Our last partial day in Wisconsin was also the first “official” day of Winter.
Before we left, we went, with our daughter, son-in-law and grandkids, to the Adolph C. and Eugenie Mayer Bolz Conservatory, which is in the Orbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison.
It was a really interesting place and I’ll be posting more of the photos that I took there on my photo blog over time.
I posted all of the photos from the Conservatory on Flickr yesterday. Shortly after I posted, I received an invitation to add the photo on the right to a group called First Day of Winter 2007, which, of course, I did. As of right now, there are 187 pictures from many different countries around the world.
The conservatory is an interesting place to visit. Of course, I was trying to get good photos and the light is kind of tricky sometimes inside. It was a cloudy, foggy kind of day, which meant that it was darker than normal inside and I was trying to shoot without using flash. I was successful at getting a few good images, though I think I may have resorted to flash on some of them.
Of course, concentrating on the photos, I was lagging behind everyone else. Karen and our daughter talked about the weather and the suggestion was made that we leave early to avoid the storm predicted for the next day, which I had thought a little bit about, and we ended up doing: see We got FED UP and LEFT Wisconsin EARLY!
Yesterday, I downloaded Expression Web, Microsoft’s replacement for FrontPage. After getting past a few exasperating points, I was able to start doing a few things that I’ve never been able to do with any of the web page programs that I’ve ever had. A quick example is overlapping of images in a web page or in a format that I could use in a blog post. This was put together in less than 10 minutes with no typing in of code, just cut and paste, drag and drop.
Don’t get me wrong. A little bit of html knowledge was required as the pasting of images was done into the “img” tag in “code view.”
I’ve got a lot to learn before I can use it “fluently.” But it has a lot more possibilities, I think, than FrontPage and I will very probably be upgrading from FrontPage before the end of the 60 day trial period.
I had always assumed the Old Faithful got it’s name because it was faithful in it’s eruptions over a long period of time. Not so. If you’re interested, I’ve published a small narrative by one of the men involved in naming the geyser. It’s over at my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog.
I was at the blog looking for a link on the site to one of my blog posts. Except for that, I never would have come across this as I don’t normally spend any time on nuclear power related websites — no reason to any more.
There was an interesting little contest put on at the Sabrina’s Money Matters blog. Sabrina had a “Win a Gameboy Advance SP!” contest. In the end, all it took to enter the contest was a comment on her blog. The Gameboy was to be awarded after only 25 entries.
The way that she announced the winner was pretty cool.
Sabrina had a drawing that was recorded on video. She then posted it on You Tube and published the You Tube video on her blog. To find out if you won or not, you had to watch the video — and believe me, no one was giving it away. The winner — and losers — had to view the video in order to learn the results.
I think this is a cool idea that other bloggers might be able to use in some variation or another to reward their readers.
If you’re interested in learning who won, watch the video.
For some link love, — and so that almost everyone will get a little bit of something out of this — I’m posting all of the entrants and the links to their sites, where applicable.
One of the things I really like about my digital camera is the ability to shoot multiple pictures rapidly. I sometimes use this capability to “paint” or “sweep” a composite image. I sweep from side to side and up and down, capturing as many as 20 or 30 images in a short period of time, which I can later assemble using Autostitch.
This photo was a bit of serendipity. I’ve had a few composite “sweeps” where there was something or someone moving. Sometimes this results in a person or thing being stitched out of the image. Sometimes, there will be a ghost image. On my first attempt with the green VW, I ended up with this image.
To get the final result, I cropped each of the original images so that the background behind the car was unique in each cropped image. Thus, when the four images were merged, the portion of the image where the car didn’t get blended into a common background.
A larger version of the image is scheduled to be published on my photo blog on October 21st
At about noon yesterday, I went up to check the mail. All we got was a catalog from Lands’ End and some junk mail. When I got back down to the porch, I handed the mail to Karen, knowing the first thing that she would do.
Sure enough, she started paging through the catalog looking to see if there were any pictures of our granddaughter in it. You see, our granddaughter occasionally models kids clothes for Lands’ End and she’s been on a few local photo shoots in Wisconsin for a couple of other companies.
Before long, Karen tells me, “I’m not sure, but I think this little girl might be Cia. It’s kind of hard to tell looking at her from the back.”
When I saw the picture, I was pretty sure it was her, but wasn’t entirely positive.
Of course Karen had to call our daughter, Jes, to find out for sure. Except Jes didn’t know because she hadn’t gotten that catalog yet and she didn’t remember the layout that Karen described to her. Of course, the parents aren’t always on the set for the shoot, so it might be something she hadn’t seen.
We scanned in the photo from the catalog and sent it to our daughter.
Before long we got a message, “That’s my sweetie!”
That’s three different Lands’ End catalogs that Cia has been in — and this time Karen spotted it before our daughter had a chance to.
Note: Cia only does these shoots occasionally and she will only be doing them as long as she continues to enjoy it. After costs, the money is being put away for college.
I took this photo on May 12th in the Clinton Library in Little Rock. With the light background, it appeared that all I had of the fellow I was taking a picture of was a silhouette.
I was taking photos and so was this gentleman, except that I noticed that he was using film. After every shot, he would roll the film to the next position. Wit the number of photos that I’ve taken over the last several month, I certainly do not miss that — or changing the film out when I get to the end of a roll — or the expenses of the film and getting it developed.
It’s taking a bit of trial and error practice, but I am learning to be more effective with my digital image editing software. Without a darkroom, there’s no way that I could have salvaged the above picture other than as a silhouette. However, with with the software, I was able to obtain this image — without losing any of the background. That is just so cool!
Note: This article was originally published January 31, 2006 on a blog I am in the process of retiring. It harks back to the times when I worked for a living — at a nuclear power plant.
It seems just wrong.
Lots of men and a few women in the building that I work in and a lot of them are packing… guns.
The one that was the strangest is the cowboy — complete with boots, jeans, western shirt, big hat and a pistol on his hip. The last time I saw him, he was leaning up against the wall down the hall from my office.
It just seems wrong — especially where I work — unless you know why they are “packing.”
The reason it seems wrong where I work is that guns are prohibited, appropriately, for everyone but the security force, except, of course for special circumstances. It’s literally a federal offense for possession of an unauthorized weapon — and rightly so.
Of course that wasn’t a problem today. If there had been an unauthorized weapon, there was plenty of “authorities” on hand for this “federal offense,” from several different federal organizations, as well as from the state and county.
So why are there so many pistol toting folks in my building today? Well, I really don’t know the details because I’m not involved with it, but it has something to do with homeland security and an assessment and familiarization of our site’s capabilities.
There sure were a lot of folks with guns in my building today, a lot more guns than I’ve seen in a very long time.
Chronicles of the American Civil War - Words and Images of the War — I've got work to do on this one. Ihave a lot of material on an old site online, but that isn't in the kind of shape I want it to be and, when I have time, I'm moving the content to Chronicles.
At about noon yesterday, I went up to check the mail. All we got was a catalog from Lands’ End and some junk mail. When I got back down to the porch, I handed the mail to Karen, knowing the first thing that she would do.
- Published November 12, 2007
(Hardcover)
