Halloween has come and gone. We live within walking distance to two schools, and trick-or-treating is so formalized here that it gets its own scheduling announcement in the newspaper, so I expected a small swarm of sugar-seeking munchkins to descend upon the neighborhood. We bought enough candy to fill two large glass jars, and set them out to hasten the appeasement of the costumed.

The sum total of the encounters of the evening: 3 visits, less than a dozen kids. We still have two half-full jars of candy.

Introduction

Moving is always a pain, and usually an expensive pain. The cheapest and most inconvenient way to move is to do everything yourself: rent a huge truck, load everything into it yourself, drive it to the new location yourself (potentially asking someone to drive your own car up), and unload it yourself once you're there. If you've never packed furniture on your own before, you risk the loss of goods, and if you've never driven a large truck before, you may be risking more than that on the road. Special features like "air-ride" suspension or environmental controls may or may not be available. On the far opposite side of the spectrum, you can pay a reputable company to pack, load, drive, and unload everything for you (paying a company you know nothing about to take everything you own is not recommended). The better companies will advertise air-ride trucks with mildew protection at the very least, and will have their own collection of furniture pads, tie-downs, and bubble-wrap necessary to keep everything protected. The downside is that you will have to schedule your move with the mover between two weeks and a month in advance, and it's very expensive. On my last move, from California to Louisiana, I went this route with Mayflower, moving a 1-bedroom apartment for about $3,500, and everything arrived in perfect condition.

I'm just now wrapping up posting the second day of pictures from the June Washington trip, and included in them were some cat pictures, just in time for the Friday Cat Blogging tradition. I'm tired at this point, so it's only fair to show a tired cat:

[image:1568 size=small]

Much delayed, it seems I have managed to complete all of the editing for the Washington hike photos in time to get everything sent out for the holidays. There were 471 total exposures (about a hundred less than I thought, when I first started editing, but I'd forgotten that my shoot rate tapered off towards the end of the trip), out of which I produced 274 final edited images. This number is deceptively low this pass; it doesn't take into account that there were lots of stitched images that condensed down into individual panoramas. Although the total number of resulting panoramas is still well into the single digits, their preparation took a surprising bulk of the time. Even using PTGUI, getting a pano just right could take an entire day.

Please pardon the somewhat rambling writing; I'm simultaneously exhausted and jittery. A visit to the woman who makes my life worth living is long overdue, and as a result my rather sporadic updates as of late are likely to become even more so for the next two weeks.

I can never sleep the night before a flight. I don't know why. It might be partly historical; I remember once upon a time trying deliberately not to sleep ahead of a long flight, so that it would be easier to sleep on the plane, and thus make the period of enforced inactivity easier to bear. Now it just seems to fade into the background of my general insomnia, a habit too well ingrained to break when my body actually wants to encourage it for me.

The automotive mount for my GPS arrived today. Inside the shipping box was the hermetically sealed package containing the mount itself... and a free sample of "Degree for Men", an "Ultra Clear Deodorant Stick" with the catchphrase, "For men who take risks, it won't let you down."

I wonder if the seller is trying to tell me something.

I've stitched a few image pairs together before, but this weekend I completed my first cylindrical projection, 197° horizontal field of view over five images, using PTGUI to handle the stitching.

After the quality problems I had with my previous stitching attempts (one using Hugin, another using a trial version of PTGUI), I had been expecting not to generate particularly good results. I managed to pleasantly surprise myself, however, and without checking against the master stitching file, I can't find the seams in the result anymore, and I'm satisfied with the overall output quality. On top of that, the sepia version of a two-image stitch I did last week is going to end up in my collection as one of my best images yet.

I finished a network upgrade today changing out my old Netgear gigabit switch for a SMC 8508T, and the old, flaky Netgear gigabit NIC for a D-Link DGE-530T, identical to the one in the resonant.org server. This is all 32-bit PCI, still, but that's all that my aging systems support. With jumbo frames now active from end to end, I'm still only seeing 28MB/s via HTTP (with about 98% CPU usage on Apache) and around 23MB/s (with about 40% CPU usage) via SMB. Since my uncached hard drive output on the server is only about 20MB/s, this isn't really that bad, per se, but I was hoping for much better. At this point, I appear to be capped by user-side CPU overhead and by the PCI bus itself, so I won't be getting much better until I completely overhaul both systems to have modern motherboards and processors. That's an order of magnitude more expensive than this experiment, so it's unlikely that I'll be doing it anytime soon.

On the plus side, the network instability appears to have cleared up. I still have one test left to run, but my first test case that reliably locked up the system within minutes has been running now for about half an hour without any problems whatsoever.

Out of a total of 28 images this batch, 19 were kept, but none were really much above snapshot quality. This does mean that I am finally getting to the Washington pictures, however.

In the continuing Gulf Storm Saga, Rita took out power for longer than Katrina did, but I'm back up and running about a day later. It's making me seriously consider buying a generator if another storm comes through. Local damage is slightly worse as well, as a number of fires have apparently broken out throughout the city. I was out and about throughout the day escaping the powerless apartment, and fire engines were a common sight — one set stopping at a gated community just a few blocks away from my own apartment complex.

My paranoid side wonders if it was due to people's individual generators catching fire. There are some drawbacks to storing ten gallons of gasoline in your apartment, after all.