And I’m a photography addict. I’m getting to the point that I feel antsy if I don’t shoot almost every day. The problem is I’m running out of things to shoot. I dislike shooting people and I’ve photographed every flower, bird, and animal in the area.
Every April my .Mac account comes do and every year I try like mad to find a way not to have to resubscribe. .Mac is Apple’s service that offers email, web space, remote storage, remote desktop, and calendar, todo, address book, mail syncing between Macs. Syncing is the only part I really use and it’s indispensable. The question I struggle with every year is if it’s $79 indispensable (through Amazon, $99 from Apple). On one hand that’s a real chunk of change to just sync. On the other hand I have yet to find something that works as painlessly. Rsyc gets confused by binary files and manually trying to merge the files is a quick path to a drinking problem. I’m still looking for a solution but I get the feeling that I’ll once again be gritting my teeth and rolling pennies to re-up again this year.
On Wednesday Dani and I went to go see Jonathan Coulton at World Cafe Live in Philly. I had never been to that venue before but it was nice. It’s big enough that it feels like a concert and not just a bar gig but small enough that it feels intimate. My only gripe about the place is that the food is over priced but that’s par for course.
I had never heard of the opening band, Paul and Storm, but they were good and funny. Dani and I have both become fans. One member, Paul, is a local boy so I hope to be able to catch more of their shows.
Jonathan was great, as expected. The set list can be found here. One of the best parts was when we caused him to lose it during Still Alive by waving our cell phones (I’m one of the amorphous blobs on the lower middle of that vid). My only regret is that I didn’t bring a real camera. The tickets said no cameras but I think we were the only ones to actually listen to it. I did get a picture of Jonathan and I after the show with my BlackBerry but it is painfully bad. Next time I’m at least bringing a pocket point and shoot. Jonathan really is a nice guy and I was honored to have had a chance to shake his hand, get his autograph, and that picture. I hope he comes back to Philly soon.
Thanks to my brother I now have a polarizing filter. I haven’t had a chance to play with it but I plan to very soon
My girlfriend and I were driving along this evening when we saw a vulture feeding on the side of the road. I have never seen one in real life and wanted to take some pictures of it so I pulled over as soon as I could safely, threw the car in park, and reached for my camera. I always take my camera with me because you never know if you’ll see something you want to shoot. I pulled out my camera and went to put a fresh memory card in when, hmm, isn’t the camera a little light? Yea, I had my camera, a couple of memory cards, even my tripod but forgot all my batteries sitting nice and charged in the charger. I wanted to offer myself to the vulture as a meal because I am obviously too stupid to live.
Lesson learned: Always, ALWAYS triple check that you have in fact brought your batteries. Just so this never can happen again I’m going to keep a set of plain old alkaline batteries (which hold a charge much longer than rechargeables) in my camera bag
I just haven’t had much to say as of late and what little I have had has been said on Jaiku. I do have a few things that could turn into posts bouncing around in the back of my mind. I just need to try to turn them into something postable.
Ars Technica has posted a great, easy to understand article on filesystems today.
As you can see by the badge on the right I use Jaiku. It’s a microblogging service, which means that you can post your thoughts in 140 character bits. There are other services like it, such as Twitter and Pownce, but I like Jaiku most because it has the best community.
That being said there are some things that are really starting to piss me off with Jaiku:
Don’t get me wrong. I love Jaiku and am not about to jump ship but these problems are starting to get on my nerves.
Some day I’ll create a page with details for all the systems. Until then this will do
Someone on Jaiku asked why people blog. Before he asked I never really thought about why I do it. I know others do it to talk about their passions (computers, politics, religion, etc) but for my blog doesn’t have a theme like that. This blog mainly exists so I have a place to ramble, to put my thoughts down somewhere and allow my friends to keep up to date on my goings on. Some would say that a blog like this is all about ego-stroking, and I guess at one level that’s fair, but in truth I really don’t care if anyone reads this. My friends and the public in general are welcome to read what I write but it matters little to me if I get one hit a month or a thousand. That being said anyone reading this is welcome to stick around.
