errantember

Maybe it's just the spray adhesive fumes, but I'm feeling pretty good right now. Tonight I've made progress on several key projects.

First, I ordered the cable necessary to remote-control my Nikon 995. Just yesterday I managed to get a small circuit board with a microcontroller attached to speak the same language, which means I can control the camera from a circuit board the size of a credit card. Why? Because as a continuation of my 2005 A Foot's Eye View of Burning Man project, I'm setting up a foot photobooth for BM 2006.

The goal is to have a completely autonomous setup where people can stick in their happy foot(wear), hit a button, and get a shot. Since I might need things like lights and fans, etc., to get good picture, having a computer brain to run the thing would be useful. Another possibility is to trigger the camera by infrared remote. The Nikon doesn't support this, but my Olympus D40Z does. The only problem is that it runs off of AA batteries, but doesn't work well with normal rechargables because the voltages are too low. However, I have some leftover 3.6 volt Li-ion batteries from my dearly departed Canon S200, and tonight I proved the Olympus can use them! They should last for a full day of autonomous foot photography. All I need to do is adapt the battery compartment to use the Canon batts, and I'm set.

Time to get out the Dremel.

"But," you're saying, "what about the fumes?" I was getting to that. Although I mournfully did not actually get to *see* the play, the Capital Theater company here in Austin just did a performance with some of the most distracting advertising of all time. I was *barely* able to contain my enthusiasm for owning one of these posters long enough for the run to be complete. However, once it was, all the posters evaporated nearly overnight!

Shocking.

However, I did find one fairly badly defaced one in the restroom at Cafe Mundi. As if the poster isn't explicit enough already, someone had drawn crude lines to completely the implied penis, and not ONLY used white-out to create simulated semen spraying out of the tip, but had actually splattered something sticky and transparent onto a the girl's face! Not to be deterred by perverted psychopathology, I managed to score the original artwork in digital format,print a paste-over of the affected section, and, using spray adhesive, re-assemble a near-perfect restoration which is now posted near the entrance to the hot tub in my bedroom.

One should never comprimise the original artist's vision!

Unless one can do better. Mr. Lucas.