The Time Sink

Somehow both the boys are off from school today, and somehow both Shelley and I have to work. ...and they (the boys) complain about how life isn't fair. Ummm hmmm...

...but I'll have Brad along with me for the morning; I could use a helper on the shopping run today. ...and he gets paid in Starbuck's and Rally's. I think thats a good deal all around.

...and since their homework is completed (or darned well better be) I'll have some time this evening to maybe finish up some pipe work on the front sprinklers. I spent most of Sunday working on changing things over to the new feed line; now it's time to handle the lines from the valves to the existing output lines. Once that's completed we can start covering and move on to the next phase.

No, I'm not taking up portraiture, but the opportunity presented itself at the game Saturday. Actually several opportunities to take a variety of shots and see what I could do with them in post processing came my way. The kickoff photo was taken from way the heck up in the end zone stands with the A-2 on a monopod and the teleconverter in place. The ISO was set to 800 so I could get a shutter speed of 1/200 at f/3.5. What I ended up with was a decent image, but with so much noise (the A-2 has problems above ISO 200) that I didn't have a lot of hope for it (heck, for the entire night's shoot!). Lightroom wasn't able to deal with the noise sufficiently, but Noiseware Professional dialed it in nicely. If I were to print that shot, I'd probably take it a bit toward abstract with 'mosaic' to hide the poor edges, but hey...

...and as to the lady? The same tele and monopod setup, so call it 300mm of zoom, ten feet away in the stands, ISO 400 at 1/6 second at f/3.5. Yeah, I can almost see you cringe from here! What to do, what to do? Lightroom for the color correction, Noiseware again to blast out the worst of the color noise; but the key for me was to kick in DreamSuite's "Dreamy" filter to soften the entire shot, noise and all. I'll likely play with that shot some more as I'd like to learn more about the different correction styles I can apply, but for now it's nice to know she liked it enough to give a print to her husband. ...and at 8x10. Yeah, real workable.

Okay, here's a strange one for the ubergeeks out there: yesterday both of the 64 bit boxen started having problems with Firefox; the memory usage gradually worked its way up toward 90% and the swap file took over and bogged both machines down. ...and since one is Intel and one is AMD, I'm wondering what changed in an update that is causing me some major grief. The 32 bit Debian box doesn't seem to have the same issue, so I'll be over on that one more than I'd like. ...and back on Konqueror for a while.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Adobe has ported an alpha release of their Flex development package to Linux! Yep, running under Eclipse, and only at the functional equivalent of the Window version 2 (not the soon to be released 3). ...but still; this is a good sign that they may be thinking cross-platform enough to give OpenLaszlo some competition. ...and hey, RIA may be ... oh, heck, it is one of the waves of the near future; seeing what the OpenLaszlo developers are putting up on the Net is getting to be darned interesting.

...and how about this to end the week: a storm system passed through today and dropped the temps under 70 for the first time since last Spring. I think I'll open the windows tonight and bundle up in a blanket with a cat on my lap and chill out for a while...

When I posted the photo of Tiffany's suitor (Hey, I thought she was married!) today I got an email from Sister Ann saying,

Tiff deserves better, and I do like the name thing, 
but couldn't you have put it on his heart?

...and I explained that her name was over his heart. Come on; I don't think he's plumbed the same as us.

...and then she suggested maybe a reader contest here to see if people here would like to vote for what Tiffany dressed up in for Halloween.

Oh, but the work that was done today! Is should type it up this evening as I really don't believe my fingers will be doing all that well tomorrow...

See Saturday. Ouch. More yardwork today; much accomplished.

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

    Thanks for visiting!  
All content Copyright 1999->2006 Daniel C. Bowman. Most rights reserved.