I played a bit more with my macro stuff tonight and was even able to fashion a makeshift light box out of some plain white paper to help illuminate a couple shots using my flash. I think I'll build something a bit sturdier that I can just slap on to the camera when necessary.

This weekend I'm going on a canoe trip in Algonquin with lots of fun people. I can't wait!! I should be able to bring back lots of good pictures too.

Here are the best images from tonight, still nothing fabulous, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

The tip of a ballpoint pen up close, check out the reflection of the lens in the ball

A wilted rose petal with small leaf

Close up of one of the figures on our German Christmas Pyramid

One of the things I would like to get is a nice 105mm macro lens for my camera. Unfortunately that lens costs about $1200. That figure isn't actually that big in the world of lenses, however it is big in my personal world so I had resigned myself to not getting one any time soon.

But, lo and behold, it turns out there is a cheap alternative! You can "reverse" a lens to get macro effects. That is, you can mount it on your camera backwards (given a special mounting ring). And, taking it one step further, if you have two lenses you can mount one backwards on the other and then mount the whole contraption on your camera and get even greater macro effects.

I happen to have two lenses, an 18-200mm zoom and a 50mm fixed. So I looked around on eBay and was quickly able to find the two tiny rings of metal I needed to stick my lenses together. The first is a male-male macro coupler, and the other is a step-down ring. Total price: $17 including shipping. Awesome, but would it actually work??

Well I have both pieces now and although I didn't have much time to play with it tonight I was able to confirm that yes, it will work indeed!! The only problem is that there is heavy vignetting due to the difference in size between the two lenses. I think that if my zoom went to 300mm the problem would go away, so I will be keeping my eyes open for a cheap 70-300mm lens in the future.

Macro photography is hard! First of all, the depth of field is almost non-existent. Millimetres matter in terms of camera position. It took me almost an hour to find the distance needed to place an object from the lens in order to get it in focus. Second, lighting is very hard because the camera tends to get in the way and cast shadows on the object. Ideally I'd have a lens mounted ring flash, but that would defeat the "cheap" part of this project. I may be able to rig something up with white bounce cards and my on camera flash though. I could also really use a tripod to better handle the longer exposure times required by the small aperture values needed to compensate for the shallow depth of field. Phew.

Anyway, here are some sample images and a picture of the whole setup taken with my old Canon A80.

My D90, with an 18-200mm lens fully extended and a 50mm mounted on the end in reverse

A spring on a finger exerciser

A TTC token

A TTC token

Last night Kim and I went with Chris and John to see the latest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I think they did a really good job adapting the book. Of course lots of stuff was changed and left out, but overall I liked it quite a bit. The effects were great too (yay ILM!).

For supper we hit up The Queen Mother which is always great. I had the Spinach Quinoa salad with grilled chicken and split the chocolate banana Dufflet cake with Kim. Mmmm.

Today Kim made sweet potato soup for lunch and it turned out awesome. For supper we're having a roast chicken. Mmmm again.

On Saturday we went to the wedding of Mr. Michael Trink, and it was a very nice affair indeed. It was at the Westfield Heritage Village which has all sorts of old buildings and a train and fancy gazebos and is surrounded by forests and fields so it is very secluded and peaceful. It was a really good venue. The reception was good too: decent food, fabulous cupcakes and lots of fun games and singing and stuff. Michael and Laura looked great and it was awesome to see them again. I can't wait to go out to Burlington to visit.

To get to Rockton for the wedding we got a minivan from Zipcar and split the costs with Matt, Adrienne, Adam and Nicole. As usual, the Zipcar thing went really well, although the Mazda 5 is a very strange vehicle indeed. Calling it a van is a bit generous as it's very short, both vertically and horizontally. It has three rows of seats but is too tall to be a station wagon. Anyway, it did the job (ie. transport six adults to Rockton and back) adequately.

