Sorry about that. When I changed hosts, I was able to start using Wordpress’ Akismet plugin for spam, and didn’t realize that it had different rules for comment moderation. All comments should be out there now =) Things are still crazy here… adjusting to a new job, acclimated to a new apartment… you know, the works. My big new purchase… a “pre-owned” Mesa/Boogie Stiletto Deuce head with a 4x12 Mesa slanted cab....
When I was about 9 or so, my grandmother gave me an old hardback edition of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. That was really the start of my interest in space in general and my love of theoretical literature from the likes of Graham Greene and Stephen Hawkins. Its pretty woefully out of date at this point, but there is an imagination that plays out that you don’t find too often in recent publications....
That was so much harder than it needed to be. It does not help when the rest of the world’s DNS servers refresh every four hours and your own ISP (damn RCN) refreshes every 30 hours (son of a bitch). Anyway. I’ve moved hosts, so hopefully things will be nicer now… more responsive and less unknown internal server errors. The marching band website got a new domain (www.dukeband.org) and a face lift in the process....
Speak of the devil, here is a wonderful little site that tries to identify which movie reviewer you should trust (or is at least most compatible with your likes). Unfortunately, I haven’t seen about 50% of the movies listed… It did say I was most compatible with Roger Ebert, so I get the feeling it might be pretty accurate. I’m not familiar with the other names it suggests, but I’ll let you know what I find....
The unfortunate thing is that this is so true. When I play tracks on my ipod from CDs made in the 80’s and early 90’s, the volume is much less, but there is a far greater range of dynamics on the tracks. Unfortunately, normalization only goes one way.
Personally, I’m a pack rat – and probably more so in the digital sense. I still have some of the papers that I wrote back in elementary school stored on some CD. I definitely won’t ever (or want to ever) read them again, but I’m just the sort of person who hangs on to those things. Even with photography, I still keep 90% of the shots that I take, even if only 10% or so are good – the only ones I do delete are the absolutely blurred or black....
Ok, I need a recommendation. For years, my sole source of quality film reviews was Roger Ebert. On roughly 90% of his reviews I agreed with. I always appreciated the fact that he knew what the film was trying to be. If it was a summer film whose purpose was simply to entertain, he respected that and he didn’t pan movies because they weren’t up to artistic snuff. The only movie he reviewed negatively which I thought was great was Usual Suspects....
It really should be a fundamental business principle, but it’s amazing how little attention it really gets. Occasionally we here about abysmal service (AOL, any outsourced phone support, etc), but rarely does good customer service get great exposure. More often than not I’ll bring lunch from home, but when I don’t, my lunch stop of choice is the Quiznos down the street. Unlike other tech “areas” there aren’t a lot of lunch eateries around the Gaithersburg office....
All I can say is… Wow! There are only a handful of instances where I think the “HDR” effect looks good, but this is definitely one of them. I’ve only tried to bracket shots a few times, but I haven’t been able to get good looking photos out of it. Photomatrix is the predominant software (reasonably priced at $99), but even trying the demo, I have struggled to understand what the workflow is....
Ignore all the critics who opine about a lack luster Pirates 3. Go see it. It is a great summer popcorn movie. Obviously over the top, cgi driven, but clever and fun. Anyone who gave this movie a bad review was expecting way to much – or thought that because the first movie was a surprising success that the second and third would suddenly be much better. It’s a long movie so try to get comfortable before the previews roll....