Day 98

A "Normal" Saturday

Slept in, then had a shot of coffee and managed the daily cat pilling without losing too much blood.  The turtles were out, so they got strawberries for breakfast.  Then Kent came over to discuss various handyman projects around the house. 

The first grilled hotdogs of the season came off the propane for lunch.  Spent a bit of time moving the Gardenias out of the house and Plectanthrus out of the greenhouse and under the junipers.  Then the Pool Whisperer (Cal) came over to open the pool. 

Day 97

Fryday

After an uneventful day back at the office (first time since May 2nd), I had time to do some turtle herding in the backyard.  Found #10 and Trudy in the Iris bed.  Naughty, naughty.  Distracted them from their illicit affair with a couple raw shrimp, which they eagerly devoured.

Meanwhile, here's a collection of photos of the Dragon Boats that ply the Willamette River.  Taken Wednesday after lunch, by evening dozens and dozens of crews were rowing them up and down the river.

Day 89

Blogging from the Desktop

Time to get caught up on embedded photographs now that I'm back at my desktop.  Funny how the Blogger app for mobile fails with my Droid whenever I specify a location or attempt to add a photograph.  It's not Glass's fault, but you'd think there'd be some level of compatibility between the desktop editor and the mobile editor.

Day 85

May the 4th be with you

Star Wars Day started out beautifully with time spent feeding and weighing turtles, watering plants, and getting in touch with the garden.  Below is a picture of the Columbines #throughglass. 

Day 66

Past the 2/3 Mark

Well, I've made it more than 67% of the way through my goal of posting daily thoughts on Google Glass.  It was a good day for Glass both in a national and local sense.

Nationally, today was the first-come-first-served online Glass sale.  Apparently, they sold out quickly even at $1500 a pop.  This confirms my belief that negative Glass events are rare and overdone in the major media.  Similarly, positive Glass reactions are common and mostly ignored by the media.  Happily, I can point to BBC's recent article that gives a very good look at the webcam-ness of Glass. 

Day 60

The North Long Loop

It was a beautiful day in the Land of Enchantment.  After work with daylight saving time working in my favor, I grabbed the bicycle and headed north with Glass to document another set of acequias.  This time I went for the 7.7 mile loop that carries me as far north as Tinnin Farms and Chavez Road before curving south past Los Poblanos.  See The Goathead Report for details and most of the photos. 

Day 55

Wisteria and Voice Recognition

First things first... the Wisteria are going crazy.  Here are some stills...

 

Including a vignette...

Interesting how the vignette's aspect ratio changes.  Hmm?  Must do the math.  Let's see, vignette 1920x1080, gives us a 1.78 aspect ratio.  Regular image, 2528x1856, yields a 1.36 aspect ratio.  The original ABQ Wx screen was 640x360 and has an aspect ratio of 1.78.  I'd say that vignettes are photos cropped to match the Glass viewscreen. 


Finally, here is the video.

 

OK, Wisteria are beautiful and they smell great, but perhaps more importantly today, I had an opportunity to do some voice recognition trials in the afternoon.  The question was, how well can voice recognition handle esoteric jargon?  The answer is... pretty dang well.

As an out-of-the-blue sample, I read the Chemical Weapons Convention list of Schedule 3 chemicals into my Droid notepad app and into Glass via Evernote.  Terms like phosgene, cyanogen chloride, phosphorus pentachloride, and even trimethyl phosphite were correctly transcribed by my Droid.  It did have trouble with the likes of chloropicrin (claro pikmin), methyldiethanolamine (methyl diopen hola mean), and a few others.  Droid's batting average was 73%.

Glass did fairly well although the sync option with Evernote hasn't caught up with the device even after 3 hours.  Triethyl phosfite, sulfur monochloride, and phosphorus oxychloride all transcribed properly, but "diethyl phosphite" turned into "die asshole phosphite."  Glass batted 71%. 

