Posts from — April 2008

I was on my way out the door to work when my son’s gave in impromptu concert on the piano.  I got a bunch of frames, but I liked this one the best.  I really like his expression.

It took some post processing in ACR to get it to look decent, the windows made the camera miss the exposure a bit and I was firing without thinking too much.

For some reason, I’m really liking square crops lately.

Clay Shirky gives a talk at the recent Web 2.0 conference talking about where people find the time to do activities on line.  After you get done wincing at the "Web 2.0" part, take a look. He draws a correlation between the shift to an industrial society and the shift to an online society. At the turn of the last century, the cultural shift was so great that society numbed itself with gin.  He maintains that for the past 50 years, they big cultural shock was this amazing amount of free time.  Post World War II, people started working more and more five day work weeks and didn’t know what to do with the free time.  Society numbed itself this time with TV.

It is an interesting talk.  Most folks I know that are hardcore "online people" watch little to no TV. Those that do bought TiVo years ago to compress what they do watch ("TV on your schedule" was an early tag line.) They usually view TV as an another information source and loop it in with others in their life.

Props to Lifehacker for linking to the video.  A transcript of the talk is on Clay’s website.

I was down at WMSE today during the lunch hour to help out a bit on the spring membership drive. I haven’t been on the air in probably 12-13 years and it brought back some memories. The station manager and I talked about the new website and all the new great content being published there.  I just got word from our video guys at About Face Media and the 50th band will be up on the video player within the next day.

If you’re a Milwaukee person and listen to WMSE, head to the website and throw them a few bones. If you’re not, tune in to the stream for a while.  The mix is eclectic and if you don’t like what you hear, wait a bit - shows turn over every three hours.

Erin hosting the Rockliedoscope at the WMSE studios busy swapping CD’s out.  I was down at the station over lunch to help promote the new web site and help out with the membership drive. Erin’s show is great and definitely worth tuning in - she plays a great mix of indie rock, with enough other stuff thrown in to keep it interesting.

Jade Plant.

Some tulips sitting on our kitchen table.

We got a lot of rain and the creek across the street from our house was running pretty hard.  Tried some slow shutter speed shots with it.

I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress installation, the dashboard had been nagging me for a few weeks. I also finally got wp-cache working after following the directions for getting it to work on IIS. It is not like I get a server crushing level of traffic here (though it still is fun to watch my traffic steadily climb), but it feels nice to be prepared.

I think the next step is to update the theme. Cutline has served me well, but quite frankly it seems a little played out lately. Everywhere you turn online you seem to run into it. As much as I’d love to roll my own, I think I’ll probably go with another pre-built theme. I just don’t have the time (if any of you reader out there have the inkling, send me an email on the about page. I’m not looking for anything fancy, just something clean.)

I’m also kicking around the idea of moving my photography site to WordPress. It currently is a simple static site I threw together fairly quickly, but I’m thinking WP will allow me to update it faster and keep it fresh. There, I might actually invest in a real theme, since its a business site. My budget isn’t huge, (we’re talking double-digits here), but again if your interested, drop me a line.

[Update: I'm seeing weird behavior in the Dashboard with wp-cache enable, namely it is caching dashboard pages, even though the plugin isn't supposed to. I'll have to look into that. Since I mainly post with Windows Live Writer, it should affect me too much.]

[Update #2:I stayed up way too late tweaking the site and settled on yet another Chris Pearson template, though I tweaked his 3 column design down to two. I'm pretty happy with it and will probably stick with it.]

Stormy weather most of the day today. I’ve attempted the “raindrops on the window” shot a few times in the past, this is the first time I’m happy with the result.

I love the bokeh on my 50mm

Mom is visiting family down in Chicago, so it’s me and the boys tonight.  May not be the healthiest, but it scores points with the kids!