Dhar

So I whipped up a goofy shirt a few months ago after my XBox 360 died The Death of Three Lights and stuck a link to a CafePress shop selling it on this site. See it there, on the right? Anyway, I hadn't gotten any email from the Cafe, and so figured nobody was buying it. A little bummed, but I really hadn't invested much in it. Still...a little bummage happened.

Today I check the mail (real mail, not electronic foolery), and hey...something from CafePress. Wait, what the?!? A check! I sold something? So I go online and find out, yeah...I kinda sold a lot of shirts and forgot to check the "Email me when I sell something" option. Cool beans, man! I totally sold something on a whim! I'm easily amused!

So now I just have to pimp the shop one more time here. Go check out the Red Ring of Death Survivor shop and buy your favorite nerd something dorky. Think of the children! Or...well, think of me.

So apparently there was an accident or somesuch along my commute to work today, and 19th Ave through Golden Gate Park was closed off. Everyone was getting detoured down Fulton and trying to squeeze through all the little streets to get to the other side of the park.

I duck down one of these streets and end up driving through the beautiful, treed heart of Golden Gate Park, and I realize...wow, my morning commute is some people's dream vacation.

Hey, maybe this delay isn't so bad after all.

Had a couple friends over for Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day on Saturday. We brewed up a baltic porter using some yeast from a previous baltic porter. Yeah, I forgot to check that I wasn't brewing two of the same thing back-to-back.

Things went well, which means only one thing went haywire. I racked my first porter into secondary just fine -- then I noticed the spigot was leaking a bit. Man. So I sanitized my arm and reached in there and sure enough, the lock nut had loosened on it.

My mini-mash method has me thinking of moving to an all-grain setup, although I doubt my electric stove can handle boiling that much water. Curse you, electricity! It already takes a while to boil 2.5 gallons...I think 6 or more would kill it.

At the end of the day, my friends agreed with each other that this was too much work. Better to have a friend who makes beer than make it yourself, they figured. Philistines.

Points if you know where the name comes from.

Recipe Characteristics

Ingredients

How did they manage to cram that much Star Trek into a single turd?

Just mixed up my first batch of Photographer's Formulary 130 paper developer (aka: GAF 130, ansco 130). Nobody told me the glycin foams up when you add it...a tiny bit alarming, but the mad scientist in me loved it. What's mixing chemicals without some foaming, bubbling, or color changing?

Tomorrow I hope to finally get a break from cleaning the place to do some printing.

So with the passport issue going nowhere fast. we went to Representative Lynn Woolsey's office and told them what was up. They got right on it, and within a few days got everything straightened out -- daughter has a passport on the way! Just wanted to pass on the info the Woolsey's people really know what they're doing. Thanks, guys!

I just love it when a company goes the extra step to make it's customers happy. I recently had the chance to see two such instances of this happening.

First, there's Stone Mills Company. I was looking for some enlarger bits and pieces, and found what I needed at their site. Unfortunately, one of the things I needed was twice the price of another website. I told Stone Mills "I'll order everything but that one thing", and they asked me "Is it the price?"

I didn't want to jerk them around, so I told them the story. They asked me what I'd pay them for it. Wow, companies don't often ask that! I named a price a couple of bucks higher than the other place, and they agreed. I didn't mind paying a tad more to these guys...they sure seemed to want my business.

And on top of that, the package arrived way sooner than I expected. Very nice!

The other company is Photographer's Formulary. I recently ordered a dry chemical paper developer kit from them. It showed up (coincidentally) the same day the Stone Mills order did. It's just like Christmas!

I open the plastic wrap over the box of developer and...white crystals spill out everywhere. Something was leaking. Looking in the box, I find that the package of metol hadn't heat-sealed properly, and had leaked an unknown amount of itself into the box.

The next day I called up PF and explained, asking "what can I do about replacing this?" They asked which kit it was and which chemical and told me they'd ship out a replacement baggie of metol right away. Very cool!

So I love both these companies, now. I mean, I liked them before, but now they're my first stop. I recommend you check them out, too.

So my wife and I have been working for months, trying to get our daughter a passport. The Department of Homeland Security won't let her have one, though. We have a birth certificate. Not good enough.

Ok, how about school records? Not good enough. Government loan for college? Not good enough. Drivers license? Not good enough. Registered to vote? Not good enough.

No, what Homeland Security wants, the one piece of documentation that will allow them to issue a passport to my daughter because it proves better than any other document is...a baptismal record. Yes, a piece of paper with her typewritten name on it is better than a signed, notarized document of her birth.

So much for separation of church and state, huh?

I asked around about my negative issue (see the previous post), and got some good pointers at APUG. I tried them out and here's what happened. Oh, and each image here also includes a little bit of fully-exposed film tongue to check density with.

Tank #1 - Single-reel tank, partial roll
D-76 1:1, 11 minutes total
Agitate 30 sec, then 5 sec every 30 sec thereafter
This is my "control" tank, just to check how D76 does with this film/camera combo

Density looks good

Tank #2 - Double-reel tank, partial roll
Rodinal 1:100, 60 minutes total
5 minute presoak in water
Agitate 4 times per minute first 3 minutes, then one inversion at the 30 minute mark

Density looks much better than it did the other day! Hooray!

Tank #3 - Double-reel tank, partial roll
Pyrocat-HD 1:1:200, 60 minutes total
5 minute presoak in water
Agitate 4 times per minute first 3 minutes, then one inversion at the 30 minute mark

What the?!? What happened here? There's hardly any frame number, but the "tongue test" shows good density. It gets even weirder...here's a section of several frames:
There's that one dark frame in there. But look closely..the clouds aren't darker. So it's only a part of the frame that got a lot of density. Weird. Must go back and ask folks about this.

So I finally developed my first negatives since high school, some 18 years ago. I have three different developers: pyrocat-HD, rodinal (or at least Photographer's Formulary paraminophenol), and some D-76 (well, close...Lauder Chemical formula 76). Wanting to run before I could crawl, I'd decided to do some stand development with the pyrocat and the rodinal. I grabbed three exposed rolls of Promax 400 35mm, some cheap no-name film I wanted ot practice on, two from my Canon and one from my wife's cheapo point-n-shoot, and developed them. The results were...surprising.

Note: all these scans are with the same settings and no manipulation. I tried to grab frame numbers as a standard density reference. They weren't scanned to be used, but for comparison. No complaining about dust or hairs!

D-76, 1:1 for 11 min, agitated for 30 sec, then 5 sec every 30 sec thereafter:

This is from my wife's point-n-shoot. Looks a little overexposed...maybe the camera is set for 1/100 sec shutter? To my untrained eye, the density looks "decent".

Pyrocat-HD, 1:1:200, 5 minute presoak in water, agitated for 60 sec, then stand for 45 minutes:

You can definitely see the stain here, but the density seems a little thin. There's no real black blacks in this negative, even in the frame number.

Rodinal, 1:200, 5 minute presoak in water, agitated for 30 sec, then stand for 2 hours:

This negative looks even thinner! What happened here?

So it seems to me like the stand development, while at the right dilution, didn't have enough chemical in total to get the job done. These were all developed in single-spool stainless steel tanks. Perhaps a single roll in a double tank would work better?

More experiments and reports back later!

So I've switched over to using Mephisto blogging software for this site. So hopefully this will get me posting more often, eh?

And yes, this is a test post.