Winter Break Update

Given the abundance of free time I have accumulated for the holidays, it seems like a time for a brief update! After returning to Houston in mid-August from working for Schlumberger near Paris over the summer, I packed up and moved to Illinois to start graduate school in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in central Illinois, roughly equidistant between St. Louis, Chicago, and Indianapolis. The nearly thousand-mile drive from Houston to Champaign-Urbana was quite a trip, especially since it was attempted with my poor Nissan Sentra filled to the roof with all my earthly possessions. Despite this, the drive went fine, although if I had to do it again, I would probably take a break and not drive sixteen hours in a day. Upon arriving, I unpacked my overfilled car, and started to get settled in my quite economical apartment. While I had to make the unwise choice of leasing sight-unseen since I was overseas and couldn't visit, the apartment has thus far at least met, if not occasionally exceeded, my expectations.

Graduate school too has certainly exceeded my expectations. While Illinois has perhaps more coursework required in their graduate classes than what I experienced in the few I sampled at Rice, they have been enjoyable and I feel I have learned quite a great amount. While Rice was academically satisfying, I have found that graduate school is much more academically satisfying, whereas undergraduate was much more socially satisfying. Perhaps graduate school has a chance to best both categories, but it isn't there yet. The residential college system at Rice really is extraordinary, and I hope that it doesn't deteriorate with all the changes abounding from the Centennial Campaign. I believe the reason graduate school is exceeding my expectations is because I have much more time to focus on my studies. While at Rice I was enrolled in around five courses of similar difficulty a semester, at Illinois I am taking only two, giving me plenty of time to understand the material by completing all reading assignments and actually understanding each problem on a homework, and more importantly, the concept that example demonstrates. At Rice, the goal was always to finish any and all homework as quickly as possible because if you got lucky you would then get to have a little fun and maybe even sleep (in general doing the reading wasn't even considered, at least in an engineering class, occasionally in a liberal arts one). It makes me recall something I was told upon starting at Rice: consider the following, 1) good grades, 2) fun, or 3) sleep, now pick two, and that's all you get. Like most Rice students, I picked the first two, trying to get by on as little sleep as possible, which at times worked fine, but at other times, was disastrous.

While it's embarrassing to admit, this choice once caused me to sleep through an internship interview. It was during my sophomore year in the fall semester, we were just finishing an ELEC241 (Connexions) problem set at nearly 3 in the morning, when we decided to go to House of Pies for a midnight snack. I knew my interview was at 8am, but I presumed we would be gone for a couple hours and I would just stay awake, get a quick shower, and go wing the interview. Well, we got back with enough time for me to catch a few moments of shuteye, so that's what I did. Unfortunately, I took more than a few moments, and got a call at nearly 9am from my interviewer asking if I was coming. I assured her I was on my way, dressed as quick as possible, and ran over to the Career Services Center, which at the time was still located in the Rice Memorial Center. The interview itself went great, because I wasn't nervous at all, as I knew I had absolutely no chance of getting the job. The most ironic part of the whole thing however is that she had offered me the 9am interview I effectively took, since no one else had signed up for it. Oh well, sleep was below the priorities of fun and good grades, although the main purpose of the good grades, getting a job, was obviously lost somewhere in that mix. With graduate school though, the fun and good grades options seem to get combined into research, because if you aren't enjoying your research, I don't see any possible way anyone could put up with the amount of time and personal investment it takes.

Since beginning grad school, I've given considerable thought to what I'm most interested in doing with my life, and there are several options I'm considering at this time. First, I could finish with my Master's next fall or spring, and try to get a job with a company. This is sort of the least interesting option in my mind, and unless the economy and job market have improved drastically in that rather short amount of time, is perhaps not a wise decision whatsoever. Second, I could continue in school towards a doctorate, and given the state of the economy, this is perhaps a wise move. This would then lead to several other possibilities, such as going to work in the corporate world or academia. In academia, the prospect of going to a small liberal arts college or a community college and teaching is looking quite interesting to me, probably more so than trying to get onto the tenure track with a tier one research university. To some extent, it seems the best way to simplify life by removing oneself from the corporate or academic rat races, but perhaps I'm being overly naïve about the politics that would still be in play, even at a small school. Third, I have toyed some with the idea of getting a law degree after the Master's. This could be an interesting and exciting line of work that I'm looking forward to learning more about before I make any decision about it. Lastly, I suppose there is always the possibility of a start-up if the need for a suitable service or product presents itself. While there are many reasonable options here, the realm of choice doesn't feel as overwhelming as it did at graduation in May, and I could always say the hell with it all and try walking down the dark path into photography. However, focusing on school and taking each day one at a time will satisfy me for now! I'll probably do a little tuneup of the website over the holidays while I have a little extra time, and perhaps try to organize things better and mention some research links.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Site Transition

