Author Archives: Gabriel

About Gabriel

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Couple Things…

Thus far the visit to NY for AES has been way busier than I expected, which is nice in a way since I always find business trips a bit weird when I have too much free time. They’re sort of like a break but you’re on the clock so you don’t ever really relax and away from all your normal break time activities.

The panels for AES basically go from 09:00-18:00 or so non-stop, so by the time I’m done it’s been a long day and it’s too dark this time of year to take a lot of photos with the gear I brought for the trip.

But I had a very curious experience, I decided to grab some take out for dinner on my way back to the hotel since I skipped lunch.  When I went to pay, the sweet young woman at the counter apologized quite profusely to me because she didn’t have any singles for change. I thought she was going to give me a fist full of quarters, but instead she handed me four of these mythical Sacagawea coins that Americans seem to loathe so much! I almost felt the need to explain to her why $1 coins are better than bills and that it was no problem, but I decided it wasn’t the time or place in the end.

Coming from the land of the Loonie it was one of those weird little cultural reminders that even though the US is almost Canada in many ways, it’s also strangely different.

Then I walked out of the store and the bag my food was in broke and landed on the sidewalk. But that’s a different story and far less entertaining…

New York, New York

I just got on the new Union Pearson Express for the first time and am off to New York for the first time in almost a decade.

Unfortunately it’s for work, but I packed my camera and I’m hoping I can take some time to shoot a few photos and maybe grab a nice bite to eat somewhere. My brother the chef has been filling my taste buds with fancy ideas of fun places to go!

Let’s Encrypt Closed Beta

I received notification that the Let’s Encrypt closed beta has started yesterday.  As of this morning this domain is now running using the beta version of the client and service.

It’s looking pretty good so far, it’s a bit wonky to integrate with a site that is already running with HSTS since I don’t have a web server listening on port 80.  (This is required for the verification step of certificate generation.)  But thankfully the client comes bundled with a standalone webserver you can run to complete the setup.

The certs only last for 90 days (by design) and I’ll be interested to see how painful or painless the cert regeneration will be when the time comes, but otherwise it was trivial to get all of the other features I use up and running.

So far, so good!

Uranium

Check it out, I’m a huge fan of Derek Muller (the host) and anything on PBS doesn’t tend to go too far astray. I’ve read several books on Uranium and the weapons development over the past several years and as much as I’m pretty strongly opposed to the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons there really is no escaping that it’s one of the most thrilling scientific, engineering, and espionage stories of the 20th century.

http://video.pbs.org/program/uranium-twisting-dragons-tail/

Good Night Moon

I was up late tonight and managed to get this interesting pic of the moon.  What’s fascinating is that with very minimal processing it turned out there were hundreds of stars in the background and they came out as perfect pinpoints of light.  My new-used 80-200mm f/2.8 is turning out to be a pretty amazing lens, especially for the price.

Zoom in to see the whole image, it's worth it.

This is without much effort since it’s late on a worknight, but I now know I’m going to have try to get some much better shots, perhaps outside the city later on this year.  I might even think about renting an even longer lens to see what I can do.

Postal Service

As I mentioned, I went on a recent camera gear bender and bought a couple of lenses which I’ve had my eye on for a long time.  One of them, a fast telephoto lens, I decided to buy used on eBay from Japan.  It was a stressful decision since I was worried about all kinds of things (am I going to get ripped off, will it be damaged, etc.) but one thing not to worry about is shipping.  The seller shipped it using Japan Post’s Express Mail Service and between them and Canada Post it’s been nothing short of amazing.

The package was dropped off on the 13th at 20:13 local in Tokyo and I came home tonight to a Canada Post slip on my door saying they tried to deliver but needed a signature.  It landed at Pearson this morning at 08:46.

Considering this cost less than $20 shipping that’s pretty much as good as it gets.  Anybody who tells you that we don’t get a great service from Canada Post doesn’t really know what they’re talking about.  In fact over the past few years, something I’ve noticed consistently is that the national postal services in the countries I’ve shipped to and from (Germany, UK, Sweden, US, Canada, and Japan) are near the top every time and their ability to ship between services and across borders is every bit as good as any commercial parcel service.