Refenestration Daily.
I’ve never been much a fan of Carlos Mencia’s comedy, but stealing jokes from other comics just isn’t cool. And, of all people, wouldn’t stealing from Cosby only make it all the more obvious?
What I do find amusing, however, is that his real name is Ned Mencia (and, no, that’s not a joke). (Via: Digg)
I had a great time at SXSW and I was able to take a bunch more pictures. I’ve finished processing those and I’ve posted those photos on Flickr. For those who may be curious, I took 43 photos, chose to process 20 of those, and posted 8 shots.
For what it’s worth, I made use of raw mode this time (well, RAW + JPEG Fine) and I my shots seemed to have a better resistance to having their highlights getting blown out (a reoccurring problem that I was running into as I was taking shots during my trip to South Africa in February). Then again, the lighting was almost completely different between those shots and these; in South Africa, I was mostly dealing with either bright sunlight or incandescent light, while in Austin I mostly had cloudy days (not that I'm complaining — cloudy days can be very handy for their diffuse light!).
Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. One exception, however, is this shot of the Q & A session after Helvetica — Andrew Dupont was trying my camera to get a feel for it; that’s one of his shots and he mentioned to me ahead of time that he’d like to place that under CC-Attribution license.
LiveScience reports on a study which concluded that “action video games that involve firing guns can improve your eyesight”:
A group of 10 male college students who started out as non-gamers and then received 30 hours of training on first-person action video games showed a substantial increase in their ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, compared to 10 non-gamers given the same test, said Daphne Bevelier of the University of Rochester.
[…]
First-person action games helped study subjects improve their spatial resolution, meaning their ability to clearly see small, closely packed together objects, such as letters, she said. Game-playing actually changes the way our brains process visual information. […]
I think this may be just the motivation I need to play Doom 3 more often — it’s for my own good, right? ;).
It’s early March and that can only mean that it's time for SXSW, a multi-part film / music / interactive festival. I’m only going for the interactive part, myself, which focuses on design, web coding, and such. Anyhow, if you’ll be down in Austin, here’re some of the panels I’ll be going to:
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
As you might be aware, I went on vacation to South Africa in February with my family to celebrate my mom’s birthday. There’s not need to focus on numbers — or at least that’s what she would say ;) — but let’s just say that it was her 3Cth (hex) birthday. Anyhow, I’ve finished processing the photos from my trip to South Africa and I’ve posted those at Flickr.
I was also pleased to be able to make use of my new camera, a Nikon D80 that I had bought just a few weeks beforehand. I went with the 18 - 135 mm kit lens at the time and it worked out great. I’ll probably buy a faster lens at some point (this one is F3.5 - 5.6) — or maybe even one of those fancy vibration reduction lenses — but I wasn’t about to start dropping big money on accessories right after the purchase of the body & kit lens.
I was away for about two weeks and I took 110 shots. I selected about 60 of those to process and, in doing so, whittled down the list to 35. It’s not that I don’t like processing photos — once I get going, I find that it can have an almost zen-like quality — but some of them just didn’t work out for one reason or another. Most often, one of those reasons was that I ended up blowing out my highlights for one reason or another. Put another way, once you hit pure white (255, 255, 255), you’ve lost all color information for that pixel and even if the image as a whole is darkened (such as to correct exposure), that pixel can only become grayer.
For example, if you’re taking a shot from within a darkened restaurant that happens to include one of its windows, you’ll probably end up with a big ol’ block-o-white where that window would be since the camera is attempting to set its exposure based on the rest of the (darkened) scene. Or, in my case, you might be taking some shots from within a museum that happens to include a handful of skylights (to name just one example). Dangit. I guess when your colorspace has “only” 256 shades of gray, there’s not much you can do. (Maybe shooting RAW might help?)
PS I offer a tip of my hat to Scott Kelby’s book, “The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers” — though I’ve been making use of image editors for years, I hadn’t extensively used Photoshop up until I started processing these photos. The book is very down-to-earth and has screenshots every step of the way; I recommend it highly.
Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1024-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 10.2 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.