[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“368” caption=“My grandfather smoking a cigar - the way I will remember him for all of my life”] [/caption]

It really sucks that I’m so far from my family.  My sole living grandfather, pictured here, is turning 70 this year.  Although I’ve always been closer to my mom’s family -  I really, really love my grandfather.  His humor, which was passed on to my father and which I hope to pass on to my son(s), has always cracked me up.  In different circumstances I think he would have liked all the same comedies I do.

This month’s LXF came with SimplyMepis 8, Zenwalk 6, and PCLinuxOS 2009.  As soon as I get moved and the world stops turning upside down I’ll get those posted.

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Day Fourteen: “You Told Me You Were Clean””] [/caption]

It’s been 16 days now since I started taking part in flickr’s famous 365 Project.  Well, flickr has many of them, but the most famous one most people partake in is the one where the photographer takes 1 self-portrait per day for 365 days.  The reason for the popularity in the self-portrait 365 project is probably due to two properties of said project.  First of all, by forcing the photographer to take self-portraits you remove the photographer’s block that can come from thinking of a subject every day.  Since you know it’s always going to be you, you don’t need to worry about what to photograph.  On the other hand, self-portraits contain a challenge in that you have to pre-frame your shot and then get in it.  At the moment the shutter clicks you are no looking through the viewfinder.  I’ve found it to be a great exercise in creativity because it wouldn’t be fun for myself or my viewers if they were all just shots of me sitting or standing in front of a wall.  I’ve only begun to scratch away at the limits of my creativity, but the house has gotten in the way; more on that shortly.  I think my most creative shot thus far was on Day 14 and has to do with Swine Flu.  Depending upon whether you are reading this shortly after posting or years later - the Swine Flu [near] Pandemic of 2009 was one of the biggest stories of the second quarter in 2009.  It’s been on the news almost nonstop for the past week and so I had to try and do a topical 365 shot.  I’m pretty happy with the result.  Follow my progress in the 365 project by visitng my 365 se t.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“B&H Event Space - Where B&H holds classes on various topics”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“Rudy Winston of Canon”] [/caption]

So the first B&H Event Space lecture I ever went to was earlier this April in a class about Travel Photography taught by Rudy Winston, an employee of Canon.  His lecture was about taking a vacation specifically to get certain photos.  In other words this was not about improving your photography while on vacation with the rest of the family.  However, I found that a lot of the tips worked equally well for either kind of trip.  Another key part of his lecture was taking pictures with the intention of loading them into a slideshow program as a means of sharing it with others.  Before beginning the lecture, Rudy showed his slideshow and here’s what I picked up from that.

[caption id=“attachment_2161” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“xkcd - Can’t Sleep”] [/caption]

The funny thing is that if you’ve been burned by this in your programming, you’ll find it tragically funny.  All kinds of disasters from mundane to NASA-level have ocurred because people didn’t make their variables large enough.  Thanks for that reminder, xkcd.

My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it.  It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems.  I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform.  Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit.  It took 20 minutes to install.  Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!

If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing.  No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs.  They will lease it all from the cloud.  (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter.  I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home)  There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone. Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography.  I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos.  I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others.  It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive.  I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment.  I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality.  Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus.  So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them!  Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit.  It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer.  This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone:  bandwidth limits.

So I’m looking over yesterday’s most viewed photos and I am seeing pictures that make sense - the baseball pictures I’ve been uploading for the past 3-4 days.

Debian…the father and grandfather of many a Linux distro.  I think indirectly Debian is probably running on more computers than any other Linux distro.  It’s the basis of Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and many others.  And many people use Debian where they need a nice, stable distro.  The fact that Debian’s stable releases come out every one to two years and remain supported for a year after a new stable version means that it’s the darling distro where stability is needed.  As great as Ubuntu is, you just can’t keep updating every 6 months on a production machine.  Now, the flipside is that Debian tends to have older software all-around.  So it tends to be used more as a server distro than a desktop distro.  But more people than you would expect do run it on their desktops.  Afterall, what does the latest version of Gnome have that you REALLY, REALLY need?