Why not 3.4 to 5.7?

I'm actually liking the RTM version of Windows 7 for my VM at work. Of course, it wouldn't be a Microsoft product without a few head-scratching moments...

An Exercise in Contrasts

via Facebook:

A Match Made in Heaven*

*actually, quite a bit south of "Heaven."

Best error screen EVER.

When trying to jailbreak my 3.0 iPhone:

I think it's a hybrid.

8 total "Hybrid" badges:

"In order to work, it requires Internet Explorer >= 6 to be in "standards-compliant" mode (know your oxymorons);"

Tag Soup

It's almost time!

37 weeks as of Sunday, and she's already 6 lb, 10 oz...

When someone impugns the integrity of your mother, you don’t say “Hey! My mother does not swim out after troop ships!” No, you impugn the integrity of their sister.

The Macalope

Photographer's Math

Meghan and John's engagement pictures

I shot some engagement pictures for friends at work recently. I've done engagement pictures before, but I've been getting into off-camera flash, and this was my first real attempt at mixed lighting. I have to say I'm pretty happy with the results.

After one of Katie's and my last Barnes and Noble dates, I ended up with a copy of Advanced Digital Black & White Photography, and I played with some more, well, advanced digital black and white photography.

And whenever I do shoots like this, I always end up with a picture that I didn't even notice when I shot it but it turns out to be one of my favorites. Here's that one:

And now, the part where I opine about photography: Maybe it's just me, but I find 'posing' any more than a few generic suggestions and asking for 'big smiles' just doesn't do it for me. The fun of engagement pictures (and really, wedding pictures too) is in the actual real happiness of two people, not the coordinating-but-not-matching outfits and the pretty locations and the 17 compositional rules you're supposed to follow or not follow or creatively break. That's why I love bringing Katie along when I do these sorts of things. She's so in tune with people that she's able to foster those real connections that make the pictures much more interesting. (Plus, she holds my diffuser for me!)

I got plenty of well-composed, accurately-exposed pictures of Meghan and John smiling at the camera like everyone assumes they're supposed to. But the pictures I always gravitate to—the ones that make me stop and smile as I speed past them in Aperture—are the ones I take right after the couple thinks they're done with a particular 'pose' and they let their 'I'm being photographed' guard down.

Yard Day 4: The End of The Beginning

The future of my lawn. Ain't it pretty?

We were too exhausted to plant the seed on Friday, so we put it off until Saturday morning. That pretty much left us with spreading the seed (and fertilizer),

raking one last time to get a bit of soil on the seeds, rolling the entire thing with a crazy water tank roller thing (pictured here),

watering the entire thing by hand,

and cleaning up the sidewalk and driveway.

Next up: Watering the whole thing, by hand, twice a day for at least the next two weeks. It's important to keep the seed bed moist, but not soaked, and evenly irrigated across the entire surface. That means hand watering and it means a lot of it.

Yard Day 3: Backbreaking Labor

Day 3 was dominated by raking, raking, raking. We bagged up about 20 lawn bags full of dirt and dead grass, and it hurt a lot.

Just so the day wasn't totally lame, we did go ahead and line the flowerbed border with bricks and drop in some new mulch. It at least gave us something to look at and be proud of. Here's pre-mulch:

And post-mulch:

Tomorrow: The thrilling not-really-conclusion.

Yard Day 2: Leave No Stone Unturned

We didn't.

Man, did we tear up some stuff. Click through to see the sordid details.

Yard Day 1: Not much to see yet.

I began the much-anticipated yard renovation in earnest today, although the work had really started two weeks ago. Beginning the day before Earth Day, I applied a total of about two and a half coats of Roundup to the yard. Roundup is a glyphosate herbicide, which is 'non-selective'—meaning it's napalm for plants. Here's what my yard looked like after the damage was done:

More after the jump.

The times, they are a-changin'

Soon, this will be an all-too-common sight.

We're in the process of getting the nursery ready, and part of that involves washing EVERYTHING. Katie's kicking butt at laundry so far!

Egypt: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

GENEVA - The World Health Organization announced Thursday it will would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. The policy shift came a day after Egypt began slaughtering thousands of pigs in a misguided effort to prevent swine flu.

AP article

P.S. I felt weird tagging this "lol," but I didn't exactly know what else to do.

The Origin of Swine Flu

I originally got this in an email from Gerardo, but I'm morally opposed to forwards—and besides, that's exactly what blogs are for!

[source unknown]

courtesy of xkcd

No Turning Back Now

It's go time.

  

This is about what the yard looked like when we moved into the house a little over a year ago. occasional patches of St. Augustine grass scattered amongst large patches of thick, dead thatch. Weeds everywhere. Occasional dirt patches. More dead grass. And more weeds. Most of it looked like this:

I tried to do what watering I could that first summer, but we spent a solid half of it out of town while the Austin area was going through a pretty severe drought. And with no sprinkler system, my yard didn't get nearly as much water as it needed.

So why "no turning back?" About two hours ago, I put about 5 (diluted) gallons of RoundUp on the yard. And only 18-ish hours before Earth Day! Most of our yard will be completely dead in the next 12 hours or so, and all of it should be dead in 3 or 4 days.

Two weeks from tomorrow I'm going to renovate the entire front yard. That includes fixing and bordering our flower beds, which currently look like this:

As well as re-mulching and bordering our two trees, one of which currently looks like this:

Needless to say, I'll have my work cut out for me—but the result will (hopefully) be a sexy Bermudagrass lawn that's a lot more drought tolerant and a lot less dead. I'll post updates as I do interesting stuff. Wish me luck and stay tuned!

