I almost got to yell "Stay off my lawn!" for real to a bunch of hooligans today. Well, Karin would have yelled it first. We had just had dinner, and I was cleaning up in the kitchen, when we heard glass break and some kids hollering outside. Go outside and there's like three kids on bikes and clearly one of them has thrown a bottle down in the middle of the street. Bad move! Karin popped out the teacher voice, we both glared at them a while, and Karin made them sweep up all the glass. Truth be told I mostly had to fight down the giggles as they tried to oscillate between being bad-ass at each other, apologizing to Karin, and telling each other they were telling Mom when they got home. Which I have to say, spoiled their attempts at bad-ass-ness. Plus, what kind of kid when on a bike and poised to flee gets off the ride and starts sweeping up glass just because somebody used the teacher voice on him? Not a bad-ass one, I'll tell you that much.

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Tags: Hooligans!

I've been playing a little with a program called called Photomatix. The idea is that you take multiple shots of the same scene with different exposures and then this program combines them into a "High Dynamic Range" (HDR) image. Many cameras - even my old Olympus C404 will do this automatically. The Olympus calls it "bracket" mode. When I turn this on I get 3 (or 5) shots, one at the "right" exposure, one darker, and one lighter. The above image is basically the defaults from Photomatix. Below are the original images It's a pretty neat program. There's a free trial - the only thing is that the free version watermarks the image. (If you're wondering why my sample image doesn't have the watermark, it's because the watermark happened to be outside my crop. There's even both a Windows and OS X version. The only real downside is you should really use a tripod. I shot these just holding the camera, but well over half the shots I try that with get too blurry to use.

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Tags: photography, HDR, Photomatix

Them there internets are all abuzz about iWork now that it has a spreadsheet. "Now Apple can challenge Microsoft Office!", sez the Apple faithful. "Not so fast.", sez I. "First off, have you ever tried to do any word processing with Pages? Pages has some neat features, but it's not a competitor with Microsoft Word." "Ah, but now Pages has a word processor mode!", sez the fanboy, his eyes alight with glee and fanaticism. Look, I don't think anybody out there hates Office anymore than I do. (Well, OK. Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman do. But nobody else!) I've tried to use Pages in the past. And I hated it. I have this iWork '08 install package sitting here on my desk and I need to print a couple of shipping labels. Let's review how this works in Word. You start up Word, the stupid Project Gallery thing comes up. you click Labels, click Label wizard (the only choice in the category but Microsoft loves the clicks!). You pick out the Avery label number for the type of label you want, decide whether you want a full sheet or just a single label, you paste in the address you want and you hit print. It's great. Again, I love to hate on Word but if you want to print a label it's pretty damn good. So I fire up Pages '08. No label support. Nothing. Nada. I can print some lovely looking envelopes but I need a label to put on a box, not an envelope. Search the help for labels. Nothing relevant. <sigh> Close down Pages and start Word. I'm all excited about Numbers (the new spreadsheet) and it looked like Pages did have a bunch more word-processor-y things than Pages '06 did. But I print labels reasonably often and I don't think it's that strange of a task. I realize there's a quagmire of "nobody needs 100% of Word, but everyone needs a different 80%", but I really think labels are probably more common than that. And ironically it's one of the few things Word does where the "wizard" does just what I want and stays out of my way. You could almost believe it was an Apple application, if all you did was print a few labels . . . .

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Tags: iWork08, Pages, MicrosoftWord, labels, MicrosoftOffice

Our landscaper was here today planting another round of plants in the front yard. I was going to take some photos for Karin (who's still out of town for another few days), but then my copy of iLife (and iWork) '08 arrived. So I figured I'd poke at iPhoto '08 and try out the new fancypants Web Gallery stuff. So . . . here it is: Pretty neat. I cropped the pictures in iPhoto, and then did a variety of tweaks - mostly reducing shadows and boosting the color temperature although I also played with the sharpness in the close zooms on flowers.

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Tags: FrontYard, Flowers, iPhoto08, iLife08, Landscaping

Spook Country.JPG

Ask yourself this: "Is Tim the sort of person who would gloat over getting a book that somebody in Japan might really want, but maybe wouldn't have paid the shipping to get it?" Then ask yourself this: "What am I freaking new here?" I haven't finished it yet, I'm a bit less than halfway through. I did go back and reread Pattern Recognition in preparation earlier this week because I had read that they shared at least one character. It goes a touch deeper than that. Not that you'd need to read PR to understand Spook Country but there's been one clear reference that says the events of PR precede SC. Gibson books are often difficult to get into, I personally find it a struggle to establish empathy with the characters. It's worth it to do so but it does take some effort. Spook Country aggravates this because it starts with three different stories and three different POV characters. Initially Gibson rotates with each chapter being a different POV, so there are THREE characters to struggle with identifying.

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Tags: Books, WIlliamGibson, SpookCountry, PatternRecognition