Mike Radar

Photoblogging Pittsburgh

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:12:07 -0400

We found an amazing photography playground! The old abandoned USX Steel abandoned steel mill across from the waterfront is densely packed with old broken graffitied treasure. The ceiling is partly deteriorated, letting in sun beams, and there's a control station in the back with really cool old gauges. And that's just one of the many buildings on the site. We MAY have been slightly trespassing... but hey, the gates in the barbed wire fence were open. I'll post more pictures soon, many of them are HDR and require some processing.

TV tonight

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:17:58 -0400

The first airing of our robot stuff on the History channel is tonight at 8pm.

Dr.

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:04:03 -0400

Today i successfully defended my thesis, my card is signed. Thanks to everyone who came to the defense, and offered their help or support!

Thesis Defense

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:47:45 -0400

Tomorrow's the big day. At 11:15am in Scaife hall, i will be defending my thesis at a public defense. I'm finishing up my fancy Flash presentation tonight, but i'm pretty much ready to go.

Mission Accomplished!

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:56:08 -0400

Major combat operations on Thesis have ended. In the battle of Thesis, I have prevailed.

As seen on TV!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:07:16 -0400

They're going to be running the episode of "the Works" about robots that my robot is in for the first time at 8pm on the History channel on September 25th. I've been on Canadian TV before, but does that really count? I may or may not be in the episode, but my robot and my pet gecko will definitely be in it, so check it out.

If you miss this airing, they seem to show each episode a lot of times, so don't worry.

It's the Final Countdown

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:35:49 -0400

Camo

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:00:25 -0400

Another zoo trip

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:51:46 -0400

I've been working hard on my thesis these past few weeks, but i did find some time to head over to the zoo, (my third trip this year) to see the baby animals. Recently, two baby elephants and a tiger cub were born at the zoo, and they are very cute. The tiger photo above is the tiger cub yawning and doing his cute little meow-roar, which you can see at 3:00 in this video.

The other photo was taken from the underwater tube in the polar bear exhibit. We were lucky to be in the tube during feeding time, so the bears were both in the water. In this shot, he's standing on top of the clear tube eating a fish.

These photos, along with the one from the previous post have been getting a lot of attention on flickr, with the polar bear one getting to #4 in all of flickr for the day it was submitted, so i thought i'd share them here as well.

OK, back to writing. More photos in the gallery and on flickr.

Klingon

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:28:46 -0400

Monkey is getting a little less camera shy, and we've got some BIG photo plans. The photo above is pretty popular over on flickr. He's also set to make his Television debut sometime soon on the history channel, i'll keep the updates coming.

I have been hardened by Canada

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:46:31 -0400

This image i took of David D. is not at all illustrative of the canoeing trip. Not even close.

It was supposed to be like this, but it ended up more like this.

Arriving in Algonquin Provincial Park at lake Opeongo, we were immediately deluged by a torrential downpour that had us sitting in our cars for a good half hour. We were a bit lucky with this timing, as it allowed us to purchase some emergency rain items at the camp store at mildly inflated prices. We had all planned for summer type weather, but instead we had wind and rain in the mid 50F range.

We had set a fairly ambitious plan for ourselves including lots more portaging (hiking with the canoe on your head) than last year, including one 3.75km (2.3 miles) single stint, which happened to be.... not so flat.

The weather subsided for our first night, then got bad for the middle of day 2. The sky opened up for some sunset hours on night 2 where we took some photos (above) and got to see an amazing night sky. Up there you can see the milky way, and the sky is a very bright planetarium. Our timing was good, as we were able to see Jupiter and a meteor shower (Perseids). The whole trip was worth it just for that view.

And then the rain returned. It rained for basically our entire long third day. All of our clothes were soaked, and woefully inadequate for the drop in temperature. Our packs doubled in weight. We put in a full day of paddling where we saw 3 otters and lifted our canoes over 2 beaver dams. After a ambitious full day, we reached the last lake at 6:30pm, and decided that instead of setting up our soaked tents and trying to make a fire, we would do our whole fourth day's paddling right then.

We set out, mostly shivering and bailing rainwater from our canoes. The only way to stay warm in the rain and wind in soaked shorts and ripped ponchos was to paddle full bore. At one point we stopped for a bathroom break, and got pretty close to hypothermia in about 6 minutes, so we dug back into the power-paddling, battling against the wind and approaching sunset. Just after the sun went down we hit the docks at the access point, only to see the tail-lights of the rangers pulling out of the driveway. We got ready to spend the night camped under the store overhang.

It turns out that the showers and front gates were still open, so we spent the night trying to find motels until near 4am. Apparently Earth Wind and Fire sold out all the hotels in a 3 hour radius of their concert so we had to drive all the way to Toronto. There's a whole thing about being 10 minutes away from a giant 6 alarm propane explosion at 3:50am, but that's a whole separate story and this is getting long.

I made a map of our trip.

Interesting things about the trip:

I've never been so cold or used so many calories in a day as that 3rd day.
Canadians continually amaze me with their overt niceness. The ranger and workers volunteered to pump gas for us an hour and a half past closing time just from hearing that we had a low tank.
9 people on the trip, and not one of us had a watch. We had quite a few iPhones in the car though.
Waterproof Dry Bags are a great modular way to expand your pack and they also double as a nice bear-bag for food at night.
Earth Wind and Fire can sell out entire provinces in Canada

Canoe Camping Strikes Back

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:07:55 -0400

I'm headed up to Canada for some good old fashioned draft-dodging, and the second annual canoe camping trip. Should be fun.

Also, I scheduled my Thesis Defense date for Sept. 18th today. Now i have a deadline, so when i get back, it's all business.

Shit Rocket

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:33:43 -0400

I visited some friends in NYC this past weekend, which was pretty great. My flight to NYC (an hour flight) was delayed by about 4 hrs due to weather near JFK. I was pretty bored, so i decided to wander around and take just one photo that was worth taking. After a while, i found some bird excrement on the terminal window, and set up the shot above. It kind of summarizes my feelings on flying these days.

The 4 hr delay paled in comparison with my return trip, which, including subways and buses, took just under 14 hrs. I think next time i'll drive.

Zoooooooooooooooooooo!

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:30:12 -0400

Got to love the zoo. It was a scorcher, but that just got some of the animals into the water. Zoo photography seems to get better every time i go. More over on flickr.

chinny chin chin

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:07:09 -0400