A. Aronsson’s WeBOLLog

Two days ago, that is Monday, the day started with the announcement that we had no water, as a water leak had been discovered near our building. During the day I saw various machines and people coming and going outside my window. At one point I was up on the top floor so I spent a couple of seconds snapping a few pictures from there. It’s not everyday that people sporadically dig up a large pit on in the lawn on the other side of the road. A change to my view.

We eventually got water from a nearby supply to keep the factory up and running, but midday yesterday things were like normal again, except for the pit then.

Oh, and while I’m talking about pictures… I have to sit down and pick some out from my vacation to post. Someday… soon, hopefully.

I also tried my shaky hand to record a zoomed in video to be able to create a loop. As you can see below my hands were indeed shaky, but at least it kind of loops! Next time I’ll make sure to get a tripod. I like video loops… but this one is a bit too wonky :P played back in four times the original speed.

Earlier I posted that I had acquired a trampoline to put in my parents garden, as I myself live in an apartment. Shortly afterward I got curious of how well it would work in water, if at all. It was quite a strange idea, but it got stuck in my head, so I had to try it out.

To make it possible to launch off of the trampoline into the water I wanted to increase the height by extending the legs. I checked if it was possible to order more leg parts, as they were stackable, but that was only possible if you actually had a broken part to replace. Then I checked the price for manufacturing extensions, which was more than half the price of a completely new trampoline! So I ended up buying a second one and used those legs for the extension.

For the trampoline not to sink in the sand on the lake bottom I prepared boards to have as feet on the legs. These were then attached with a rope to stabilize the structure somewhat.

To test the rig out I brought together a number of friends and headed out to a beach belonging to the second largest lake in the country. It was in my first week of vacation so it was cold in the water, a friend guesstimated 14°C, but it was the only weekend this summer that this amount of my friends were available!

To see the process and the end result, watch the video below! Enjoy!

I’ve talked to a few people which give blood, and I’ve been curious to try it out, it does serve a purpose! What pushed me into really contacting the blood central and registering was a talk with a friend’s grandfather, which had been a blood giver all his life. I’ve also talked to my neighbor about it, as she also is a blood giver.

Two weeks ago I finally booked a time, after having left a sample before my vacation, and it went perfectly fine! When I got there I had to sit in line for a few minutes, then I got to lie down and they slurped out 450ml of blood through my left arm!

I think the biggest mess with leaving blood is the iron pills I get to swallow after it. Apparently it would take a whole lot of eating until you have restored all that iron you lose with your blood, but pills will fix you up! Just that they make you weird in the stomach.

For people with fright of needles, I caution you to look away. Well, I guess that’s too late now… below are a two pictures the nurse was kind enough to take!

If you live in Sweden and also want to get rid of some of your blood, for the sake of others, go to GeBlod.nu! I have to say it results in a good feeling, like you are contributing to society in a good way, in addition to paying taxes and abiding the laws.

Two weeks ago we were visiting a couple of friends to test out pistol shooting at a pistol shooting club where they are both members. I set out with two cameras, my Ixus 75, and the borrowed Sanyo Xacti VPC HD1A.

My plan was to film both myself when firing and the target at the same time, I ended up partially successful. It was a bit stressful to set up two cameras while getting information and instructions of how to safely fire a bullet weapon, but I somehow managed.

During the day I tried different levels of zoom which made some material fairly blurry and worthless, but some of it ended up usable. To my slight surprise It was the clips recorded using the digital zoom in addition to the analog that would display enough detail, I guess it is a smart camera that uses those extra pixels in the sensor when zooming digitally.

Below are a few pictures from the event, and the resulting video from all that recording!

All in all a very interesting and teaching experience, thank you Jönköpings PK. I might join a club myself in the future, to work towards marksmanship.

A week ago I took a walk with a friend to scout out a track for running. While strolling along I snapped a few pictures of the wonderful vegetation. Below is a very small collection of five pictures, of which three are panoramas!

The last panorama was made up of more than 35 snaps! Original resolution is 8475×4817 pixels :) Not super-huge, but large enough to take up a lot of memory!

The 14th, that is yesterday, I had a small gathering to bring attention to my ever increasing age. It was a nice, calm, relaxed, easy going event. My mother had been nice enough to bake me a cake, and I got to garnish it with whatever, so I did.

After that gathering, some of us went to our regular Pizza-place, TBG! There I was treated to half a pizza, they are quite large there, so even a split pizza was plenty! This one was the Pizza of the House, with tons of stuff on it. I became full, goal achieved!

All in all a fairly quiet and relaxing birthday :)

This Thursday I finally got my NeoCube! I ordered it after seeing it online, somewhere, at April 30th. So I had waited just about 10 weeks! I’ve been plenty busy with other things in the mean time, but I was still happily excited when it arrived!

The mail arrived directly in my mailbox, all the way from the US, which was nice. I ordered the Cube-Tastic Value Pack, which at that time was $10 cheaper! The popularity and availability is reason enough to increase the price, I think, so the new price is justified.

