Anthony Rants

This past weekend I looked at various parts of Champaign-Urbana through my viewfinder, a hobby that has taken the proverbial back seat to my more recent obsession with the art of brewing beer. One thing I've immediately realized, if you don't stay in practice, little by little you lose your eye. All of those shots that looked wonderful in your mind just will not line up. My second revelation was a little slower in realization. Those of you who know me know that I shoot entirely in digital, do a minimal amount of post work, and primarily share my work through my great (albeit sporadically updated) photoblog. I always expose, adjust saturation, and finally sharpness to the point that it looks good on my relatively calibrated LCD at home. Unfortunately for me, very few of my viewers are reviewing my work on my LCD, and therein lies the rub. Completely digital presentation, that is, through some sort of a web/electronic medium can never be consistent. I adjust everything for viewing at home, head to work and share under-saturated, under sharpened photos through the dull glow of our cheap LCDs at work. It is no wonder Matt prefers the traditional development process. Even though he eventually has to deal with these consistency issues (when he scans his pictures), he will always have that 'perfect' print that matches exactly what he thought that moment/place/object should be represented as. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't start printing my photos more regularly.

In other photography related news, both Canon and Nikon have announced new entry-level cameras, but neither have really piqued my interest, especially considering the ridiculous choice of SD memory cards on both of those bodies. Don't they know I have 10GB in CF that I'm attached to!? I have no idea what my future camera plans are, but I do know that with all of the other purchases of hobby related items recently, if I don't acquire at least a European vacation for Anna and quite possibly an automobile shortly after that, I may be looking at acquiring a bed for the garage :) So if I figure that a new camera body purchase is at least a year away, it really makes it hardly worth considering at this point... maybe I can sneak a lens in there somewhere though ;-) probably something in the big zoom range, maybe something like 100-400mm or a 70-300mm 4-5.6 IS. A decent zoom is definitely something my camera bag lacks, right now I make do with an old 75-300 4-5.6 III that I picked up for a song right before our honeymoon trip to Hawaii... and while it has captured its share of pictures (1,2,3), I think it may be time to retire it to the great camera bag in the sky.

When you're in my line of work, often you hear of trends in technology way before there is anything useful you can do with it. I feel like that is how it was with my sordid relationship with RSS. I heard about it years ago, and in the way-back-machine, I remember Mike Denzel asking me to make a feed of my blog. Back then my blog was that custom crap, so making an RSS feed required me to gain a familiarity with it. But even then, I really couldn't find a reader I liked and honestly didn't think it would really save me any time.

Fast forward 18 months >> Matt and I were having a discussion about RSS (I think in the context of keeping up with forums) and he mentioned Google Reader. At the time I kind of dismissed it, RSS yea yea, greatest thing ever, blah blah. Well, a couple of weeks ago, after realizing I was reading the same forum thread for the fourth time, I thought that I might as well give it a shot. So I subscribed to the forum's feed, and suddenly, a great fog was lifted. Instantly I can see new threads, mark them as read, etc. So then, I started adding in all the blogs I read, and then Slashdot, and Slickdeals, and Techbargains... but I couldn't stop there! I added our local Newspaper, Yahoo's Odd News, and of course Google's News. Google Reader is possibly the biggest improvement in my Internet habits in the last 6 months (probably 2nd biggest of all-time, most important improvement would of course be tabbed browsing ala Firefox). One of the best things about Google Reader is its centralized nature. It's like a big personalized bookmark for the Intraweb, at work, at home, everywhere!

But it doesn't stop there, I want to encourage my readers to empower themselves as well. To that end, I updated AnthonySnaps to the latest version of Gallery, broke everything, re-customized it, and enabled an RSS feed of my latest photos (was only doable with the latest version).

