aaron c beals

…so photos will have to do. first, a photo i took in Bangkok in late June outside CentralWorld. next, a photo from earlier today in the exact same location [Boston.com].

i don’t remember how i found out about these guys, but Untravel Media has been doing some very cool things with self-guided tours. they’re Boston-based, and one of their first tours caught my eye because i love the notion of secret passageways.

their tours aren’t unreasonably priced ($6.99 each), but i think in order to get traction, they’re going to have to offer one or two of the tours for free, to give people a sense of what the tours are like. i also think they should charge less for the audio version (right now, the audio and video versions are priced the same).

during the course of my recent investigation into the local startup scene, i came across FlyLite, a non-traditional software(ish) startup. their value prop is simple: flying with luggage is a pain in the neck, so eliminate the luggage and have what you need waiting for you.

to start, you send them a suitcase full of all the things (clothes, toiletries, etc) that you might need on a business trip. they inventory your things and make the list accessible via a web interface. before a trip, you select all the items you plan to use, and they pack up the suitcase and have it waiting in your hotel room. when you’re done, pack it back up and send it off again (they pick it up). as far as i can tell, they even launder your clothes.

i think it would take a rather heavy frequent flier lifestyle to justify this sort of service, but it certainly promises to make your life easier. though i guess your clients may wonder why you dress the same way every time you visit…

on my recent trip to San Francisco, i had the opportunity to catch a Giants game at AT&T Park, which is a phenomenal place. of course, it doesn’t have the old-school charm of Fenway, but this also means you’re facing the diamond in every seat and there’s enough legroom. the park is right on the water, which means the views from the top deck are excellent. anyhow, this post isn’t about that.

the issue i had was that i only had our Canon Elph point-and-shoot, rather than the 5D or 20D with a wide-angle or fisheye lens, so i couldn’t capture the entire park in one shot. (and honestly, i still think that it would have been tough with a wider lens.) so instead, i took a series of shots with the intention of stitching them together later. now, i’ve done this before (during our trip to France in 2003, for instance), but what ends up happening is that the individual pictures sit around on my hard drive waiting for me to go through the painstaking process.

in order to avoid repeating this scenario, i did a little searching online and found that there are two options:
1) do it yourself with Photoshop
2) use Panorama Tools

seeing as option #1 wasn’t working for me, i decided to explore option #2. it turns out that the Panorama Tools software is a set of open-source libraries created by Helmut Dersch and released under the LGPL. they’re very powerful, but unfortunately are also very hard to use, as they have to be configured and accessed programatically. as fun as per-job script-writing is, i decided to keep exploring.

what i found were two very highly-rated commercial UI’s built on top of Panorama Tools: PTgui and PTAssembler. they are both powerful, simple, and even automate much of the manual work required. unfortunately, both of these tools are not only commercial, they are expensive. before shelling out money, i wanted to see what else was out there…

…and i found hugin. this is a free, open-source software package that provides much of the same functionality as the commercial products. it even integrates with other open-source plugins for edge blending and automatic connector point generation. the latter is the real time-consuming and difficult part of the process: identifying points on different images that represent the same location in space, so the software knows how to overlay, modify, and connect the images. you can do this manually, but the plugin does a very good job of auto-discovery.

see for yourself:

Last night, we hopped a cab out to haight & ashbury. If you don’t know why this area is significant, google it.

It was all I thought it would be and more… The hippie vibe is still strong, and I finally found out where all the Phishheads went once the band broke up.

There were a bunch of music shops, including Amoeba Records (good store, but high prices) and a guitar store (very cool, good selection). And there were a handful of smoke shops selling equipment “for tobacco use only”. Shocking.

I had a moment of reminiscence as I looked around at the dreadheaded 20- and 30-somethings, and I got to thinking. What I liked about the scene was the laid-back atmosphere, the general love for your fellow man, and a willingness to share. Violence was low, if not non-existent. But over time, I started to realize that the laid-back tendencies were tied to general apathy, or in cases where people did feel passionately about something, a general unwillingness to “think big” about getting the message out there.

I also noticed that the selfishness inherent in mankind was starting to show through — in the end, people were out for themselves. This ugly side shined through most clearly in the (unfortunately sizable) drug culture within the scene. Increasingly, people weren’t there for the music, art, or community … They were there to make themselves feel good. It was a shift from focus on others to focus on self.

Anyhow, back to the Haight. We saw the house (710 Ashbury) where the Grateful Dead lived and played, and then walked down to the Magnolia brewpub.

Honestly, from the food to the beer to the atmosphere to the eloquently-written menus, this was hands-down one of the best brewpubs I have ever been to. I had a sampler of flights and then a pint of cask-conditioned Dark Star Mild. Outstanding. Laura had a homemade root beer. For food: buffalo wings as an appetizer, steak and moules frites for dinner, and a cheese plate for dessert. This place was it… the dream… my goal. They even use organic and local ingredients — sustainability!! Some day more people will start caring about sustainability. They’ll have to.

* The Parc 55 hotel is well-placed in Union Square, with close access to both shopping and the Moscone convention center. It’s an older hotel, but you wouldn’t know it from the inside. It appears to have been redone recently. The room is nice-sized and very clean. The bed is huge and comfortable.

* The folks at the hotels Hertz/concierge desk are pretty rude. Unless you need to rent a car, steer clear.

* Internet access at the hotel _sucks_. It costs $15/day and the connections are terrible. You have to pay per-MAC, not per-room or even per-computer… So if you want wireless, you can only use wireless, and if you want wired, you can only use the wired. The wireless is only 802.11b and performs much worse than that, and the wired isn’t much better.

So (as per my recent post) I’m not micro-blogging yet, nor do I plan to. However, since I’m on the road with limited access to my laptop, I’m going to try blogging short notes from my blackberry. I’ll call it mini-blogging.

The first note is that the trip to the West coast isn’t so bad the second time around. That trip to Seattle was rough time-zone-wise, but it set me up well for this trip.