Here we are, on the other side
The weekend was a lot of fun. Lot's of people were over for Halloween. Having friends stay over for the weekend is always nice. (I went as a bed bug, 
helloheather was a love bug. yes, that is cute 
)
Today (Halloween) is my sisters birthday. Happy 25th Megan!!
helloheather helped me assemble our new pull-behind leaf sweeper which I employed on Saturday. I'm going to try and stay on top of the leaf pickup this year. Unfortunately, I'm already going to be behind thanks to the ending of daylight savings time. I don't really mind getting up in the morning when it's still dark, but I do miss the evening light. Thanks to the time change the sun will have set before I leave work.
However, with that being said, this morning's drive to the train station was really nice. If it were not for the changing leaves, I would have thought it was spring. The air was cool and a little humid and you could smell the earth (especially as I drove by the sod farm). Their was some fog and the sky's were cloudy. It felt very peaceful and I wished I could have stopped and enjoyed it even more.
When I got to the office today, it was about 88 deg F inside. By noon it had cooled down to about 85. Here at the end of the day it's still not below 80. It's been really uncomfortable. Getting out of the office for a walk during my lunch hour felt great. I wandered around with the camera for a bit and then had a bite to eat in a diner in the West Loop area.
I was going to discuss a bunch of other little things that have been happening but I keep forgetting what they are. Oh well. Probably not important.
No wedding here!
Spotted while on a walk during my lunch hour. The building used to be home to a law firm architectural firm but is now vacant.
White Sox Rally
Today there was a big rally downtown for the White Sox. Part of the parade was on La Salle St. which is just 3 blocks from work. So I went down there with two coworkers to see if we could catch a glimpse at anyone. It was really crowded and we ended up being pretty far back.
On Wednesday (thanks to craigslist) I picked up a used Fuji A205. An old 2MP digital point and shoot for $35 (a good price IMHO). It's going to replace my film point and shoot that I keep in my bag 24-7. But I only have a 16MB xD card which is good for about 24 shots. So, take a camera that I have little experience with and no manual controls, add one small memory card, a big crowd, and high-contrast light and you get a bunch of "eh" photos:
http://www.bernhard.us/photos/white-sox-rally
Still it was fun to be there and to see the team. It's been a while since Chicago sports fans have had a lot to cheer about.
(Note, yes, I know the Chicago Fire has done really well in the past couple years)
keyword: wifi!
The third and most recent manufacturer to release a compact digital point and shoot camera is Canon:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0510/05102501canonsd430wifi.asp
Following closely on the heels of Nikon's announcement of the P1 and P2 compact digital cameras that feature 802.11b/g access, and Kodaks EasyShare One, Canon has released the SD430 with built-in 802.11b.
While this is sort of neat in a "ooh shiny!!" sort of way, I'm in agreement with dpreview.com that I'm really not sure what problems Wifi modules will solve with these types of cameras. It might be neat to see photos at an event nearly instantly displayed across the room on a big screen (trade show, company party, open house, weekend BBQ, whatever) and if you're at home with your kids birthday party, no longer worrying about storage on-camera would be nice as you send your photos to your PC, but really, what else is there? Even if you get a wifi hotspot on the road, there (at first glance) doesn't appear to be a way to connect your camera to your server halfway across the country. Do you really want to be sending your photos to some stranger's pc?
Maybe if someone came up with a cheap kiosk that could accept images over wifi and burn a CD on the spot, but that sort of infrastructure would take a ton of time to build.
Baby Lauren via the babysitters…
helloheather and I generally take a couple of pictures of Lauren when we babysit. So, we started a "best of" photo album in order to feature some of our favorites. They are in increasing chronological order:
RIP US Space Shuttle
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2144513/nasa-dumps-space-shuttle
For better or worse, NASA is going to retire the Space Shuttle within the next five years.
OpenOffice.org 2.0.0
distribution: OpenOffice.org P2P Downloads
OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released. Download it via bittorrent with the link above. Right now there are 400 seeds so the dowload is very zippy.
