Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Yesterday, I forgot to mention that I got myself a copy of Hamlet....in the original Klingon:

It's been a month today since I moved to MI. Time flies! I know, I have been neglecting this blahg a whole lot, and I promise to try harder :)

Here are some photos of stuff from the past few days...

I like bread. This one even looks tasty:

A couple of days ago, I got myself a can of Spam. Unfortunately, it turns out, the can's seal got compromised, and the insides look quite uneatable:

Today, I was doing some more grocery shopping, and I couldn't resist but get some drink worthy of a warrior:

(Yes, that's a 40th anniversary of the IBM S/360 mug.) It's hard to identify the contents of the mug, so here's a photo of the bottle:

That's it for today's what's-Jeff-up-to post.

Today (well, technically yesterday), I decided to go explore Ann Arbor with my camera. Here are many of the photos I took - minimally edited for your viewing convenience.

It was a sunny day; not many people around - quite strange actually.

The Lurie bell tower is a hard to miss feature of North Campus. It has 60 bell clarion.

Unfortunately, I did not have a tripod with me, so the source images for this panorama weren't as good as they could have been as I was forced to hand-hold them. You can see the Duderstadt on the left, the Lurie tower next to it, then you have the CSE building, the Dow, and then the EECS building. I will probably go back with my camera and a tripod to take some good panorama source material.

I've climbed up the bell tower at Trinity church in NYC enough times, but not even once did I consider the fact that a bell tower could have an elevator. Well, the Lurie tower does!

And another shot of the tower, from the other side now.

Then it was time to head to Central Campus and explore things there. By the bus stop, I noticed these two guys...

Once on Central Campus, I didn't have to go far to see this sign (which I saw few days ago, but didn't have a camera with me then). It just reminds me of XKCD far too much.

The university runs a bunch of buses to get the students between the North and Central Campuses, as well as the hospital that is located right between the two. My understanding is that they are called Magic Bus. I can't help but wonder if it is in any way related to The Who song...

A fountain...pretty self explanatory. I took a bunch of photos with different exposures to see how each would look.

The Rackham Graduate School building. I actually took enough for a panorama shot; I'll create it and upload it some time later.

This sign was above a door to a shop of some sort, that was on the second (possibly third) story of the building - you know, the kind that has a enough of the building's ground floor for a staircase and nothing more. I do not know what it is that they deal in, but something tells me that I'm not going to go check it out.

Edit: I did some searching on the internet, and it seems it's a smoking-related supplies shop.

Few minutes later, after being surprised by a stream of people that did not seem to end for at least 15 minutes (after a few minutes I realized that it was the result of people pouring out of the football stadium after a game), I ran into Bruce hanging out with his juggling buddies. Well, before I ran into them, I took a bunch of photos for a high dynamic range photo. I haven't done the combining ... yet.

Then I headed off toward North Campus. Since the buses were full of the crowd I mentioned before, so I decided to go on foot. On my way there, I saw a parking lot for bikes:

Few minutes later, I noticed a sign by a parking lot:

Just a few dozen meters later, I got distracted by an entrance to an arboretum. I entered, and not long after, I noticed this sign. It's actually nice, they have a bunch of trails that are quite manageable in a wheelchair (I haven't tested it myself), or with a stroller - more on that in a bit.

Almost a mile of walking later, I came across a more "vehicle" friendly path. There was even a nice rest area.

I wouldn't have taken a photo of the rest area if it wasn't for this label on one of the railing-type things:

After exiting the arboretum, I had to walk past the hospital. Since it is a major one, they had helipads - I counted 3 in total. They were all fenced off, with these assertive signs all around.

Then, I found a pretty sweet spot to take a photo of the hospital. Unfortunately, as I already mentioned, I did not have a tripod. I tried anyway, hand-holding the shots. When I got home later, I tried to combine them to get higher dynamic range. It turned out ok, not great, but ok. The following are the 5 source images (left 3, and first 2 on the right), and the resulting HDR image on bottom right.

Here's a larger version of the resulting HDR. The ugliness with the clouds is because they moved enough during the 20 seconds I spend on taking the source images.

Since I had the app (qtpsgui or whatever it is called) all loaded, I tried to tone-map the HDR image. Here are the two I liked the best.

Some walking later, I got back to North Campus. Here's another view of the Lurie tower.

You may have noticed this already in the panorama, if not, then surprise! There's a 9-10ft ground to tip Rubik's cube in front of the Duderstadt. It doesn't actually work, but as far as I know, the base allows it to rotate - one degree of freedom is a good enough start, no?

I ended my exploring with a shot of the spiral staircase in the CSE building. Definitely a great place to have a sword fight!