1. What is my initial reaction?  Even if the photograph is meant to be confusing or super artistic with a message (think Malevich’s Black Square), there is still an initial reaction.  This includes things that just jump out at me as being good or bad.
2. Where do my eyes go?  It doesn’t matter if you have the coolest looking thing ever on the right side of your frame if my eyes keep going to the left.
3. How is the lighting?  This is where the mandatory Photoshop work comes in.  On 95% of the photographs that I critique, I copy and paste them into Photoshop, open up the curves tool, and see how it looks when I hit Auto.  The automatic setting is surprisingly on, so it’s a good judge to go by.
4. How are the colors?  A lot of the time the colors could use some boosting.  A brightness/contrast adjustment layer might not be the best choice for doing final work but it works great for this.
5. What post processing techniques would look good?  Blurring the background, making it look like a painting, this is the catch all stage for stuff like that.  I don’t do it, I just say what comes to mind.
6. What final thoughts do I have?  Since I type the critique while I’m doing stuff, I might have some more thoughts that would be helpful.  I add those to the end.

And there you have my process for critiquing a photograph.

Lynn’s Star Circle

Originally uploaded by Fort Photo

Over at Sapid Existence I’ve had a few people ask to see the EXIF for a photograph that I’ve shown.  Ok, only one person actually.  But I think that’s enough to warrent putting the EXIF with every photograph that I have over there.

There’s only one problem, I can’t figure out how to do it.  Over at Flickr, the request to have this available is either passed off as stupid or ignored/left alone so people will be quiet about it.

On the WordPress end of things it’s better, but not by much.  There are plenty of gallery plugins that will show the EXIF for photographs hosted by me.  But as far as I can tell, there is nothing that will show the EXIF for a photograph hosted by Flickr.  So I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on the WordPress people.

I feel like I’m running around in circles trying to figure this thing out.  Hence the photograph above.  If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.  I’ve exhausted just about every route I know of in order to find an answer.

For looks, it integrates with your system unless you have another theme.   Which is great for me, no more trying to find themes that match it.

The Awesome Bar took some getting used to, but now that it knows me better we’re getting along just fine.

The new download box is nice.

Really though, no review can explain something like this right.  Just go try it ofr yourself.

Red fox pup ( wild )

Originally uploaded by Eric Bégin

Firefox 3 is released today. I’ll have my look at it later.

I can tell you right now though that at first I wasn’t a fan of the new Awesome Bar. But it’s starting to get to know me, so I think it’s just like having t start over with the autofill stuff.

Anyway, further look into it later.

After tonight’s game, there’s really no way you can deny it. Boston’s going to win the NBA title this year.

There’s no way to explain how a team can come back from being down by 24 points on the road.

There’s no way to explain Kobe Bryant’s new strategy of getting everyone else going first and then worrying about himself.

There’s no way to explain how any coach wouldn’t do more to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen.

There’s no way, except that this Celtic team is favored by fate.

Unless you’re one of those people who thinks the NBA is fixed now. But there’s no way this storyline would have gotten out of the meeting. It’s just too far out there.

Yes, my overworked self is thinking of adding more work to the pallet. I don’t know why, maybe Kayleigh’s right and I just really like work, which doesn’t explain why I didn’t do homework in high school unless this is a recent development.

The reason why I want to host a contest (between here and the photo blog over at Sapid Existence) is because I’d like to give lesser known photographers a chance to actually win something. Every contest I’ve seen just seems to be dominated (or at least favoring in some way) more accomplished photographers. I want to run something that the guy next door could conceivably win with his camera phone.

After that, the details get a little murkier. Among them:

1. What will I do about prizes? I was originally thinking of sending prints to the winners (bigger for finishing higher), but one of my friends convinced me that money would probably be better. Or gas cards, but I don’t want to assume that everyone drives. So I’d have to find some way to get money from this, which leads us to…
2. The entry fee. It’s not a question of if, but of how much. After talking,we figured that prizes of $25, $25, and $10 would be good. So in my mind, that caps the entry fee at $10 because I don’t think people should lose money if they’re one of the winners. It’s a battle in my mind between not wanting to charge so much that people won’t enter and not wanting to charge so little that people won’t think it’s worth it to enter.
3. How will I do the voting? Wordpress has poll plugins, and that would be easy. But those can be easily manipulated. And I don’t want to decide all by myself who wins. Right now I’m thinking the polls could work.
4. How will people enter the contest? This involves how will I get the payment and how will I know what photograph goes with which payment.

Despite all this, it’s still something that I want to do. Any ideas/suggestions/questions would be greatly appreciated.

This blog has taken many different directions. It’s been a holding place for my CD list, a personal blog a few times, and a failed tech blog.

