I'm fed up with statistics!Monday, February 1, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Snow
I live in the Dublin mountains, and most of the time I love it. In fact, most of the time, it's my favourite place in the world. But there's a price to pay for the beauty and peace of this place, and that price is paid when it snows. To say it's inconvenient is an understatement. For the past week, our car has been parked in our neighbour's yard. Where's the problem with that you might ask. Only that our neigbour lives a 20 minute walk away. This means that whenever we want to go out, we have to dress up in our walking boots, hat, gloves and scarf and march down to get the car. Our house is at the top of a very steep hill which is impossible to get up, and very dangerous to get down, in the ice and snow.
And then there are the days, (like today) when no one can get up or down. Well, Brendan, (my other half) did get down this morning to go to work. But with all the snow fall this afternoon, there was no possibility of his getting home again this evening, and my daughter hasn't ventured home since New Year's Day, so I'm stuck up here, alone, with only the cat for company. (He's stretched out on my lap right now as I sit beside the fire and write this)
And still...with all the inconvenience, the place looks so beautiful, and it's so quiet and peaceful, it is still actually my favourite place in the world. Besides, in our amost 12 years since moving up here, this has only happened twice, (the first time being last winter). It's unlikely to happen again for a long time...isn't it?
Monday, November 30, 2009
Here's a couple of sites that are helpful for research purposes:
http://www.psihq.ie/ The Psychological Society of Ireland
http://www.apa.org/ American Psychological Association
http://www.psihq.ie/ The Psychological Society of Ireland
http://www.apa.org/ American Psychological Association
Sunday, November 29, 2009
I need a laptop...or do I?
I need a laptop…or do I?
It’s only November, and already whenever I go into the Library in college all of the PC’s are occupied. So...maybe the solution is to buy a laptop. But there are so many out there, which one do I choose?
First Things First
Well, what are my needs?
1. As there aren’t many power or network outlets in the library, it must have Wi-Fi so that I can log into the college network and the internet, and…
2. It must have a long battery life.
3. It must have a large enough memory chip to run the likes of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
4. It must have a large enough screen to be able to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator comfortably and practical ably.
5. It must be small and light enough for me to carry around.
6. I have to be able to afford it.
Wi-Fi is obviously essential so that I can log into the college network without having to plug it into a network connection I need to be able to access my folders and the Lecturer’s notes and assignments. I also need to be able to access the internet for research and to submit assignments via Blackboard.
Most laptops seem to have a shorter battery life than advertised on their promotional literature. This is because they run the tests when the computer is idle and not actually processing any data. I’ll need to find some independent research on this to get the real battery life. There’s nothing as frustrating as not being able to finish your work, or worse, losing it, because the battery has died.
Some of the smaller notebooks have chips of only 1GB. These are grand for most things you’d want to do, but for this course, we use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, both of which use a lot of memory. To run them at any kind of workable speed, I’d probably need around 3GB.
The same goes for screen size. Working with those programmes on a small screen for any length of time is just not practical, nor comfortable.
If I’m going to have to carry the laptop/notebook around all day, it’s going to have to be small and light.
Finally, can I have all of the above at a price that I can afford? Well, this is where the real research comes in. Do I buy online or from a shop? New or second hand? Which brand is the best value? Does the price reflect the quality or the brand name? Do I stick rigidly to my budget or could I be swayed by the promotion? So many questions.
Those are my basic requirements. I’d also like it to be a pretty colour and design. So now all I need to decide is…do I really need one?
It’s only November, and already whenever I go into the Library in college all of the PC’s are occupied. So...maybe the solution is to buy a laptop. But there are so many out there, which one do I choose?
First Things First
Well, what are my needs?
1. As there aren’t many power or network outlets in the library, it must have Wi-Fi so that I can log into the college network and the internet, and…
2. It must have a long battery life.
3. It must have a large enough memory chip to run the likes of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
4. It must have a large enough screen to be able to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator comfortably and practical ably.