Well, I'm finally taking a little time to transition parts of my website away from entirely my own hosting and coding, as I simply don't have the time to develop the web apps that are readily and freely available, such as Blogger where my blog is now running.  Unfortunately I saw no way to add a simple couple pages with my personal and professional information on to Blogger, so I still have these pages up on my old website platform.  I'll keep the old site around, but I have been able to migrate much of the management off of the server.  For example, due to improvements in DNS customization at my registrar, Gandi, I was able to migrate from bind on our server to Gandi's servers, which simplifies my management.  Further, I've set up some CNAMEs to redirect traffic to certain places, such as photo.taylortjohnson.com pointing to my SmugMug photos, and blog.taylortjohnson.com to point to my Blogger account.  Overall, pretty good, and definitely a cool setup. Finally, I have also added an HTTP 301 permanent redirect to the blogger site for any default accesses of http://www.taylortjohnson.com, but the few extra pages I need still reside there.

Site Updates - Awaiting the New Year

While taking a break from the usual holiday vices (for me that's trying to escape The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion, Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare, Tabula Rasa, and Counter-Strike Source, and even maybe a few treats), I decided to finally get the database backend of this hooked up. Now I have PostgreSQL behind the scenes instead of loading all the text directly from a PHP include. This probably wasn't worth the hour of hassle, as the main issue is text entry, not sourcing the data. I'm considering looking into the APIs for some of the popular blogging services like Blogger or WordPress to use these services for entry and storage, and simply pulling the data out of a feed or API call to display it here on this page. It would allow more easily integrating graphics and video into posts, which certainly has its uses.

Test Post

While playing around on Word in Office 2007, I ran across the blogging features and wanted to give them a try.

Bon Voyage à Clamart et Paris l'Été Prochain

Once in a while, you have to be disobedient to be who you are. The past three summers, I have interned on projects at Schlumberger in Sugar Land, Texas. Since the summer after my freshman year, I have spent every summer in Sugar Land, working on very interesting problems, meeting amazing people, making good money, and learning lots about a company that I now respect and admire. That aside, having spent three summers at the same place, even in the same building, it is now time to branch out into the world more. Thankfully, Schlumberger is helping to make that possible by offering an internship for next summer near Paris, France in Clamart, which is a bit southwest. Unfortunately, interns in Europe historically are not compensated incredibly well, and while comparatively Schlumberger has made a great offer, my parents have been worried about it. Finally I decided to break the 5th and just accept the offer, ignoring their concerns and playing it by ear. No doubt they will be miffed and upset, but hopefully they will understand why I need to do this.

While I often meet people in Houston that have never left the state or a few even the city, there are plenty of people who have crossed the oceans. Having myself never been overseas, the opportunity to be paid to do so for a temporary time is a great boon. Given the difficulty of studying abroad in a four-year engineering program, this opportunity between my undergraduate and graduate studies should help to provide a new perspective for me on the world, and especially on international business. While this school year is providing some experience through our senior design project in conjunction with SUPÉLEC in France, it is not the same as actually experiencing the culture and life as an engineer there.

At any rate, hopefully my parents will be forgiving in a couple weeks at Christmas celebrations. It is the season for giving, maybe they will give me a break.

