Or more importantly, holed up at home while I slog through my doctoral proposal in preparation for my preliminary exam in a couple of weeks.
So I really haven’t had much to post about, or the time to even think of posting.
When I do get a moment you might hear about:
I find it’s easier to motivate to workout when I have a goal. To this end, I signed up for the Sea Gull Century. Held this year on October 7 on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the Sea Gull has the reputation of being the flattest century in America.
Even better, the next day there’s an (optional) 40-mile ride and all-you-can-eat crab feast. I’m told lots of people simply drive to the restaurant :-).
While I did sign up for the 100 mile ride, I didn’t register for the crab-feast. I’m not sure I’m up for two drives out to the shore in one weekend, but I could be convinced. If anyone wants to join me for either day, let me know.
Kate‘s comment last week regarding content “above the fold” reminded me of my posts from last year on making an impact in less than 30 seconds and tools for more effective blogging. I realized that I hadn’t evaluated my own blogs in the intervening 18 months since I wrote those posts.
Much to my surprise, bloat had occurred on both blogs. Google and Amazon scripts plus my own CSS code had taken their toll; both sites had balloned to over 100K each. Now 100K might not sound too bad, but Google’s main page is a mere 10K and I’m not nearly as useful as Google :-).
Early last week I decided to take my own advice, so I implemented several changes to both blogs. On this blog the main change is fewer posts on the first page. I also revised the CSS to be more efficient, but you shouldn’t notice any real difference.
The photoblog had a pretty severe re-design, but for some viewers the changes will be invisible. The roll-over effect that presents more information about each photo has been changed to pure CSS, instead of the hybrid CSS/Javascript solution I had been using. While this is a really positive change and I’m happy with the leaner, meaner implementation of that feature, users of Microsoft Internet Explorer will no longer see the roll-over effect.
As it happens, the effect had been broken for some users of IE anyway (I think those who had certain Office components installed), so the loss bothers me less than it might have otherwise. Additionally, this frees me from having to support Mcrosoft’s constantly broken implementations of web standards.
Those of you still using Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf the web should really switch Mozilla Firefox, it’s standards compliant, fast, flexible, and free.
I’ve managed to get the pages cut down appreciably, and I’m going to continue streamlining as time allows. If you have any suggestions (I do plan on moving the HTML to 4.01 strict eventually) or tools you like, please let me know!
Some results from my little experiment yesterday.
Based on the web server logs we had:
87 users come in from traffic exchanges
19 Blog Clicker visitors
39 Blog Mad visitors
36 Blog Explosion visitors
Apparently, 7 users are using multiple exchanges.
In total, we had 14 comments from visitors arriving through the traffic exchanges which works out to 16%. Truthfully, I feared it would be much lower.
I managed to visit all of the visitor blogs, and left comments on most. Two people only allowed comments from Blogger users, so I couldn’t leave them a comment.
I’d like to thank everyone who participated, and I was really gratified to see that many of my (male) friends read regularly.
My old friend rasberryleaf has a long running blog over at Hot Air. But she’s a bit down after a recent car crash, and I can totally sympathize (I’ve been in too many myself). But the odd thing is that one of the last times I saw her, we were driving between a wedding and the reception and got rear-ended in her car. That time she ended up in the hospital with a neck injury, and I managed to get away just a bit sore.
But the sad part is that this time, like that older incident, it’s not her fault, but the other driver is still trying to claim it’s not theirs. Luckly the police don’t believe them this time anymore than the last.
Feel better Laura.
I’m curious about how many of the people who pass through here actually even look at the posts. So, I have a proposition: leave me a comment, include a bit about what your blog is about, and I’ll swing by your blog, read at least one post, and if I have something nice to say I’ll even leave a comment.
So, any takers?
You should use your digital camera’s raw shooting mode.
It’s a simple statement, but many don’t use raw mode while making photographs. Their primary excuse seems to be that using JPEG mode requires less space on (expensive) flash memory cards.
But the simple fact of the matter is that unless you’re shooting in raw you’re throwing away information that can let you rescue marginal photos.
When dealing with any mode besides your camera’s raw format, information that might not be visible on the LCD or even your computer screen, is thrown out to save space. Many people are fine with this, until the time comes to correct problems with their photos. When an image is too dark, too light, or has a strange color cast from indoor lighting, raw mode gives you the flexibility to use the extra information recorded when you made the photo to correct these problems. While some image editting programs do not support editing raw mode photos, the software that came with your digital camera usually does.
Here’s an example of a photo that I shot 2.5-stops too bright, and the corrected image I created from the raw mode data.
Now, some would say that one of the benefits of using a digital camera is the ability to recognize failed shots, and retake them immediately. But unfortuantely, you can’t always recreate the moment. A fleeting expression on a child’s face, the once-in-a-lifetime brush with celebrity, or even just the particular fall of light, hair, and expression on your subjects face might never come again. Once missed the decisive moment may be lost forever.
So, how many of you use raw now, and are you going to give it a try?
I apologize to anyone who had problems accessing the blog and related sites today. Heavy rains in the area knocked out our Internet connection for about 6 hours. We’re back up for now, but the rains are expected to continue, so please bear with us.
Comment spam has been on the rise lately, and I’ve been deploying anti-spam software on the blogs to counteract the recent increase in spam activity.
Akismet is a great tool, sorting out 99.8% of the comment spam I’ve received in the last couple of months with very few errors. Available as a plug-in to WordPress, and for many other systems, it has certainly reduced the burden of manually moderating every comment I receive.
But, I’ve enjoyed a couple of entirely spam-free days courtesy of WordPress Hashcash. This plug-in silently causes the visiting browser to perform a small computation that fails on some of the software used by comment spammers. I had to hack on it a little to force it to work on the photoblog, but otherwise it’s a great tool. I’m currently running Hashcash with Akismet still lurking in the shadows as backup.
I’m sure that spammers will eventually catch on; but minimally, Hashcash is going to slow them down. And, for the time being, I’m seeing zero comment spam!
Give Akismet and Hashcash a try, and let me know what you think.
This is the operating system I chose to install on the Shuttle XPC.
(Click to enlarge)
And here’s one of the entire rig.
(Click to enlarge)
With the correct tools from the Web, the entire process was pretty much point-and-click. Sound, video (Quartz Extreme and Core Image), and Rosetta were all working immediately; overall this wasn’t much worse than installing on any previous Mac.
There have been a few glitches:
It was difficult tracking down the right stuff on the Net, even though I already owned licenses and had installation media for Mac OS X 10.4. If you’re interested in duplicating my results check out the OSx86 Project.
You can find some notes on what I did to make my system work on this tech notes page.
Let me know what you think 😉