5. It must be small and light enough for me to carry around.
6. I have to be able to afford it.
Wi-Fi is obviously essential so that I can log into the college network without having to plug it into a network connection I need to be able to access my folders and the Lecturer’s notes and assignments. I also need to be able to access the internet for research and to submit assignments via Blackboard.
Most laptops seem to have a shorter battery life than advertised on their promotional literature. This is because they run the tests when the computer is idle and not actually processing any data. I’ll need to find some independent research on this to get the real battery life. There’s nothing as frustrating as not being able to finish your work, or worse, losing it, because the battery has died.
Some of the smaller notebooks have chips of only 1GB. These are grand for most things you’d want to do, but for this course, we use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, both of which use a lot of memory. To run them at any kind of workable speed, I’d probably need around 3GB.
The same goes for screen size. Working with those programmes on a small screen for any length of time is just not practical, nor comfortable.
If I’m going to have to carry the laptop/notebook around all day, it’s going to have to be small and light.
Finally, can I have all of the above at a price that I can afford? Well, this is where the real research comes in. Do I buy online or from a shop? New or second hand? Which brand is the best value? Does the price reflect the quality or the brand name? Do I stick rigidly to my budget or could I be swayed by the promotion? So many questions.
Those are my basic requirements. I’d also like it to be a pretty colour and design. So now all I need to decide is…do I really need one?
Digital Photography...what took it so long?
Digital Photography…what took us so long?
An American photographer,David Bergman,took a panoramic photograph of President Barack Obama’s inauguration with a digital camera and a device called a Gigapan. The picture is amazing not only because it covers such a large area, but because, when you zoom in on pretty much anyone in the crowd, you can see them clearly.
Rewind
Now, rewind back for just a moment to 1979, when I bought my first SLR. It was an Olympus OM1, cost IR£150 (today’s equivalent would probably be around €600) and I had to wind my film through and around a serious of spindles to load it. When I took my photographs, I brought the film to the chemist and waited for 2-3 weeks for my photographs to come back. This is what everybody did, unless of course you had a Polaroid Camera, (read the other article on this on by blog). But then came the Digital Camera.
History
Put “History of Digital Photography” into any search engine and you’ll get hundreds of results. Pretty much all of them will tell you that it began with an idea, as does everything. Eugene F. Lally was the man with the idea in this case. In 1961, when he was working for the Jet Propulsion Labortory in the US, Lally wanted the spaceship to be able to take pictures of planets and stars so as to chart its position as it travelled through space. But he didn’t develop (oops…sorry!) the idea very far, and it wasn’t until 1975 that the first digital still camera was actually patented by an Eastman Kodak engineer called Steven Sasson. Resolution was 0.01 megapixels and the shutter speed was 23 seconds. It was the size of a toaster and look like this...
Well, it was a beginning.
Fast Forward
Fast forward now through analogue cameras, Luigi Colani designer cameras, still-video-recording-to-solid-state-memory-camera (The Homic), the Fuji DS-1P, (first ‘true’ digital hand held camera, developed in 1988, but never sold!?) and on to 1990, when we have the first digital camera to actually go on sale, the Dycam Model 1. This had an internal 1MB Ram, 376 x 240pixels, a shutter speed of between 1/30 and 1/1000 and a built-in flash. It was also attached to a PC to transfer images. It cost $995. Now we’re getting somewhere!
But…
Adobe Photoshop also emerged in 1990, and this was significant. Now whatever quality was lost through the camera could be made up on the computer.
Today
Fast forward again to today and everyone has a digital camera, even if only on their phone. The average half-decent camera costs less than €100, has a resolution of 10megapixels and many can fit in a pocket or handbag. And, take a look at David Bergman’s website at to see what you can do with one, an accessory called a Gigapan and a computer. This, for me, is an amazing example of where digital photography is right now. It’s taken 50 almost years to get here though, and that’s a long time in the history of technology.
For David Bergman’s site, go to http://www.davidbergman.net/obama.html
A History of Digital Photography is at: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39029429,49293172-1,00.htm
And there’s more history at: http://photocritic.org/digital-photography-history/
An American photographer,David Bergman,took a panoramic photograph of President Barack Obama’s inauguration with a digital camera and a device called a Gigapan. The picture is amazing not only because it covers such a large area, but because, when you zoom in on pretty much anyone in the crowd, you can see them clearly.
Rewind
Now, rewind back for just a moment to 1979, when I bought my first SLR. It was an Olympus OM1, cost IR£150 (today’s equivalent would probably be around €600) and I had to wind my film through and around a serious of spindles to load it. When I took my photographs, I brought the film to the chemist and waited for 2-3 weeks for my photographs to come back. This is what everybody did, unless of course you had a Polaroid Camera, (read the other article on this on by blog). But then came the Digital Camera.
History
Put “History of Digital Photography” into any search engine and you’ll get hundreds of results. Pretty much all of them will tell you that it began with an idea, as does everything. Eugene F. Lally was the man with the idea in this case. In 1961, when he was working for the Jet Propulsion Labortory in the US, Lally wanted the spaceship to be able to take pictures of planets and stars so as to chart its position as it travelled through space. But he didn’t develop (oops…sorry!) the idea very far, and it wasn’t until 1975 that the first digital still camera was actually patented by an Eastman Kodak engineer called Steven Sasson. Resolution was 0.01 megapixels and the shutter speed was 23 seconds. It was the size of a toaster and look like this...
Well, it was a beginning.
Fast Forward
Fast forward now through analogue cameras, Luigi Colani designer cameras, still-video-recording-to-solid-state-memory-camera (The Homic), the Fuji DS-1P, (first ‘true’ digital hand held camera, developed in 1988, but never sold!?) and on to 1990, when we have the first digital camera to actually go on sale, the Dycam Model 1. This had an internal 1MB Ram, 376 x 240pixels, a shutter speed of between 1/30 and 1/1000 and a built-in flash. It was also attached to a PC to transfer images. It cost $995. Now we’re getting somewhere!
But…
Adobe Photoshop also emerged in 1990, and this was significant. Now whatever quality was lost through the camera could be made up on the computer.
Today
Fast forward again to today and everyone has a digital camera, even if only on their phone. The average half-decent camera costs less than €100, has a resolution of 10megapixels and many can fit in a pocket or handbag. And, take a look at David Bergman’s website at to see what you can do with one, an accessory called a Gigapan and a computer. This, for me, is an amazing example of where digital photography is right now. It’s taken 50 almost years to get here though, and that’s a long time in the history of technology.
For David Bergman’s site, go to http://www.davidbergman.net/obama.html
A History of Digital Photography is at: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39029429,49293172-1,00.htm
And there’s more history at: http://photocritic.org/digital-photography-history/
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Rise and Fall...and Rise(?) of the Polaroid Camera
I read an article recently by Georgia Fitzpatrick on, helium.com on the birth and death of the Polaroid Instant Camera. It was significant to me personally because I remember when my mother bought our Polaroid camera (The Swinger) in the early 1970’s. Georgia tells us that the Polaroid Corporation was owned by a man called Edwin Land, and that the Polaroid Land Camera was first produced in 1947. (As a child, I always thought there must have been an underwater version too, why else would they specify that this was a Land camera?) It’s difficult to imagine now just how significant these cameras were in their day.
The Polaroid Swinger
Gratification Delay
With all other cameras, you took your roll of film to the local chemist for developing and it could take anything up to three weeks to get the photos back. This was Gratification Delay in action. But with the Polaroid, you took your picture, pulled it out of the back of the camera and watched it slowly develop in front of your eyes. Edwin Land sold us Instant Gratification when he sold us the Polaroid Instant Camera. But he didn’t stop there. The Polaroid Corporation also invented the Pack Film and integral film cameras. Instead of fiddling around with rolls of film, threading them through and around spindles, now you could just load this flat box of film and battery into your camera, and not only that, it also automatically ejected the film from the front to the camera after you took your shot. The most popular of these models was the SX-70 which had an SLR lens (that means that when you look through the viewfinder you’re actually seeing through the lens, by means of mirrors and prisms, rather than slightly to one side or above the lens, as in other cameras). This camera was way out of the price range of our family in the 1970’s, but I still see them around today. In fact Georgia Fitzpatrick tells us that you can still pick one up second-hand on ebay for between forty and one hundred euro, and although the SX-70 film is no longer available, you can use the type 600 film with the addition of a ND-Filter. ( What Georgia doesn’t mention though is that the Polaroid Corporation stopped producing all film in 2008, and that the last batch of Polaroid Film passed its use-by date on 16th October 2009. I know, I’m such a nerd. What can I say?)
Histroy
Family history repeated itself in my case in the late 1990’s when Santa Clause left my daughter a Polaroid Spicecam. (Spice as in Spice Girls) She didn’t specifically ask for such a camera, but Santa Clause had a kind of a soft spot for Polaroid Cameras, you see. Georgia tells us that the Corporation when on to produce two more SLR cameras, the imaginatively named SLR 680 and the SLR 690 which, she says, produce excellent quality images. Unfortunately though for them, the digital camera was already gaining popularity, and spelling the demise of the Polaroid. But, she says, instant photography is enjoying some kind of revival, and by the amount of articles and blogs on the subject to be found on the web, I think she’s right. There’re campaigns to “Bring Back the Polaroid” , an endeavour called “The Impossible Project” which aims to do just that, (Bit defeatist tho, don’t you think, with a name like that?) and even the Urban Outfitters shops are selling old stock Polaroid Cameras.
Take a look at the following sites for more information and some interesting debates on the subject: (Well, interesting to me anyway.)
http://www.helium.com/items/134524-the-history-of-instant-photography-and-polaroid.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/blog/index.php?/archives/290-Bring-Back-The-Polaroid!.html
http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/features/polaroid
Postscript: Found the following press release on http://www.the-impossible-project.com/ :
The Impossible Project inspires Polaroid to re-launch Instant Cameras
We are pleased to herewith announce a history making cooperation between Polaroid and The Impossible Project:
As we have created quite some buzz about Analog Instant Photography over the past 12 months, the Polaroid licensee - The Summit Global Group - now can't resist any longer and announced at a press conference on October 13th in Hongkong that they will re-launch some of the most famous Polaroid Instant Cameras.Therefore they are commissioning The Impossible Project to develop and produce a limited edition of Polaroid branded Instant Films in the middle of 2010.
The Impossible Project is proud and excited that its ambitions and all the relentless work that has already been invested are now becoming the foundation for Polaroid's comeback as a producer of Instant Cameras.Large-scale production and worldwide sale of The Impossible Project's new integral film materials under its own brand will already start in the beginning of 2010 - with a brand new and astonishing black and white Instant Film and the first colour films to follow in the course of the year.
…so, they’re not so defeatist after all!
The Polaroid SwingerGratification Delay
With all other cameras, you took your roll of film to the local chemist for developing and it could take anything up to three weeks to get the photos back. This was Gratification Delay in action. But with the Polaroid, you took your picture, pulled it out of the back of the camera and watched it slowly develop in front of your eyes. Edwin Land sold us Instant Gratification when he sold us the Polaroid Instant Camera. But he didn’t stop there. The Polaroid Corporation also invented the Pack Film and integral film cameras. Instead of fiddling around with rolls of film, threading them through and around spindles, now you could just load this flat box of film and battery into your camera, and not only that, it also automatically ejected the film from the front to the camera after you took your shot. The most popular of these models was the SX-70 which had an SLR lens (that means that when you look through the viewfinder you’re actually seeing through the lens, by means of mirrors and prisms, rather than slightly to one side or above the lens, as in other cameras). This camera was way out of the price range of our family in the 1970’s, but I still see them around today. In fact Georgia Fitzpatrick tells us that you can still pick one up second-hand on ebay for between forty and one hundred euro, and although the SX-70 film is no longer available, you can use the type 600 film with the addition of a ND-Filter. ( What Georgia doesn’t mention though is that the Polaroid Corporation stopped producing all film in 2008, and that the last batch of Polaroid Film passed its use-by date on 16th October 2009. I know, I’m such a nerd. What can I say?)
