new lens + cs3 + county fair = time to play with high dynamic range stuff. so first: the original two photos. the top was metered for the shadows, the bottom, for the peaches in the sun.

then, the two get combined, and voila! high dynamic range. it’s my first attempt, so there are definite issues (like the woman who appears twice), but i think i’ll keep playing around with it.

a quick-and-dirty entry from my iPhone, just to test the new interface¹ - all seems well, and this might just get me back to moblogging (after my short-lived attempt back at the beginning of the year, when a post turned into a page and frustrated me to no end).

there’s also support for uploading photos, so i’ll have to try that as well.² still no word as to an easy alternate stylesheet for iphone viewing optimization, though. must look into that.

desktop edit: so i wrote the post on the phone and added the photo, which showed up - as you can see - at the bottom. no way to add alt or title tags to it from the iphone, and no easy way to specify where it is placed in the entry. (the phone’s continuing lamentable lack of cut-and-paste figures highly here.)

for them that’s interested, the photo is of the PAHO building, as seen from the E street trench.
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¹ it’s apparently slightly buggy, as the “save” button abruptly disappeared after i added another category. something to tell the developers.

² photo apparently uploaded, but no immediately obvious way to embed it in the post.

boy, my sense of timing could use a tuneup. two of my favorite things - information and disease¹ - now taste great together, thanks to google and the harvard medical school.

it’s healthmap. and in these days of the census bureau goofing around with the protocols for the 2010 headcount, it’s a breath of fresh air.

hmmm. they appear to have a jobs listing…²
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¹ see - i didn’t even have to create new categories for this post. that’s how near and dear those topics are to me.
² just kidding! i really like my current job!

okay, here’s my first attempt at using a Mac dictate for dictation purposes. I’ve got the dog sitting next to me, snoring, the goofy headset on my head, the sun shining outside, and a bottle of water on my desk. So far it seems to be working okay. What is strange to note is that I actually speak differently than I write. Intellectually, I know we all do this, but hey — I figured I was different. Narcissism!

Well, it apparently carriage returns when I tell it to. Although if I were to actually use the words that I spoke to get the urge to return they wouldn’t be printed I would get a new paragraph. In fact, it tried to do it right there, so I had to speak very slowly to trick it into writing the words.

So that’s it. I’m not speaking particularly differently than I would on the telephone, and it’s a bit strange sitting here looking out the window and seeing the new words appear on the screen. They show up more quickly than I would’ve expected them to based on my previous experience with ViaVoice — a program which, in my opinion, colossally sucked.

Freaky! And I suppose I’ll have to get used all of this auto capitalization. I’m really much happier with my lowercase eyes. Yes, it typed “eyes.”

you know you’ve been getting your money’s worth out of your iphone when you realize you’ve just used the two-fingered spread on your laptop monitor to zoom into a portion of the screen… and are momentarily perplexed when nothing happens.

this morning’s random bits:

• it’s apparently difficult to get rid of all the personal data on an iphone.
• xkcd introduces geohashing. geekier geocaching for the investment-inclined.
• sometimes i think people would be easier to understand if their speech had html markups.
• nick has photos from istanbul up - quite neat, even if he didn’t take his SLR. apparently his main site is down, tho. is this the end of defenestrate.org?
• bad political news: kennedy’s malignant glioma. good political news: va’s abortion law gets overturned. again.
• and a quasi-art project.

that is all for now.

another reason to dislike the wordpress 2.5 dashboard: too easy to click on a new PAGE instead of a new POST.

so now i have a witty PAGE that no one can see, and i can’t change it to a POST until i’m on a real computer because my iphone still can’t cut and paste. BAH!

after about a month of wordpress’ incessant reminders that i was running an outdated, unsecure version of their blogging software, i finally caved and took the time to upgrade. and while there should be no visible changes to this blog, the back-end interface has changed enough to make me grumpy.

tabs were moved. color schemes changed. the GUI refigured. and despite the changes, i still can’t scroll through my category list on my iphone. this is frustrating because i do most of my blogging on the ‘phone these days.

while i’m sure i’ll get used to it fairly quickly, my reaction upon writing this, my wordpress 2.5 inaugural post (using my ‘phone), is this: yuck.

in other news, i’m toying with the idea of making an iphone-optimized version of baggage carousel 4. we’ll see how that pans out.