This definitely goes in the “If I had a million dollars” category. The Jerry Weist Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art and Books is up for auction September 12 and 13 in Beverley Hills. It’s an incredible collection that includes original art by some of the greatest SF artists including Frank Frazetta, Virgil Finlay, and John Schoenherr, whose cover for the first Dune paperback is one I’d love to have.
Archive for the ‘If I had a million dollars’ Category
Great collection of SF art for auction
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011Wanderlust
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010Here’s a beautiful video shot in South America and Europe – just travel scenes – but quite gorgeous. It was shot with a Canon 5D DSLR and looks like a Hollywood movie.
Wanderlust from Thinklab on Vimeo.
Maybe not the ultimate sound system, but close
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010I used to be a real audiophile and spent a lot of time trying to upgrade my stereo system. I never had the money to get the system I wanted, but did fairly well on my limited budget. Since then, I’ve pretty much lost the bug but every once in a while, I see something that makes me go “Oh, wow. I’d love to hear that.”, and this guy’s system is definitely in that class. I don’t think I’d want something this complicated, but I’d sure like to sit down for a couple of hours with it and a few of my favourite CDs.
Each speaker horn has a conical flare and is 13 feet deep. The mouth of each front horn is 8 feet x 8 feet. At the throat, a JBL mid-range exponential horn with a pair of 2440 compression drivers delivers sound between 400 Hz and 6 kHz. An array of 30 Cerwin-Vega tweeters reproduces sound from 6 kHz to 20 kHz. Behind the mid-range horn are two 16-inch Empire woofers covering 15 Hz to 400 Hz. The left front and right front horns each have two 24-inch Cerwin-Vega sub-woofers for frequencies below 50 Hz.
Going ‘Droid
Friday, May 28th, 2010Smartphones are getting more and more capable, to the point where they’re almost capable of replacing a notebook PC for a lot of things. And they’re a lot more portable. My colleague, Scott Nesbitt, recently purchased a Google Nexus One and I have to admit that ever since he showed it to me, I’ve been suffering from a bad case of gadget lust, as have a number of people who’ve walked by his desk and seen it.
Scott has written a blog post summarizing his impressions after using the phone for a month or so. If you’re thinking about getting a smartphone, especially an Android-based one, you’ll want to read this.
As for myself, I’d love to have one, but I can’t afford to buy a $500 plus phone, and I don’t want to lock myself into an expensive, long-term contract. So I’m holding off – for now.
Digital back for Hasselblads
Sunday, April 18th, 2010Back in a previous life, I worked at a camera store in Grande Prairie, Alberta. The store’s owner also ran a photography studio, and like many professional photographers, he used Hasselblad cameras. These were (and are) beautiful pieces of equipment, shooting large-format images on 120 roll film. The Zeiss lenses were tack sharp and the large negative sizes would give you images with stunning detail and tonal range. Blads, as they’re affectionately known, are big, a bit fussy, and not anywhere near cheap. And when NASA sent cameras to the moon, they sent Blads.
If you happen to have a Hasselblad gathering dust somewhere, you’ll be happy to know that you can now bring it into the digital age, with a snazzy new digital back. Simply replace the 120 roll film back on your existing camera with the new digital back, and you’ve entered the digital age, with a sensor that records 39-megapixel images.
I mention this only out of sheer gadget lust. It’s been almost 30 years since I last used a Hasselblad, but if I had one I’d be saving my pennies for this. It might take a while though, because I’d need about 2 million of them.
The manual pages that saved Apollo 13
Friday, April 2nd, 2010Apollo 13, despite failing to reach the moon, remains one of the high points of the U.S. manned spaceflight program, because it represents NASA at its absolute best. Those guys should have died out there in the cold and the dark, but they got back alive because of the ingenuity, perseverance, and resourcefulness of NASA’s engineering community.
And one contributing factor to their survival was the documentation – a flight manual showed them how to shut down the electrical systems on the spacecraft to preserve what little battery power they had left.
Now the pages from that manual are up for auction at Bonhams in New York, on the 40th anniversary of the flight. I wish I had the money to buy these. Maybe the STC should bid on them – they may be some of the most historic documentation ever written. They should be framed and up on the wall at STC headquarters to remind people that sometimes the documentation really does matter.