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What’s happening right now has to be the most awesome thunderstorm I’ve ever seen. It’s right overhead, and there is a huge amount of lightning. It’s only raining occasionally, and I’ve been outside a couple of times to try to get some photos. After a couple of hours of trying, I finally got a good one: I’ve tweaked and trimmed it a bit to make it really cool, but, even so, it’s still pretty natural. And this wasn’t even a particularly impressive strike. There have been ones that have been stacks better, but I’ve missed them. I have noticed that the camera seems to need as long after an exposure as the exposure time to process the shot. Which isn’t very good if you are working with 30 second exposures, like I was to get this shot.

Well, Summer time is here again - although the recent weather where I had Festivus was not exactly Summery. Apparently it was the coldest Christmas on record in Melbourne, and in Hamilton, it was the coldest day of the month, and the wettest. It got up to all of 14.6°C, and the minimum was 4.4°C. There was more rain (7.4mm, more than the rest of the month combined!). We spent the day in the pub, with all of my Father’s family. That was good, since my Uncle and his family are moving to Queensland in a few weeks, so this may be the last time for a while that we all get together. I took about a thousand photos, most of them of my nephew, Jack. I’m yet to find the choice few to print out, but I’ll do this in the next few days. Robe was pretty quiet up until Christmas, and then it rapidly got very busy. I was going to write more now, but it’s getting thundery, and I want to try take some lightning photos.

I’m really loving Adobe Lightroom. It’s only a beta, apparently, and there are still some features missing. I’ve only had one photo I’ve taken with the Pentax *ist D Digital SLR that has had any red-eye (I have been mainly taking outdoors photos, or working without the flash), but there is no way in Lightroom to quickly and easily remove a red-eye.

iPhoto does this reasonably well, although not excellently, and I haven’t been able to install Aperture to see how well it does it.

Lightroom kicks some serious arse, though. I’ve taken a heap of photos that are under-exposed (ie, too dark), and it works wonders with these. It can’t do that much for over-exposed images, as there really isn’t enough detail in these to work with. You can also do a whole lot of other corrections. If one part of the image is over-exposed, and the other part under-exposed, you can correct, to some extent, and end up with fairly reasonable results.

You can also fix up (or create!) lens vignetting, which is the darkening around the edges of a photo you sometimes see. There is a whole lot of flexibility regarding the stuff you can do - for instance, you can make a greyscale image, but control which tones are lighter, and which are darker, resulting in a whole lot of variables that can make a photo appear drastically different.

I’m not at my preferred machine right now, which makes doing some stuff difficult, but here are some photos that have been manipulated a bit to make them cool.

I’ve heard of BookCrossing.com - lost of people have. The idea is that you find a book somewhere, read it, and leave it somewhere else. Until tonight, however, I’d never actually come across any BookCrossing books. I suppose I could have just printed out the stuff for one of my own books, but I’ve never been one to give books away. I like keeping them. So, the book I found tonight is Tall Poppies: Successful Australian women talk to Susan Mitchell. Not exactly standard fare for what I normally read, but I’ll give it a whirl. It was first registered by crossword, in Adelaide, SA. I might have to leave it somewhere a little more exotic. Perhaps in Hamilton.

I finally had to buy some more shaving soap on the weekend. People who work with me will attest that I hadn’t shaved for about three weeks, and was looking somewhat like the wild-man. Anyway, I bought some more, at $10.95 for a tub. I thought it only cost $7.95 last time, but I might be wrong. Anyway, that was back in May, 2005. So, about $10 worth of shaving soap lasts for about a year and a half. Add to that the maybe six packets of safety razors I bought in the same time frame - another $70 tops. Compare this to buying Schick razors, at $15 for 5 (expect to buy around 18 packs in this sort of time frame), and shaving cream at $10/can (maybe 9 cans in that time?). Not only does it give a cleaner, cut-free shave, but it saves me about $200/year.

Speed test of Internode Wireless Internet, while drinking a coffee in Illy, Hyde Park:

Test run on 18/12/2006 @ 6:31 PM Mirror: Internode Test type: ADSL Your connection speed: kbps: 695.2 KB/s: 86.9 Mbps: 0.7

Courtesy of Oz Broadband Speed Test.

That’s it. The worst ‘feature’ of Adobe Lightroom is it’s keyboard shortcuts. Having keypresses that aren’t ‘modified’ (we call Cmd, Alt, etc. modifier keys), is the worst design choice they could have made.

Medallia20Blog3A20SmackBook20Pro20Archives This is cool. A way to have multiple desktops, and change between then by giving your laptop a bit of a thump.

It’s no secret I think Touch Football is the coolest sport in the world. However, a couple of sports I caught on SBS’s broadcast of the Asian Games came pretty close. The first one was Kabaddi. It’s basically chasey, which makes it cool enough. But it’s got some other cool rules, and is truly stunning to watch. Grown men ‘tagging’ one another, and then trying to escape without being pinned by them. The other was Sepaktakraw. Think of volleyball, but instead of using a large air filled ball, use a small cane one. And instead of hitting the ball with your hands, use your feet. There’s still a high net, and this one is also amazing to watch.