Year: 2005

Printing photographs from Digital Rebel

Today I gave few pictures from my Digital Rebel for printing to the studio. This is the first time I printed pictures from this camera, although I have it for more than a year now. I have to say that I was very impressed by the quality of the images. I expected much less. I ordered about 50 prints in standard size and also got a few enlargements free of charge. Both the standard size and enlargements came out really good.

I was satisfied already. But than I also thought that all the pictures that I gave for printing were postprocessed and compressed for the web and that none of them was ever inteded for printing. Now I am very interested in the enlargements. I wonder how big can I make them without obvious quality loss.

Thankfully, there are a couple of projects coming up where I will be able to check the enlargements’ quality…

Which web service to choose for blogging?

As I have already mentioned before, my mother is very interested in blogging. She is about to start blogging herself. I am helping her to find the proper tool and get used to the idea. I think it is important to remind here that she is not by any means an advanced computer user.

Features that she needs:

  • Web interface. As easy as possible.
  • Few security levels for posts. She needs to be able to write public articles (viewable by everyone), “friends”-only articles (viewable by a number of people selected by her), and private articles (viewable only by her).
  • Categories for posts. She needs to create several categories for her posts, similar to the way I have it.
  • Searching. Searching for posts that she wrote previously is an absolute must.
  • Comment control. She must be able to switch comments on and off and to limit comments to “friends”-only.
  • Image galleries. She wants to post images from her travelling and day-to-day life. Organization of images, annotations, and comments are all considered and advantage.
  • Favourite links on the main page. She wants to maintain a number of links to her favourite sites and other blogs (like mine) on the main page. In other words: blogroll.
  • Free. She is not yet totally convinced that she wants to blog, thus paying any money for this functionality is not an issue.

After talking to her for a couple of hours yesterday, I realized that she sees my blog as an ideal example. I would have, of course, installed a copy of Nucleus CMS for her on my server, but I am not so sure about the user friendlyness of it. I mean I can easily modify HTML and PHP code as needed for my blog. This is not an option with my mom.

So far I have inspected the following web services:

None of the above services fully satisfy the requirements. Out of all these, Blog.com has most of the features. It has an a very easy to use interface, themable blogs, multiple blogs per one account, categories for posts, image hosting and photo albums, comments control and much more. It even offers easy blogrolling, linking, syndication, and book lists. Surprisingly, the service is free. There are a few limitations though:

  • Disk space. Free account is limited to 10 MBytes. This is more than enough for any beginner who plans on writing text only. With photo albums and image hosting functionality it is pretty easy to run out of though.
  • Bandwidth. Free account is limited to 250 MBytes per month. Again, this is more than enough for a blogging newbie, but can be ran out of easily with lots of images or mild popularity.
  • Advertising. Free accounts will have a mandatory, but small Google Adsense advertising. I don’t see it as a big problem. This is much nicer than banner ad programs that websites used to have long time ago.
  • Minor functionality limitations. Few features are not available with the free account. Most noticably, access statistics are locked, so you won’t be able to see who comes to your blog, from where they come, and what do they want. Also, private blogs (limited to the owner or selected group of people) are also not available.

I personally see these limitations as minor ones. Most people use web services which don’t even offer half the features Blog.com does, so few cut offs are an OK in my book. In case there is a need for more disk space or bandwidth, or if those limited features are all you need, Blog.com offers a really nice pricing scheme.

Greece Independence Day

If you are wondering why all the offices in Cyprus are closed today, I’ll tell you. Today is the national holiday – Greece Independence Day. Cyprus has a very strong connection with Greece and celebrates many Greek holidays nation-wide.

There will be a military parade in Limassol on the Makariou III Ave. . I am not sure about the time, but my guess is somewhere around 11:00am. There will probably be something in Nicosia too.

Since I am working in the NOC during the first half of the day, I won’t be able to attend and photograph the parade. If you have any pictures or stories from the event, please post them or link to them via comments.

Self-inflicted barbering

One of Maxim’s recent hobbies is barbering. Since he is still way too young to use any machinery or even scissors, he uses his bare hands. When someone picks him up, and holds him long enough for him to realize that person has hair, he opens his fist maximizing the distance between fingers, than he stucks it into the person’s hair, than he closes the fist as strong as he can and pulls. If not stopped, he repeats the procedure. Once he got stuck in Olga’s hair and she had to ask my mother to help her free the baby.

But, of course, person who suffers the most from this habbit is Maxim himself. He is still learning that his hands are in fact his and that he can control them. This thought can be seen in his eyes when he can see his hands. The problem comes when he moves his hands too far to the side or to his back. In that position he forgets that these are his hands. Often he would catch some hair on the back of his head, close the fist and pull. This hurts. So he cries. And repeats. Someone has to actually take his hand from his own head. Otherwise he can pull some hair out. The skin on the head becomes read from all the pulling…

Sometimes I feel pity for him. That makes me want to cut his hair. He never did it long enough though for me to actually barber him. Poor thing…

Finger activity

FingerworkFingers are Maxim’s most active body parts without a question. He moves his fingers all the time. And I mean all the time. He moves his fingers when he sleeps, eats, baths, dumps the load, plays, goes outside… You get the idea.

With all these movement, some of the figures or gestures he displays are really funny. The problem with capturing them though is that they don’t stay. He changes the location and position of his fingers constantly. Rarely, when he focuses on something else, like sleeping or eating, his fingers stay a few seconds in the same place.

We are having lots of fun watching him move. The best time is when he is awake and his fingerwork happens simultaneously with his funny faces. At this time he can impersonate anyone – Eminem, The Presiden of The United States, Cyprus taxi driver, Marilyn Manson’s fan at the concert – anyone.

Sometimes I am fast enough with the camera setup to capture the complexity…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-24_POTD/