I hate using a flash. I hate the way it looks. I hate the harshness - the way everything washes. I hate red eye.
Of course, that's because I have no idea how to use a flash properly and as a result I've got pretty good at taking photos in extremely low light conditions.
As I posted before, there's a really cool site, Strobist, that takes all the mysticism out of using a flash and I've been catching up on my reading there.
Time to learn.
Yesterday I ordered a Nikon SB-900, along with a lightweight stand and a shoot-through umbrella. The flash was due to arrive today - we did have two UPS deliveries from Amazon, annoyingly both for my wife ;-)
I guess I'll have to wait until Friday.
I'm really looking forward to working my way through the Strobist "assignments" and improving my photo knowledge toolkit - wish me luck...
Oops.
Nice review - the car even wins over Clarkson ("the volt-head has overtaken the petrol head... yes, it is snowing in hell").
Shame about the car's reliability problems during the review.
Hot on the heals of the Xbox 360 support, Netflix watch instantly is now available on the Tivo.
This works just as well the Xbox 360 integration - some might say better as I don't have to switch the 360 on to use it...
Every night since he was born (except Wednesday, that's Pub Quiz night!), I've put Julian to bed with some reading, songs and a few other rituals.
First we read - usually he chooses the book and then I sing to him. The same songs. The same order. Always.
Then we do the rituals:
- Phony - He gets to look at photos on my iPhone.
- Blowing up - We take turns "blowing each other up" until we we pop like a ballon. it's hard to explain - you have to be there...
- Hugs.
- Love you! G'night!
Recently though, I've been wondering "when will he ask me to stop"? He loves the songs, I love singing them to him, but he's five now. I'm guessing that this bedtime ritual will stop at some point before he goes to college, but I have no idea when.
And that makes me sad.
I am so annoyed. The band that optimized my love of music during college completely and utterly sucked.
A few months ago when I found out that the Sisters were playing in Seattle I was incredibly excited. I blogged about it. My boss even decided to come along with me on my recommendation.
However, upon arriving at the venue this evening, El Corazon, I realized that the band had obviously come down a few rungs - it's one of the smallest venue I've been to, probably with a ~300 capacity.
Anyhow, I was still upbeat.
At around 9pm they came on stage.
I say "around", because I have really no idea. We were in the bar and was expecting some sort of thunderous noise when they came on.
We went into the venue proper, and it was packed with ~300 expectant fans.
All I could see was dry ice. And two silhouettes. I could vaguely make out one guy pretending to play guitar and one guy pretending to be Andrew Eldritch.
Seriously.
They were lip syncing. Just playing the CD and pretending to play along. Eldritch wasn't even competent at lip syncing. It was so obvious.
It was pitiful.
And on top of that, it wasn't even loud. I was having conversations with those around me about how much it sucked and how the band of our youth had just sucked $35 from each of us.
And how they, or rather Eldrich, had just lost us all as fans.
Most people just headed back to the bar where the bartender was on the phone to her boss explaining that they shouldn't pay the band as you'd have a better experience just listening to the CD in your car.
What a way to burn out as a band - sucking your fan base dry and subtracting 300 people from it one gig at a time.
Last night I received the update to the Xbox Dashboard - the eagerly awaited New Xbox Experience.
For those of you that have been living in a cave, along with the update comes the ability to watch Netflix Watch Instantly content - it's streamed directly to the Xbox.
To say I've been looking forward to this would be an understatement! The amount of content available is astounding, and the best bit is that it doesn't cost me a single extra penny as I'm already a subscriber to Xbox Live and Netflix.
Anyhow, last night I couldn't get it activated due to some (widely reported) problem, but it worked flawlessly this evening. The first move we watched?
My stint as a juror lasted just a day.
I arrived way too early (7am for an 8am start), as I'm completely paranoid about Seattle traffic and then headed into the Juror Room. I was the first there and got a prime spot at a desk right next to the WiFi hotspot.
At around 9am, the court clerk gave a quite humourous presentation about what we were in for during the day - apparently involving a lot of waiting around. He said that every now and again they'd call about thirty to forty people to a court room for the selection process for a trial. Most trials there are apparently quite short, he said. Two to three days max.
