I didn't enjoy last weekend at all. It was kind of a matter of what was going to go wrong next. All things considered, pretty much everything has been fixed, but up until yesterday, crawling in a hole sounded like a good option.
Thanks to lots of rain over the weekend, my roof sprung a bit of a leak. Thankfully it wasn't the dripping into a bucket kind of leak, more the "Look, my wall has a boil on it" sort of leak where there was water sitting under the paint, and when I touched the paint, the water decided to come out. Well, all things considered, better the water was on my kitchen floor where it could be soaked up than in my wall getting absorbed into the drywall. The "boil" as it were, was approximately 40cm long. There was a small crack above that which was approximately 5cm long. Today they came and found where it was leaking on my roof, so if it keeps raining, it shouldn't be a problem.
Then, on Sunday I was cooking a lasagna, well, trying to cook it at least. I made everything, put it together, and put it in the oven. I thought it seemed to be taking a tad long to preheat, but my flat was pretty cold, so I just put in the food and set the timer. I come back to the oven 35 minutes later, go to pull out the lasagna, and find that not only has the cheese not melted, but the food was actually colder than when I put it in, because although the fan on my oven was running, the heating coil had died. Well, at least that's what the repair people told me today. So, that's also been fixed, so now I can eat food that's not prepared in the microwave or on the stove again :-)
And to top the entire weekend off, I caught a cold. Thankfully I'm feeling better now, but it just topped off what was an otherwise totally crappy weekend.
Here's to next weekend being better... I'd say it couldn't get any worse, but that'd just be asking for trouble :-p
Basically, what the workflow does is:
1. Downloads the photos
2. Creates a new folder
3. Renames the folder based on the date
4. Separates the jpgs out into a separate folder within that folder (get the action at Complete Digital Photography)
5. Ejects the disk (Now working thanks to an additional step)
So, my goal is to have this run automatically when I plug my camera in, then once it's done everything, eject the camera. I've saved it as a folder action, but it hasn't quite worked yet.
Still, this is the furthest I've gotten with getting a workflow to work correctly, so it's definitely made me happy :)
Edit: My workflow now actually works! When I plug in the camera it downloads the pictures, puts them into the right folder, separates the jpgs and raw files, then ejects the disk. I was just missing a step between separating the jpgs and ejecting the disk where I specified the volume that I wanted to eject.
Yup, I think I've got photographer's block. My Flickr account isn't updated as often as it should be. I know that I've been busy (note my last entry about writing 30,000 words in under a month for assignments), but I also think it's sucked my creativity.
So, Utata has a big project coming up and I really want to participate. They've got 6 categories:
- Stock photography
- Portraiture
- Landscapes
- Portfolio
- Projects
- Photojournalism
After doing this photo (left) I thought that it might be interesting to put together some sort of noir type story, because that would stretch my photography skills, my photoshop skills, and my writing skills. But then, my photoshop skills are kinda subpar, and hell, that sort of writing is definitely not my forte.
I could do a project or portfolio based on night photography (right). I did a photowalk a few weeks ago with some other photographers that was really enjoyable, and I felt that I got a lot of good shots, but at the same time, it wasn't necessarily a challenge. So, it was fun, but I'm not sure I want to make it my project for this.
The fact that it's winter in Wellington makes it difficult because there are no events going on where I could take a group of photos centred around a theme. And while I love taking fun pictures with my devil duckies, they're not going to be my project.
So, that's where I am. I'm stuck with a photographic block, and the desire to come up with something good. Talk about frustrating. I'm hoping that after a bit of relaxation once I turn in my last assignment my mind will decide that it likes to be creative again. Until then, I'm stuck.
Here's my "To do" list between about 18 May 2007 and 13 June 2007:
- ICT Use in New Zealand (3000 words).........................done
- Business Plan (7000 words).......................................done
- Literature Review (5000 words)...................................done
- 24 hour test (4500 words)...........................................done
- Virtual consulting (3000 words)...................................to do
- Final Research Proposal (6000 words).........................to do
I'm running out of things to say :-p
What kind of camera(s) do you own?
My most used camera: A Nikon d50
My point and shoot: A Canon Elph s230
My film SLR: A Canon Rebel 2000
And yet, would you believe I don't have a picture of any of my cameras? :p
Good god it's been a long time since I've updated this.
I'm still alive, I've had a stressful little while, but I'm back at school. Doing an honours degree in Information Systems. Hey, it's a good start to a possible Masters degree, but we'll see what this year brings. :-)
On a side note, the Wellington Flickr Group had an exhibition that I was a part of, and that totally kicked butt :-)
The books are totally awesome though. I so love the books, and I can't wait for the next one to come out. Harry Dresden has got to be one of the most amusing scifi/fantasy characters ever because if it weren't for bad luck he'd seem to have no luck at all, though he happens to get lucky with situations all the time. It's a great series of books though, and I can't recommend them highly enough.