Building with these magnetic balls sure is a new experience for me, very interesting. It took me a while to re-realize how the relationships between magnets makes them behave when arranged in a structure, but after that a whole lot of possibilities opened up in my mind.

Below is a video I compiled yesterday. I’ve been trying out a camera I borrowed at work, a Sanyo Xacti VPC HD1A. As my floor is all wooden boards the camera sways a bit when I move around, even with it mounted on a tripod. It’s extra noticable as the camera is zoomed in. I also had problems with the weird MP4 format it uses for its media, rendering errors when fading between clips and choppy playback. I ended up re-encoding the lot of them! What a hassle! Luckily, I found a neat application for doing just that!

Last Friday I was out on a boat trip. It has been a tradition here at work to have a trip for the employees every year, before summer vacation, and this year we went out on the Göta Canal, again. Apparently it has happened a few times before, but each time different parts of it.

I have finally had time collect some of the images I took. Again, I usually post pictures without much people in them, as I wouldn’t want people to post pictures of me online without asking either.

We traveled down 16 flood gates, descending about 40 meters I believe.

There are lots of trees next to the canal, and some houses! You can also travel by bike along it.

We ended up in Sjötorp, where I found this wall full of bird houses, and later took a picture of the boat we had traveled with as it moved out. We were taking buses back.

While waiting for the buses to leave, I went out on a pier and found these old poles behind some rocks. I find it more interesting to photograph old worn things, than new and shiny things.

One of the rings you can attach your boat to when between flood gates.

I managed to make at least one sky panorama.

Next are pictures from when we had reach our final destination. First the boat, and then the small harbor, and lastly a building I happened to l see while walking to the buses.

Currently the plugin I use to display the pictures does not make a caption from the title of the link, which the Blog software adds, but the title of the image. I’ll try and mess with it to fix that myself if it isn’t included in the next version or so as I like to have descriptions in the title property.

That’s it for now!

Update: Apparently dragging images after adding them totally botches up the links, fixed that now! I wonder if any olds posts are broken as well…

The past weekend was three days long because of a national holiday, so I was out of town from Friday morning until Sunday evening. Good times!

I took a bunch of various pictures even though the weather was mostly gray with spots of rain, but some might be worth posting!

On the Friday I went to a conference called Nyhemsveckan, camping with my parents and my brother in a caravan. The pictures below are from the pine forest we were stationed in.

They’ve had a large tent for the meetings and concerts for ages, but this was supposedly the last time. After this they will build a large conference building instead. For this reason I made sure to take some pictures of the tent, and following is a panorama from one of the ends of the tent, which is where I sat.

The next day, Saturday, we went to a candy factory, which is traditional for us to visit. It was quite crowded, so the queue was stretching to the far end of the outlet area. While standing there I noticed what they had painted on a couple of doors (might have been there since always!), and it was a pair of illusionary corridors! I’ve been planning to make something like this on my apartment door for a while, though… I think it’ll have to be on the inside, as the landlord might not like if I modify the outside of the apartment.

After this me and my brother spent the evening and following day with a few friends living in a nearby city. While there we played some multiplayer Tetris on their projector. When you finish rows you send them to other players so their bottom row gets duplicated, or remove rows, etc, depending on what is shown below your playing area when you do so.

In the two pictures below you can see Player 2, which happens to be me, having a screen full of rows added by other players (or myself, you can do that too), but both times I happened to get a 1×4 bar to drop down the single collumn hole to the bottom!

Next is a picture I took while walking back after eating out, holding the camera on my outstretched arm taking random photos. It is my face that’s closest to the camera. When browsing for pictures to post I just couldn’t drop this one as I really like how the light just barely manages to hit the roofs of the buildings, which I still look like toy houses! :P

In general, a terrific weekend :) As a bonus, I’m adding a boxy sky panorama taken today while I was biking home for lunch!

These images are from last Thursday, loads of high altitude clouds, displaying a cloud landscape with an incredible depth. I managed to botch up the exposure between shots, so the images didn’t end up panorama friendly.

Next up are a few photos and panoramas from the weekend, where I spent time at a lake for a barbecue, and then at a villa to participate in a birthday celebration. I ended up staring at the sky at these occasions as well.

There two first panoramas are of the lake, in the evening. First a horizontal panorama, and then a vertical.

When walking back to the parking lot to ride home I couldn’t resist snapping a picture of the sun beams striking across the sky.

This is at the villa, first a panorama from the ground, and then a panorama where I rotated the camera 90° from a window on the second floor.

Lastly a picture of the three trees with the sunset behind them. Lots of sun/cloud/sky interaction recently, but it’s hard to resist when I think the colors are so fantastic, and the volumetric properties of the clouds in addition to their scale. A nice sky makes me take deep breaths and enjoy my existence.

Again, all these pictures and panoramas were taken with a pocket compact camera, an Isux 75. I should really get a DSLR, but then again, a DSLR would be hard to fit in my pocket and carry around all day long.