Anyhow, my waiting around didn't last long.
At 9:15, I was called as number 15 out of 55 people to Judge Heller's court.
So off we went - I got to sit in the Jury box! Cool.
After we all settled down, the Judge explained what was going to happen and the whole voir dire process. He them informed us that the trial (a civil trial) was likely to take about three weeks!
Erk.
He then proceeded to ask the Jurors if this would involve any hardship, where hardship is defined as "you better be having heart surgery next week" - well, he didn't quite say that, but I believe that's what he meant...
Needless to say, I didn't qualify for that exemption, but after the whole Jury selection process finished, it appeared that the defense council didn't like me too much and I was excused.
Maybe I was just a little too loud and opinionated...
It's a pity really, I would actually have liked to have served...
Bright and early in the morning, I'll be off to Seattle for Jury Service at the King County Superior Court.
I've never served on a Jury before - never in the UK and even though I've received requests before in the US, I've never been eligible as I wasn't a US citizen.
But now, of course, as freshly minted US citizen I get to serve!
This afternoon Nabila and I went down to the local USCIS office in Seattle and became American citizens.
Wow!
After eleven years in the US, seven of them as a permanent resident, I'm finally there. Theoretically I could have become a citizen two years ago as you only have to wait five years as a permanent resident before you can apply for naturalization, but I just never got around to it.
Then last October, two things occurred to me:
- We have kids who are both US (and UK) citizens.
- An election is coming and dammit, I'm voting this time.
We cut it close.
The deadline for registration is October 4th by mail or online and October 20th in person, so this evening I registered to vote and for the first time, when asked "are you a US Citizen?", I selected "YES".
The oath ceremony was pretty nice, not what you'd expect when sat in a building with the words "Department of Homeland Security" written everywhere. We watched a few short videos (which included probably the nicest video I've seen that starred George W. Bush) and accepted our certificates of naturalization.
Probably the coolest thing was that from the 109 people that were there being naturalized, they represented 44 countries.
Anyhow, once we were done, we picked up the kids and I headed back to the office where I discovered that my co-workers had decorated my desk in honour of the occasion, and our resident Photoshop guru had created this as the centerpiece:
Rock on!
The last time I was in Santa Monica visiting some colleagues at the local Google office, I stayed at the Sheraton and never got down to the waterfront.
This time is a little different. I'm staying at the Georgian and can see the pier from my hotel room.
Even more fun was that I wandered out of the hotel looking for something to eat, turned a corner and stumbled into the local British Pub: The Kings Head.
Result! I'm supping on a Kronenbourg 1664 as I write this!
Awesome.
A cover of Still Alive, the finale song by Jonathan Coulton for Valve's Portal.
Ticket bought. I am so going to this gig!
Note that I said "ticket" and not "tickets". I don't believe I know anyone locally that will join me...
Kev, fancy a visit to the states?
Chrome quite literally rocks. If you're a Windows user, please give it a try.
It's pretty snappy, but something that I find quite amusing is that ten years ago I worked on another cool and snappy browser called Chrome.
Heh.
Anyhow, I've been using it on XP at work and today tried it on Vista for the first time. On Vista, Chrome looks quite minimalist and beautiful.
And no, Robert, I didn't work on this one...
Kris Krug just kicked off Gnomedex here in Seattle with a great presentation on photography.
Read. Absorb. Enjoy.
When I was in Boulder last week, a colleague mentioned that he had a Kindle, so I got a chance to play with one - it's a lot smaller than I imagined and not as bad looking as I had expected from reading reviews.
Anyhow, I was so smitten that I ordered one there and then to be delivered on my return to Seattle the following day.
It has seriously changed how I read.
I have always have been a prolific reader, but every time I went anywhere I struggled with the decision about what books to take.
Now I just take everything.
I've loaded it up with a few new books that I've been meaning to read and a few creative commons books too, such as Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Blood, Sweat & Tea by Tom Reynolds.
In addition to books, you can email your kindle PDF files (amongst other formats), so I've sent a bunch of papers to it, including the Larrabee paper.
Highly recommended.
