In which, our hero learns to tie his shoes

I've hated having to tie my shoes for a long time now.  In fact, as a defense mechanism, I own very very few shoes with laces.  Look at my feet next time you see me, chances are they're slip-on of some description or other (although this will soon be changing!).  I justified this as a combination of 'efficiency' and a style choice (luckily sketchers/merrell/etc has been making a lot of fashionable slip-ons lately), but I was only fooling myself--I just didn't know how to tie my shoes!

I thought I knew what I was doing (tie a knot, make a loop, go around the loop with the other loop, tada), but it NEVER FREAKIN WORKED.  The two 'bunny ears' always justified themselves perpendicular to the direction you'd normally think of for shoes, and I COULDN'T FIGURE OUT WHY.  

My wife bought me a pair of really nice brown New Balance shoes last week, which, although they were really nice, I secretly wept, as I knew that I would have to wear them, and that the day I wore them would be spent miserably retying my shoes every half an hour, and I'd have to suffer the indignity of having the laces look (in the brief periods they remained tied) stupid and un-shoe like.  I couldn't say anything, obviously, as it is completely unacceptable for an Eagle Scout who is also a Mechanical Engineer to admit he can't tie his shoes.

Today I decided that enough was enough, and I was going to swallow my pride and figure out why I consistently failed at shoe-tying.  With some (ok, a lot of) help from the internet, I finally realized I've been tying them in a 'granny' knot all this time!  Simply switching the direction I loop the loop around suddenly changes the whole thing from a stupid looking tangle of uselessness that unties itself almost immediately to a beautiful symmetrical bow capable of keeping my shoes firmly on my feet.

Amazing.  When tied properly, these new shoes are actually quite comfortable, and I look forward to wearing them, and joining the ranks of successful shoe-tiers worldwide!

The moral of this story is, if, when your shoes are tied, they look stupid, with one loop pointing towards your toe and one up towards your ankle, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!

Android Pill Minder--outline of a program I want to write

My mom mentioned to me today that my (gracefully) aging grandparents sometimes have a hard time keeping track of their rather complex perscription cycles: when to take what, with or without food, and how often can be hard to juggle, espcially when the bottles themselves are identical and crawling with tiny text.  

She suggested individually shrink wrapped pills that would blink when you needed to take them--I agree this would work, but I think that I could write a program for an Android device (currently just the G1) to do the same thing more genericly, with today's pill bottles.

Currently, there are no hits for pill, pills, medicine, or perscriptions in Android Marketplace.  I think this needs to change.

The major G-phone API's I'd need to figure out how to access are the barcode scanner, background scheduler, a setup screen, and an alert interface.  Really, there wouldn't need to be any more complex than that.  I'd also say that the barcode scanner is optional (but extremely handy).

Basic functionality would be inputting how often you should (in case of scheduled medicines) or can (in case of 'take no more often than Xhours or Y times per day') take your various medications.  The program would then provide an alert at the appropriate time, telling you when you should (or can) next take said medicine.  That's the barebones version.

Adding one level of complexity, you could 'color' each medicine by adding colored dot stickers to the corresponding bottle.  So rather than an alert saying "Take your hydroxydoxorubicin!" it would be a flashing green screen saying "Take your hydroxydoxorubicin! (GREEN BOTTLE)"

Adding a second level of complexity, there are currently barcodes of some kind on all the perscription bottles I've seen.  When you're setting up your new medicine, you would 'check in' the new bottle's barcode.  It would store this code with the schedule, and when it prompted you to take your medicine, it wouldn't clear the alert until you'd rescanned the correct bottle.  This would prevent you from accidently taking the wrong medication.

A third level of complexity which isn't possible without the involvement of pharmacies would be to add 2-D barcodes to the labels encoded with all of the direction information about your dosage schedule.  2-D barcodes are grid looking structures that look like this:

That particular barcode has "http://eng.wikipedia.org/" encoded into it, so you can see how easily large amounts of information could be compressed into a small symbol on the bottle.  This code, when scanned by the phone, could then add all of the information automaticly.

I think the Android is definitely capable of handling this entire task, it's just a matter of me gaining the knowledge to make it happen.  I've been wanting a legitimate reason to try my hand at writing an Android program, and this seems as legitimate as any, so we'll see!  I just wanted to use this blog entry as a napkin sketch of my ideas, in case I don't have the time to impliment them while they're still fresh in my mind.

Holga Photo simulation

My brother in law was playing with his cheap plastic Holga camera when he came to visit, and I was inspired to see if I could approach the effect digitally.  

The camera original shot on medium format film, which was then often cross-processed, resulting in a unique artistic color pallette.  Cross processing is intentionally or accidently developing film using the wrong chemical baths.  Here's an actual image from an actual Holga, that has been cross-processed:

Note the yellow-orange skin tones and cyan sky that is the signature of a cross-processed image.

For maximum 'realism', I duplicated the camera as much as possible with the tools I had at hand, namely a Canon Rebel xti and a prime lens:

F/13, 50mm (not 60mm, sigh), ISO 400, shutter speed 1/100.  

Then I played with a variety of 'old timey' action sets and filters, most of which were awful and didn't do anything close to what I wanted.  I ended up doing most of the effect 'by hand'.

Here's a source image we took that duplicated all the Holga settings (except focal length):

And here is my attempt at emulating the effect:

I'd say I got 60% there.  I'll fiddle some more and see if I can do better.  The analog process of the plastic camera is fun, as they are about one step above shoebox/pinholes.  Plus, hacking it to use 35mm film instead of medium format is a fun challenge.  They're about $20 on Amazon....hmmm...may have to pic one up.