Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

I like this photo but I don’t really know why.  I think I need to crop the right a bit.  It might also have worked a bit better if I’d been less of a wuss and gotten closer to the edge.

It will take me a couple days to get things setup and then I’ll have to turn the DNS crank. That should take another couple of days. After that we should be moved.

It was suggested that I try removing the foreground and emphasizing the clouds and shiny water. So this is a quick attempt at that. I whacked the “local contrast” action a couple of times (meant to do it once) but didn’t want to go back and redo it. Hence the 50′s B+W TV look to some of it.

As always, click the picture for a bigger version.

More TRNP. The sky is way cooler in color. The foreground is cooler in B+W.

Click the image to go to the full sized image in the gallery.

Some quick notes.  I do not think that MS’s Writer sharpens images when it resizes them.  This is irritating.  I need to look into it some more.

I’m using the veryplaintxt theme. Seems just a bit nicer than the one I was using. I’m also trying to figure out how to give the blog a cleaner look in general. I think I need to post smaller images with links to the full sized images.

This isn’t such a bad thing. For the most part I find the size I use on the site to be pretty wishy washy. Just big enough to tell that there are details you can’t really see.

I might yet go fixed size for the blog but I haven’t found one big enough yet. 470px for actual content is pretty weenie.

Just yesterday I was fighting my way through the plastic of my new Lexar Jump Drive Firefly.  (Way cool, btw.  512MB for $8 after rebate.  I have the green one pictured here.)  At one point I was managing to cut everything but the plastic.  After trying to stab the plastic and being thwarted I ended up using wire cutters to get into the plastic.  I believe these things are now made of kevlar.  This wouldn’t actually be so bad but I needed the paper contents to survive so I could file the rebate.

So I found it entertaining to read Mark Cuban’s blog entry on trying to open a Seagate 6gb pocket drive.

I sliced, I diced, i cut, i sawed. I broke the skin just enough to squeeze my fingers in hoping to pry apart the jaws of plastic that had intruded into my simple goal of helping out my wife. Unbeknownst to me, this was no passive plastic that gave up once the shield of its defenses were broken. Oh no. This was the payback plastic. The kind that wanted you to carry a reminder of the plastic battle you fought and fought.

The plastic drew first blood. My fingers went in, and I swear I heard it laugh milliseconds before it punctured me in a far more precise manor than i could ever inflict on it. Paper cut my ass. This was a plastic cut. Quick. Deep. Bloody.

Click here to read the full blog entry over at Blog Maverick.

Added a new photo.  This is WAY blown out.  And the colors are a little over the top.  (The ground is cool.  But the sky got a bit too punchy.  Even so it took all of about 4 minutes to do this.)

Now that Mickeysoft is in the blog business they have decided to come out with a WYSIWYG editor.  Seems to work.  (Well, we won’t know that until we see if this gets posted or not.

Anywho, find it here – windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com.

I forgot to put the PotW up this week.

Approaching storm at TRNP. I kind of like the way the hills sort of meander their way towards the storm.

There are details in this one I like. It is actually about 2/3rd’s the original scene. (I figured there might be something in the scene I liked so I shot it all.) Haze is the problem with this one. Very bright out and a heavy haze. Puts the color off.

Click on the foto to go to a much bigger version. (768 pixels high versus about 2700 for the original versus about 330 for this.) There is some detail around the trees. Kind of interesting. Just another attempt at learning how to do panos. Some day I hope to do one that is actually intersting. But at least I seem to have the stitching part worked out.