Well, I suppose since its official with paperwork and all, that I can reveal Matt as one of the newest employees at the Beckman Institute. He will be starting in December. Matt & Kate were up yesterday and today looking for a place to live, no final word yet on what they have chosen. Last night after having burgers at a kind of not-noteworthy place, we went to the Blind Pig. The Blind Pig is very noteworthy (at least in my mind). They have something like fifteen beers on tap, fourteen of them are what I would consider craft-beers, and one of the taps is occupied by Pabst (It is Illinois after all). Getting past the fact that the bartender was a little pissed I didn't start a tab, the place itself has a great atmosphere. They don't serve food, so its all business there: beer business. Matt & Kate had Rasputin Imperial Stout (a beer I consider a very worthy contender to Flat Branch's Oil Change stout) and I had a Belgian Strong Ale by the name of Delirium Tremens, which I would later come to find has a quite interesting history (oh, click that link, you know you want to). We retired pretty early, which is good, because this morning I did not feel well at all. I doubt it had any link to the small amount of drinking we did and more likely linked to the awful weather that blew into town. All day it has been rainy, windy, and cold. And most of the day I have been congested, achy, and cold.

I have officially started a new hobby. Well, I guess I officially started back in October, but it has been awhile since I have substantially written about stuff. After lots and lots of research (as I'm known to engage in right before a hobby), I have taken up the home brewing of beer. It is actually quite a bit like cooking, also quite a bit like cleaning, ironically enough. I have brewed two batches so far. The first was an American Amber Ale that I named after Anna, since she was so understanding and surprisingly supportive of the idea. Its called Anna Maria's Amber Ale. I may post the label that I have for it later. The second batch was a Nut Brown Ale (Northern English Brown to be more exact), it is yet to be named. The amber ale is just about ready to keg, probably sometime on Sunday or so is my best guess. The brown ale still has quite a bit of fermentation/resting left to do. In conjunction with this brewing enterprise, I actually ended up building what will eventually be a kegerator. Right now you have to open it to dispense, but eventually there will be taps mounted on the outside of it. Maybe I'll take some pictures and post about that whole setup later. Many people start home brewing by bottling, but the prospect of cleaning and sterilizing 48 bottles everytime I had a batch of beer did not really sound that appealing, so I've decided to keep only a small stock of bottles on-hand. I'll bottle some of each batch for kind of archival purposes, and also I will use bottles to give the beer away. At home, I'll drink it off of the CO2 dispensed goodness of the kegerator. My brewing sessions seem to last about six hours when it is all said and done, and I would say at least 60% of that time is spent cleaning, re-cleaning, or sanitizing some piece of equipment. The next batch to be made is a yet-to-be-named Chocolate Hazelnut Porter. That will bring me to 15 gallons brewed (or about 160 bottles), luckily I know someone(s) who is(are) moving to the area who likes beer :) I'm also hoping that maybe some of you people out there will take an opportunity to come and visit, if for no other reason than to sample the latest beer from the Benjamin Brewing Company.

Today, after I spent six hours trying to get two small combo-boxes to correctly display some database data, I confirmed a realization I had a few weeks ago. I no longer enjoy programming. I may be good at it, but it definitely does not yield any satisfaction. I am attempting to market my other skills at work, but seeing as how I was just promoted in August to uber-Programmer, its a long row to hoe... But I guess good things don't come easy? I'm hoping that when Matt arrives here, he lets me lend a hand to some sort of photographic enterprise. That should be different, exciting, and maybe give me an opportunity to explore the what-if (What if Anna made so much money, I could quit my job and do some sort of photo-thing for a job?)

Anna and I carved jack-o-lanterns tonight. She did the one of Jack and I did the one of Oogie (from the Nightmare Before Christmas, of course!). We found some patterns on the intraweb, and an hour or two later, bam.

Happy Halloween!

Improved some of the Javascript stuff going on so that now the Recent Photos link on the right sidebar actually shows a slideshow of my five most recently posted images along with a link to their respective page on Anthony Snaps (in case you want to comment there or something).

The Javascript that I am using is actually a free, Creative Commons licensed script called Lightbox.