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A car powered by four ounces of water? Supposedly, this isn't a prank… and yet today is the first I've heard of it.

P.S. Hyrdogen burns (or explodes) quite easily. Remember the Hindenburg? Adding oxygen to the mix only helps, obviously, as combustion requires oxygen. Is that all that's going on here?

Simple question, simple answer:

I don't. I think it's pointless and silly. I think the name itself mocks those who "twitter" away precious time better spent getting work done, hanging out with family, or simply relaxing. But hey, I've almost never even used my IM status to convey a message other than the truth - "Went to run errands - back at 2" or "Pas ici." Occasionally I remember to set my available status in Adium to the "iTunes" status so people can see what I'm listening to at the moment.

But twitter? No thanks.

This is one of the better shots from the evening. Going back to a point-and-shoot after spending so much time with a 5D really sucks. I couldn't even keep the flash from turning on every time I turned the camera on and off, let alone control ISO and aperture. I had to take what it gave me. Two rows in front of us were a few gentlemen shooting with semi-pro gear who didn't appear to be members of the press. I'll have to inquire about the possibility of sitting there some day to take some pictures.

Of course, I was able to witness one of the greatest shots I've ever seen. The first goal of the game came off the stick of Sidney Crosby, who literally split four defenders and let loose a forehand wrister while still mostly airborne and falling down. The puck was probably going 75 MPH and caught the top far shelf cleanly. You can see video here or here. The perspective is virtually identical to the one Carey and I had in section 3W row S. Note for the future: row R is behind the little camera/handicapped pit.

Those videos were deleted but this one is up for now, and the goal we saw was #1 in the list of best NHL goals by Crosby.

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Here is my Aperture 2.0 wishlist. I've tried to limit this to features I think we could see.

• Improved performance. I still have to quit most of my apps (especially Safari) if I don't want minutes of stalling and disk-thrashing. And this is a Mac Pro with a Radeon x1900 with 5 GB RAM.
• A more widely exposed and improved API for plugins. The export capabilities have been well-used - now it's time to let Noise Ninja or other plugin makers plug in to the actual editing.
• Ability to export a raw image plus a sidecar image of some sort so that another Aperture user could see my image with the adjustments, further adjust it, etc. I've read good and bad things about DNG, so that may not be the solution.
• Better stack management. Searches and other things should more clearly have the ability to look inside stacks (or not, depending on the state of a checkbox). As such, stacks are a bit of a headache. Selecting a stack selects only the stack pick.
• A vastly improved spot/stamp/clone tool.
• Lightroom's "click/drag" adjustment capability for color saturation, hue, etc. I believe they call it the "targeted adjustment tool." Whatever it's called, steal it.
• Something like Lightroom's "sync" feature. The "lift and stamp" tool is fine and all, but sometimes I want to just apply a single change to the 10 or 20 images I've selected (this is an example of a time when selecting a stack sucks). For example, I want to adjust the sharpness of all images to 0.6. I should select them all, click an "apply to selected items" checkbox, and slide the sharpness to 0.6. Currently I have to apply the sharpness to one image, lift it, uncheck and delete several adjustments, then stamp on each image (or on a range of images).
• Multitasking, primarily in the form of background exports.
• I reserve the right to add to this list. 😀

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My own comments on Steve Jobs and education are currently under lock and key. I thought the issue of Steve's comments was a dead one, but the hits just keep on coming. The latest response (that I've bothered to read) comes from a gentleman named Dale Hill, a "34 year retired educator with a Masters Degree in Counseling." Has he been retired for 34 years? Is he 34 years old? Or is he just a 34-year veteran of education? We don't know because Dale comes off as an uneducated doof via wretched grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Normally, employing poor English in an attempt to sway someone's opinion is not an effective tactic. Doing so when talking about education just makes you look silly.

In an attempt to learn a little more about my camera the other day, I took some pictures of my yard. I didn't really have a goal in mind - just to try to take some interesting pictures in what was basically a very dead yard. It's not yet spring, of course. I constrained myself to close-up shots (with the 24-70 lens) or at least unusual angles. Most of the pictures were a little flat (it was mostly overcast), so I experimented with excessive contrast.

My favorite shot (despite the focus being a tad low on the house - ideally I wanted the hole to be on the focal plane at f/2.8) is this one, of a birdhouse we have in the back yard. The opening in the trees was nearly a perfect fit.

Others follow, with minimal commentary.

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Carey and I are attending a Penguins game tomorrow, and try as I might, I can't find the camera policy for Mellon Arena (for Penguins games) at pittsburghpenguins.com.

I called. Point and shoots are fine. No detachable lens cameras. Oh well. At least we have the point and shoot.

I eagerly awaited the arrival of Tiger Woods for the Wii. Today, using my mom's christmas present (a Gamestop gift card), I picked up my copy. Suffice to say I agree with IGN's 7.0 rating. They say:

The real question is whether or not the Wii remote perfectly simulates a golf club. The answer is no - there are still some issues, which we'll outline, but it works well enough most of the time for us to recommend Tiger Woods, especially for die-hard golf fans.