Fall Back - Sleepy in Houston

Bonjour! J'étudie français maintenant! Yes, right now I am trying to study French for a test tomorrow, but a break seemed necessary. It has been too long, as seems to always be the case with blogs. However, many times in the past few months I ran across something interesting that I wanted to mention somewhere to someone, but never had the chance to do so. Instead, I kept all those small, serendipitous, and frankly meaningless happenstances bottled up. While now I don't recall them all, I think I will perhaps mention others I come across now. I'll mention a few that I remember. One was the generous barber who opened shop a half-hour early for me, after coming back across Shepherd Street where he was giving a legless homeless man a few dollars. (I ended up there a half-hour before opening because I always remember my father going to get haircuts at his preferred hour of the day, au petit matin, around 6:00 AM. My arrival at 8:30 AM to a closed barbershop was thus a bit of a surprise. I'm rather in need of a haircut again, perhaps I'll try my luck again tomorrow...) Another interesting sight was the two construction workers standing behind a broken second-story window of Autry Court enjoying drags on cigarettes. Autry is under construction for much needed renovations. The irony of modern society's stigmatization and loathing of smoking in public buildings was nicely juxtaposed to the destruction of that building. A final occurrence that got me thinking is a movie I borrowed from one of my former photography professors. The late Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up" has got me thinking about the role of the photographer in society, and more importantly, within my own life. Hopefully I'll get a chance to get into the photography in life story later, but for now it's back to French. Au
revoir.

Spring Break - Lazy in Albuquerque

Time sure does fly when you're having fun--I mean that more for the school year and less for Spring Break, although it's been speeding by quick enough. Every year, I can scarcely believe how fast time goes by when looking back a month or two, and this year is just the same. Already halfway through this semester, and it still seems like the first few weeks to me. Whether that is good or bad always eludes me, so maybe it's both good and bad. Oh well, enough on that.

To finish up the last post briefly, my 21st birthday was good, with a night of hazy mayhem at a few bars in Rice Village. Mardi Gras was pretty amazing, although most of my film ended up turning out pretty badly, so that had me really down for several days. The digital pictures came out wonderful, but almost all of my film turned out badly for a very sad reason--the Mamiya C220's flash sync mode had unfortunately been set by the previous user to M mode instead of X mode. This leads to an interesting step back in time, to the age of magnesium (hence the "M" mode on the "M-X" switch) and other chemical flash bulbs. These bulbs required a chemical to be burned and light to be emitted in the reaction. These reactions generally take many milliseconds to occur (maybe a quarter of a second to reach full amplitude), so when the shutter is released, the flash is triggered before the shutter opens to give time for the reaction. Today's modern electronic flashes are all xenon-gas filled discharge tubes (hence the "X" mode on the "M-X" switch). A xenon flashtube's output (flash) signal can reach full amplitude almost immediately (a few thousandths to hundredths of a second) after it is triggered, thus there need not be a delay between when the shutter is released and when the flash fires, as the flash will almost assuredly occur when the shutter is open. Thus, if you are using an electronic flash that has no charge up time in M mode, the shutter releases after the flash has fired. And that's how about 8 rolls of 120mm film turned out for me, with absolutely no fill-flash. Ah, c'est la vie. I'll never be making that mistake again, although it's unlikely I'll end up using cameras that still have the "M-X" toggle available. Other than that, my 21st birthday went well, as did our class trip to Mardi Gras in Galveston.

The flight out to Albuquerque was smooth, with Austin kindly dropping me off at Hobby last Saturday afternoon. The rest of Saturday was pretty lazy, but Marshall and Stephen mixed things up Sunday afternoon when they stopped in on their trek to the Grand Canyon. They stayed the night here with a few hundred more miles to go on their journey. Hopefully it was warmer here than it will be out camping in the canyon. Shopping filled up most of Monday after Marshall and Stephen got on their way, with some new summer clothes, and a couple jackets picked out for when the sales pick up a bit more. Tuesday Mom and I went touring, mostly to the nice Albuquerque Zoo, but we also briefly stopped by the Botanical Gardens, as well as a couple wineries which were unfortunately closed on Tuesdays. Sadly, Wednesday and today have been filled with a fair bit of work, trying to get nicely ahead on the second COMP314 project: gzip.

Gzip is an interesting scheme, with many idiosyncrasies and tricks. The documentation the class is given is not too detailed, primarily in the form of RFC1950, RFC1951, and RFC1952. Given that there are numerous RFCs (Request For Comments) for using birds as real-time data carriers ("Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers" and "IP Over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service"), I'm not sure how much I trust them. More information on using IP over Avian Carriers can be found across the web, including a recent development by the Chinese. Luckily, these are generally from a series of April Fools's Day RFCs. A humorous aside, but gzip and compression are certainly interesting topics. Well, more on that later, perhaps once the project is done I'll delve into the details.

