More tomatoes, more canning

Yesterday we picked another 30 pounds of tomatoes, and 7 pounds of cherry tomatoes. From our total of 50 pounds of tomatoes we used about 40 pounds to can 16 quarts of tomatoes.

Buck Mountain Trail Canopy

I never get bored with these types of shots. Taken handheld at 10mm f4.5 @ 1/15s shutter with my B+W circular polarizer.

Buck Mountain Summit Lake George, NY

This weekend Erica and I climbed to the summit of Buck Mountain near Lake George, NY. Here is a pano that I stitched together comprised of 6 shots. I (idiotically) broke the main rule of shooting panos which is "always shoot on a tripod", and you can see it in the results. The sad thing is that I actually had my tripod! I lugged that 7.4 pound (I just weighed it) thing up 3.2 miles with a 2000 foot ascent, and still didn't bother to use it for this pano setup. All the while I was thinking "eh, I can get it straight enough"; what a moron! Another thing that I have found is that wide angle lenses don't really work well when stitching together panos. These were all shot at 22mm and they were still too wide. The edges of each shot just get too distorted.Here is our proof!

Token Finster pictures

All shots credited to Erica :)

Finster gets cross-eyed when eating corn :)

Showing off his technique, and keeping a kernel in his jowls for a midnight snack.

Corn sure is lip smacking good!

Today we picked the last of our 2nd planting of corn. We picked another 36 ears, froze 4 bags, ate 2 and fed 2 to Finster. He actually eats the corn like a person eating corn on the cob!

First run of tomatoes

Today we started canning tomatoes. We picked 19 pounds of our plum, zebra, beefsteak, and pineapple (the green ones) tomatoes today. There is still a lot of green and orange tomatoes on the vine so we will likely reach our 90 pound goal again this year. We also got another 36 ears of corn, of which we ate 2 (and Finster ate 2 because it was too ripe and meaty) and froze another 4 bags.

Vote for me, everyone else is!

I mean heck, your mom got a tattoo showing her support and broadcast it live on national television (see the video).

Odd place for a fire hydrant.

Saturday I was walking Finster and found this fire hydrant in the weeds about 200 yards away from the road.

It's pathetic

How much hard drive space this dog takes up. I know he's a big boy, but seriously!

Puppy post

And here is the token daily puppy post. Because I can't get my camera out without shooting the pup!

Corn

Today we picked most of our 2nd planting of corn. We picked 55 ears, had 3 for lunch and froze 7 bags. About 7 ears of corn go into 1 stinking bag. In addition we picked a few monster tomatoes, a few delicious carrots, zucchini, and a few cucumbers. Needless to say; we had a big lunch :)

One of the reasons I love my job

I love the different types of problems I get to solve with logic every day. For example today I had x amount of buttons that I had to distribute equally between 2 panels.

My original loop looked like:

JPanel addTo = leftPanel;

for( StatusType type : StatusType.values() )
        {
           int half = StatusType.values().length/2;

            if (type.warnClient)
            {
                StatusCheckBox cb = new StatusCheckBox( type );
                //alternate panels so we get an equal distribution
                if(type.ordinal() > half )
                {
                    addTo = rightPanel;
                }
                addTo.add( cb );
            }
        }

This loop yielded an unequal distribution of 3 buttons of the left and 5 on the right because most of the type.warnClient == true types were in the end of the array. That distribution looked like crap:

To better the distribution the first idea was to iterate through the loop twice, once to figure out how the warnClient==true values in the loop are distributed (i.e. where the actual half way point is) and then once I have the actual correct half value iterate the loop again with the correct halfway point. This is obviously not the best route.

In my case I don't care about the order of the buttons so instead I changed the loop algorithm to this:
for( StatusType type :StatusType.values() )
        {
            if (type.warnClient)
            {
                StatusCheckBox cb = new StatusCheckBox( type );
                //alternate panels so we get an equal distribution
                if(addTo == leftPanel)
                {
                    addTo = rightPanel;
                }
                else
                {
                    addTo = leftPanel;
                }
                addTo.add( cb );
            }
        }

This loop simply alternates putting a checkbox first on the leftPanel and then on the rightPanel guaranteeing proper distribution and I only have to iterate the loop once. Woot, a properly distributed set of checkboxes!

