FFT

I just figured out a cool trick in Photoshop. Often my X-ray images from the synchtrotron at NSLS have periodic noise in them, which shows up as fringes. These are annoying and can make the images look bad. After some web searching, I came across this page which uses a fast Fourier transform to remove periodic fringes. It seems to work well. The top image is the original, and the bottom is after filtering three distinct sets of fringes. As you can see, the features of interest are largely untouched and actually appear sharper in the filtered image.

The Window of Our Discontent

For a long time (several months) the driver's side window on my car hasn't worked. It's a pain in the ass because I have to show my badge every day at work to get onsite, so I have to open the car door (although it is a good deterrent from using fast food drive through!). However, it turns out having an inoperable window is grounds for a safety inspection failure. Yesterday I finally cracked open my door panel and discovered what was wrong. The power windows have three components: the switch, the motor that actually moves the glass window, and an amplifier in between. It turns out the plug into the amplifier is a bit loose and so it loses contact. But if I press the plug into the amplifier, the window works perfectly and consistently. I'm going to try putting on some zip ties about the plug and amplifier to keep it plugged in and see if I can pass inspection that way.

When I took my car into the dealership, they told me it was a bad motor. I believed them, and I ended up ordering a replacement from a junkyard in Kentucky for about $80. Now I don't need it. I should have checked it out myself. When the window stopped working, it didn't "whir" down like a failing motor. It just either worked or didn't. That's why I originally thought it was a broken switch (but the switch looked perfectly fine when I checked it out a few days ago).

Goodbye to You

Is it true that the only cover of the excellent Scandal's song Goodbye to You is by the Aussie teen pop star twins The Veronicas? Come on, we can do better than that, can't we?

Hard Times

I think I've been having a bit of a rough week this week. Things seem to be going wrong more often. First the headphone jack on my work laptop completely quit working, so I'm working without music until I get my USB sound card in the mail. Now my PC at home won't start up, so I'm currently without access to my music collection. My car needs an inspection (expired at the end of last month) and today the guards at work wouldn't let me drive in the gate. And I've been generally tired and worn out the past couple days. The weekend should be good. Hopefully I can recalibrate and take care of things that need fixing.

False Colour

I've spent the better part of the day figuring out how to create a false color RGB image out of three grayscale images in Photoshop. One thing I can do easily with my synchrotron data is generate elemental image "maps", but each one is a single grayscale image. The ultimate goal is to take those image maps and combine them into a nice publishable false color image, but I've never taken the time to figure it out until today. With some help from the internet, I found out that Photoshop not only lets you edit images in terms of "layers" but also individual color "channels" (it's a separate tab). So you can just paste the grayscale images into different color channels (one for red, one for blue, and one for green) instead of different layers, and voila!...instant RGB image. I spent some time playing around with levels and curves and filters and blending and transparency until I found a method that seems to work consistently well. In the image above red is carbon, green is calcium, and blue is iron.

Aimee Mann

Wow, it has been a while since I blogged something. I guess I've been preoccupied with other things. Anyway, Kirsten and I went to see Aimee Mann perform at the 930 Club Saturday night. Now if you've been paying attention, you might be wondering to yourself, "Well Brad, didn't you just go to an Aimee Mann concert?" And you would be correct, but that was in a festival setting, and this was a headliner concert. Kirsten kept telling me not to expect very much but it was a much different experience. She played a lot of the same songs, mostly from her new album, but there were several additional songs (and some missing songs too! She didn't play the Elton John cover or "You're With Stupid Now") that I didn't get to hear live in Vancouver.

Meanwhile, since everybody in my group is at the M&M meeting in Albuquerque, I'm in charge of the TEM this week. This means that if something goes wrong or is somebody has a problem or complaint, I'm the point of contact. Fortunately, nobody is signed up this week!