Looking Towards The West

A beautiful Fall evening where the colors of the sky match those of corn stalks and pumpkins signaling the presence of Autumn. Looking towards the West while sipping a glass of Witches Brew wine. Just the right amount of spices to make it a perfect fit for this occasion.

While looking towards the West, it’s an opportunity to breathe the Autumn air, collecting my thoughts as the days don’t usually provide an opportunity to digest information. Two ducks or geese fly high across the sky from West to East and I wonder, which field or pond will they land in. Not that it matters, but curiosity is a thing of beauty at times.

Just as I finish the last sip of wine, Mr. asshole drives down the street with music blaring with the bass turned to high. This person ruins the moment of peace as I think of ways to put a tire blowout strip in the street without being caught.

Once the car passes, I can go back to my moment but the moment is gone. Time to go inside because I’m cold and the wine glass is empty.

Awesome Photography Technique

Usually I wouldn’t link to articles that I know are link bait but this one is so cool, I feel as though I have to share it. I’ve never heard of ‘Tilt Shift Photography‘ before but according to Smashing Magazine, it’s a technique where life sized objects appear as though they are at a miniature scaled size. To start taking photographs using this method, all you need to do is to shoot subjects from a high angle, especially if you can do this from in the air. Or, you can use a tilt-shift lens which provides a shallow depth of field.

Tilt Shift Technique In Action

Image created by Automatt.

Please check out their list of 50 examples that have utilized the technique. It is hard for me to pick a favorite but the one with the firetrucks is awesome.

Where We Do What We Do

I don’t know what it is about work spaces that intrigue me so much but I find them to be visually entertaining. Every work space that I have seen is unique in it’s own right. It’s where people end up creating, working, communicating ect. I strongly believe that the workspace can be a good indication into the makeup of a person. Then again, I might be crazy. I have an idea as to what my ideal work space would be like, but because of the constraints of not owning my own home, I really can’t create my ideal workspace and have to deal with the cards that have been dealt.

As I was monitoring my Twitter stream the other day, Steve Rubel passed along a link to WhereWeDoWhatWeDo.com This is a site dedicated to workspaces that have been submitted by user’s across the globe. WWDWWD is a project created by the Subata Corporation which is worked on within their spare time. Honestly, I really like the site’s design as I feel it places plenty of emphasis on the photos located on the front page. Upon clicking on one of the photos, the left hand sidebar gives you photo information with a link to digg the article. Below the photo information box is the comment section, followed by the comment form.

I thought it was a bit goofy that you have to approve an email that is sent to you before your comment can be displayed on the website, but I suppose that is a good way to deal with spam, considering if the emails are not confirmed, the comment will never make it to the site.

I love checking out every one else’s workspaces. I posted mine back in an archived article entitield What Is Your Blogging WorkSpace? My layout has slightly changed as I now have a new tower for my desktop PC as well as a black HP all in one printer, that sits in the bottom drawer of the notebook desk. Other than that, the workspace has remained the same.

Personally, I think the best workspace showcased on WWDWWD is THIS ONE. What work spaces have you come across that you wish you had? Link to them in the comments section and let’s talk it over.

Photos Of The Blogging Master 3000

Today as I was building the machine, I took the opportunity to take a number of photos of each individual piece of hardware. Most the photos involved me playing with the MACRO settings on my Kodak EasyShare and are not of the best quality but, they should suffice none the less.

All of the pictures I took today can be found within the Blogging Master 3000 Flickr Photoset.

Flickr Launches Stats For Pro Members

Flickr has introduced a new feature for PRO members. The new feature highlights various stats for your online photos. If you’re a pro member you can activate your stats now. The first round of stats will take at least 24 hours to process.

The stats show you how people arrive to your photos. There are stats available for people surfing on Flickr itself – where the referrer is flickr.com – and stats about people coming from other websites. Flickr will now be able to tell you the sorts of things people search for on search engines where your photos turn up, and tell you how many views your photos have in a week, or for all time.

Flickr Stats

The stats will display as far back as 28 days prior to the day of activation. As for the more technical details of the stats themselves, Flickr states:

We update stats once a day
Your own views of your own photos are not counted
We track views and referrers when a page on flickr.com is loaded. We are unable to count views of your photos on external sites (like your blog).
The “Search Engines” group of referrers counts traffic from most of the major search engines online, including Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, Ask.com, and live.com
When reading search engine results, we are able to show what people searched for to find your content.
We don’t display links to individual Flickr members as referrers

For more information in regards to this new feature, check out the official Flickr Stats FAQ.

Blogger Adds Slideshow Support

Blogger has added a new tool for their user’s called the “Slideshow Page Element“. This element adds a slideshow to your page that displays photos from your Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Photobucket or any site that supports Media RSS. The photos will appear in your blogs sidebar, fading into one another. The slideshow supports navigation and each photo links to the albums home page. According to Blogger,

Like all page elements, Slideshow requires that your blog is using Layouts templates. Still need to switch? Read our help article on the topic.

Seems like a cool new feature to add to your hosted Blogger Blog.

New Features Debut On Flickr

Flickr has unveiled a new feature/project called Places. Places is a Flickr project that makes use of all of the publicly available Geotagged photos. Think of it as a new way to see a massive amount of data that otherwise, may not of been noticed. Asides from being able to see photos of places all over the world, Flickr has also developed an experimental new map which somehow displays breaking news. That is, if an event is taking place somewhere in the world such as The Oscars, chances are, there will be a number of people taking photos which will then show up on this map.

I gave the new map a try and I thought it was pretty cool. The text that appears on the World Map is the name of the event. If you click on the event text, a photo ribbon appears showing all of the photos that were taken at the event. I saw an event that appeared to be taking place in the Pacific Ocean. After clicking on it, I figured out it was a wedding in Hawaii. At any rate, Flickr has succeeded in giving user’s yet another way to kill time.

Wedding In Hawaii

Video Demo Of Picnik

Picnik is an online photo editor that is somewhere in between Photoshop and a bare bones application in terms of features and functionality. Picnik works seamlessly with Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa web album’s giving you the oppurtunity to edit your online photos straight from the Picnik website. Picnik is hastily becoming one of the best online photo editors. Check out the following video demonstration for more information on this web application.

Bloggerplay Releases iGoogle Gadget

Blogger has developed and released an iGoogle gadget for those that enjoy Blogger Play. Blogger Play is a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. Blogger has also added some additional functionality to Blogger Play. The keyboard can now be used to control the flow of images. The space bar plays and pauses while the left and right arrow keys move backwards and forwards.

Just sitting at the Blogger Play page watching all sorts of images go by is yet, another productivity killer to add to my list.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

photos