ISO virtual meeting: Day 3 (and 2)

I realised why I didn’t seem to have anything to write yesterday. I’d completely forgotten that I’d woken up with an alarm just before 3:00 am, to join the second day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting. They started a full day at 9 am California time, which meant the early start for me here, joining in via web conference.

It was the first day of technical sessions. We discussed standards on:

  • Depth Cameras — Proposed definitions for “depth camera”, “ground truth” in the context of depth camera measurement, and “flat field” as a 3D structure for calibration. And going through expert comments on the first draft of the standard.
  • Skin Tone — Converting a technical committee report on more diverse and representative skin tone patches on camera test charts into an ISO technical report. There was some technical discussion of principal components analysis of various skin tone databases, which produced some unexpected results due to differences in illumination specifications. We agreed to proceed with the project and assigning an ISO number.
  • Opto-electronic Conversion Function — This is a review of an existing standard to reconfigure a test chart to avoid camera flare issues contaminating results.
  • HDR Best Practices — A follow-up to the recent HDR standardisation work, to outline user workflows and implementer recommendations for consistent handling of HDR images.
  • Photo with Associated Media — Initial work on a new standard to define formats for things such as Apple’s LivePhoto, a photo with an attached video clip. We want this to be general, so the attached media could be anything and represent a wide range of auxiliary information relevant to the photo. There was discussion of making this compatible with the HDR gain map standard also being developed.
  • DNG — Adobe’s Digital Negative format has now been published as an ISO standard, and now we’re looking to extend it to add new useful features in a version 2.
  • HDR Readouts — An expert showed the problems with existing HDR UI controls for shooting HDR in scientific contexts. Hasselblad’s Phocus software displays the same HDR files differently to Adobe Lightroom, with no consistency between the UI tone mapping controls to be able to display the image the same. So standardisation is really needed here to enable scientific work in capturing HDR images.

The meeting ended at 11:00 am here in Sydney, giving me the afternoon to do other stuff, mainly university image processing report marking.

Today I skipped the first technical session of day 3 of the ISO meeting and only got up at 5:00 am, giving me an extra two hours sleep. The topics today:

  • Image Information Capacity — The technical session I skipped. This is on developing a standard to measure image fidelity using Shannon information theory metrics. I’ll catch the important points in the meeting minutes.
  • Angle Dependent Flare — Not much progress on this one as the project leader has been busy handing over the CEO role of his company to a new person. There was an experiment result presentation by another researcher.
  • Low Light Performance with Hand Shake — Psychophysical experiments are continuing to determine suitable performance thresholds for the standard.
  • Resolution — A revision to fix some issues and add new information.
  • Vocabulary — Another revision to add new photography term definitions.
  • Systematic reviews — We discussed five standards that are up for systematic review, and for which a country voted to revise. Two had proposals for additions, while the other three are still awaiting submissions.

I finished a bit early today, as the people physically present in Cupertino ended the day with a demonstration of HDR displays and image rendering, which didn’t translate to watching over a web conference.

I finished my marking of the student image processing assignments. And then I finally had the rest of the day free!…

To start packing books into boxes and hauling them down to the garage, in preparation for the repainting in just over a week. I’d planned to be doing that during this week, but was so busy with other things that I only started today. I got seven large plastic storage crates from the garage and filled them all with books. Well, I left some space, because they are big and when full of books I wouldn’t have been able to move them at all. With seven boxes full to as much as I dared, I’ve almost cleaned out one large bookcase. There are still two shelves of small paperbacks, and then there’s the other bookcase which hasn’t been touched yet.

Tomorrow we’ll go to the hardware store and buy some cardboard moving boxes to temporarily store the rest of the books, and also for our clothes, as we have a built-in wardrobe, which the painters are going to be painting inside.

Phew!

Marking day

I marked student reports today. And didn’t do much else.

I walked Scully at lunch time. And after that we drove up to the hardware store to buy some screws the right size for mounting the new laundry shelf on the angle brackets. I finally had to do this because the builder is coming tomorrow to drill holes in the brickwork for mounting it on the wall, so I wanted the brackets attached to the shelf so we can just measure where the holes need to be drilled.

For dinner I made Brussels sprouts, fried with miso, garlic, and chilli, and tossed in some asparagus and diced potato.

I got through 5 of the 7 reports I need to mark. I’ll knock the rest off tomorrow.