Today I went with Rob, Will and others to the Summer Cask Festival at Victory Cafe. They had 16 different Cask Ales which are unfiltered beers that are both fermented and served from a cask without any additives or extra carbonation. Thank you Wikipedia. Anyway, there were some very fine beers on hand. For $15 I was able to sample 3 different half-pints, get the most amazing sausage on a bun I've ever had and keep the glass I used for the drinking! I feel this was exceptional value. The beers I sampled were: Black Oak Summer Saison (Marmalade Edition), C'est What? Caraway Rye, and Cheshire Valley IPA. All were good. I'm not so much into the India Pale Ales though so I think I enjoyed the other two more. The Summer Saison was definitely a good starter as it was light and fruity and I don't normally start drinking at noon. The Caraway Rye was pretty special. I've never had anything like it before and very much enjoyed the unique flavour. The sausage on a bun was also a major highlight. It was good German bratwurst with lots of sauerkraut and this spectacular homemade beer mustard. All this was on a bun that was made from soft pretzel dough. Mmmm....good!

After enjoying the cask ales I met up with Kim and we went out to speak with a designer at Made You Look about wedding bands. It's a pretty cool place which represents local independent jewelery designers who do custom work. We talked with Karen Macrea, our designer, about our ideas. She showed us some samples and was very quickly able to get some designs drawn up. I had looked at rings in normal jewelery stores and was mostly unimpressed (both with cost and look). Going the custom route looks like it will be less expensive and much more likely to get us what we actually want. Also it's always cool to support local artisan-type people. So I guess that's win-win-win. Right?

For supper tonight we made Pistachio Asparagus Pesto on Penne and it turned out really well! I think that guy's food blog is quickly becoming one of my favourites. He is very prolific and the fact that he's located in Toronto means that when stuff is in season for him it's in season for me too!

Anyway, that's enough words, here are some pictures from the last little while.

Building in the Distillery District being demolished; ever-present CN Tower in the background

Pastoral scene at Michael's Wedding place (Westfield Heritage Village)

Spinning and Weaving shop at the Westfield Heritage Village

Sneak shot of Michael and Laura while they get their official photos done

The Ice House

Michael and Laura

More Michael and Laura

Matt with extra glasses

Wedding Cupcakes!

We went to the distillery district this weekend to look around and just to have a nice walk. Of course we stopped in to Soma to get some gelato and I noticed that Soma is making "microbatch" chocolate bars now. They actually purchase and process the raw beans themselves so they control almost all stages of production.

Anyway I picked up a bar made of beans from the Dominican Republic. I haven't had any high quality chocolate lately so I'm enjoying this bar even more. It's 70% cocoa content and the beans are fair trade and organic. The chocolate is smooth and has a pleasant aftertaste. I can't wait to try some of their other microbatch bars, however they appear to sell out quickly. This isn't surprising since they can't make that many at once.

We just got back from seeing Victoria Day a new Canadian film set in Toronto in the late 1980s. It's a "teen" film, but a serious one. It's not full of drinking, drugs, sex and ridiculousness but instead attempts to be true to a real teenage life (so it has a bunch of drinking, drugs, sex and ridiculousness, but in a genuine way, if that makes any sense -- the film has all that stuff but it isn't really about all that stuff).

Anyway, it was a great movie, not so much for the story as for the character development. Everyone seemed very real, and genuine. I used that word already but I really think it how best to describe the movie. Genuine. The people and events, although interesting, are also very normal. It makes the movie fantastically believable. Pretty cool stuff.

The ending was fairly flat, but I suppose that fits in with the rest of the movie. Real life doesn't tie itself up into a neat little package at the end of each stage or major life changing event.

I loved all the bits of Toronto in the movie. The neighbourhood the kids lived in was totally North York and it was cool seeing the harbourfront near Ontario Place where I have walked and roller-bladed many times. I'm a bit surprised the movie wasn't screened at the Toronto International Film Festival given the strong connection, but I guess they already had a distributor so they figured it would be best to just get it out there for everyone.

Good movie.