Die-hard golf fans will be among the first to appreciate a golf game, and yet, some of the pickiest, too. The thing just doesn't feel like a golf swing at all. Wii Sports, as the review says, at least offers 1:1 movement. TW does not.

Additionally, some things are just plain wrong. The manual says you can use the d-pad to adjust your putter distance, but I couldn't figure out how to adjust the distance. The tutorials didn't teach me how to spin the ball, and hooking and slicing don't seem to work as intended - I hook just about everything and can't even slice when I try. The graphics are "eh" and the game behaves like a quick port - selecting equipment (a new driver, clothing, etc.) with the Wii pointer is an exercise in frustration.

I will keep trying to play TW the way it should be played - with the Wii remote - but if all else fails, apparently you can hook up the nunchuck up and play the "traditional" way.

Carey and I are attending a Penguins game this Friday. I booked the tickets when the whole "Pens might be leaving Pittsburgh" talk started to get serious. However, I'm very happy to see that this probably won't happen: the Pens reached a 30-year agreement with state and local officials.

Fuck Ed Rendell, though. It's rare that I swear on this blog, let alone at someone, but I've done it, and he deserves it. Twice. Fuck Ed Rendell.

P.S. It takes almost three years to build an arena? Really?

My server correctly reports the time via the date command:

[11:01am root@as:~] # date
Mon Mar 12 11:01:17 EDT 2007

But this morning, a WordPress post I had set to publish at 10am did not publish until 11am. The server is set to "(GMT -05:00) EST/EDT." If I change it to EST only, date reports an hour ago (10:01).

What's up with that? Is the server to blame, or WordPress?

P.S. I posted this via ecto, and when it reloaded the article after posting it, the time on the article was changed to 10:04 despite me explicitly having set the time to the current time. Re-posting it to add this postscript has reverted the time back to 9:04!

P.P.S. <?=date('Y-m-d H:i:s');?> returns the correct time. WordPress has a daylight savings bug?

Imagine you walk into an engraving store to purchase a silver frame engraved with your name and birth date. Imagine returning a week later. The clerk pulls out ten or twelve other engraved items, all permanently engraved with your name and birth date, and tries to sell these to you at exhorbitant costs. You turn them all down, purchase your silver frame, and leave. The merchant throws all of the extra items away. After all, with your name and birth date on them, they're not worth anything to someone else.

Sound silly? Sure, until you realize that this is almost exactly how portrait studios work. JC Penney's, Sears, and dedicated portrait studios all print extra 11x14s, 8x10s, 5x7s (etc.) of various poses and with various "special effects" (you know, like sepia toning, oooooooh) and attempt to sell them to you when you come in to pick up your $19.95 package. "You could have these three extra sheets for only $35!" Never mind that you already got six sheets for $19.95 - that picture of your daughter is so cute, you've just gotta have it.

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One quick tax thing that bugs me. Despite spending about $18k for an office in 2006, only $3k (the carpeting) can be deducted immediately. The other $15k is depreciated over 39 (yes, thirty nine) years. It's "structural," so it gets depreciated. The carpeting was not.

WTF sense does that make? We paid cash, my self-employed business still made a very healthy profit, and the $15k was a true expense. Though Carey and I plan to stay in the house for 39 years, that's an awfully long time - and when you sell the house, BAM, you stop being able to depreciate the cost. Then the government taxes you on the sale of your home, including the extra value you added by doing the addition in the first place. So far as I know, you can't deduct the remaining depreciation value when you sell the house.

I'm still looking for the perfect web developer for a "part-time sweat equity" project related to photography. Some more details (click the link above for the basics):

1. I don't care about the language - PHP, Ruby on Rails - doesn't matter. If someone wants to bastardize Drupal, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, or even a forum software package for this project, I don't care so long as it works and leaves room for future development.
2. I estimate about 4-6 hours/week of work for 4-6 months. Guys who code quickly or have done similar things (i.e. have a code library) could get it done more quickly.
3. Design skills appreciated, though not necessary.
4. Developer will have between 20% and 33% (equal share) ownership of the company.
5. The primary task involves building a paid-content/membership/referral-based system which integrates with the membership piece of a forum.

I started Freshly Squeezed Software as a "sweat equity" startup. Most indie Mac software companies start this way, in fact. I believe very strongly in this project, and if your skills and interest are up to snuff, I'd like to talk to you. If you know of someone who may be interested, pass along the URL to this entry.

Best way to contact me is via AIM (see "About Me" in the sidebar).

Once I listen to a podcast, I delete it (except for the Golf Talk Podcast). I end up seeing this dialog rather frequently:

It bothers me in a few ways, but the largest reason is that a completely destructive method is the primary choice. This is not only annoying ((People know that cancel = escape and the blue button = return, but only today did I discover that hitting "m" activates the "Move to Trash" option. Prior to this discovery, "annoying" equaled "I had to use the mouse.")) but, well, just downright stupid.

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With the iTunes 7.1 update, one of my more handy AppleScripts (see the first comment) for viewing all media no longer works:

tell application "iTunes"
     set view of front browser window to library playlist 1
end tell

I'm not sure why: "view" and "browser window" and "library playlist" all still exist in the iTunes suite.