ISO virtual meeting: Day 1

I got up at 7am and grabbed breakfast and quickly sat at my desk to start up the videoconference software for the ISO Photography Standards meeting. The opening session began at 13:30 California time, or 07:30 here. It was all administrative stuff and liaison updates from other groups. The most interesting thing for me was a tentative narrowing down of dates for the meeting in October next year, which is now confirmed to be in Cambridge, England (it was still unclear last meeting if it might be in London). It’s pencilled in now for the second last week of October, though we may be more sure by the end of this meeting.

We did get an interesting technical update from the liaison representative from the World Wide Web Consortium. They are working on PNG version 4, which is planned to implement one of our standards, for HDR gain maps. HTML will gain a CSS element to control HDR headroom for controlling rendering of HDR images on displays. This will allow more precise and consistent rendering of HDR images across websites and displays.

The meeting closed for the day after 10:00. I spent the rest of the morning working on slides for a student lesson this afternoon on research for essay writing. And before that class I had one for my science student, today about the moon, including phases, eclipses, and craters.

And after finishing all of that work I quickly worked on a new Darths & Droids strip.

New tooth and preparing for ISO meeting

This morning I had to go back to the dentist for my scheduled follow-up to fit a newly created porcelain crown to one of my teeth, after my appointment two weeks ago to have the teeth scanned and the original tooth ground down for fitting of the crown. The temporary plastic crown was annoying as it didn’t fit properly—having not been made as a custom fit like the porcelain one is—and was causing me some pain when chewing and a dull ache during the night.

The dentist removed that and fitted the new crown, completing the job in about half an hour, including time for the anaesthetic to take effect. The new crown feels a lot better than the temporary one and tonight I was able to chew my dinner normally without pain, so the signs are good. It still feels a little unusual, but the previous crown I had done settled down after a few weeks and has been find ever since.

When I got home, my Internet was down. I’d planned a day of preparing lessons for online classes tomorrow, but I couldn’t do the necessary research and image searching. So I went for a 5k run. But it wasn’t back when I got home, and stayed off until mid-afternoon. I did manage to write a bunch of slides and then fill them in with images after the net came back on.

Tonight my next ISO Photography Standards meeting starts. The physical meeting is at Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, but I haven’t travelled there for it. Frankly, I don’t want to risk a trip to the USA at the moment with the political situation there. Having seen stories of Australians being detained and deported for no good reason, it’s too scary to consider.

The first day’s meeting begins after lunch, at 13:30 California time. I’d made some crazy mistake converting the time zones and concluded that 9-5 in California corresponded to 11pm to 7am here. But upon double checking tonight, I found I was somehow 4 hours out. The 9-5 day there actually corresponds to 3am to 11am here. This is great news, because I can get a few hours sleep before waking up at 3am each night, rather than have to be awake during my entire normal sleep cycle. And tonight, with the meeting beginning at 13:30, that’s actually 07:30 tomorrow morning for me! I can get my full normal night’s sleep! I’m going to savour it.

Busy Sunday and Monday

I didn’t have time to write an entry on Sunday night because my critical thinking classes didn’t end until 10pm. Daylight saving began a couple of weekends ago, which moved all my classes an hour later.

During the day on Sunday I drove up the coast to visit my mother for a brunch at a cafe near her place. It’s an hour drive on the freeway, so a bit of a trip. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since our trip to Europe in July, so I gave her the gifts we got: hot paprika from Budapest and some Slovakian crystal from Bratislava. The I drove back and had to get stuck into my classes in the evening.

Today I had more classes in the morning, then I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off and hopped on a train into the city. I wanted to look around some book and game shops and then head across to the university for tonight’s image processing tutorial. I saw a tempting game: Monkey Palace, by Lego! I looked it up and saw it has good reviews on Board Game Geek, so I almost bought it… but I realised I really don’t need any more board games right now.

I planned to go to a specific place for an early dinner and to sit and relax a bit – a Japanese place that does gyozas, which I don’t normally get to go to because it’s a bit further from the university, but it’s on the walk from the centre of the city so I passed it today. But when I got there it was closed for a private function! So I had to go somewhere else and kill an hour. If I’d known I couldn’t eat there I would have spent more time shopping around in the city first.

After the tutorial I came home and am just dashing this off quickly before bed time.

Online games and retiring the landline socket

Friday evening was online board games with friends. I played games of Boomerang: Australia, Bärenpark, Just One (our own Discord implementation, with vastly increased word list).