Another Year and Thoughts of Tomorrow - 21st Birthday, Mardi Gras, and Decisions

As I started to write this, Toby Keith's "Should've Been a Cowboy" was just coming to a close over internet radio. What I had been planning to start writing could have been less eloquently titled, "Should've Been a Photographer". I don't know what it is about making pictures, but something about it intrigues me like nothing else seems able to do. Maybe it's the controlled gamble of it. You set up technical things on the camera and lens, let some light shine on some photosensitive stuff, and later look to see if anything showed up. All of it is so prone to failure technically that I'm amazed how many good photographs are out there, and even more amazed that I've been able to capture some okay ones. Perhaps it's the ability to learn from those psuedo-gambles. I've been using flash for well over a year, and just yesterday at Mardi Gras I learned more about it than any other day of shooting. While I had often used flash with digital, I had never tried it with film, I guess because my film experience before this year had been limited to a large-format viewcamera. I got a Vivitar 283 for the Mamiya C220 I've been using, and also tried it on my dad's old Pentax 35mm. I haven't developed the film yet, but I transfered how Geoff told me to set up the Vivitar to my Speedlite 580EX, and after reviewing the digital images, I realized they are the best flash photographs I've taken. Maybe it's the creational process that you get something to look at after taking the picture, I do like creating things which has drawn me to engineering.

Gary Allan's "Life Ain't Always Beautiful" plays now in the background, and I realize I must go back to work... More to come on the birthday later...

Spring Cleaning

Last night I decided to do a little spring-cleaning while listening to President Bush's State of the Union Address. My room has been cramped all school year, and it's definitely my fault. When I graduated high school and my family moved from Brenham, my parents gave me an ultimatum of taking everything I wanted with me or it was gone--so I took a lot of crap to Rice. While I do have tons of stuff here at school, it is in fact nearly every possession to my name, except for a box or two of keepsakes with my folks. So I got my bed lofted and completely reorganized my room mostly last night, although there is still plenty of work to finish up before it's fully ready.

Anyway, I thought organizing my own small piece of this nation was somewhat fitting during the same time Bush was doing a little organization of his own, trying to set domestic and foreign policy for the new year, and giving his thoughts on the current state of affairs our nation and world are in. As a speech, I feel Bush did well, although as you can find anywhere in media right now, he will have trouble for the remainder of his tenure as a "lame duck". While many people disagree with many of the topics Bush touched upon, they are all important issues that some consensus must be made on, and I hope for the sake of our nation and the world for the next few years that the executive and legislative branches are able to reach consolations and continue progress in some direction. To look at this from my own life, what I feel is the best impromptu speech I ever gave during speech and debate in high school was over the question, "Is an oppressive government better than no government at all?" While the question had certain factors included that are important to any living being, it can similarly be considered as the question, "Is any government better than no government at all?" This question is more relevant to where we are right now, with a different party, with a vastly different agenda, controlling legislature. Any progress is better than no progress, because eventually, history has shown us that a better world is eventually the result, even with the most horrific governments: thankfully we always make it back to a quiet equilibrium, even if it is just brevity. Human beings do not let atrocities continue endlessly. While they may not always be stopped immediately, they are eventually quashed. Often speeches such as the one I was delivering are performed in classrooms, which also often have inspirational messages on the walls. The room I gave this speech in happened to have a speech on the wall by Martin Luther King, Jr., and I integrated many of his words into my own. King had the foresight to see through the terrible actions (and inactions) of his time inflicted on humans by other humans, to a better world where such things did not occur--he dreamed farther to a world where society was not divided by race, but instead just functioned together. From an efficiency and engineering standpoint, bickering over such minute details is ridiculously inefficient: such wasted productivity of the human race over a futile argument. A better world is a difficult thing to define, but from a basic standpoint and my own viewpoint, I'm glad that I'm alive today and not a thousand or a hundred years ago. The judges of that speech agreed with me, as they choose me for first place ahead of a hundred or so other contestants.

Well, back to getting my room organized and usable again--I hope our government is able to do the same with our nation in the coming days.

First Week of Spring 2007

As expected, the first week of classes flew by me. The week went very well, but getting back into the swing of things took a few days of adjustment--waking up closer to breakfast-time instead of lunchtime was quite a change from the holiday season. It's been good to see friends back at school, with all the catching up and sharing stories from the short break.

