The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • 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:

  • 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!

  • Video clip: I shall feed myself!

    http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type%3Dhd%2Cvideo_uid%3D069cd7b91710e58f

  • To the person…

    that I promised a new photo of David.  Here you go 😉

  • Now that’s a meal

    Tonight we were running a little behind so we skimped on dinner so that we could get David in bed on time. What did I end up eating, you ask? Only one heck of a combination:

    Why, a Fluffernutter sandwich complemented with a Fat Tire Amber Ale!

    + = MMMMM!

  • You’ve received a greeting ecard

    Has anyone received this email, over and over and over lately?

    On normal days, I just delete. But since today is my birthday, I thought I’d download that innocent looking e-card.exe and see just what kind of cool birthday card greetingcard.org sent me.

    (more…)

  • Birthday and a Cozy Dog

    Today is my 29th birthday, so for lunch we headed out somewhere I had never been and Ana has only been once.  The Cozy Dog!

    That’s right, we have both lived in Springfield for a long time – heck I lived within a mile of the place growing up – but I’ve just never eaten there before.  I had a Cozy Dog and a chili-cheese dog and must say, they were pretty delicious.

  • Lightroom 2 and NVidia Performance

    I’ve run into some problems with Lightroom being extremely slow when using the new localized adjustment brush – a great new feature in 2.0.  After a few strokes with the brush, it would become very slow and unresponsive.

    This morning I looked around on the Adobe forums and found some people saying they had some luck adjusting their NVidia 3D settings.  So I gave it a shot, and so far seems to have cleared things up.  Here’s what I did.

    Open up the NVidia Control Panel and set move the Image Settings slider from Quality to Performance.  This will change global performance, so we won’t leave it here.  This is just so we can write down what settings get set when it’s in Performance mode (versus Quality).  Note on the screenshot, the slider should be all the way to the left – apparently I took the screenshot before the UI updated all the way 🙂

    Now go to the Manage 3D settings and take note of the settings that it applied.  Here are mine:

    Go back to the slider and put it back to Quality.  Then come back to the Manage 3D settings, but this time sleect the Program Settings tab.  Here’s where we’re going to tell the NVidia driver to use special (non-Quality) settings for just Lightroom.exe.  Click Add, locate Lightroom.exe, then set the individual settings to what you took note of earlier:

    Click Apply and you’re good to go.  Fire up Lightroom and see if you notice an improvement.  I noticed the adjustment brush felt very responsive, but the overall Lightroom UI seemed a little more sluggish.  This went away when I re-Enabled Triple Buffering (one of the last options in the window above).  So far, it seems to be running much smoother.

    Your mileage may vary, of course, but I hope this helps.

  • This post is brought to you by the letter Z

    Last weekend Ana finished up painting and decorating a bathroom for David, so he has graduated from the baby tub into the real thing.

    This was from the first time, complete with spongy alphanumeric characters he used to encode some messages on the tub wall.  He liked Z.  Alot.

  • An evening in Fast Forward

    I’m still feeling my way though some of this video stuff, here’s one I put together tonight.  I think the aspect ratio is off a tad… and it’s bugging me.  Anyway, enjoy!

    http://www.motionbox.com/external/hd_player/type%3Dsd%2Cvideo_uid%3D069cdcb41f12e98f

    Update: Re-encoded the video, now the aspect ratio is correct.  Woo!