The iPhone commercial shown tonight during the oscars was pretty sweet! It featured clips from a ton of movies where people said, “hello.” It revealed a June release date and, as far as I know, is the first commercial for the phone. Looks like they got the trademark thing settled with Cisco.

Luckily, my younger brother pre-ordered this for me for my birthday (which came months ago), because the book is now sold out. Ever since I heard about it in Oct 2006, I couldn’t wait for it to come out. There are really great tutorials online, but I needed a nice coherent, beginning to end book to guide me through the process at least once. As you know, I’ve already done one animated short, " Penguin Flight", and a few quick animated scenes in preparation for my next animated short, " Budgies". However, although I have the basic techniques down, I know there are enough gaps in my knowledge to make any reasonably length animation a pain in the butt.

One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been customization. People customize their cellphones, myspace pages, websites and computers. Via the popuplar widgets system on the Mac OSX, SuperKaramba for KDE, and gDesklets in Gnome, people customize their desktops to make them unique to their vision. Even Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon recently and introduced a widget system of its own. All of these customizations would have taken place on the computer no matter what.

Here’s another shot someone has asked to publish: As I mentioned before, getting published (as wish my other shot on NPR or the beach shots in the Tampa guide) is a photographer’s dream come true. It’s an acknowledgment that one has pictures worthy of others adding to their reports, websites, brochures, etc.

Here’s the email for this photo:

That picture is an awesome shot. I would like to know if you would give me permission to use this shot on a college report on the cultural aspect of the Brighton Beach community.

With all the recent hype revolving around Second Life, Darren Barefoot created First Life. In case the site goes down or is sold off, here’s a screenshot. Click it for a full resolution view.

I’m working my way towards making money from my photography. I really enjoy the trade craft a lot and if I get to do it as a job on the weekends, all the better. So I’ve bought some books to shore up my technique since I’m pretty much a self-taught photographer. One thing my latest book has driven home is something I’ve noticed countless times in magazines, books, and my own work. I need to relax and take my time. I know enough, and have slowed down enough, to think about the aperture and shutter speed in relation to the effect I wish to achieve. I also know to frame my shot correctly and double-check my ISO settings.

Veterans of Linux installs from the early days may chuckle at my new discovery, but I’ve only been installing Linux since the graphical days of Anaconda and Fedora Core 1. (But first some background info) I was recently installing Xubuntu on my father-in-law’s computer. He wanted me to install a new Windows Media Player version, but I needed to upgrade to Windows Service Pack 2. The Kami at M$ were not smiling upon his household because this hosed the computer.

I’ve done a few updates in the past week or so and I’ve been in fvwm-crystal, so I don’t know which update fixed things, but Gnome finally handles Dual Screen Compiz correctly. Previously, if I maximized a window, it would maximize across both monitors! I NEVER want that kind of behaviour because my screens are not only a few inches apart, but they also have a 2-3 inch frame between viewable areas. I really didn’t like that discontinuity in my viewing area, so I would always have to manually size up the windows. This behaviour was only occuring in Gnome; KDE, fluxbox, fvwm-crystal and other WMs were correctly handling the maximize command. So I’m glad that Gnome will no longer be a source of frustration for me.

To all who celebrate this as the start of a new year (not just Chinese).

Welcome, Year of the Pig! Goodbye Year of the Dog.

Back in 2005, when gas prices were high, the Republican Congress (although the Dems may have acted the same in their shoes) decided that, to save a few barrels of oil, they would move daylight savings up 3 weeks. They forgot that the ENTIRE WORLD now runs all of its most critical applications on computers and computers are programmed to follow the same daylight savings from 60 years ago! Now Bill Gates is warning people not to trust their appointments in MS Outlook and other software until the day of the old daylight savings. Don’t these guys remember the Y2K mess? And now they want to mess with the way computers keep time AGAIN?