Life imitates art, awesomely.

I've been doing photography in earnest for 11 years now, but I've never really worked with video.  When Nathan was born, we bought a camcorder.  There's been a slow dribble of videos making their way to Youtube, but I haven't uploaded much from the past three years.  Part of it was lack of time and computing power, too.  But now I have a fancy new laptop (which I bought for web design) and a 160 minute commute, which I mostly use for web design, but which also leaves plenty of time (and computing power) for other things - like video processing.

This is it: my photo backlog of four years is all gone.  Every single photograph I've ever shot has been processed, and the good ones uploaded to the intertubes.  Here are the final sets.

First, for your viewing pleasure, may I offer the San Francisco Zoo:

I've been taking advantage of my commute to go through the rest of my photo backlog, and I'm almost done.  Here are the updates:

Panoramas from the roof of my old apartment in the Haight:

Blue Angels at Fleet Week:

There's been more and more talk recently about using your cell phone to pay for things.  I'm all for it.

"But, what if I lose my cell phone?"  Well, what if you lose your wallet?  If you take something valuable out of the house, there's always a chance that something can go wrong.  But that's always true.  Besides, if you're smart, you've already protected your phone so you can get it back or deactivate it if it gets stolen.

I was recently sent an op-ed from the New York Times, which argues in favor of lowering the barriers of entry for attorneys.  Here's the link.

Thought-provoking, to be sure, but I don't agree with this op-ed.  Winston seems to make two assertions: (a) lowering the barrier to entry would lower the costs of legal representation, and (b) there should be a rating system for lawyers, like Zagat's or Consumer Reports.

I've blogged before about how I hate it when an operating system takes away features that I like.  Two years ago, I left KDE for this reason.  Two years later, I'm leaving Gnome.  Their sin?  Removing support for Compiz.  I want my spinny cube.  To be sure, Gnome 3 has some very nice features, and it's beautiful.  But the Gnome developers made a conscious decision to remove support for a popular feature, a feature I lean on heavily.

I usually ignore advertisements, but I had to share this one.  Apparently, Honda is running a new ad campaign showing that their CRV is superior to the Toyota RAV4.  Yelena & I test drove both cars, multiple times, before choosing the RAV4 two years ago.  So, were we wrong?  Is the CRV superior?  Here's the answer, according to Honda:

I previously complained about Google's poor integration between their own products.  For example, I've previously blogged about how Google Voice is a fantastic service (multiple times), but it has remained separate from Google Talk, their instant messenger.  "Aren't those separate technologies?"  Not when Google Chat lets you do voice chat and send/receive messages from cell phones.  So you're left with two products that offer almost identical VOIP services that don't talk to each other.

Until now.

You might have already heard the news.  This may sound like jumping on a bandwagon, but I was sad to hear it.