ok, second book review for tonight (and ever), i just finished reading this book by paulo coelho that was recommended to me by my brother. it's a very famous book and story, so i'm not going to go into all the details, that's what wikipedia is for. i looked at it on wikipedia and thought i can't be stuffed, then on a particularly boring day, i decided to buy it. amazon amazingly predicted a delivery date of 4th august when i ordered it in late june, it actually arrived within a couple of weeks.

it's basically a story about a young man that wants to travel and follow his dreams. his journey takes him far from home, and he learns many things from people he meets and experiences he has with the world. there are religious connotations, but i think you can construe them however you want. it's got more to do with psychology and personal well-being than anything. i actually read some things about psychology before i read this book, and they basically said the same things regarding doing what you want and achieving what you want.

one other note i found amusing was that there is a reference to falling over seven times, and getting up eight times (that part is in his introduction of the 10th anniversary edition), which is the same slogan that d-wade had for his converse ad campaign a couple years ago, if you think about, it doesn't really make sense .

ok, so the book, it's an inspiring blah, blah, blah, seriously it's a good story, and i can certainly take away a lot of things from it, those are personal so i won't share them. now i just have to find another book, maybe i should join a book club , not. in conclusion, good book, good read, very worthwhile, and it's even pretty short at only ~170 pages.

pic stolen from amazon.

ok, first book review for tonight, my blurb book arrived, at the short end of the 7-15 business day delivery cycle i must say. alf's arrived on the long end, so there isn't much to say about that, pot luck i guess. anyway, it cost $40 bux, i got the image wrap hard cover and had 76 pages. as the old saying goes, first impressions last (i think that's a saying), i will just say that i was a little underwhelmed after removing the book from the package. the front cover appears more purpley and darker than it does on my calibrated monitor, and there are some bits of damaged (minor) plastic. the hard cover feels nice and all, but you know. one thing i noticed about alf's book, was that it really doesn't open up much, maybe i was expecting too much, but it's the same with mine, so full bleed pictures probably are only good if the inside section is not important at all, don't even bother with panoramas.

as alf noted, the pictures showed up darker than he expected in his nz book, he also has a calibrated monitor might i add. if you have images with lots of black in them, probably better not to put them in, or really lighten them up. contrast (possibly because of the photos appearing darker) seems to be a little less than i was expecting. apart from the aforementioned covers, and one over-saturated photo, colours seem fine to me. after looking through it a couple times, the quality of the prints seems pretty good to me.

so in conclusion, will i use blurb again? maybe, depending on if there are other options. regarding the photos, my advice is make sure that your photos are bright but not over-saturated, keep the amount of black (shadows) to a minimum (unless you have bright subjects), grey is fine, the right hand page seems flatter. full bleed is fine, but make sure that nothing ends in the middle, and obviously the edges. and i wouldn't bother with panoramas, nor stretching full res pictures across two pages, you'll have to crop or resize to a smaller version, the pages just aren't flat enough to look at a picture stretched across properly. at least i have a reference now (or two if you count alf's book) for future books if i go that way, and yes, i'd recommend the hard cover over the soft cover for sure, it does feel cool .

quick picture i took of the front cover, haha, the picture i took makes it looks worse than it actually is, i couldn't be bothered using the flash, or processing it properly.

si, si, haha, no more spanish for now (i promise), anyway, it's all official now, i'll be going there for several months starting from november. i've got leave approved from work, and now it's just a matter of getting my shit together i guess. visas, vaccinations, gear, etc, i don't know everything i need, but i'm sure it'll all come together by november. either way, i'll be starting in argentina, and i don't think there is anything that especially needs to be done for there. yes, it's only been just over two months since i got back form mexico, and it'll only be six months when i leave for argentina, but some things need to be done, and this needs to be done, just to clarify, i do not consider this a holiday, it's more about education, which is not to say that i won't be having fun .

i'll post more stuff as the date gets closer and i get things sorted, i do plan to update the blog with news while i'm away, so don't worry . there will be less frequent and less crap talk, but the quality should be good, that's all for now, just thought i should announce it to the world.

pic taken from the lonely planet site, this book better look after me.