A few months ago, I posted a link to an article deriding the current focus on Java in schools. Here's a quote from that article:
...Computer Science (CS) education is neglecting basic skills, in particular in the areas of programming and formal methods. We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in part responsible for this decline. We examine briefly the set of programming skills that should be part of every software professional's repertoire.
An interesting read. What's more interesting (at least to me) is that I used to agree whole heartedly with it's sentiments. However, I've recently been writing a lot more code in Java than C++ and interestingly, I'm getting to like and appreciate it more - appreciate it's power, expressiveness and yes, performance.
Anyhow, today along came another article in a similar vein.
In an interview with Robert Dewar from New York University, James Maguire writes:
In essence, he said that today's Java-savvy college grad is tomorrow's pizza delivery man. Their skills are so easily outsourced that they're heading for near-term obsolescence.
Dewar stresses that he's not against Java itself. But the fact that Java is taught as the core language in so many colleges is resulting in a weak field of computer science grads, he says.
Later on, we are told:
"Furthermore, Java is mainly used in Web applications that are mostly fairly trivial," Dewar says, with his characteristic candor. "If all we do is train students to be able to do simple Web programming in Java, they won't get jobs, since those are the jobs that can be easily outsourced. What we need are software engineers who understand how to build complex systems."
Dewar obviously hasn't been out in industry very much recently. I know of quite a few very complex systems implemented in Java...
A couple of posts ago, I talked about the need for a new A/V receiver. The basic problem is that I now have a fair few input devices and two of them have HDMI outputs, whereas my TV only has one HDMI input. It'd be nice to route the video and audio signals through the same place.
Problems solved:
- Mismatch of what's being shown to what's being heard. You know the problem - you hit 'TiVo' on the universal remote and you get the TiVo coming out of the speakers and the AppleTV on the display. The Logitech remote handles that nicely with it's 'help' button, but it's still a pain.
- If you don't use the remote you've got to switch both the TV and the receiver.
- My TV only has one HDMI input which means that the TiVo is plugged into that so that I can watch HD content (HDCP being required). This means that I can't watch HD content from the iTunes Movie store as it also requires HDCP - having the receiver route the video signal solves this problem.
- I wanted outside speakers and to have different things playing inside and outside. I.e. the kids can watch Dora on the TV while we're listening to music outside courtesy of the AppleTV.
So I picked up the Denon AVR-3808CI and all my problems are solved. I also got a few bonuses into the bargain:
- TiVo and AppleTV hooked up via HDMI. Xbox360, Wii and DVD player hooked up via component and sundry audio connections.
- Outside speakers can play audio sources independently of what's playing in the living room.
- Switching inputs is a breeze.
- The unit has an ethernet port and can stream internet radio. You can also manage it via a builtin webserver. I must say though, the design of the web content served leaves a lot to be desired.
- Nice GUI. As the unit is routing the video, it overlays it's own GUI on top, such as audio levels and it's setup/management interface.
The two spare HDMI inputs are also handy, as I suppose I'm going to have to get a Blu-ray player at some point...
Overall, pretty nice. It even met with spousal approval!
I did have one problem during setup though. The multi-zone support is nice and the idea was that I could be outside and listen to music from the AppleTV. Unfortunately it took me ages to get working.
The problem was that the Denon unit wouldn't let me send audio sourced from an HDMI input (which the AppleTV is connected to) out to the second zone. I have no idea why.
To solve the problem I simply connected the units using an optical cable and had the receiver use that as the audio source for the AppleTV rather than the HDMI audio source. At that point, it would route the audio outside.
Anyhow, highly recommended.
And after setting it all up, I realised that every piece of A/V gear except for the DVD player in the living room is now on the internet - the Denon receiver, TiVo, AppleTV, Xbox360 and the Wii.
Wow.
On a related note, you might be thinking "Well, if the kids are watching the TiVo in the living room and you're sat outside supping on an adult beverage, how do you control the AppleTV, sucker? The interface for it is on the TV which is being used by the kids!"
Well, I have my iPhone. On that iPhone I have the 'Remote' application which lets me browse the content and control the operation of the AppleTV over WiFi. And I can do it whilst sat outside supping on said adult beverage!
Sweet!
