Canton Repository Building HDR Photo

I'm still trying to figure out this HDR photo process. Here is a shot of the front of the Canton Repository in Canton, Ohio. Howard and I drove over for a visit on Tuesday and the light was really nice when we arrived. I had my tripod in the car so I figured I'd try the process where PhotoMatrix combines multiple exposures. Maybe I'm not picking the right scenes to get the extreme effects I see on pics tagged with HDR on Flickr. On the other hand, this is about what the building looked like in real life. The other thing I think will help is a cable release because at these long shutter speeds using a high ISO, I'm sure camera shake is still happening when pushing the shutter release, even on the tripod. Stay tuned...

Rumor has it that there a gold Pulitzer medal, won for coverage of a crime scene a year earlier, embedded in the cornerstone that was placed in 1927 for the Canton Daily News, the first paper to work out of the building.

View from my office window

I went sailing today

Went sailing today, originally uploaded by sailorbill.

Took my RC Laser out for a sail today on the Erie Canal behind the house here in Fairport, NY. The water is not all the way back to normal summer height, but it has been full enough to sail this winter when there was no ice on the top. Not much wind today.

26.2 miles in London

My parents are in London so that my dad can run the London Marathon this weekened, continuing his quest to run the world's top 5 marathons.

My dad ran Boston (#5) last year, missing the rainy day there last weekend. London is (#1) this weekend. The Berlin Marathon (#2) is in September and next year, New York (#3) and Chicago (#4).

Good luck!!!

Looks like our house is selling

We've formalized a contract on our house in Birmingham, AL. The final price is significantly less than we were initially asking, but considering the current market worries and the fact that we are already half-way moved to NY and renting a townhouse for a few more months, we took the offer with few changes. To boot, it's a cash deal closing in 30 days. A doctor and a former Miss Alabama are going to move in later this summer. There will be three doctors and two Miss Alabama winners on our little cul-du-sac now.

Nice car

Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84

I was just telling Tracy that she should read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

He died last night.

I met him once. Great writer.

Thumbs-up

In my 13 years of building sites, I don't think I've ever had the time to keep an eye on details to the point where my site validated "green" according to W3C rules.

Throughout today and tomorrow we are converting 174 of our sites to version 2.0 templates in our CMS and the coding for every single page using the new templates is validates XHTML 1.0 Strict!

Great job Nick, Jonathan and Howard!

One-for-Ten Rule

I don't think I'm a messy person. In fact, there's this odd behavior where I pick up things found in the wrong place, and when I'm finished, I end up putting whatever it is back in the same wrong place.

My wife has been out of town for ten days, tending to our house that is still for sale in Birmingham, AL and visiting with her parents.

Maxine and I have been buddies in and around the house for the past week-and-a-half. We walked to Fairport several times. We went to the park several times. We climbed a small mountain in a snowstorm to go take pictures on Sunday. We've tracked in dirt, birdseed, snow and what appears to be about a half-bale of straw. As far as I can tell, we've only killed one house plant.

I've accumulated a pile of dirty clothes and two loads of dishes (surprisingly, I did not order pizza one time).

I've figured that it takes me about one day to clean up for ten days left on my own.

Hyper-local

Uncommonly individualistic.

Everyone else is doing it

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High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging

I finally bought a tripod this morning and now I have the ability to make multiple images of the same scene. This allows for experimentation with the HDR tools in Photoshop. It seems somewhat weird that my first experiment was of the Kodak building in downtown Rochester, NY which I happened to pass on the way home from the camera store.

Google Desktop for Mac (beta) download available

You can find the download link for Google Desktop for Mac on the Official Google Mac Blog: Google Desktop for Mac as of this morning. I'm a frequent user of Spotlight, but have not been totally satisfied with it and was eagerly awaiting the Leopard release for OS X to see if it improved, but for now, I'll try Google Desktop.

Carolina Tigers NC AAU baseball team site launches

I've been helping my sister and brother-in-law put together a site for my nephew's baseball team. He's #2 :)

They have photo photo slide shows and videos from the games and practices.

The site was put together using Plone, a CMS built using Zope and hosted at Interlix.

Using various permission levels, the coaches and managers can update the site (mostly without my help) and the team members can log in to participate in forums hidden from the public view.

Check it out and let me know what you think. And check back to cheer on the Carolina TIgers at carolinatigersbaseball.com!