By far the more worrisome problem is numeric transcription.  Neither Droid nor Glass could handle CAS numbers like "6548-32-8."  These turned into "6548 dash 32 dash aight."  Most numerals are OK, even long, complex ones, but '8' and 'hate', '2' and 'to' are still problems.  Also, I've yet to have any voice-to-text system handle dictation of punctuation, carriage returns, and such in a satisfactory way.  Finally, Glass with Evernote needs a data connection.  At least my Droid's note-taking app works offline.  OK, Google, can offline voice transcription be added to Glass? 

Nuff for now.  Stay tuna'ed.

Day 51

Second Half

I managed to survive this past weekend's botanical expedition and now am just enjoying springtime with Glass.  Here's the Wisteria in the Hidden Garden on the west side of our house.  Even though it doesn't get morning sun, it is in a protected area with trees on either side, a high fence behind, and a heated greenhouse about 30' away. 

Day 50

Field Research and Batteries

I set Glass up plugged in to my car's auxiliary outlet this morning for a charge.  Unfortunately, my Prius shuts off after about 15 minutes without its digital key within range. 

Glass turns itself on when charging begins, but doesn't turn itself off when power is lost.  The result was a completely discharged Glass as the day began.  Bad Google; bad Glass.  Glass should not power up when it is plugged into power for charging after it has been manually turned off. 

Day 49

The Great Jemez Botanic Expedition of 2014, Second Try

Saturday 

With warmer weather and no snow in the forecast, we set out to complete the data collection that was blown out by foul weather two weeks ago (see Day 35).  Indeed, it was a fine day and we got an early start.

Day 45

Seattle Springtime Video

The thing about Glass is that it lets you record things you never would have with a hand-held camera, even a smartphone.  For example, on Friday we were boarding a SWA flight to Seattle and I had a hand on my luggage, the other on my boarding pass and ID, and a hoard of impatient travelers behind me.  No way could I have  stopped to pull out a camera or phone for this: 

Day 44

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig

Back at Schlepp International Headquarters and finally able to download-upload-embed photos from the weekend.  Here's a sampler:

Lunch in Ballard

Day 27

Close-up Photography with Glass

Here's a series I took of some peach blossoms.  The first was taken from about 6" away.  Despite the large and centrally placed target, Glass could only focus as close as the branch behind, perhaps 9" away.  The open flowers are about 1" in diameter.

This second pic is from a little further back, about 9".  No problem with focus and the wide-angle lens provides crazy deep depth of field.  Unfortunately, the flowers of interest are already shrinking too far to show much detail. 

Taken from about 12", this picture again shows excellent depth of field but not enough detail for the small target. 

At 15" the peach blossoms are much too small to be a point of interest and we begin to see some washing out from the bright sky to the left. 

 

Must talk to Kent about the optics of a Glass close-up accessory lens.  I could try my old 50mm set of lenses from my Pentax K-1000 for a test series.  It would be most effective with video, since you can see the image being captured in the prism.  Speaking of which, it'd be nice if there was a preview option for the still camera.  

Day 22

After yesterday's time spent with my brother, it was great to have a completely unscheduled day, a day to use Glass to capture the totally mundane.  Here's the entry into my local John Brook's supermarket, a photograph I'd never take with a standard camera or even with my smartphone.  I'm convinced that the ubiquity of cameras and other digital tools will give generations of researchers and historians yet to come endless material for theses and dissertations. 

Day 20

Glass in the News

I see that the Washington Post has a piece today on what Glass is and is not.  In the comments was a link to an item titled "Five Google Glass #fails."  Glass continues to be a hot topic online and the buzz Google is generating is very impressive, even though there are detractors. 

Day 6

A Valentine's Day Trip to the Vet

Bella Cat had her annual physical this morning.  Dr. Barb of Aztec Animal Clinic gave her a clean bill of health.  The health applications for wearable tech are in legion.  It was handy just to photo-document Bella's check-up.