Photography
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Sunday, December 16th, 2007
This has been quite the productive and exciting weekend: I’ve seen Alissa’s play again (this time with Jesse and Brenda), taken interesting makeup photos with Jessie (see above), learned bucket loads about SQL, and released an early alpha of Traskpro.
I’m feeling surprisingly good given that I didn’t have much downtime this weekend. Having a personal project like Traskpro has re-energized me. I’d forgotten how fun coding can be - particularly with tons of small rewarding features to work on. I feel like I’m using agile with a 2 hour sprint!
Traskpro is finally feature-complete enough to stand up to day to day use. I still have a TON of work left to do on it, but that can happen over the next few weeks. Go in and check it out - updates from now on will be pretty much transparent to the users. The temporary production location is at Traskpro.com - I’ll be getting a more official URL for it shortly.
Update: Changed the URL above to the actual production URL. No more temporary URL’s for me baby!
Photosnobbery
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007I saw this and it made me smile.
Via Photododo
72 hours
Monday, October 8th, 2007
A lot can happen in 72 hours. Since Friday night I’ve:
- Attended HUMP, the local amateur porn festival
- Cleaned my condo (with some help from the dynamic duo)
- Wished my friend Elliot a Happy Birthday at Tutta Bella (v. delicious Pizza btw)
- Continued the process of falling in love with Google all over again - playing a lot with Gmail and Google Applications for Domains
- Watched the Matrix trilogy on HD-DVD
- Quit smoking (again)
- Discovered $2,500+ in damage to my A6 done by some asshat trying to park an SUV, apparently on my front bumper
Busy weekend - I need a few more days to finish it up!
Skitch: reviewed recursively
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Shortly after putting the finishing touches on my glowing review of Skitch for Gear Live I was fooling around and created this meta-skitch recursive image. Oh the idle joy’s of modern computing! Seriously though - check out the Skitch review, it’s one of those apps that you likely haven’t heard of yet won’t be able to live without once you try it. If you want a beta invite follow the instructions on the review for an opportunity to win one from me. You might also want to check out the Skitch website or my expose-screengrab experiment with Skitch.
“meta-skitch” by sparktography
iPhone reviews, studies, and commentary of the day
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
I just posted a couple of great articles to Gear Live on the Apple iPhone. First up is a bit of commentary and a link to the usability study performed by Computerworld which pits Apple’s iPhone, the HTC Touch, and the Nokia N95 against each other in a usability battle royale. Obviously the iPhone scores high marks, but there are some other interesting insights to be garnered from the review relating to how it differs from it’s main competitors in the touch-based phone world.
Next up I posted my in-depth review of the Vaja iVolution Top SP Holster case (featured in the image above) which is my current favorite iPhone accessory. It’s both stylish and protective - a great combination for a sexy device like the iPhone. You can check out the full review here.
“Vaja iVolution Top SP Holster for the iPhone” by sparktography
Skitch: 5 minutes in
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
The geniuses over at Plasq have created another application, and while it hasn’t won any awards yet (it’s still in beta) but it’s certain to do so shortly. Skitch allows you to show the world something on your Mac effortlessly rather than try tell them about it in writing or sending massive and unmanageable screenshots. I’m 5 minutes into my experimentation with it and I already can tell this is one of the coolest applications I’ve played with in a while. It makes image capture and annotation a breeze, and does it all with a highly polished elegance.
Skitch allows you to capture screenshots, windows, webcam images, and all sorts of other media into its editing window. Once you have a base image it’s easy to annotate and edit the image with text, handwriting, or other shapes then one click saves it up to the Skitch site on the web for easy sharing. If you don’t want to go the upload route it’s easy to drag your creation into any other application on your mac, or just save the finished file to disk.
I’ll be writing a much more in-depth review on Gear Live over the next couple of days so stay tuned and check my Gear Live posts for more info on this delicious little software treat.
UPDATE:As amazing as the Skitch application is that’s not everything Plasq is throwing on the table with Skitch. Now that I’ve spent a few more minutes with it the service side of Skitch is starting to shine. The ability to save and upload one of your creations (skitches?) to the Skitch service with a single click is wonderfully simple and well implemented. Once the upload is complete you are taken to a webpage for that creation where you can share it with friends as simply as pasting a link into an IM, e-mail, or forum and you can instantly share what you just created. Check out the Skitch page for the photo above.
Akiva and Shae get hitched!
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Yesterday brought the marriage of Akiva and Shae in a beautiful ceremony. Attending was an interesting experience for me as this is the first Jewish wedding I’ve ever attended. While I didn’t directly understand any of the Hebrew prayers or blessings it was still fun to observe. I was very touched by how emotional Akiva got - he was shaking during the ceremony, and you could tell it really was a bit overwhelming for him.
The photo above is my favorite couples shot. I also really liked this shot of Eric, my capture of Shawna’s back, and this trippy twin-like shot of Troy. For all photos from the wedding check out my Flickr set of their wedding, or check out their Flickr wedding pool where hopefully other guests will also post some of their photos.
Congrats guys - myself and all your friends are wishing you the brightest of futures and the best of lives together!
A triptych of iPhone wallpapers
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
I did a little work on some old photos tonight to work them up as Apple iPhone wallpapers. I ended up selecting two of them as my favorites, and am posting them here as a triptych with sunlit frond which I posted about two weeks ago. They were all selected for their central composition, and color pallets to go with the frosted grey and blue popups that appear on the homescreen. All three of them have been resized to 320×480 pixels from the original version and I adjusted the colors to look their best on the iPhone screen.
To set one of these as your iPhone’s wallpaper click the thumbnail above, then save the origional version from the pop-up to your hard drive. Save it to the location your iPhone syncs photos from (the folder of your choice on Windows or a Mac, or into iPhoto on Macs) and sync it to your iPhone. Once it’s there you can select it by clicking on Settings then Wallpaper to get to your photo library then selecting the photo of your choice.
“Chain link iPhone wallpaper” by sparktography
“Sunlit frond iPhone wallpaper” by sparktography
“Contrail to God iPhone wallpaper” by sparktography
Many things are happening
Sunday, September 16th, 2007
Further experimentation with my 20mm lens. This lens makes it much easier to work with reflections than the lensbaby did. I’m going to have to try this shot again at a higher fstop to make both the primary subject and the reflection be in sharp focus, but for now I’m really happy with the hypnotic effect. Image inspired by Myla Kent.
The long weekend is at an end - I wish I could take tomorrow off as well, but when work calls I unfortunately must answer. Hopefully I’ll be able to take another long weekend soon enough.
“Many things are happening” by sparktography
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