Well, I finally did it. My blog now uses a database to store posts and comments and other relevant data. It only took me about 6 years from the time I realized that my original implementation was a poor long term solution for a blog. I figure in another 6 years I'll realize that personally writing and maintaining my own blogging software makes no sense when there are solutions like Wordpress which do it better/faster/more securely than I can hope to do by myself.

Anyway, the time of the original blog creation was January 2003. I decided I should use my University web space for a blog since that's what all the cool kids were doing back then. I also decided that my implementation decisions would be driven by opportunities for learning. So, if a technology was something I did not already know, it went to the top of the list of potential candidates. This way I could get exposure to lots of useful, resume-padding acronyms. XML was obviously the biggest and most important acronym so I decided to store my blog posts in an XML format which I invented. I used PHP and the some other tools to parse the XML and display it as HTML in the browser. If it had been 3 or 4 years later I would have been able to use XSL to do the translation and it might have been awesome. But alas, such a thing, while it existed, was not widely supported.

So yeah, until today, all my blog posts were stored in one big long XML file which had to be opened and read completely (since the XML had to be validated) every time I wanted to display a few posts. This had to be repeated for my RSS feed and I'm not even going to describe the nightmare that was my implementation for adding comments to posts.

Anyway, now everything is in a happy MySQL database which, in addition to being much more efficient and easy to maintain, allows me to do things like get statistics about my posts. For example, this is my 386th post. It would have been hard to figure that out before. Crazy.

Unless you don't pay attention to Toronto (quite possible if you don't live here) then you've probably heard that all retailers in the city are now required to charge at least five cents for plastic bags. Setting aside any and all issues with this, I like it just because everyone now asks you if you want a bag. Previously they would assume you want one, and unless you were paying attention (my mind wanders...) you'd find your stuff all packed in plastic before you even had a chance to stop them. I frequently have a reusable bag with me but on occasion I failed at using because I wasn't vigilant enough. But this will no longer be the case. Yay!

I just made some minor updates to this blog. I forced all images to have captions and I added a "permalink" to the end of each post. A permalink is an address that can be used to link to a specific post at any time, even after that post has fallen off the first page. Anyway, there shouldn't be any problems with these changes, but if there are please let me know.

This weekend was much more relaxed than the previous. Friday night we had the annual deck opening party at work and I also went with Kim to see a set of films at the Worldwide Short Film Festival. The party was lots of fun, and I went back to it after viewing the films. The films included Chris Landreth's new short, The Spine, and although I'd seen it before, it was great to see it again on a proper screen. The set of films focused on psychological issues and so some were quite disturbing (and Chris Landreth's film fit right in). I really liked a couple of them, in particular the short called "After Tomorrow" from the UK. The set ended on a lighter note with the new Wallace and Gromit film, "A Matter of Loaf and Death." Wallace and Gromit is always good and was a fantastic balance to the other, heavier films.

On Saturday we did some shopping, took care of some wedding things, and watched the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Sunday we went with Chris and John to the Taste of Little Italy festival, mainly to go to Dolce to get some yummy Gelato. We also had lunch at Craft Burger. The festival was alright, but other than the Gelato it didn't seem that special. We did get a chance to visit three random open houses though which was pretty neat. The last one was especially nice (only $650,000). Also on Sunday, I managed to watch the extended editions of the other two Lord of the Rings movies: The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I have no idea how I fit that in since that is like nine hours of movie. Good times!

Of course I took a bunch of pictures too, and here is a selection.

Burgers being prepared at Craft Burger

Kim trying on funny sunglasses

Chris trying on Harry Potter glasses, too small!

Random church and blue sky

CityPlace continues to grow

Clouds and buildings

Dead roses in the dying sun

Flowers

This past weekend was full of awesome food and fun and photography (alliteration much?).

On Friday, Jen had a housewarming party in her new apartment and she provided delicious marble strawberry cake and made-from-scratch strawberry daiquiris. For myself I brought the "Mill Street Seasonal Sampler" which is six different bottles of Mill Street beers. I like lots of the Mill Street stuff and this gave me a chance to try two I hadn't had before: Mill Street Pilsner and Mill Street Belgian Wit. The Organic Lager and the Tankhouse Ale are still my favourites, but it was fun to try new stuff. Anyway, the party was good and I was able to chat with some people I haven't seen lately (like Holly and Simone!).