Lawn Baby
On Saturday, helloheather babysat Lauren in the afternoon. I stopped by while running errands and, due to the wonderful weather, suggested we all go outside for a bit. Despite some wariness over the texture of the grass, Lauren seemed to really enjoy herself.
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
-Edgar "King Lear" (Act V, scene iii)
Supply and Demand
Due to the relatively high costs of producing digital imaging sensors, only a few companies in the world do it. One of the largest is Sony. Sony makes CCD chips for almost every digital camera company in the market.
So when a production run of sensors is faulty, the effects ripple far and wide. Case in point, review this web page: Imaging-Resource.com - NEWS! - CCD failures: the bigger picture.
Sony announced a problem with a particular run of CCDs that, at last count, ended up in 58 different digital cameras from 7 different camera companies. All of the companies are fixing the problem free of charge and Sony is picking up the tab for the whole thing.
So, if your camera is on the list and has been exhibiting problems with image capture, you might be due a free fix.
edit/update: more details about the problem here: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20051005/109314/
Google Reader
Just two weekends ago, gonj and I were talking about web-based RSS readers. I had briefly searched for PHP-based solutions but had not gotten any further than that.
However, just recently, Google Labs released a web-based RSS reader of their own. Called Google Reader and still marked as Beta, the Reader is an interesting solution. I'm not yet convinced that the interface is as good as it could be, but then again, I have very limited RSS-feed-reader experience. In general, my RSS feed usage has been quite limited. In part because I can have Firefox open a collection of news sites into tabs in one click and can browse the sites that way, and in part because I've found the feed readers I have used (local applications) to be cumbersome and annoying.
But a web-based reader is far better than any local client installs and Google Reader might be the solution a lazy sack like me could use.
Ketchup
Happy Birthday Stacey! We welcome you to the land of 30 with open, but arthritic, arms!
Happy Belated 4th Aniversary to wallybat and husband.
Happy New Ipod Battery to moonwick.
Happy New-Glasses-And-Meeting-Alton-Brown to nugget and equiraptor. (Though the glasses part is just for Nugget).
I'm sure I've missed a lot because I've been slacking on my LJ friends list.
Quality vs Quantity
As everyone knows, helloheather and I shoot a rather large number of photos with our digital camera (a Canon A80). That's a bit of an understatement actually.
Our basic philosophy with using this camera is: shoot more now, edit later. That is, we shoot a lot of photos during the event, and cull the bad ones at home. The cost to shoot a single photo with the A80 is amazingly small, therefore it doesn't make sense to /not/ shoot whenever and whatever we want.
Those that we want to save, are posted to our online gallery.
However, for a long time, our culling was...reserved, let's say. The number of photos going online was rather absurd, given the importance of the event. Now, of course, part of this comes with the "ooh look shiny" part of owning a new camera and the dead-easy way in which photos can be distributed, but our methodology resulted in bad habits being formed.
There is a constant struggle between wishing to "tell a story" with the photos we post, and simply present some nice photos from the event. I have to constantly remind myself that our online gallery isn't (or shouldn't be) a flip-book of the event, but a showcase of our photography. I don't mean to make it a resumé, just a nice family album.
In the past couple months I've been put more thought into the image review and posting to the web. I've tried really hard to take a much more critical eye to the photos we shoot and eventually post, limiting images to those that really jump out. It is my hope that, as I take a more critical eye to those photos that I've already taken, I will take a more critical eye to the photos I /am/ taking. That is, an improvment in deciding what makes it to the web will influence my thoughts before taking photos in the first place.
Current Music: Fielding - "All You'll Get"
“Serenity”
Went with a bunch of people on Saturday to see "Serenity." Wonderful film, good stuff for fans both old and new. I highly recommend it being on your short list of films to see soon.
More yard work today, I hope. And maybe washing a car if the slacker spirit in me stays away.