that was fast, took it in on tuesday, and the guy rang me tonight and i was able to pick up the framed picture tonight. it looks good, i think pretty much anything in a nice frame like this would look pretty good. the picture is lacking a bit of contrast, my main issue being that the light rays don't seem to be as clear nearer the bottom. i just have to work out where i'm gonna put it now i guess, don't know if i really want it hanging over my bed like in the picture (which by the way, is purely to show the size, also there is still a plastic wrap around it which i need to remove). i know where i'm gonna put it when i move out (haha), just not right now.

i reckon next time i'm gonna get a slightly smaller canvas print, it'll be smaller, yes, and pricier, but they look freakin' awesome. a little off topic now, i was driving home from basketball, and all these sporty cars (read rice) were lined up on the inside lane for some reason, then when i drove past, they started driving slowly. they never really took off or anything, they were following me for a little bit, then they all just disappeared. it was like i had driven onto the set of a cheap fast and the furious knock off or something.

and finally, back to the picture, yes, it's a crap upload here (the white balance is stuffed, and it's crooked, etc), but it'll look good hanging up on the wall when i get around to it.

went and saw the much hyped new batman film, and for entertainment value, i have to say, the hype is well deserved. it's quite long at about two and a half hours, but only at the end do you really notice. it's got a bunch of stars in it, but obviously everyone talks about the late heath ledger as the joker, and once again, that is deserved as he does steal the show. he plays a psychotic crook with nothing on his mind but anarchy, and he does it well, probably the best character (in a non comedy) that i can remember (maybe the hired gun in no country is close). anyway, about the film, basically batman has cleaned up the city, and all the crooks are running scared. in steps the joker wanting to bring terror back to the streets of gotham city.

he succeeds in killing a lot of people and bringing mayhem and chaos to the people by turning them against each other. harvey two face makes a brief appearance (i haven't read this (or any) version(s) of the batman comics, but in cartoons that i've seen he is a recurring character, not this one obviously), but i didn't find that that part added tremendously to the film. it almost seemed like a bit of an add on to prolong the film a bit, and not particularly necessary. it doesn't matter though, it was a good film, and probably one that you want to get on blu-ray and watch on your true hd tv (along with most of will ferrell's films haha).

pic taken from the wikipedia site.

i took my photo into the photo lab to get it printed yesterday, and the guy said it was too dark. i tried a few different things to get the shadows up without losing the rays of light, but i just couldn't find the right compromise. so i thought maybe i'd try exporting a couple of tiffs (one underexposed, one overexposed) and see if i could get some exposure blending or tone mapping with an hdr program. i tried qtpfsgui, but i just couldn't work out how to get it working (i'm not very patient), and didn't particularly like the gui anyway. i tried using cinepaint to just brighten the shadows, but i can't work out how to save a file (and the gui is crap). so having exhausted my freeware options (i didn't look too hard), i decided to see what photomatix could do, i've never been particularly impressed with what it could do with hand held bracketed shots (probably my fault), but i did like the results in terms of colour and contrast.

i was able to get something that worked well (i thought), so i decided to get it and get rid of the watermark, hopefully this printout looks good, it's getting to be a pretty expensive poster . i'll post a picture of it once it's done, all framed and everything. but i think it's not a bad investment, now i have the ability to really fix up under or over exposed pictures without working too hard or throwing away the picture. i'm not going to go back and fix all my other stuffed up pictures now though .

picture taken from the hdrsoft web site.

i didn't notice it at first, just thought it was a bruised finger, then after the game i was looking at my left pinky and it was sorta bent out of shape. the other guys said it looked dislocated, it didn't really hurt, just a bit numb. so i looked on the net, and they all say check it out at the doctor, so i did. they did x-rays but the doctor said it looked normal, so probably just some kind of tendon thing or something. it's pretty annoying, cos the doctor wrapped it up (not even tightly) and said don't get it wet, and check it again on saturday, hopefully it's straightened out by then, and i don't need to do anything else. damn, i was gonna be like kobe, it's probably better that it's nothing serious. oh and btw, we lost the game .

that's it, i've uploaded them all, only took a couple months. now i start posting to flickr (only a select few), and panoramio (i've already done but i'll have a kmz file for google earth soon), but i can start posting links around the place to try and bump up my visit records. i've got my blurb book (which i think i stuffed up) coming (sometime in the next year ) and i'll try to get my poster print this week. i'll definitely post a picture of that when i've got it.

