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Sara Cammeresi

And we're back! —

Only took 2.5 weeks to get the DSL back up, but at length, it's up and running as grandly as ever it was. Very fun indeed, let me tell you. Two missed due dates due to problems, then Champaign Telephone missed a work order date, then they showed up late.

posted by Sid at 09.53 / 662     [ Comments: 0 ]

Let us catch up —

A bit of diarisation now to catch folks up....

Removal day went fairly smoothly, aside from a small dispute with my new landlord over some money they wanted me to pay them which wasn't delineated in the contract we signed. Shortly got a bed and futon. The following weekend, motored northward for some photographing in the Chicago suburbs on Saturday, stayed with friends that night, motored on Sunday to meet another friend to shop at Ikea to buy more furniture.

Let me take a small break here to explain exactly why Ikea is the most rulingest furniture store ever created. If you have never been there, the Schaumburg Ikea consists of three storeys, two of which comprise their showroom and one of which is a warehouse. You pick out which items and colours you want in the showroom, write down where they are in the warehouse, and then go down there and load up a trolley with a bunch of flat boxes containing your future furniture. (For instance, my coffee table came in a box having dimensions of, say, 3 ft x 4 ft x 6 in.) You pay, drive your car round to the loading area, load it all in, and off you get.

Now let us recount what I bought: bookshelf, coffee table, big desk, small desk, desk drawer cabinet thingy, dresser, and night table. All of those items except for the bookshelf fit into my little hatchback Hyundai (aka The Royal Automobile), which my friend squeezed into his Celica. His parents thought we wouldn't be able to fit it all into both of our cars and that they'd need to bring some of it down in a pickup when they came down to Champaign in a couple weeks time. Pshaw.

So all of the furniture is now assembled, and all systems are nominal and on the line. Ikea furniture is of varying quality. Some of it is okay, but some of it is kind of cheaply made of that fake paper veneer stuff. Their Galant line of desks is pretty neat though, in that they just sell you pieces, and you can fit them together in divers ways, so I bought two 47 in x 31 in desktops and bolted them together, giving me a 94-inch-wide monstrosity which I have dubbed The Desk of Doom (at which I have also located The Throne). Hopefully, I will find my digital camera again soon, and I can put some photographs of my new estate online.

posted by Sid at 10.01 / 667     [ Comments: 0 ]

The value of roughing it —

A bit belated, but here is my 13 August HBL post.

Harry Binswanger wrote:

The philosophic meaning for me of this kind of vacation [camping] is a reminder, by contrast, of the value of civilization and technology. Manhattan is a man-made world; here we are immersed in what John Ridpath calls "the ongoing struggle" to tame nature.

I think there is more to it than that. Reading a book would provide you with much of the same knowledge, although directly experiencing a rougher lifestyle yourself would certainly serve to give a fuller understanding of the nature of such a life and intensify the related emotions.

Due to my hobby of photography, I own multiple cameras, and my favorite is quite unique. It is an enormous mechanical contraption called a view camera, the design of camera used in the dawn of photography, the type of camera with a bellows, which you focus with your head under a cloth, and so forth.

My view camera is new, but the design has been essentially unchanged for over 100 years. Everything is completely manual, even more manual than the most manual 35mm camera. The entire process of setting up my camera and taking a single picture can take me as long as an hour. With a modern 35mm camera, you don't even think about something as mundane as advancing the film after taking a picture, but with a view camera, handling film involves loading film holders with sheets of film in the dark, inserting the holders into the camera, pulling out a darkslide, making the exposure, and tracking which holders have been exposed and which haven't. Maintaining mental focus is critical because there are more ways to make mistakes than you can possibly imagine.

Why would I go through such a laborious process?

On 9-11 or the day after, fellow HBLer Ben Bayer and I were discussing the "common man's" reaction to the attacks, and Mr. Bayer said he thought a large component of the outrage was because the attacks had brought the evil of terrorism to near the perceptual level.

While one cannot directly perceive evil, productivity, or achievement, when I hold a finished print in my hand or when I am camping and start a fire for warmth using only the tools I brought to do so, that moment is a value to me because it brings my productivity and mental accomplishments to near the perceptual level.

posted by Sid at 10.29 / 687 in Large Format     [ Comments: 2 ]

Power button failure —

One of the disks in my frontend machine started going on the blink by making a funny noise with a period of approximately 61-62 seconds, so I decided to not only replace the disk, but to also retire the other crappy disk in it and upgrade the machine to Win XP. I went and bought a disk, stuck it into the machine, and hit the power button.

Nothing, zero, totally dead. Hmm, I think, how did I fry the power supply or motherboard? I haven't been doing anything really exotic. Maybe I'm stupid and didn't plug the machine in. Nope. Aha! I bet I knocked the wire loose that connects the power switch to the motherboard. Hmm, no, I didn't, and I didn't knock loose the power connector on the motherboard either. Let's reseat the power switch connector. Still no action. Scratch head for several minutes. Well, maybe something in the switch or its connector is dodgy. Short the power switch pins on the motherboard with a screwdriver, and the machine roars to life.

At length, I have now built and installed a new power switch for my frontend machine, and at long last, I now have a machine with a Big Red Button, but I'm totally at a loss as to how the power button could have failed. Certainly, it wasn't from overuse, as I never turn my machines off.

The good news is that I bought an el cheapo multimeter from Radio Shack, and I am happy to report that the power points in my apartment are currently outputting a glorious 124.7 volts of AC.

posted by Sid at 09.18 / 637     [ Comments: 1 ]