | 2 comment(s)
(from banksy, via olivier)
Wednesday, April 05, 2006 10:06 AM | rahel luethy | 0 comment(s)
after the tremendous success of tarzan, erfolg, patent et al., it seemed like the t-shirt hype had certainly reached its peak (at least here in basel). the latest contribution will probably only work in the US anyway: pre-pixelated clothes for reality TV shows.