While I was initially worried the advanced photography course I'm taking would be canceled due to having too few enrollees, through valiant recruitment efforts by the three original members of the class, we were able to triple our initial numbers to have the class exist this semester. This was a great relief for me, as if the course had not been able to come about for the semester, I don't think I would have had any non-major courses to keep me sane. While I love math and science, I can only stand hearing lectures about it and working with it so much. At any rate, I'm ecstatic the course will exist for the semester. I've already started taking some shots of what I want to photograph for our projects, and I went out to Camera Co-Op to get supplies yesterday afternoon. For some time I've been meaning to purchase a decent tripod that would last me at least several years (as my last one was rather disappointing at around 2 years, although it was a hand-me-down from my dad), so after I tried a few out, I purchased a nice professional tripod, a Manfrotto 3021BPRO. Overall I'm quite pleased with it, and especially the head I got for it, a Manfrotto 3265 Grip Action Ball Head. The one time I had tried a ball head it seemed a bit flimsy, but this time with proper adjustment of the friction gear, it was as solid as a rock--I could not even nudge the position a little.

What have I done with the tripod so far? Well, I've been meaning to convert an old lens cap into a pinhole lens, so I got around to making that last night too. After marking up the cap in 45 degree wedges, I borrowed a drill and made holes in the cap. I made around 20 1/16" holes, a few 1/4", and a single 3/8" hole at the center. Afterward I used duct tape to cover the holes in a couple layers, and finally used a sewing needle to make a few pin pricks. That version has worked okay, although I have made a few improvements. The pictures with just duct tape covering the holes were too bright, so I tried a temporary solution of using black construction paper in between two layers of duct tape. This served its purpose very well, and vastly improved the contrast in the images. A friend picked up some black duct tape and electrical tape at a hardware store earlier, so I'm going to go see how well that works now.

Well, once again, to all who have started classes, I hope they are going well, and to all those who are still waiting to start, I wish the best luck once things get rolling!

Happy New Year! - Health, Wealth, and Happiness in 2007 and the Spring Semester, and Looking Back on 2006

As the new year begins, one of my family's annual rituals is to sit around a wonderful mid-afternoon meal of ham, cabbage, and black-eyed peas. One is for health, one is for wealth, and one is for happiness--all ideals to be achieved in the new year. No one in my family ever seems to be able to remember which food is for which ideal, so as my mother has put it to me for 20 years, "Always eat at least a spoonful of each, even if you don't like it, to make sure you get some of each in the coming year." I didn't like cabbage for a long time, but it's been growing on me in recent years, so we all ate lots of everything. Now looking at these ideals, they could all be considered as the same thing--each is truly wealth in a different arena. Wealth in monetary matters, wealth in one's state of mind and body, and wealth in one's personal life. Thinking back to economics and the thoughts of a great family friend, wealth is the only infinite in the world, transcending the possibilities of physical "things", so we truly do have much to look forward to in this new year and every tomorrow. While I realize many people do not have a tradition like this, I hope all do have health, wealth, and happiness during 2007.

The past year ended well for me and mine. My father started his new job with Ernest Health in February after a move to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This was certainly a great change for my parents, as my father hasn't lived outside of Texas since before I was born, and my mother has never lived outside of Texas. The spring semester went okay for me, and I interned for a second summer at Schlumberger in Sugar Land, Texas. Ending the summer, I had a great time at Rice photographing and helping with IT during O-Week. Finally, this past semester ended quite well, with the best grades I've received for an individual semester at Rice. I also feel the semester was very productive, through my work with IT, the Thresher, and starting some research with pedometers.

The new year has started on a good note as well, during a nice and white holiday season here in New Mexico. I took some nice photos in the snow here in Albuquerque, although shovelling the foot out of our driveway got tiring. Tomorrow morning I fly back to Houston to start the spring semester at Rice--I'll have a few days to settle down and finish relaxing before classes start Monday. I wish everyone good luck in the new semester and new year!

Welcome!

Over our short winter break recently from Rice, I've taken a little time to set my personal website back up. Currently, I'm considering a few sections, primarily a blog, contact information, and personal and professional details. One fun feature I'm planning to include is a photograph of the day, since I take so many photos from all around. Hopefully I will be able to get this semi-finished before school starts back, but if not, oh well!

While it currently isn't too pretty, the website's appearance will improve as I have time. I have a design outlined on paper currently, but I don't have access to my stock photos to finish it out here in Albuquerque. Maybe I'll get it finished when I get back to Houston!