1224 - Underneath The Streetlight

2010-02-19

Time to go to work. This is an image of yesterday evening. I was in a hurry to get home and see what I can do with my expensive brick, and this image just found me. I took seven different exposures until the framing was about perfect (it was not, I had to still do some slight cropping), and basically that was it for yesterday, photographically at least.

Now to the brick. With the help of a friend at work, I found that I had to delete all partitions on my hard drive, in order to make the VAIO boot from most bootable CDs that I threw at it. Funny. It booted just fine from a Windows 7 installation DVD, but for example it refused to boot from a vanilla XP installation CD. As soon as I deleted the partitions on the hard drive (as part of Windows 7 installation, but aborting the install immediately after the partitions were deleted), it would boot just fine from any bootable medium. XP would crash immediately, but at least the laptop suddenly accepted other boot media. What a weird BIOS!

But essentially that was what I needed. With the VAIO I had got a Windows XP downgrade option in form of an XP CD, and that was an XP customized to this hardware, with all the drivers, an XP that did not crash. As soon as I got home, I first installed XP, then under XP I performed the BIOS upgrade, and finally I installed Windows 7 again. Guess what? No blue screens of death any more 🙂

This morning I added some additional Sony software, some drivers, and now I’ve only one more problem: Sony provides no 64 bit Nvidia driver for the second graphics card, and Nvidia’s standard 64 bit notebook driver does not recognize the hardware. Hmm … more research to be done 😄

The Song of the Day is “Underneath The Streetlight” from Joni Mitchell’s 1982 album “Wild Things Run Fast”. I was amazed to see that this album seems to be unavailable via Amazon, being sold from $70 in the Amazon marketplace. One more of the marvels of the Capitalist religion: How can any Joni Mitchell album ever go out of print????

That’s like France closing the Louvre, locking away the Mona Lisa! They just have no right to do that. That’s our cultural heritage, not a damn asset!!!

Anyway. Here’s a video from Yahoo/Spain.

There are 7 comments

J. L. T.   (2010-02-19)

Hm, sweet light and colors. With a little fantasy I see a soup plate🙂 Have a sweet weeekend!

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Esther Emma   (2010-02-19)

always love the yellow meshed up with blue and with that i arrived at you brick blues 🙂 i love the blues (specially when i hear someone sing about theirs 🙂 though i love to hear about the light shining on the horizon (brick coming back to live 🙂 and again i am back at your image of today the light shining all ove you 🙂 have a nice weekend, andreas (singing the blues lightening your days or something like that 🙂

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Ove   (2010-02-19)

This with the brick has been amusing reading, even though I know it must have been at least a bit frustrating. I can't help it, but working with PCs sound to me largely as working with old cars. 🙂

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andreas   (2010-02-19)

Hehe, thanks all. I already have a 64 bit driver, whether it will install or not, that's to be seen. If I manage to get the NVIDIA card to work under 64 bit, I just have to install Photoshop et al., and my games for those log train sessions, and then I'm done. If I can't get it to run on 64 bit, I'll shell out another 80€ for Windows 7 32 bit, reinstall once more, call it an experience, and that's supposed to work in any case. We'll see. Old cars? I don't know, sounds more like new cars to me. Whenever I read a Steinbeck and someone fixes a Model T, I have to smile. Those were the days when cars could be fixed by lay people without computers to aid them 🙂

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Flo   (2010-02-21)

I just love this image - an in-your-face yellow with the rest in blue. Fantastic! It could stand in for a bright yellow egg yolk!

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andreas   (2010-02-21)

Actually I was surprised myself. I saw the lines, but of course I didn't see the colors. The sky was still bright, but because of the light and the resulting underexposure, it all came out much more colorful than I had seen it for real. And not only that: The yellow light pushed automatic white balance far into blue territory, giving me nice color contrast. This is one of those things that you just have to find out. Of course, with much experience you begin to know such things, but because you can't see it, it always stays a little bit awkward. Seeing is so much easier than having to remember 🙂.

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Thomas   (2010-02-22)

Great colors and contrast. The lightning and framing is just perfect! Love that one. Re. your expensive brick: Congratulations for reaching the safe haven for now - and forget about my mail below. Was catching up on your posts in chronological order.

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