Histroy
Family history repeated itself in my case in the late 1990’s when Santa Clause left my daughter a Polaroid Spicecam. (Spice as in Spice Girls) She didn’t specifically ask for such a camera, but Santa Clause had a kind of a soft spot for Polaroid Cameras, you see. Georgia tells us that the Corporation when on to produce two more SLR cameras, the imaginatively named SLR 680 and the SLR 690 which, she says, produce excellent quality images. Unfortunately though for them, the digital camera was already gaining popularity, and spelling the demise of the Polaroid. But, she says, instant photography is enjoying some kind of revival, and by the amount of articles and blogs on the subject to be found on the web, I think she’s right. There’re campaigns to “Bring Back the Polaroid” , an endeavour called “The Impossible Project” which aims to do just that, (Bit defeatist tho, don’t you think, with a name like that?) and even the Urban Outfitters shops are selling old stock Polaroid Cameras.
Take a look at the following sites for more information and some interesting debates on the subject: (Well, interesting to me anyway.)
http://www.helium.com/items/134524-the-history-of-instant-photography-and-polaroid.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/blog/index.php?/archives/290-Bring-Back-The-Polaroid!.html
http://blog.urbanoutfitters.com/features/polaroid
Postscript: Found the following press release on http://www.the-impossible-project.com/ :
The Impossible Project inspires Polaroid to re-launch Instant Cameras
We are pleased to herewith announce a history making cooperation between Polaroid and The Impossible Project:
As we have created quite some buzz about Analog Instant Photography over the past 12 months, the Polaroid licensee - The Summit Global Group - now can't resist any longer and announced at a press conference on October 13th in Hongkong that they will re-launch some of the most famous Polaroid Instant Cameras.Therefore they are commissioning The Impossible Project to develop and produce a limited edition of Polaroid branded Instant Films in the middle of 2010.
The Impossible Project is proud and excited that its ambitions and all the relentless work that has already been invested are now becoming the foundation for Polaroid's comeback as a producer of Instant Cameras.Large-scale production and worldwide sale of The Impossible Project's new integral film materials under its own brand will already start in the beginning of 2010 - with a brand new and astonishing black and white Instant Film and the first colour films to follow in the course of the year.
…so, they’re not so defeatist after all!
It's difficult to remember to keep the blog updated, particularly when you feel that no one's really interested in reading it.
Life as a mature student is a different experience than it is for the usual age group. Well, certainly as a married, mature student it is. The social life associated with college life is pretty much non-existant, and even if I were free and single, there're very few of my age group to flirt with! I'm even older than the majority of lecturers.
But, having said all that, sure that's not why I came to college in the first place. I came here to learn about psychology, and that's what I really am enjoying. The group work is easier than I thought. I was afraid I'd want to 'mammy' the others, or that they'd expect me to, but that hasn't been the case at all. I am used to interacting with this age group anyway as my own daughters are 19 and 21, and both are in college too, so I had some idea of what to expect when I began.
Life as a mature student is a different experience than it is for the usual age group. Well, certainly as a married, mature student it is. The social life associated with college life is pretty much non-existant, and even if I were free and single, there're very few of my age group to flirt with! I'm even older than the majority of lecturers.
But, having said all that, sure that's not why I came to college in the first place. I came here to learn about psychology, and that's what I really am enjoying. The group work is easier than I thought. I was afraid I'd want to 'mammy' the others, or that they'd expect me to, but that hasn't been the case at all. I am used to interacting with this age group anyway as my own daughters are 19 and 21, and both are in college too, so I had some idea of what to expect when I began.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
.JPG)