On Saturday I got up early and went with Matt to St. Lawrence Market to acquire various foods for later cooking-related adventures. The Saturday north market is really starting to come alive, but it's not quite at capacity yet. I can't wait till the summer produce season really gets going. I love seeing all the fresh and local fruits and vegetables and making delicious things out of them.

Saturday afternoon I cleaned a bit, made muesli, and read for a while on my balcony. It's such a perfect time of year right now; warm but not humid with an awesome breeze coming in off the lake. I can smell it when I sit on the balcony (which I'm also doing right now) and it smells like AWESOME.

Around 3pm on Saturday I headed down to the Harbourfront to check out the "1000 Tastes of Toronto" festival where local chefs and restaurants were serving generous samples of their often expensive food for $5. There was so much available and it all smelled delicious. I was a bit disappointed to see that most people were flocking to "safe" choices but I guess that's the way people are. But for $5 you'd think they'd be more adventurous. Since it was mid-afternoon I decided to only get one thing and I chose it by looking exclusively at the places without lines. I ended up getting something from the restaurant Amuse Bouche because I got close and it smelled really good. It was a pulled pork sandwich except that the sauce was made with cocoa, almost like the Mexican dish chicken mole. It was SO GOOD. The chef was there and super friendly and described what it was and offered hot sauce to give it some kick. I was so happy with my choice and I think I'll try to go to the restaurant at some point.

On my way back from the Harbourfront I stopped at Rabba's and ran into Keizo and Rob! They had been at the Jays game and were meeting Chris and John and Will to get some supper at Volo, a really good bar to get fancy beers and delicious food. I decided to join them and we had a great time eating and drinking. I was able to sample my third new Mill Street beer of the weekend, this time it was the Mill Street "Lemon Tea" which smelled like iced tea and tasted like the Stock Ale. It was a definite chilling on the patio in the summer sort of beer (which is what we were doing). Good times! After supper we played some random game at Chris's house (with more beer).

Sunday morning I got up early once again to go for a long walk with Matt. I've always wanted to check out the Leslie Street Spit so we walked all the way out to Leslie Street and then all around the Spit. We chose to take the Queen streetcar home though as by the time we were done we had walked 17km. The Spit itself was pretty cool, lots of random stuff and about a million birds. I know it's a protected bird area and stuff, but there were many more than I expected.

Once I got home, I relaxed a bit and then started cooking. Kim was in London over the weekend but would be home for supper so I wanted to cook a something nice for her. Matt also joined us since I made a lot of food. I had a package of butter chicken spice mix that we'd been itching to try it out. There was a lot of prep work related to marinating and cooking the chicken in advance but it was all worth it as the result was delicious. We had naan and asparagus to round out the meal and Matt brought mango juice to drink. For dessert I made yummy strawberry-rhubarb crisp which we ate with vanilla ice cream. Supper was a definite win.

Here are some pictures I took over the weekend. My main failure with photography this weekend was that I didn't take any pictures of all the food I ate! I kept eating it before thinking to take a photo. Anyway, first up are some photos from Jen's party:

Cake picture number one

Cake picture number two

Strawberry daiquiris being created

View from Jen's balcony

Then there are some pictures from my dinner with people on Saturday:

Mill Street Lemon Tea beer

Will, Rob and me looking strange

John with his cash monies

Will on a street light

Giant light-up Corona bottle

Finally here are some pictures from our walk on the Leslie Street Spit:

Huge ship at the Redpath sugar plant

People on a path on the Spit

Random metal on the water front

A thistle in full bloom

A flower pot on the Spit

Pretty blue flowers

Rusted out old shed

CN Tower bump

Lots and lots of birds

Parallel swans

Foot bridge on the Spit

Turn winch manually