I'm a Chicago girl, born and raised (for a good part of my life at least), so how could I not say:
GO BEARS!!!
We're going all the way this year, Chicago sports teams are coming back strong!
This weekend I went to Wings Over Wairarapa in Masterton, New Zealand. I mainly went for a photographic challenge to myself. I'd never been to an air show before, and by that same logic, I'd never tried to photograph an air show before.
Taking pictures on the ground is easy because nothing is moving. It can be hard to try to come up with shots that aren't too cliche, but when you've only got so much time to wander around the ground displays before you need to get back to your spot to watch the flying, it's not too much of a concern.
Taking pictures at of the flying planes at an air show is a challenge. Everything is moving so fast, and you have a lot of other challenges to deal with as well. I was using a Nikkor 70-300 f/4-5.6G lens on a D50. Even though the propeller driven planes go slower than jets, you have to shoot with a lower shutter speed so that you don't freeze the propeller in your shot because it just looks strange. So this means making sure you have a slow enough shutter to capture it, but set the aperture high enough that your shot isn't totally blown out and white.
For the propeller plane shots, my shutter speed was somewhere in the 1/200 sec range. I shot on full manual so that I could slightly underexpose my shots. This turned out to be a pretty good method. Even with the settings on my camera correct, the next difficulty came in framing my shots. As I said before, even slow planes move fast. Getting the right timing is difficult and I applaud people who don't need to take 5 shots to get one at air shows. I still did some post-processing work in iPhoto afterwards just to lighten things up, increase some sharpness, and do other minor corrections, but I feel like I learned a lot.
The day was overall really enjoyable, the weather was nice and warm, there was a gorgeous breeze, and the atmosphere was just good. The only downside of the day was getting back to Wellington. We were informed around 12 that the Rimutaka Hill Road was closed due to a terrible accident and was unlikely to reopen until at least 8pm, so people returning to Wellington were told that it was recommended to go to back via Palmerston North (a small 100km detour). Even that wouldn't have been so bad if there hadn't been another accident on that highway, which led to even more delays. Combined with the extra traffic from the air show, what should've been an hour and a half without the detour, what should've been 2.5 hours with the detour, was a 5 hour ride back to Wellington. I was never so happy to get back.
Shelfari is a website very similar to Last.fm, but the main difference is that it's for books.
It's something I've been looking for for quite a while actually. If you've read my other posts, you know how much I love to read, and that means that I'm always on the look-out for new books that I will enjoy. I could use amazon to see what other people who bought the book have bought, but I don't find it to be accurate all of the time.
Shelfari solves that problem for me. It's currently in beta, but it's looking really good. And unlike other library programs and websites, it's free to add as many books as you want unlike some of the other online services I've come across (yay for those of us who actually read a lot).
Once you've signed up for an account and sign in, the first page you will see is the welcome page. From here you get kind of a summary of everything that's going on. This page lets you see your recent activities, any discussions going on about books you have on your shelf, and also other people that have similar books on their shelves (and how many books they share in common with you).
After you sign up for an account, the first step really is to add books. You do this through the "Build Shelf" area. There are several ways you can add books to your shelf. You can search by Author, Title, ISBN, or subject, or you can import files from various programs such as Delicious Library, Library Thing, or any other Tab Delineated file that you might have for your books. I haven't tried adding a file yet, but I do have my books stored in an Excel file, so I may try to convert this to the appropriate file type and try uploading rather than adding all my books by hand. I can say though that adding books manually is easy.
Once you've added some books to your shelf you'll be able to see those in the "My Shelf" area. It gives you all sorts of options on how to sort the books (Author, Title, Rating, etc). There's even a wish list for books that you want, but don't have yet. A very good way to keep track of this I've got to say. In this area you'll be able to see if the books have any activity on them within Shelfari, such as discussions, reviews, and opinions. It even links to the Amazon.com reviews of the books if you want to read those as well.
When you click on a book to see more details about it, it gives you the full information on the book that you would expect (Author, Publication Date, ISBN number, etc.) But it also gives you other information as well that you can choose to fill in that relate to your copy of the book, such as when you read it, where you bought it, how much you paid for it, whether or not it's signed, and whether or not you've loaned it out (Handy for keeping track of people who like to keep books you've loaned to them).
Finally, you can also view the activity that's been going on in relation to the book so you can see if any of your friends have reviewed the book, write your own opinion on the book, rate it, or read the Amazon.com reviews in this area.
In addition, the site has many of the usual social networking features, such as the ability to tag your books, connect with other users by adding them as friends, and send notes to other users.
I've found this site to be pretty user friendly, though I haven't quite worked out how to use it to add books to my blog. I'm not too concerned about that at the moment though since Vox lets me add books really easily.
I'd really recommend checking this site out if you like to read and you're a fan of the last.fm sort of site. Personally, I'm looking forward to using it more and putting more into it than I have for now. Enjoy, fellow bookworms :-)
