Pie Palace

So it’s finally happened. The Green Party has a federal MP. It didn’t happen through the blood, sweat, and tears of an election, but through a sitting MP switching his affiliation. More of a whimper than a bang.

Blair Wilson was elected as a Liberal in the BC riding of West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Sea to Sky Country. He left the Liberal Party under allegations of election spending irregularities (of which he was cleared by Elections Canada), but tried to rejoin as recently as last month.

How does this new, high profile Green effect the Party? His status as a sitting MP removes the most recent excuse for the television stations barring the Green Party leader from the televised national debates. The significance of that can’t be overestimated – it gives us credibility, and the ability to reach a huge audience. Of course, the TV stations could simply raise another barrier, as they’ve done when we met their requirements in the past.

Sadly, Mr. Wilson probably won’t get a chance to represent the Party in the House, since Harper looks to be gunning for an election at the earliest possible date.

Welcome aboard, Brian. We’re happy to have you. Hopefully you’ll have a few more GP pals in the House come this Fall. And do try to get re-elected.

So Banksy’s identity may have been discovered. For those who don’t know, Banksy is a “street artist” (read graffiti artist) who specializes in is own brand of agitprop. Along with producing fantastic graffiti, he’s broken into galleries to hang up his own work and improved famous London statues¹.

In my mind, Mr. B is a genius. His graffiti is intelligent, thought provoking, funny, and accessible. I would love to live in a city that filled with that kind of art. If Robin Gunningham is Banksy, I hope that the media attention doesn’t slow him down. If not, I hope that Mr. Gunningham gets something out of his 15 minutes of fame.

And for the folks who call graffiti a blight on the urban landscape, it’s worth noting that Banksy’s graffiti is receiving protection from property owners. At least one town council is ensuring that one of his paintings is protected, and another has been protected by a sheet of plastic. If a similar talent started working in Ottawa, would we recognize it?

Images from Banksy’s shop.

1. Perhaps that should be “reimagined”. (back)

As much as I pooh-poohed this year’s theme at Burning Man, I’m sorry that I’m not going. For all those who aren’t:

Here are my pics from Lumiere 2008. There are three broad categories: light painting, long exposures, and conventional photos.

Light painting

Let’s get this out of the way straight off: I don’t like using flash outside of a shoot. It’s bright, it’s obnoxious, and I find it hard to control.

A poor man’s flash is a flashlight and a long exposure. My flashlight was a crappy little LED jobby that dangles at the end of my keychain. It isn’t very bright, but over a long exposure, it does the trick:

I set my camera up on a tripod, got out the flashlight, opened the shutter (1/2 sec), and sprayed light all over the robot. Because I could direct the flashlight, I was able to get highlights on its chest and face without drawing attention to the surrounding frame. The picture isn’t fantastic, but I’m pleased that the painting highlighted the areas that I care about.

On a similar vein, there’s a tree with hanging lanterns. Since I knew that the lanterns were going to be blown out in any image I took, I left the shutter open long enough to paint the tree trunk, base, and foreground leaves with the flashlight. I was hoping that there would be enough light thrown out by my fellow festival goers that some interesting patterns would be thrown onto the sensor. I was in luck: the streak on the foreground and the flash on the mid left add two interesting features. I also lucked out with the lady in the blue sweater – the vivid light blue adds a splash of colour to the pic, and her pink baby sling is almost the same colour is the extinguished lantern beside her. Not intentional elements, but they add to the quality of the pic.

Long exposures

I took the long exposures of the paper baggy labyrinth. There were dozens of people wandering through it, so a short exposure would have caught too many people. Since I’m not a fan of photography without consent, I went for long (15s+) exposures so they’d disappear into the background. The labyrinth was under a set of bright lights, meaning that I had a chance of picking up detail.

[caption id="attachment_660" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Heftily cropped labyrinth from afar"][/caption]

I cropped these two so tightly because of the angle: most of the frame was filled with grass at the bottom, and orange sky at the top. None too interesting, so those part of the images ended up in the bit bucket.

The first year I went to Lumiere, I took a picture very similar to this. For some reason, the ordered rings of baggies centered in the right catch my eye. I’ll have to bring a ladder next year to get a more aerial view. I like the streaks and ghostly people.

Conventional Photos

And now, dear reader, you witness my idiocy. Something I knew I should have nailed down my ISO, exposure, and exposure adjustment (ie overexpose by 1.3 stops) before the fire dancers started performing. Did I? No. Did I stick on my 50mm lens and leave it on for the whole performance? No – I fiddled around with a much slower telephoto. Did I trim my flash and use it to improve the colour balance between the dancers and the flame? No.

The pictures aren’t bad, they just aren’t as good as they could have been. The ISO was higher than necessary (with the 50mm lens I should have been shooting at 200 instead of 800), but the duration (.6sec) was perfect. I probably could have dropped the duration down to .4 and caught more of the dancer’s face:

[caption id="attachment_664" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Fire Weaver doing poi"][/caption]

The remaining sundries are decent. If anything, these pictures make me question my lens. The 50mm Pentax lens left weird green ghosts opposite some of the flame. On top of that, the damn thing seemed to lose focus and spend forever hunting around. If I was gutsier, I’d try manually focusing (or letting the camera choose its focal point), but I don’t have the cajones to entrust a once-in-a-year event to my crappy eyes or my camera’s choices.

Can’t believe I used ‘rippers in the title of a post? Neither can I. I don’t usually talk about anything more personal than my political tastes, but I’m making an exception for this post. If you’re reading for more than my political and technical ramblings, read on…

Every year I say “Hey! I’m going to post about Lumiere early!” and I never do. Continuing on with that great tradition, here’s my annual last-minute post about Lumiere:

OMG! Lumiere! Fire dancers! A local event organized by people who live in Ottawa! (And a chance to take pictures of awesome fire dancers)

Follow this link to take a gander at my fire dancer pictures from 2006 and 2007.

(Forgive the crappy quality of my 2006 photos: My SLR ran out of film and I went to town with a recently purchased Canon point-n-shoot. The pictures looked reasonable on the camera’s screen, but there wasn’t enough light)

Anywho: Lumiere is on Saturday, August 9, 2008. I think it’s in Strathcona Park, but the link on the Lumiere website is broken.

I do like getting linked to. I really do. But not when my posts are being scraped without my permission. Today I discover that some guy on blogger is scraping some of my posts for his (marketing?) blog (viz. this post). Anyone have any hints for dealing with content theft?

Piepalace.ca has been spanked by more than its fair share of hits recently. Usually, I would just assume that I’m really popular and leave it at that, but Dreamhost has been getting increasingly upset at the load these hits are putting on their server.

Some simple analysis (with the help of the Dreamhost support wiki) has shown a couple of weird trends:

• 207.58.129.221 really likes me.¹ It downloads my RSS feed 800-1100 times a day.²
• The Aspie Quotient test is pretty popular. It gets literally thousands of visits a day. It’s basically a static page that relies on javascript for processing, but I’m afraid that Wordpress is still falling down under the load.

I’ve blacklisted our friend at 207.58.129.221, and I’m using WP Super Cache. Hopefully this will lessen my load to appease Dreamhost.

Can anyone recommend a decent apache logfile analyzer? Preferably something that runs on the commandline and doesn’t leave HTML turds all over the place.

1. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks IP addresses by the number of requests they’ve made. (back)
2. Discovered by running

   zcat logDate| awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n

   on my daily logs. This ranks URLs by the number of requests they received. (back)