Textual Pornography

i.e., even more filler.

In my three semesters thus far in college, I’ve had the pleasure of being supervised by two permissive RAs. This semester was comprised of an unusual amount of do-whatever-you-wantness, although things never truly got out of control (except perhaps for the impromptu rave party in the RA’s room). You can learn a lot about a culture by examining its artifacts, especially those with writing. I think perhaps the most elegant expression of what this floor stood for this semester was found on the large RA whiteboard a few days ago. Plus it gives me an opportunity to test my new <img> style for thumbnails:

As you should be able to tell quite clearly, the four panorama images were quite poorly taken; different lighting conditions and, of course, poor photo takery overall. Since I got my G4 laptop last year, I’ve been looking for an OS X native photo stitcher. At first, PTMac seemed ideal. It has a huge load of customization, and it’s based on the open source Panorama Tools. However, the few times I’ve used it, I’ve been sorely disappointed by an overcomplicated interface and particularly gratuitous picture mangling.

So, I’ve been using the Classic application I started stitching panorami together with, a Canon bundled application simply titled PhotoStitch, which wins hands down because it Just Works™. Now, that movie is oversimplified; I always go back to touch up the seams between images because usually at least one needs improvement. There are two very cool ways to do this; in the default mode, it displays a window with copies of the adjoining pictures, and you just drag one on top of the other so that they overlap correctly. In the second “advanced” mode of stitching together pictures with complicated joinings (funky angles, bad lighting, etc.), you drag a small green box from one image into the exact same region in the second image. PhotoStitch is fast, easy to use, and (here anyway) produces the best results. In my pants.