Archive for May, 2007
Eating Organic on a Food Stamp Budget
Rebecca Blood is trying to eat cheap and organic for a month. So far, she’s posted about a week and a half worth, and she’s doing far better than we ever do. We’d be happy to hold the food budget to twice what she’s doing. Admittedly, that’s for 4 people, but one of them doesn’t eat much yet.
No commentsOur New Best Friend
This little one found the feeder within a couple hours of it going up. So I annoyed it with the flash for a few minutes.
No commentsLightroom
I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since the beta3 time frame, and I’ve got to say that it’s improved the results of my photography. There’s a noticeable quality improvement from the pre-Lightroom times. 1.0 has been solid, if not totally speedy on my Macbook. I have a couple of quibbles though:
- Sharpening — there’s very little control of sharpening. I’m used to (older) Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask, and the ability to control radius and threshold is quite useful.
- Noise Reduction — i can barely make out that it’s doing anything. At least it’s split into color and luminance noise sliders, so that the little it’s doing are on appropriate axes.
- ‘Channel’ Mixing — This is so important that they rounded up twice the usual number of channels. I wish that there was a good way to see the individual channel contribution quickly, like the cmd-123 in photoshop.
- The Slideshow produces a PDF. Great, but probably relies on some acrobat specific behavior to make a slideshow. This is the most useless of the 5 modes for me right now.
- Web Galleries are a nice way to dump out the images for a quick gallery. The HTML seems a little limited. I would have liked to see something similar to the flash gallery done in HTML. (Thumbnails across the bottom, in a frame/scrolling div, and the main image on top.
- Also in the Web Galleries, the flash versions look absolutely horrible if the image isn’t displayed at full size, since they don’t use a good scaling algorithm to adjust the image size. I’d rather that they simply let a smaller image float rather than scale an image with jaggies
All in all, that’s a pretty small list for a 1.0 product.
No commentsUmmm. Yeah, I guess Cat and Plant do sound alike.
So, Boy is mumbling something like “Can you get me water so I can water the plants”. Sounds reasonable, except that it’s 7:30 am, I’m pre-coffee, and he’s in his jammies and welly boots, and he’s got a watering can.
Then I see the cat run across the yard. And think, hmmmm? Did he really say that he wanted to water the cat?
And he’s chasing the cat. With a watering can.
A little later, he’s found the bigger watering can, and the cat is nowhere to be seen.