Well it has been good, Summer 2008. In honor of your passing, I’m firing up the grill for one last summer-Sunday grilling.
And with that, my favorite season of the year begins tomorrow!
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Photo Hosting
I have hosted my own photo gallery for around 7 years now and have been perfectly happy with my arrangement. I first started with a homegrown php photo album and used that for a year or two before moving to Gallery, which I have used since. In addition to using Gallery to display and share my photos, I used it as my archive of sorts – every photo was stored and backed up from there.
That changed last year when I purchased Lightroom and my Canon 30D. It quickly became the home of all of my photos and I’ve since only uploaded select ones to Gallery. Backups are all handled directly on the Lightroom catalog and managed directories, and Gallery has pretty much turned into a mess. Disk space has also become annoying as I’ve moved my Apache web server into a virtual machine.
These things, in combination with my recent purchase (rental? lease?) of a MotionBox account for videos has gotten me thinking more and more about how I want to handle pictures. Primarily I want more bandwidth, to ignore disk space concerns, prettier photo galleries, room to expand (customization, maybe even selling photos?, I don’t know yet), and a stable provider with a good history.
So I’m trying out SmugMug.com. They seem to fit the bill for all of the above, at a reasonable price. It’s a 14 day free trial, so be looking for an announcement about my Gallery being shut down and some things moved to my SmugMug account.
Stay Tuned!
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Internet Explorer 8 Beta
Late this afternoon I decided to download and install the beta of IE8. Total usage time since I’ve installed it has been maybe 5-10 minutes, and I’m going to uninstall it.
Why? I downloaded a zip file, but when it completed it was deemed corrupt. Tried 2 more times with the same result. Fired up FireFox and as expected, it downloaded just fine. I’m not going to waste time on the beta if it can’t even download a file correctly, that’s sooooo 1998.
Thanks Microsoft.
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DNG Codec for Windows Vista
Last night I came across a DNG Codec for Vista by Adobe Labs. If you’re wondering what the heck this is, it’s software that will allow you to view thumbnail previews of your .DNG (Digital Negative) photos. Pretty handy.
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Mit Romney
Anyone else notice that the Ashley Furniture commercial guy sounds like Mit Romney? If you haven’t, you will now!
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Toy box
A couple weeks ago I used Google SketchUp to layout what I wanted to do for the toy box I wanted to make for David. Saturday morning we made a quick trip to Lowes to purchase materials and decided to give it a shot.
What do you know, it’s Sunday evening and the box is sitting in the basement, essentially completed. All that remains is a piano hinge, some sanding, and I’ll hand it over to Ana for some decoration (ie. paint/staining and whatever else she seems fit).
I think I used just about every tool I have at my disposal to finish this thing, and I did so without any extra trips to the hardware store for more wood. That’s definitely a first!
Anyway, here it is. Notice the pretty cool little inset shelf for some of his books. I can’t wait to see the finished product!
Use your imagination and picture a hinge there:
Here’s the inside, sans lid:
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9 Months Old
Mr. David is 9 months old today!
Once again I transformed our family room into our little photo studio to take David’s 1st year monthly photos. Once again, it was even more difficult than last time to get him to linger in one area, happily, long enough to get captured by the camera.
See them all in Gallery, or via this PDF Slideshow.
We also had some luck actually getting a family shot!
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To the person…
that I promised a new photo of David. Here you go 😉
The Johnson Blog 