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    Monthly Archives: April 2008

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    Ever want to go 205mph in a Corvette?

    Now you can. Ride along in the new ZR1 a test track in Germany. The ZR1 is the new $100,000 corvette made out of carbon fiber and ceramic. It has 640hp supercharged v8 in it and is truly a supercar. This car is sick.

    Leopard’s “Download” folder. Not good.

    I’m finding this folder to be a pain in my sitting place. Not all the applications use it, and I frequently am wondering where the heck my files are getting downloaded to. Also, I just realized I have a two hundred and six terrabytes of random stuff in there. I’ve changed Safari and Firefox to download to the desktop so this stuff gets managed properly. I’d delete the folder from my User folder, but Leopard won’t let me. I will, gleefully, delete the shortcut from my dock. Take that, folder. Not so hot now are ya?

    Edit: I changed the permissions on this folder to “read only”. Now nobody can save shiznit there. Powned.

    Steve Carell on cover of Wired Magazine lighting diagrams

    This article on www.wired.com caught my interest because they have some pictures of diagrams that show how the photographer, Brent Humphrys, lit Steve Carrell for the photoshoot for the cover of this month’s issue.

    Gs Carell4 F

    Portrait photography is something I’m very interested in and have been studying up on. For example I’m currently reading a fascinating book called “Light: Science and Magic: An introduction to Photographic Lighting”. I recently bought a bunch of light stands, a backdrop stand, and I have a few off camera flashes now. For now I’m doing the strobist method, but eventually I plan to buy some real studio lighting. Anyway, I love to see how these photographs are made.

    Gs Carell3 F

    Looks like he used a ring flash, a couple of grids and gobos, a soft box, and a couple of bare strobes. Nice. Seems like a complicated arrangement, but you can’t argue with the results.

    5 Steps to creating picture keywords

    Adding keywords to my photos is something I’ve been struggling with. It’s just a pain. The website www.organizePictures.com has a good article on how to do this efficiently here. I also see some other interesting articles on this organizepictures.com that might be worth reading. Keeping my pictures organized is a big struggle. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Sigh.

    If you want your head to explode, and you want to do more with keywords, go check out the website www.controlledvocabulary.com. I’ve been tempted to buy their keyword library, but at $70.00, this prices seems about twice as expensive as it should be. If you buy this library, you can import it into Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture and go from there.

    Erin Vey

    I really enjoy Erin Vey’s photography. She specializes in pets and children, especially her Great Dane, Gracie.

    Erinvey

    Entourage Sound Sets

    Microsoft Office Entourage Sound Sets is one of my pet features I added to Entourage a bazillion years ago. A sound set is basically six sounds that you can change so that when you get new mail, you can hear a duck quack or a clip from your favorite movie - “I’m in the pipe, five by five”. This feature was really fun to add, though generally I like my computers to be as quiet as possible so I don’t really use it. But today I’m working at home due to a sore back so I want Entourage to ping when I get a work email. I want a very quiet, short sound, which is why I dug this feature up again. I find the default sound to be too long and annoying.

    Here’s a nice tutorial on how to make a sound set. And here’s a website with a bunch of free sound sets on it. Very cool. Go ahead download them. Annoy your spouses and coworkers. And think of me when you do it. :-)

    Edit: I just tried one of these sound sets and Entourage doesn’t recognize it. Turns out the old sound sets aren’t compatible with Entourage 2008. You have to convert them. Here’s how. I find this to be disappointing (but I understand why they did this). I just can’t be bothered to convert over the sounds sets linked above. It would have been nice if Entourage converted them for you. To me this is a little thing that goes a long way toward pleasing users. There’s a fair amount of people who got bit by this.

    Here’s some more info on Sound Sets in Entourage 2008:

    Google Groups
    Apple Support Discussion Group
    An Entourage Blog posting
    Erik Schwiebert posts about Entourage Sound Sets on arstechnica.com
    Another long thread with people banging their heads against this

    Sigh. I’m giving up. I can’t get it to work. How sad.

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