YES! thank u. as a fellow writer who doesn't really write, i notice that kind of thing. i also notice that he's unintentionally (it seems) grammatically incorrect and it bugs me.

Anonymous commenter on a blog I won't call out by name

A Wolf Loves Pork

Absolutely amazing kind-of-stop-motion video. Definitely worth your four minutes.

A Wolf Loves Pork, courtesy of Laughing Squid

For many people, even if Apple's prices are high, they're preferable to a typical Vista-based PC for reasons similar to why it's better to live in overly taxed Europe than under-taxed Africa.

MikeRT, Slashdot

Mandy's son Peyton

We visited a bunch of old high school friends over Easter break, and we got to meet Mandy's 2-month-old son, Peyton. There's a gallery of his photos here.

Too cool not to share

We got back from DC almost a week ago, but I'm just now getting around to culling through my 500 or so pictures. I'll have a full gallery and whatnot up in a few days, but I stumbled across one I had to share. I wasn't blown away when I took this picture, but when I got back to the computer, the expression and angle on the lead soldier's face just seemed to fall into place. A quick trip through Aperture and Silver Efex Pro, and this is what I came up with:

Worth a (re)post

Some of you may have already seen this picture, but I just rediscovered it and wanted to share again.

My youngest brother Brent was but a high schooler in 2005, when Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of The Sith was released. He and a bunch of his nerdier friends decided, as Star Wars nerds are wont to do, to go to the premiere in costume. He's the second character from the left in this picture; can you guess who he is?

If you guessed "George Lucas, the director of the movie," you're correct. That's him "directing a scene" with his friends. He said he even signed a few autographs at the theater.

Congratulations, little brother; you've managed to out-nerd the nerds. Now that's Jedi.

Annals of Great Software Design: Lotus Notes

I've long been a fan of Lotus Notes for its user-friendly, functional UI design. One important concept in designing a great UI is to keep it as simple as possible. Here's an example from the latest version of Notes for the Mac:

Click it to make it big so you can fully appreciate the design aesthetic.

I appreciate the gigantic-ness of the dialog box itself, obscuring almost all of my desktop and encouraging me to focus on my meeting response. The tiny-by-comparison text area keeps the text relatively narrow and easier to read. The Text Properties button follows along as you type, ensuring that your ability to change text properties is literally at your fingertips. Of course, the ability WOULD be there—if the button actually did anything when you clicked it.

24: Mad Libs

I'm a big fan of 24; well, I have been for a long time, but this season is... iffy. As someone who works quite a bit with technology, I'm usually willing to let the occasional technological TV nonsense-speak slide for the sake of entertainment. I spent several seasons of 24 happily letting everyone 'send info to everyone's screens,' which, although it made no real sense, was inconsequential enough that it was OK. But this season's plot is centered around technological nonsense. Exhibit A, my favorite short blurb of techno-babble so far:

In case you didn't get that, the quote was:

We're going to have to tie the main servers together. I need an AVI motherboard but you're going to have to reconfigure it for a macro uplink.

I just couldn't let that one slide. It's like they just combined random words that are mostly from the area of interest to the conversation. To try and translate that into another vernacular:

We're going to have to marinate the carburetor. I need some V8 tires but you're going to have to retread them for a stick-shift lug nut.

If you come up with a good one, leave a note in the comments.

This is exactly what I was doing last night as I was blogging.

Like I've said before, this comic gets me.

Stars on Tanks

OK, last post for the night, I promise.

While out at Yuma for work recently, I came across their display of Army equipment that had been tested at Yuma Proving Grounds. Some of the tanks were WWII- or Vietnam-era equipment that saw battle. These pictures are battle-worn stars from those tanks on the front lines. They are sized to be used as wallpapers on widescreen monitors—if you want 4:3, let me know and I'll see if I can recrop them.

P.S. Thank a vet today (or tomorrow).

The Bailey Family

I was looking through some pictures from Christmas (finally processing them) and found one of my favorite things: an unexpectedly interesting picture that I forgot about almost as soon as I took it. For as long as I can remember, grandma and grandpa have had a set of little clear plastic magnetic picture frames on the fridge—one for each of their grandkids. As they get new pictures, they simply put them in front of the old ones. There's a surprising amount of family history in small little piles on that fridge.

(P.S. In case you can't tell, I'm having a love affair with Aperture and Silver Efex Pro tonight.)

Jesse

Valentine's Flowers

Stargazer Lilies were the flower of the day at the Bailey house on Valentine's day—after a decade or so, roses get a bit repetitive! Plus, they smell GREAT. You can avoid cleaning the kitchen a lot longer when you have the overpowering scent of lilies!

And one more of Molly that's a bit blurry full-size but too cute to pass up:

Katie's looking pregnant!

In other news, I can feel the baby moving around! Here's Katie last week:

McKinney 'Falls'

Another part of our photo excursion was a trip to McKinney Falls State Park in south Austin. Unfortunuately, because of the super massive drought, the 'falls' weren't really falling, but we did find some interesting streams cutting through the rocks. Here's the whole gallery, and here are a few samples:

Downtown Austin on a cloudy morning

A few friends and I headed out early this past Saturday morning to put our cameras through their paces. Our first stop was Zilker Park in downtown Austin. The sunrise was less than spectacular, but it was a fun trip nonetheless. The whole gallery is here, and here's a link to all of my 2009 galleries so far. Here are a few of my favorites: