Secret life of tulips

I picked-up a ring flash for doing macros and, hopefully, decent portraits. Here are some initial macro shots ...

Pixel-peepers can see these much larger on Flickr -- click on the pix!

Hey, I'm in a book!

Members of a mailing list that I'm on, The Pentax Discussion Mailing List, got together recently and edited a book of some of the member's images created during 2008-2009. Everyone was encouraged to contribute one or two shots to this collaboration, and my two submissions were accepted. Sales of the book will be donated to the National Childhood Cancer Foundation.

There are 110 photographs in the book, representing every imaginable style, from photographers in fifteen countries.

You can read more about PDML Photo Annual 2008-2009 book project, and even order one if you like the idea, here ...

Air - La Femme D'Argent

I simply cannot believe it's already been 10 years since Air released Moon Safari. I refuse to believe it, in fact. Hrmph.

Her Morning Elegance / Oren Lavie

There is more creativity crammed into this video than I've seen in the last years' worth of videos. Put a huge smile on my face -- and you prolly don't appreciate how hard that is to do. :-)

As seen at Ken Brown's blog

Winter announced itself

Dollars and Sense

Lefsetz is always a good read, but  this posting  really resonates.

Fall colours time ...

More photos ...



Japanese maple



Weeping birch

I've been tempted to do this

Noteboek

Extremely clever!

I've been enjoying my dSLR a lot lately. I've even been getting all artsy-fartsy ...

Mr. Rogers: piss off

Well Mr. Rogers has gone and done it: totally screwed the pooch with the iPhone's intro to Canada. The rates for voice and data, especially data, are way out of line with US, UK, and in fact most of the rest of the world. He's caused some pretty serious rage out there in blogland ...

Fuck You Rogers

Phun for Mac OS X is out

Cool!  You can get Phun on the Mac now ...

http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki/Download

Phun - 2D physics sandbox

I can't wait for the Mac OS X version!

Link to Phun website ...

"Radio Ladio" - Metronomy

The 80's have returned in glorious colour!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/zMjmxF58wFc"><img alt="No user-serviceable parts inside: " radio="" src="http://img.skitch.com/20080209-pp4xnhk92sppuhfy2j6gtcyhgy.jpg"/></a>

Headline of the year?

Source: The Language Log

Eat Krispy Kremes, save taxpayers dough

Dutch researchers found that the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers.

Link ...

Ch-ch-ch-changes ...

This is very well put together. Bravo!

Symphony In SLANG

Fake Steve Jobs on Real Steve Balmer

FSJ may be fake, but his insights are real. Here's his take on the Microhoo! buyup plan. Brilliant.

[...] here's the really dark part of all this. He knows it won't work. He has to know this. He's not stupid. The cultures will never fit together. And the deal is too big. It's not manageable. And it's completely anathema to Microsoft. It's totally out of character for them. It goes against everything the company has ever stood for. Ballmer knows this, and he's doing it anyway. Because this is exactly what every old-guard CEO does when all else fails. I mean it's right there in the official playbook that you get in business school. And ultimately, smart as he is, Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He's not really a tech guy. He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He's a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It's Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can't think of anything else to do.

So if the deal happens -- and I'm not convinced it will -- Ballmer will have bought himself maybe two years before it becomes clear to the entire world that it has failed. By then maybe Ballmer will be gone and someone else will have to mop up the mess. [...]

Link ...

Post to instapaper (AppleScript)

Update (26-Jun-09): This script doesn't handle more recent versions of InstaPaper very nicely. Another NNW-to-InstaPaper script, "NNWInstaPost", has appeared in the meantime and I suggest that you give that one a try ...

Update 2 (29-Jun-09): Also checkout Logan Rockmore's little Javascript which promises to be even faster ...

Here's a little script to post the currently selected headline in NetNewsWire (my favourite Mac OS X newsfeed reader) to your instapaper account.

You need to create an instapaper account before using this the first time. The script is not very good about errors, so just correct the issue and retry the script. It creates a short summary by "un-HTML'ing" the description, but it does this naively (using a long sed invocation), so it's restricted to a subset of HTML entities -- basically common Western ones.

To install this, select and copy the script from the box, paste it into the AppleScript Script Editor and drop it into NNW's script folder.

(*
* Submit NetNewsWire headines to instapaper for later reading.  See http://www.instapaper.com/
* Create an instapaper account first, select a news item in NNW, then run this script.
* Assumes you're using Safari. Doesn't handle all html entities; works best on English feeds.
* Doesn't check if the submission succeeded, so you need to keep your eyes open. :-)
* -- Bruce Walker <bruce.walker@gmail.com> -- Feb 1, 2008
*)

on unhtml(html)
 -- remove markup, convert common entities to ascii (the rest to "?"), nuke blank lines & restrict length
 return do shell script "echo " & quoted form of html & "| sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' -e 's/&nbsp;/ /g' -e 's/&mdash;/--/g' -e 's/&lsquo;/`/g' -e 's/&ldquo;/``/g' -e 's/&#8220;/``/g' -e \"s/&rdquo;/''/g\" -e \"s/&#8221;/''/g\" -e \"s/&#8217;/'/g\" -e \"s/&rsquo;/'/g\" -e \"s/&#39;/'/g\" -e 's/&[^;][^;][^;]*;/?/g' -e \"s/'/\\\\\\'/g\" | tr '\\r\\n' ' ' | dd ibs=1 count=192"
end unhtml

tell application "NetNewsWire"
 set NNWURL to URL of selectedHeadline
 set NNWTitle to my unhtml(get title of selectedHeadline)
 set NNWSummary to my unhtml(get description of selectedHeadline) & " …"
end tell

tell application "Safari"
 -- submit to instapaper using Safari's saved session/account cookies
 set foo to do JavaScript "window.open('http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=3&u='+encodeURIComponent('" & NNWURL & "')+'&t='+encodeURIComponent('" & NNWTitle & "')+'&s='+encodeURIComponent('" & NNWSummary & "'),'t','toolbar=0,resizable=0,status=1,width=250,height=150')" in document 1
end tell

Enjoy!