I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there.  A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same.  Here’s my January 2010 calendar.  To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows.  Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.

So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update.  So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past.  As always, I followed the instructions here.  It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades.  It only took 2 hours 40 minutes.  I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t.  But then installed anyway.  I’m not sure what’s up with that.  The specific package was abrt.  And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed.  Go figure!  So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading.  All my taskbar icons are much more spread out.  I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get.  See the images below for a comparison.

At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project.  I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had.  On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review it as well.  I expected it to be spartan like FreeBSD, but it appears that Sun has learned a lot from the Linux community.  It booted up to this grub screen:

A bit more complicated than it should have been.  That’s really the lesson here.  In fact, it appears not to have worked at all despite about five tries.  The first two times I did it 100% with the GUI and had no idea why things were going wrong.  The third time I did it on the command line so I saw that it was complaining about not having enough space - even though it did.  And the fourth time I used the “trick installer into downloading” trick on this page and it still didn’t work.  It appears not to be downloading the updates.  I’m going to take to the mailing lists to try and figure out what’s going on.  No one was able to help (or willing?) on the IRC so for now I remain with Fedora 11.

Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD.  I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv show rights holders from using the music.  But I think that whoever owns the music should just let it be used!  Why?  Because it can end up leading to music sales for the music rights holder.  This wasn’t the case in the bad old days of records and CDs.  But now that the viewer can just buy any song he/she wants, the music rights holder is just losing money for no reason.  Recent example:  Danielle is currently working her way through the Nip/Tuck DVDs.  After watching the season four finale, she searched around the Internet to find the song and then bought it off Amazon.

Today I worked on a python program to create a graph of the views of all my photos in my 365 Project set. Here’s the result:  (click for full size)

[caption id=“attachment_2937” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“365 Project Views Graph”] [/caption]

I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns.  Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly below 50 views per photo.  I also expected to see more views after I started adding my photos to more 365 photo groups, but this is not the case.  There do appear to be clusters of views.  In other words, one highly viewed photo seemed to lift the ones by it.  That one huge outlier is my photo making fun of causes of the swine flu. The other big one is my Heroin Chic photo, no surprises there.  It was fun to create this and I learned a new python module.  Also, even though it probably took me a bit more time to program than to do it manually, it will now automatically generate whenever I want, and that’s worth the time it took.

Kids at Christmas are awesome! Nearly every present that Anthony, Alex, and Lizzie got received a loud, “This is the best present ever! This is all I ever wanted!”

My mom usually sets this up under the tree (although never this elaborately). By moving it to a table in the living room she was able to do a really amazing job. Also kudos to Denny who helped her with the landscaping.

What is it that intrigues us about rusty cars?  On flickr there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such photos.  I also see them in books.  I think it’s partly because of the colours, partly because it reminds us of our own mortality, and perhaps partly leftover cultural hatred of machines.

Another hard bird to photograph.  The blue jays are in my yard even less often than the cardinals.  And they run away at the slightest move by me.  But, once again, patience paid off.