Tip of the Day: If you’re looking for a spot in which to parallel park and you see a space that’s half the length of your car, don’t try to park in it.

Yeah, I thought this was common sense too, until I saw someone doing it while I was walking to lecture today.

The Daily Shoot

#DS568: Make a photograph that features a grid of some sort today. (Assigned June 6, 2011.)

A fabric with a grid-like pattern.

I realized today that I’ve been wasting tons of money on bread.

If you’re not aware already, Jimmy John’s sells one-day-old bread for less than a dollar (I remember it being around 49 cents back at home, and it’s 50 cents in Madison). This is the full-sized 16-inch bread, not the 8-inch pieces they use for regular sandwiches.

If you go to a grocery store around here, buying a loaf of bread costs about $3 or so. That means that for the price of one loaf of bread, I can get 6 massive sticks of bread from Jimmy John’s.

Now you might be saying that the one-day-old bread from Jimmy John’s isn’t fresh.

Which, in that case, you would be correct. But once you buy your loaf of bread, you’re not going to finish all of that in a single day, and it will sit on your counter for however long it will take for you to finish it. On top of that, it has most likely been sitting on the store shelf for more than one day anyway to begin with. So basically, a loaf of bread is much less fresh than one-day-old bread.

So yeah. I’m never buying loafed bread ever again, and whenever I want bread, I’m walking to Jimmy John’s (which is just across the street).

No, this isn’t a sponsorship, I’m just really glad that I remembered Jimmy John’s had one-day-old bread.

The Daily Shoot

#DS566: Make a low contrast photograph today. (Assigned June 4, 2011.)

Clear gummy bears.

My day has consisted of reading documents for my two sociology courses.

And that’s about it.

My brain hurts.

The Daily Shoot (@DailyShoot)

It was brought to my attention today that the Daily Shoot, a project that encourages people to go out and take photos every day, has come to an end. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for a while, you know that I used to participate in Daily Shoot.

Now that it’s over, I found the motivation to go back and do the assignments that I missed during my Daily Shoot break. If you know me at all, you know that I hate it when good things come to an end, and I prefer consistency and security over change and volatility. By doing this, I sort of feel like I’m putting off the end of Daily Shoot until later and avoiding the inevitable until I actually run out of assignments. Normally, I would say to face reality, but in this case, I don’t see any negative consequences of dwelling in the past and getting to do what I didn’t have a chance to do before.

So here’s my first missed assignment in a series of over 100 to come within the next few months.

#DS565: Focus on an edge today and make a photograph. (Assigned June 3, 2011.)

The edge of a pad of sticky notes.

Today has been a relatively uneventful day; I spent most of the morning and afternoon reading and studying, and most of the evening working at the family business and doing martial arts.

The Badger Herald, Summer 2011 Projects

I decided to throw in this Badger Herald section in my blog once in a while whenever I feel as if I need some feedback about something I’m working on – because really, who would give better advice than my readers? (Actually, a lot of people, but I’m trying to make you feel special, so go with it.) For those who don’t know, I work at the Badger Herald as the Web Director during the academic year while I’m at university, and over breaks, I do small projects related to the website.

The first small thing I finished today (which I intended on finishing about a month ago, but forgot about) is a document submission form. The editor-in-chief-to-be gave me the idea; she thought it would be a good way to let people send us PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, or any other files anonymously through our website.

Right now, it’s located at http://badgerherald.com/contact/.

If you have the time, please test it out and try to break it. Someone already helped me find a bug in it, and it would be helpful to find all of them now so we don’t run into any problems with it in the future. If you find an exploit, I can usually figure out how it was caused, but if you don’t mind, sending me a message through the Contact form on my website would be helpful.

If you find something and would like credit for it, feel free to send me a description of the bug you found with your name, and I’ll give you a shoutout in a future blog post.

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS564: Illustrate symmetry in a photograph today.

It’s symmetrical if you ignore the dust.

(If you think this story I’m about to tell is extremely vague, then that’s good, because I intended it to be like that in order to protect the identities of the people involved in the story.)

Yesterday, someone sent me a video to work with. After I received the video and opened it up, I noticed that it was recorded at a 16:9 ratio but was rendered at a 4:3 ratio and 480p quality, sized at about 23 megabytes. (For those who don’t know, 16:9 ratio is widescreen and 4:3 ratio is the old TV ratio. If you render a 16:9 clip at 4:3, it creates black bars at the top and bottom.)

I just used the video that I received, but told her for future reference that she should render her videos in widescreen high-definition in the future to make them better-quality. I told her the one she sent now was fine, but she insisted on rerendering her video.

She asked me for specific instructions, but she uses Final Cut Pro and I use Sony Vegas Pro so I couldn’t really help her out that much. Instead, I went on Google and searched for how to render in high definition on Final Cut Pro. I emailed her a link to a screenshot showing the rendering settings.

Instead of using this screenshot intuitively to find out how to render in high definition, she used it literally and rendered her video at the same settings as shown in the screenshot – 1080p, 60 frames per second, Blu-ray quality. Her 2.5 minute clip ended up becoming almost half a gigabyte.

#Fail

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS505

Make a photograph from an unusual point of view.

From the Eyes of a Fridge: This is what my refrigerator door would see if it had eyes.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2