Like, perhaps, many of my readers, I knew Jane Lui’s music mostly from her cover songs. But I really liked her voice and so I decided to back the Kickstarter for her new album, Surrija. By the time this review is published, I’ll have had the album for about 2 months. For this review I’ll first focus on my initial impressions and then my impressions after having listened for a while.

I love just about everything in this shot. Even the hair is pretty neat, although I would have preferred for it not to cross the middle of Scarlett’s face.

There was something about this image that reminded me of older snapshots. I think it’s the fact that it’s a candid moment, not perfectly sharp as Scarlett moved out of the focal plane; but it’s not out of focus - you can see that from the shirts. So when I was processing the shot, I went for an older look. I think I ended up applying a Kodachrome effect.

Scarlett (March 2020)

a post-race selfie

Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)

11 years ago (HOLY MOLEY WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?!?) I wrote about Jeffrey Friedl’s LR Stats plugin. As you know if you’ve been around my blog for a while, I love stats! It’s the biggest reason I do my end of year posts with my music, reading, and video game stats. Well, I haven’t used Lightroom for a few years now, and for some reason I was inspired this past weekend to recreate this ability. So I started on photostats, which will present a lot of the same stats that his Lightroom plugin does. On the plus side, my Python program is app-agnostic!