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Archive for June, 2005
Spoiled
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I’m sitting in the hallway outside of Lesley’s studio in Braun Music Building listening to the St. Lawrence String Quartet rehearse Schumann’s Piano Quintet with Kwang-Wu Kim (a great way to help time pass as I identify reef fish and critters from ID books).
The week so far has been insanely busy because I’m participating in the St. Lawrence String Quartet’s Summer Chamber Music Festival. There are lots of familiar faces, and the musical instruction and immersion has been quite intense.
Living in Oakland does not make full days at Stanford easy. Some of the others seem to be bonding well because they are living on campus and have been spending late evenings reading music and hanging out (while I’ve been going home to do work). It’s been a vastly different experience than in years past, but I’m still having a great time. There’s a BBQ-dinner/music-reading party tomorrow night that has always been a lot of fun, so at least I’ll get to socialize a bit. :)
Back to real life on Monday. Apologies if I’ve been hard to contact.
Disney ditches shark fin
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Disney has decided to remove shark fin soup from its menu! I wrote about the problem earlier this month.
The press release states, “After careful consideration and a thorough review process, we were not able to identify an environmental sustainable fishing source, leaving us no alternative except to remove shark’s fin soup from our wedding banquet menu.”
Great job, everyone. (protesters, media, and everyone who sent letters)
Magic de-megapixelling of cameras
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My camera has an amazing magical property: when I give it away, it loses half of its pixels. It’s true! Somehow, the resulting photos contain half the pixel rating of the camera.
Can anyone guess why? (read more »)
BoxTop ProJPEG 6.0 - Photoshop Action Problems
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I recently upgraded to Adobe Photoshop CS2, which seems to work properly with all of my old filters except for BoxTop’s ProJPEG 5.2, which causes Photoshop to throw away color profile information when opening JPG images (super lame). I really like ProJPEG because the files it produces are smaller than Photoshop’s built-in JPG routines.
Anyway, so I noticed that BoxTop has released ProJPEG 6.0, which I have downloaded and am trying out. (read more »)
Always back up!
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Man. I use iView Media Pro to organize my images. 5 minutes ago, it crashed and CORRUPTED MY DATABASE.
Luckily, I frequently back up. Back up, guys, especially if you are my friend and use me as a computer consultant. It will make life easier for the both of us.
Microsoft Acrylic Preview
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Yesterday, Microsoft announced the beta of an image editing program (codename: Acrylic). It’s about time Adobe got some competition for Photoshop — although it could be some time before the product is mature.
Combined with native Microsoft RAW support, Acrylic might eventually be serious competition for Photoshop. But again, who knows. (The market seems to think so — Adobe’s stock fell today…)
FeedLounge Alpha Announced
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Alex King and Scott Sanders have announced the alpha release of FeedLounge, a web-based feed reader designed to be as functional as a desktop application. It looks really, really nice, and I can’t wait to try it out. [FeedLounge]
I currently use FeedDemon on the PC, which I really like — except that I can’t see all of my groups/categories on one page. It will be great to have one place I can go to while on the road to get an update of what my web world is doing.
USPS Print Shipping Labels no longer works
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Recently, the USPS changed something in their online Print Shipping Labels area — and now, it’s broken. I’ve tried two different computers using both FireFox and Internet Explorer, and neither of them have successfully been able to print. The new version requires Adobe Acrobat Reader — which I have, but I still can’t get it to work. I’m reminded of the time they rolled out their fancy new “Point of Sale” systems, which had in large lettering on the front, “P.O.S.”. It is indeed a P.O.S. (read more »)
Grenada, June
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 Grenada: X marks the spot (Google Maps)
Google satellite imagery is very cool. On Friday night, I’m off to Grenada to collect images and a story. Any tips on what I should try to see, besides the wreck of the Bianca C? (read more »)
No trackbacks for you!
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Bastard spammers. They finally found my trackbacks, and left like 50 of them, one after another. I shut the entire thing down. No trackbacks for you. (sad)
Disney Hong Kong planning to serve shark fin soup
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 dead blue sharks
I assumed that most people would know about this by now, but I forgot that most people don’t care.
Disney is planning to serve shark fin soup at Disneyland Hong Kong when it opens on September 12, 2005. Virtually every environmental group on the planet has urged them not to do so, because it’s stupid — and hypocritical. (read more »)
Fix: recent pop-ups in Mozilla Firefox
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The annoying web marketing folk have recently discovered a way to circumvent Mozilla Firefox’s pop-up blocking mechanisms. The exploit seems to use Macromedia Flash, and can be blocked with the FlashBlock extension, which will allow you to play selective Flash animations when arriving at a website that tries to use this trick.
I’ve just installed FlashBlock, and it has worked for at least one site that has started delivering pop-ups in Mozilla.
It’s too bad the extension doesn’t allow you to also deliver electric shocks to the authors of the ads.
Exhibit Photography for Dummies
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 did you use a flash? if so, this is what you’re going to get.
If you are photographing something behind glass, turn off the flash and press your lens against the glass. Exposures may be really long if the room is dark, and you’re going to need all the stability you can get. (read more »)
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