picture i took playing with the wireless flash and the aperture ring on my fa50, where is the focus?.

ok, so i've had it for a bit more than two months now, and finally post something substantial about it. i definitely like it a lot more than all the windows systems that i have to use, the file system is a million times better, and it does just seem to look and feel better. another good thing is that the os is based on unix, so it means i get to improve my command line skills as i go. software wise (with a couple exceptions), everything just feels better.

my gripes on the software side are a bit grey, first, eclipse seems to crash a bit, and also behave in a strange way when editing files sometimes, but that's more of an eclipse issue. the application menus can be a bit of a bother, for example with firefox, they don't have control over that, so middle and right clicks don't work properly. spotlight is very cool (i haven't tried quiksilver, don't see a need at the moment), as long as i can remember to use it. the other thing is that a lot of the free/open source apps that are available for windows aren't for mac, there are usually alternatives, but they're not always as good (or take a bit of time to get used to). my one real gripe has been installing php, partly because it's a 64bit system, partly because it's a mac, i still haven't been able to get it working the way i want. it means i have to have apache compile as a 64bit binary, mysql as a 64bit binary, php as a 64bit binary (or all as 32bit binaries). so far, i just haven't been able to crack the code to get it up and running, i'll get around to it eventually.

on the hardware side, just one minor quibble (and it may be because i haven't set it up properly), mouse actions (mostly in firefox) aren't quite the same as windows, i've got a fancy mouse with lots of buttons but half of them do the same thing.

on the plus side, it's got a lot better hardware than anything else i'm using at the moment (2.4ghz dual core intel, 4gb ram (installed myself)) which is good because some of the photo processing i'm doing definitely needs all that power, and the os can actually utilise all that ram, and other software will be able to as long as it is 64bit. it's dead quiet (except if playing a dvd), all passively cooled so i can leave it running over night next to me. i'll have to wait a while before i can see how it handles the hot weather of melbourne. i've never really tried running it in the most efficient mode possible, but it gets about three hours (non stop) running off the battery, doing some intensive stuff, like photo processing playing mp3's etc.

the wireless network was ridiculously easy, it detected the network when i started it for the first time, but one glitch, it does seem to hang a bit when the connection drops out (which is my netgear router's fault, not getting one of them again).

i've got a dual monitor setup with a 22" monitor to take care of all the multimedia stuff, but the 13.3" (1280x800) glossy monitor is very usable, but with a big monitor things are a lot easier. so in conclusion, i'm very happy with the macbook, and it will make a very useful companion when travelling i think, as well as being very capable on the desktop. so it's not as upgradeable as a pc (hardware wise), that's all right, i'm sure when the time comes, i'll be able to upgrade, and/or setup an additional server pc.

pic stolen from the apple site.

so i decided to get this monitor calibration device from datacolor, the spyder2 express, which is the bottom of the line model. basically you look at the back of the box, and everything is no, while the next model up has half yes, and the top of the line is all yes. anyway, i don't need anything fancy, i just want to make sure that the photos i want to print will look all right. it's a funny little thing (sensor) that you put over the monitor, then run the software which goes through a bunch of colour options to calibrate the monitor. i hope i did it right, i turned all the lights off, and let it go for about ten minutes.

my wallpapers look better, less of a green tint (when comparing the colour profiles) compared to the profile i did by squinting . too bad the cheapo version doesn't work with multiple monitors, so my macbook still has to use my squinty profile, but i'll get over it. all my pictures look pretty good, so that's a good thing, my squinty calibration isn't so bad, but obviously it's not good for the eyes.

of course i got it from adorama, cheaper and probably faster than ordering from australia. although i'm still confused by ups' shipping, it always says that it arrives in vic, then the next part says it's in sydney, then it says it's in victoria again, before it arrives. anyways, here's to having better colours in my pictures in the future, also i'll be getting my blurb book as soon as i've seen alf's one, and also getting my poster print in the next week or so too, so i'll post about those too (and some other stuff that i have been putting off).

pic taken from the datacolor web site.