Photographing Candidates for Political Office

Christine Gregoire. Photo by Omaha.

Christine Gregoire, the governor of Washington state, does not photograph well. I've just filtered through about a hundred photographs of her at a pep rally for field volunteers for the 33rd District Democrats, and it was very hard to find one where she doesn't come off looking like Senator Palpitane's long-lost sister. Who let her website use that picture, unshopped, for her campaign website? It's unfortunate, because I think she's done a pretty good job and is far more qualified than her Republican opponent, Dino Rossi.

( A brief aside on Dino Rossi. )

Shay Schual-Berke (WA District 33 Pos 1) was an easy subject for the camera. Tina Orwall, Shay's successor, photographs pretty well except when she knows there's a camera on her, then she tries too hard. Dave Upthegrove (WA District 33 Pos 2) photographs great. A bad pic of Dave is almost certainly due to a lazy photographer. Karen Keiser (WA District 33 Senate) is another who photographs easily. (And hey, she's still using my photography and art! Right on.)

I know these are very shallow considerations on which to judge a candidate, but for the past six months it's been my task to photograph these people, and I know when I get a block of Gregoire I'm going to spend at least an hour looking for the one I'm going to use for an article.

Gods, what a week

Children of the Corn

Goddess, what a week overall. I've been fighting that damn sinus cold, infection, whatever for two weeks now. It's really been hanging on. Tonight is the first night I haven't been so stuffed up I needed psuedophedrine to sleep through the night, and thank the Gods for that.

Actually got a lot done at the office. After a positively heroic effort, I've upgraded our infrastructure's VM from Python 2.3.4 to Python 2.5.2, so that'll be going into the product pretty damn soon. While we're very conservative where I work with a strong "it ain't broke" attitude, there are some features and facilities in Python 2.5.2 that just cannot be ignored much longer.

Omaha and I took the girls to one of the farms in southern King County to pick out pumpkins and do the corn maze. We had a lot of fun in the corn maze, but Kouryou-chan kept trying to take the lead and I had to keep reminding her that it was Yamaraashi-chan's turn to chart our course to the next marker in the maze. Kouryou-chan has the map in the photograph. We only picked up two pumpkins this year, that was all our budget could afford. Omaha shared kettle corn with the girls; I indulged with the cheaper, more artery-clogging treat of roast corn with too much butter and salt.

Yamaraashi-chan carves a pumpkin

On Monday, we carved the pumpkins. Kouryou-chan's was very ambitious, a silhouette of a cat, and although she tried to get it right the cat's head still fell off. Yamaraashi-chan's was much more ordinary, but she had good fun working on it. My camera has a lot of noise in low-light, which annoys me, but it never ceases to amaze me how well Yamaraashi-chan photographs. Some people just photograph poorly (see prior post). I've knows some very pretty people who don't photograph well; something about their face is lost when translated to two dimenstions. Yamaraashi-chan's not among them.

Tuesday, I had to run Yamaraashi-chan up to her quarterly eye doctor's appointment. Nothing to report. No changes; her eye still wanders, but not so much as it used to, the exercises are doing her good. Unremarkable. The doctor is back in his old office, which confused me. I asked about it and the woman behind the counter said, "Well, we were here, then we moved across the hall, but that half of the building burned down, so we're back here until they rebuild." Goodness!

I had a date Thursday with a friend that I had to call off because the sinus cold came roaring back and kept me up all night. I've been exhausted all Thursday and Friday. It was probably a good thing, too; I had too much to do with the girls' costumes as it was. But damn, I'd really like to have a life where I get to stop being either (a) sick, (b) working or (c) a dad every minute of the day.

Haven't done much writing. Too tired, too stressed, too worried about next Tuesday.

Pure Vanity.

Secret Agent Elf

Sorry, I just really like this photograph. Wanted to share. I'm so vain, Carly Simon wrote a song about me.

I think I was trying to capture the graffiti, but it didn't come out clearly.

Miscellaneous photography

Why Grammar Matters

As I was walking to the grocery store the other day, I passed by this sign embedded in the yard of the Shell gas station. The issue at hand is a property tax levy to pay for a new fire station and other thing; the current fire station is so old it's no longer up to code and will collapse in the event of an earthquake. Personally, I'm for the measure. This sign does nothing for the other side, however, which communicates only that opponents of Proposition 1 never completed basic grammar.

Yes, I know, I've made this mistake myself in stories, but never in something quite so small, or so important.

Death's Head Pretzels

What's the word for the human tendency to see human faces in everything? I saw this bag of pretzels, cheap ones, at some discount store and was amused by the way the pretzel, as positioned on the bag, looked just a little too much about the skull. Could these be the pretzels than nearly killed President Bush?

Why Grammar Matters II

I think I know what this guy's trying to say, but the wording, lack of punctuation, and general thoughtlessness in this home-made signage add up to a failure to communicate.

Consilience UML Chart

In case anyone's curious, this is the UML chart with WAE I churned out for my To-Do manager. The model is pretty simple: Users have Lists, Lists (called "Documents") have Tasks, Tasks have DoneDates. Task properties include a minimal number of days that a task can be allowed to slide, and a maximal amount. An algorithm, initially in python but I intend to migrate it to javascript and do the math on the client to reduce server load, figures out how to decorate the task list based upon the task profile and a collection of done dates "around today."

This chart is very shorthandy: in many cases it's a matter of my knowing what I meant. The boxes with circles in the upper right hand corner are controllers; the ones with squares are views. There's some confusion on the chart as to whether or not there are controllers that are view generators; the one labeled "doc builder" appears to be, but there's no corresponding view generating controller, I don't think, for Lists of Lists. There are also weaknesses in WAE that I've never gotten around to addressing, which is that it was first cooked up in 2003 and has almost no sense of ajax or component-driven view management, and has a whole bunch of notation for frames that can't really be ported over to ajax.

And still there is hope.

I spotted this about two weeks ago. Something like that. There are still people hoping Hillary runs again.

Disappointed in PopCap Games' Bejeweled Twist

PopCap games has released Bejeweled Twist for the PC, and is scheduled to come out with a Mac version later this year. Since Omaha is a Mac game reviewer, she gets nifty free copies of lots of different things and one of the things she scored was a copy of Bejeweld Twist PC edition. Most people have seen Bejeweled, the tetris-like game where you try to line up jewels to score points; it's PopCap's best-selling game and damnably addictive.

I have long praised PopCap for being Wine compliant. I've bought three of their games before: Zuma, Bejeweled 2, and Peggle (Peggle's my favorite; unicorns for the win!), and all three run absolutely flawlessly under Wine. They've all worked so well that I have to wonder if PopCap does a QA pass under Wine. Testing under Wine would probably cost them a day of development and open up an entire new audience that they couldn't reach before.

Bejeweled Twist doesn't work under Wine. It plays, but there's a bug in the registration code. Apparently, Twist uses DDE to talk to the underlying HTTP libraries, and there's a disconnect such that Twist is passing an empty URL to winebrowser and no dialogue is happening between the two. So I'm stuck in "Free User" mode, which has a lifespan of 120 minutes before the game craps out and I'll have to re-install it or something. Other games with on-line registration mechanisms have worked for me in the past, so this is a bit of a disappointing step backwards.

It's a pity, because Twist is a very beautiful game, with great audio and gorgeous backgrounds. It's really just Bejeweled with a different mechanism for lining up the stones, and with new "benefits" and "reward" modes. But since I have a registration code, I'd like to, you know, be able to register my game.