There is that part of the evening that’s called The Blue Hour. Colours are magical and the light is perfect. But it also presents a problem. It’s still too bright to shoot long exposures in order to blur water or clouds (or anything moving for that matter). You have to bump up the aperture which can cause problems depending on the lens your using. I don’t often shoot above f8 on my DSLR, sometimes f11 (which I guess I should do more often).

The following was a 2.5 second shot at f8, when it was still pretty bright out. I was able to blur the water enough, but was hoping for more.

Going to try see if I can make more use of my blog space here and post some photos I’ve been working on. This first one is a night shot I took from right downtown Ottawa, standing on Portage Bridge, facing the Parliament Buildings. It’s a 60 second exposure taken at f8. I chose these settings because I was looking to get some movement out of the clouds and water, but it was a pretty bright night with lots of lights. Shooting at f8 allowed the time to be pushed higher, while not overexposing too much of the scene.

You can visit this photo on my flickr pool here.

Over the years I’ve said some boneheaded things in the name of comedy. Some got some great laughs, others some time alone to think about what I’ve done. Against my better judgment, I’m going to share a few of them with the world, or at least the 3-4 people that read this blog.

1. “Just because you want to be monogamous doesn’t mean I have to be.” Yah, don’t bother pointing out that the definition of monogamous could be used to describe a single person. It won’t work.

2. Her: “We can visit the place Henry VIII killed his wives.” Me: “Yah! Maybe we can re-enact it!” No sense of history these women.

3. “Sorry, I can’t do the laundry, my penis gets in the way.” She was too dumbfounded that I’d actually said this to reply with the obvious “We can fix that…”.

4. “Hope you have that baby soon. It’s making you retarded.” She totally agreed with this one.

5. “I’d like to sleep with that girl. It’s so you don’t have to! I’m doing it for you…” Some women don’t appreciate the sacrifices we’re willing to make for them!

6. “Money Money Money. I don’t see how you can worry so much about something we have none of.” This one just keeps on giving too, cause we never have any money.

So there you have it. If for some reason you find yourself in a perfectly good relationship with your wife/girlfriend, feel free to use some of these to resolve it.

I’ve been using Gmail for what seems like ages now. I believe I had to find an invite for it when it first came online even. I kept my own mail server for personal mail though. I ran this mail server myself, owned the domain and everything. A few months ago, I got into a consolidation mode/mood and decided to try sending gmail over to my mail server to check mail, giving me all my mail in one location.

A bit of getting used to. Some labelling took care of most issues though it just wasn’t “what I was used to”. After a week or so, I realize Google spam filter was way better than my own spamassassin setup, which was wonderful. I was manually deleting a dozen spam a day and trying to get spamassassin to learn better, but it was just too much. Google got rid of it all.

I then realized that I wasn’t spending any time at all managing my mail server or my mail folder. No deleting spam, no sorting, no emptying trash, nothing. Then it occurred to me, google isn’t doing that either. I loaded up Thunderbird and logged into my server. I had to download thousands of messages that hadn’t been gathered since I started the gmail process. Of course, I had specified in the gmail setup to leave mail on the server as I was just testing things out. What annoyed me a bit was that it didn’t appear to delete anything on the mail server, even the mail that I had deleted within gmail.

But, all is pretty good regardless. My personal mail server actually has a few accounts on it, all funnelled into one inbox, which is then checked by gmail. I’m able to set aliases up so I can respond right in gmail using any of those email addresses. Guess I should just take the next step and set it to delete mail from the server and be done with it.

This isn’t a rant about quality of digital vs vinyl. That’s a lost battle, each side being perfectly accurate in their respective rebuttals. There’s no win. This is about the idea, to me at least, that vinyl has become a genre of music. Let me explain.

I own a large amount of music in what could be considered “digital” media. I’m going to include CDs in this group, as they are technically digital right along with MP3s. I have iTunes purchased music. eMusic purchased music. Some directly purchased music from artists that gave digital downloads for the effort. At times, I get quite subjective in these purchases, cherry picking the best music that suits my auditory pleasures. I’ll preview it on iTunes or somewhere else. Read a review over at Pitchfork or take a friends word for it. Basically, I’m selective and buy only what I like, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

But vinyl. That’s a whole different platter of wax. (HA!) There’s a small gas station up the road from me that has an amazing collection of old vinyl, collected over the years. I take the kids every Wednesday after school. They get candy, I get vinyl. I browse the stacks, checking out every title for any familiarity. A name. A cover. Anything that might grab my attention. An old album my mom used to have (though I now have all those…) An album by a group that did a song I liked once, even though I can’t remember the name of the song. Heck, any group I’ve even heard of, referenced in some obscure TV show or movie that suddenly jumped into my head. I buy it. Yup, just like that, I grab it off the shelf, give it a quick quality control check and pull out my cash. I rush home and throw on the turntable to give it a listen while the kids eat their candy. I’m amazed each and every time I do this. I could put any one of the LPs I own on the table and sit and listen to it end to end. Any one of them will also make wonderful background music.

The point, if indeed I have one, is that it doesn’t seem to matter what’s on the wax, just that it’s there, and that makes it wonderful. Now, listening to NIN and Beastie Boys on vinyl? Pure heaven.

I’ve been “reading” lots of Reddit lately. (Scanning headlines and clicking on a handful of links, mostly pointless stuff). Some big news about Glenn Beck lately having raped some poor girl in 1990. Being a big Reddit target, tons of links/stories were supplied, all about the same topic. Trouble is, most of them were submitted to categories that had nothing to do with Glenn Beck or whatever it is he does. On the front page today, I counted 5 different categories for Glenn Beck articles; pics, reddit.com, politics, economics, WTF…

This is the problem with the standard method of categorizing things. Often, we end up shoe-horning topics in places they don’t really belong. I suppose tagging has sort of fixed this problem, but tags have their own problems. Just another thing that has outlived it’s usefulness I guess.

Remember back in the day of running forums when hotmail “users” caused so much annoying spam that we basically just banned all hotmail account users? It caused quite a few problems for those that actually used hotmail and couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed to sign up to sites using it. Well, I’ve been running The CPC for quite a while now and lately I’ve been getting tons of spam from real people using gmail.com addresses. In fact, I have more gmail spam than I do real gmail users.
So should I ban gmail.com on my site? Not on your life. That just seems so wrong on the internet these days. Google can do no harm, not like the big bad Microsoft and hotmail of days gone by. I suppose there are far more savvy gmail users today than there were hotmail users years ago?

I’ve talked about last.fm in the past. I had kinds words to say about them, and I’ve continued to use them since writing them. They’re in the news again this past week because of plans to require a subscription to stream music. Not even a large payment. $3/month. $36/year. A small price to pay if you like the service and want to support the site. I already did. I’m a paying last.fm customer.

But they’re catching hell over this deal. People hate paying for things. But there’s a special sort of hell being created for this scheme. Only those customers outside of the US, UK and Germany have to pay. That’s right, if you have the misfortune of living someplace else in the world, you have to pay. Cause the internet is all about borders and customs.

I live in Canada. I’m used to getting screwed when I try to buy stuff. It’s a fact of life even though it’s slowly changing. But to run a global service (which was created by the users I might add. They don’t have a recommendation list without us.) and charge only a handful of users based on geographical location is wrong. Just plain wrong. I have 50 days left of my subscription and I’ve scrobbled 17K tracks. I’m going to look at some other options now.