Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Latent Thoughts on Old News
May 07, 2007

I had a few thoughts on the recent HD-DVD folderol that was going on at Digg and other places, and I figured I would let them stew a couple of days to see what I managed to mentally sift out of them.

There have been a few interesting points made on the subject of the release of the HD-DVD key. If you haven’t heard, or you just didn’t care, or you had been left ignorant by big media news (no surprise if that’s the case), then you should know what happened before we begin.

The Bulletin
May 04, 2007

A new front in the junk mail war has opened.

I struggle from day to day trying to keep loose trash out of my yard. It’s not as bad in the new house as in the old, where the wind swept all of the trash into our lawn to roost, but the other yards in our neighborhood are so immaculate that one piece of rubbish in our lawn looks like a bright red boil on the face of a supermodel. That is why I am a bit concerned about this new Bulletin epidemic.

Lion's Teeth Evolution
May 02, 2007

We have an experiment in evolution in our own back yard – a vivid and undeniable example of natural selection at work.

Dandelions. The plague of the suburban lawn. Dandelions sound like a cute little plant, and they’re really not all that bad looking taken as just the flower. Indeed, their method of distributing seeds gets my vote as pretty darn ingenious.

Something Fishy
May 01, 2007

Berta’s sister’s family was in town for the weekend, and on Saturday we packed up everyone and trekked over to Adventure Aquarium in Camden.

They’re making some changes at the aquarium, or at least they have since the last time we visited. We had to enter through a different entrance, and there was a lot of construction. Still, the aquarium was in plenty good enough condition to make the trip worthwhile.

Graphs and Filters
April 29, 2007

Two things that are on my mind at the moment:

I would like a good set of filters for digital photo enhancement. I just want the colors to “pop” a little more in the photos I take than what they do. It seems like the colors are true, I just want to enhance them a bit.

Also, it would be keen if there were some simple color-correcting filters I could apply. I’ve got some photos where the white balance was off, and they look quite blue. I would love to be able to correct those.

Although I do have Photoshop, I would like an actual filter so that I could use it from Irfanview, as opposed to a set of actions, which I can only use when loading the bloated full Photoshop application. When all I need to do is adjust color, I don’t need the full power of Photoshop, if you see what I mean.