And now, I’m just tired of trying to box it in. When I tried the tech blog thing I kept thinking of posts that would have been great if I was still doing a personal blog. When I did personal I thought of nothing but tech stuff.

All that over thinking is now (hopefully) done. From now on, I post what I want. If it’s tech stuff, then it’s tech stuff. If it’s how I think about something, then I’ll post that. If it’s this weird dream where I, along with a group of other people, have to fight these dragon/shadow things similar to at the end of Link’s Awakening but I can’t get my powers unless I have some sort of slushie, then I’ll post that.

By the way, that dream actually happened. It was freaky, and yet didn’t feel weird at all while I was having it. Go figure….

Anyway, I’m going to post things, and hopefully somebody will read it. And if nobody does, then at least I have an outlet for my thoughts. And there isn’t much as dangerous as a trapped thought.

So be on the lookout for stuff. I’m not sure what yet exactly, but if you ask me that’s part of the fun.

So as I got relatively bored the other night, I started to do just that. Opened up Photoshop and made myself a life size document (12.5′X17′) complete with life size furniture pieces in there. It might be a little crazy to do that, but it really cut down on the math needed to keep everything to scale. And trust me, it was bad enough having to convert all of the measurements to inches.

As of this writing, I’ve come with 9 sets of floor plans. But that number may have changed by the time you started to read this. Here are a few of my favorites.

I call this one ‘Weird Tetris Piece’ because it was the first one that I made where I noticed that the T shaped piece would fit in there really well.

The appeal of this arrangement is that it leaves plenty of space in the middle of the room to do things. Our big problem last year was a lack of floor space. But we’ve picked up 34 square feet in the new room this year because we get an extra foot in one direction and lose a part of the wall that jutted out a foot in the other direction.

This arrangement to the right is called ‘Middle Commons with Islands’ because we have that middle area open and the desks are acting much like kitchen islands.

The big appeal here is that we get to keep the desks close to the bed. For all of the pains that our arrangement last year caused, we did get really used to being able to get things onto and off of the desk without leaving the bed. With this second layout, we wouldn’t lose that feature.

If you’re going off to college this year, you should consider drawing out some possible arrangements before heading off to school. It’s a lot easier to move furniture around when you don’t have everything in the room yet. Just remember that your room might have some irregularities in it that could thwart your plans, so be prepared for a change. Also, don’t throw out an idea just because you don’t think it will work. You could be right, but that idea could be the springboard for something great.

Are there any other ideas you have that could work? Do you see something in my set of ideas that you could see yourself using? If so, please let me know in the comments below.

Here are the improvements to the grading templates.

1. My favorite, you can now enter letter grades. I know I would much rather enter B+ than 3.3, it’s less to remember.
2. There is a major specific GPA sheet. Useful for grad school.
3. More items are tied together, so less editing is needed overall.

I think this is a lot more useful than the original. See for yourself, in Excel 97/2000/XP and ODS format.

• A new icon set which matches more closely the icon style of other mozilla applications
• Category colors are now shown next to an event box, giving users a much better overview of their differently categorized events
• Events with alarms now have a visual indicator showing an alarm bell
• A totally overhauled alarm dialog
• Sunbird now recognizes the timezone definitions in .ics files created by other applications. This fixes the longstanding issue of Sunbird miscalculating the date or time of events contained in those files
• The timezone guessing has been significantly improved
• Sunbird now contains experimental support for viewing remote calendars offline. This feature has known bugs and is included for testing purposes only
• Sunbird contains several performance fixes, which should improve working with larger calendar files
• You can now define for each of your calendars, whether you want to be notified of alarms for events in these calendars or not
• A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website

After the jump, see what I think about these changes.

As for the new icons, I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been told. I’m just not that concerned with what the buttons look like as long as they do what they look like they should. But I know plenty of people who won’t use a program because the buttons are ugly.

I’m back and forth on if I like the new way that categories are shown. I use the week view and have 3 people’s calendar showing. When there’s not any overlap the new category color system works out really well. But when the time’s overlap it covers the text so that I can’t tell as easily what the event is. This could easily be fixed by me changing the way that I label events, but an option to use the old way would be nice.

The bell that is shown if you have an alarm set for an event is great. It doesn’t take up too much space and is all the way over next to the category color column. It’s about time I have some sort of confirmation about having an alarm set.

Timezones work better now. And anything working better is good. Since I use this just for me it’s not really that big of an issue. But I can see where it would be a problem if timezones didn’t play nicely together.

Showing remote calendars off line is great, even if it is only experimental at this point. But I’m taking it as a very good sign that they think it’s important enough to have out in a public version.

Overall, I’m pretty excited about this. If you haven’t tried Sunbird, then you should.