This reveals more about my stereotypes than anything else, but I was extremely shocked to find out that the lead singer from The Offspring (yeah, the Pretty Fly for a White Guy band) is a molecular biologist. He’s working on helping to kick AIDS in the butt. Who would have thought?

If you’re taking concert photos professionally, you will get access to the pit area and will be able to photograph there for the first three songs. Put your camera into manual mode and, depending on the lighting, manual focus and try to get original and heartfelt shots. This blog post is for the rest of us.

First of all, unfortunately, you probably (MOST LIKELY) won’t be able to take your SLR and the lenses you’d need to properly photograph the event. The reason the photographers get to take photos for only the first three songs is to make sure they don’t disturb the people behind them so they aren’t going to take kindly to an amateur ruining things for others. At best you can bring in a premium point and shoot like the Canon S110 or G15. At worst you’ll be using your cell phone. The most important thing to know is that you need to turn off your flash and pump up your ISO. Anyone more than a couple rows back does not have a flash powerful enough to reach the stage and all you’ll be doing is lighting up the heads of the people in front of you.

[caption id=“attachment_6722” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Cooking[/caption]

Back in May I came across an article on Boing Boing Titled " You Don’t Have a Moral Obligation to Cook":

I have found myself frustrated with Michael Pollan lately. In the course of promoting his new book about cooking, he’s taken to spouting some opinions that I’ll frankly call claptrap. He’s mocked women who felt trapped by the kitchen drudgery that they got stuck with simply because they owned a vagina. He’s implied that it’s easy (if you’re not lazy) for everyone to make every meal an ideologically sound slow-food meal. In general, he’s disparaged the very idea that some people don’t like to cook.

A few months ago Lifehacker had people post images of their Smart Playlists. So I decided to share some of my Dynamic Playlists from Amarok so that others could see the syntax needed for various types of playlists.

When I really got into animation a few years ago, I started appreciating a lot of the aspects of animation that people don’t even realize took work. For example, in a live action movie the set designers can go buy chairs and lamps and lights. Everything in an animated work has to be created from scratch. Although Disney feature films tend to put a lot of emphasis on the voice actors, most TV cartoons are voiced by people who only we animation geeks know. Giant Bomb brought video game voice acting to my attention with their discussions over the last three years or so about how Nolan North is in so many video games that they were able to have an entire Game of the Year section called The Northies in which they decide which of his roles was best acted. (Unfortunately, the joke wore thin and it won’t be there this year.) Giant Bomb was at it again in this clip in which they consider baby/kids toy voice acting. ( at the time I’m writing this, there’s a bug that doesn’t show the play button. Click left of the left-most numbers)

“I could run China”

-Co-worker

[caption id=“attachment_7124” align=“aligncenter” width=“604”] Civilization V game against Dave - 3760[/caption]

I had my KVM set to the wrong computer so I accidentally fortified my warrior on the first turn. I didn’t realize this when the second turn started (getting used to playing hot seat) so he sat around for a turn. I started moving him around and discovered that I seem to be in a resource-rich area. This is good for me in the early game as the marble will allow me to build some buildings more quickly and the gold (bottom left of the screenshot) will allow me to build more buildings before I go into debt. The dyes will be good in the mid-early game by helping my citizens be happier and giving me something to potentially trade with the AIs. I think I know where I want to put my next city, but it’s going to be quite some time before I can do that, unless my production picks up when my city grows. Speaking of that, my city will reach a size 2 population in one turn, woohoo! I assume Dave’s in a higher-growth area and that’s why he has a higher score than me - either that or he has a civilization with a high culture rate and has already expanded the culture zone around his city.

Stephen Fry is asking for the Olympic Committee to cancel the Winter Olympics in Russia this Winter. The reason is their recent horrible actions against LGBT people. Politically, I think Fry’s in the right. (The gay stuff plus tons of other bad things Russia’s been doing lately) But I feel it could be unfair to the Olympians who spent all these years training. (Especially the older ones who can’t wait 4 more years) Additionally, given all the commercialism BS I’ve heard about the IOC and how you can’t even reference the Olympics if you’re a business in the city in which it’s happening, I doubt they’ll have the convictions to pull the plug. But how awesome would it be if they succeeded and just moved it to the second-place city that was advocating for the Olympics? One can dream….

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

I think in these photos Scarlett is finally starting to have the same facial features as 1.5 year old Scarlett.

Whether or not you consider my 365 Project to be a year’s worth of selfies depends largely on whether you believe in the point of 365 projects. But I would say the selfie is more like the pictures you see on Facebook. Like others I viewed them with disdain. Then I came across an interesting article.

I know most people hate selfies. They groan and complain about them, from the duck lips to the filters. Why, just the word “selfie” can induce legendary amounts of eyerolling.