Then at the end most of the others begged off and there were just two of us left, so we searched through Board Game Arena’s list of games suitable for two players, and the other suggested how about we play the lowest ranked game of that entire list. It turned out to be ChinaGold, an abstract strategy game played on a hexagonal “map of China”—which so unresembles China that neither of us twigged at what it was supposed to represent—with two types of overlapping territories: rivers and mountains. Each hexagon has a gold nugget on it, initially hidden. On your turn you get to “discover” up to 4 nuggets in a straight line, governed by a dice roll. If your discovery reveals the final nugget in one of your territories, you claim all the gold in that territory. But if you discover the last gold in one of your opponent’s territories, they get to claim it all, so you need to be careful.

It was okay, but it took us a few turns to get the strategy down, by which point I was behind, and could no longer recover, so I ended up losing. Interestingly, not only was the board nothing like a map of China that it supposedly represented, but the rivers run through the mountains, not between them. I might be tempted to play it once again, just to have a full game knowing the strategy a bit better, but probably not more than that.

I also did the usual grocery shopping and online classes on Friday. Today, Saturday, I went for a 7.5k run. I went early in the morning, but it was already 26°C. The weather is still ridiculously hot for this time of year. It reached 30.5°C and we’re expecting more temperatures above 30°C in the week ahead. Which is close to 10 degrees Celsius above the average maximum for this time of year.

Also today, in preparation for the big repainting, I removed the old telephone landline socket from the wall. The electrician who came to install our new kitchen lights advised me that I could do this, and seal the wires with electrical tape to prevent them touching and possibly shorting something at the telephone exchange, then tuck them into the wall and get a builder to come and plaster over the hole, before we paint it. I did the removal and taping, but I’m not up to plastering a hole neatly, so I’ll get a pro to do that.

A bit of a slow day

I slept very badly last night, possibly even not at all. I don’t even know why. I think I just didn’t read enough before bed to get sleepy like I normally do, and ended up lying awake for a bit, and then instead of drifting off my mind started thinking about the lack of sleep, which is a trap.

So today I was a bit tired and lazy. I worked on things slowly, making one comic, and teaching 5 online classes, but not doing much else. I took a walk up the street to buy some more rye flour for my sourdough. I was hoping to do some more housecleaning prior to the painting (in 3 weeks), but didn’t really get going on that.

Oh, the most interesting thing of the day happened while I was up the street. I went into the bookstore for a bit to browse around the shelves. The shop was empty except for one staff member. While I was in there, another woman came in, and the staff lady recognised her, and I overheard their conversation. The other customer was my former Member of Parliament for my electorate, Kylea Tink. She’d just come in to look for a specific book, and the staff member helped her find it. I didn’t go over and say hello, but in hindsight I should have expressed my appreciation for her efforts representing the local community in Parliament.

Another quick update

I finished writing my new class topic today on Money, and ran the first classes this evening. It’s an easy topic for me to talk about, but some of the questions had the kids thinking hard and having a bit of trouble answering. We’ll see how it goes.

It was hot today, up around 32°C. It’s going to be hot for the rest of the week too, hovering around 30°C or so. The long-term average maximum for October in Sydney is 22.2°C, and we haven’t had a single day that cool yet. And may not get one at all if this continues. I don’t remember if I mentioned but our September was the hottest September ever recorded. Looks like October might be heading for the similar record.

I also did some more house cleaning. I started going through the filing cabinet, clearing out old documents, trying to lighten things up before the repainting.

Last of the photo scanning

Today I worked on my next week’s critical thinking topic, which is Money. As in cash, and other media of exchange: gold, silver, shells, credit cards, cryptocurrency. I’ve done several classes before on simple economics like buying and selling things, so this is different, concentrating on the idea of money itself.

I also scanned the last of the photo albums, so we can save space by discarding or boxing old photos (depending on whether we want to keep the hard copies or not).

I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and then we went about 2/3 of the way to my wife’s work and met her as she was walking home.

Not much else.

Public holiday Monday. Kinda

Today was the Labour Day public holiday. My wife was home from work. But I had my usual 4 critical thinking classes to teach from 9am.

After those we went for a walk with Scully. The day was hot, reaching 32°C, but a cold front came through about 4pm, cooling things down a lot and bringing some light rain. Tomorrow should be a lot cooler.

I did a 5k run late in the afternoon, after the temperature cooled down, but managed to avoid the rain. I did some more photo scanning. A Darths & Droids comic. And that’s about it.