More free press for my GCC show

I was interviewed by TheBatavian yesterday about my GCC show and photography in general. They were able to turn 15 minutes of rambling into a coherent 2 minute video :) There is some serious LOL moments it this beaut so be sure to be in a location where laughing out loud is acceptable.

Java 5 Enums rule!

After reading a section from my new Effective Java 2nd edition book I realized that I was using the new Enums incorrectly. I was using the ordinal when I should have been using the EnumMap type to map/reference variables assigned to each enum. An example would explain better.

public enum StatusType {
READY(true),
HOLDING(false),
HOLD_NOW(false);

public final boolean warnClient;

StatusType(boolean warn)
{
warnClient = warn;
}
};

Previously I was doing something like this:

ArrayList warnings = new ArrayList(StatusType.values().length);
for(StatusType type: StatusType.values())
{
warnings.add(type.warnClient);
}

and to access that I'd do:

for(StatusType type: StatusType.values())
{
boolean warn = warnings.get(type.ordinal());
something.enable(warn);
}

This is not great for a number of reasons, and the better implementation is to use an equally efficient EnumMap like so:

EnumMap map = new EnumMap(StatusType.class);

for( StatusType type: StatusType.values())
{
map.set(type, type.warn);
}

and then to access

for( StatusType type: StatusType.values())
{
boolean warn = map.get(type);
something.setEnabled(warn);
}

Using an EnumMap is much safer than using an ArrayList as it is fairly easy to overrun the ArrayList unless you know to use the .ordinal() so it's much less safe than using enum values as in the EnumMap method. Also, the ordinal() call isn't supposed to be used by developers using Java.

Finster vs. Cucumbers

 

Today we were out picking cucumbers from our garden. Finster had his nose in the vines and all of the sudden he jumped back :) Finster finally found out that cucumbers are pretty spiky when on the vine. Erica and I picked a bunch and showed Finster and he kept is distance and barked at the cucumbers when they got within 5 feet of him. So, of course we teased him with the cucumbers as it is irresistibly funny to see a 118lbs dog scared and barking at a 4 inch cucumber.

Tomatoes and Squash

 

 

 

We finally picked our first cherry and plum tomatoes last week. In my quest to start eating and liking tomatoes I have successfully consumed a few raw chucks with other food. I haven't yet dared to eat one by itself. I have found that they aren't as scary as I had always thought. In fact I can barely taste them when I eat one with a cucumber for example.

We picked the rest of our first batch of sweet corn, we froze some and ate some. We are totally getting inundated with summer squash. Currently we have about 12 sitting on our counter, and I'm sick of eating it. Erica has made about 10 loaves of bread with it and we still can't keep up with it.

Border and title

 

The Daily News called me today and did an interview for an article they will be running at some point about my photo show. After the interview the woman asked me to send a different press release photo from the one that I sent to TheBatavian with a label on it. I have never added labels to photos before; GCC actually designed the postcard that I scanned and sent to TheBatavian, and the Daily News. I remembered seeing a section in my trusty "The photoshop CS2 for digital photographers" book about doing just that. Following Kelby's instructions (with a few minor tweaks) I came up with the above label.

My press release for my photo show at GCC

The Batavian news site picked it up!

More produce.

Today we picked 20 pickling cucumbers and canned 11 pints of pickles. We also picked another 2.2 pounds of green and wax beans. We are just going to pressure can those in salt water. We also had our first ears of corn for lunch along with the typical daily summer, and zucchini squash.

Tilly and the Wall

Last night we went to see Tilly and the Wall at the Mohawk Place in Buffalo. Those Tillies really know how to party! They started out their show by passing out balloons for people to blow up. That turned into a massive keep-the-balloons-in-the-air party. This was fantastic as the waiting while a band sets up is usually horribly boring. It would have been especially horrible last night as it was about 90 degrees in there and about 90% humidity, and no air conditioning. Tilly really filled the place up which didn't help with the heat/humidity. When they came the place went nuts (as nuts as about 200 people can get) and dancing and singing ensued. Everyone was drenched in sweat by the 2nd song but we were all having a great time! The sound wasn't fantastic, but their energy made up for any technical shortcomings. Plus, they just look fantastic! Here's the proof.