i’ve been doing a lot of hdr photography lately, thanks to my friend charlie for the recommendation – checkout this hdr primer if you too want to get started…
i’ve been active online since the earliest days of the web & blogging since january, 2002 – so it shouldn’t be very surprising that my family would be really involved online as well…
my wife karyn has a blog dedicated to her family, faith and her hobbies such as needlepoint – you can find it at the teakettle corner…
my oldest son sean is also very involved online and has had numerous blogs – he recently started a podcast on the state of the video game industry, something he’s studying in college hoping one day to be a video game developer…
finally my youngest son ian has recently started a videoblog, capturing and posting to his youtube channel most days hoping to do this for an entire year – or basically for his senior year of high school and as he prepares to enter college next fall…
i’m always terrible at keeping up w/ upgrades, but finally blocked a few hours to upgrade this blog since there was a thunderstorm rolling through our town and i knew i wouldn’t be able to go for a mtb ride until it passed…
i love the way wordpress tells you it’ll take no time at all to upgrade – the actual upgrade of the database is very quick but all the other steps take time and focus – this one took about 2 hours to get everything back to normal – but glad i did it and now i’m on the latest version 2.8.4 which should last a few weeks i hope
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Originally uploaded by glemak
this tree is in our yard/woods in vermont, not sure how long its been there but most of the big trees in the area have been logged on and off since the 1800’s – this one looks like it was struck by lightning and is now a home to fungi and little critters – has a very cool old soul look to it though…
“Zemanta is a revolutionary new platform for accelerating on-line content production for any web user. Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read??? by Zemanta, which recognizes all contextual content. Zemanta then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results to the user to enrich and inform their content. What’s more, Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.”
ok, this is actually pretty cool and straightforward to understand and use – everything below this line was added via the zemanta plug-in that i added-on to firefox which was available as soon as i enter my wordpress dashboard and started to create this blog post – sweet…
i’m meeting with their ceo later today so i wanted to test out the functionality myself prior to – very nice app, impressed
my friend brian tagged me, rules are simple: go to the sixth page of your flickr stream, and post the sixth picture that’s listed, then tag six more people.
i was a little concerned that i would end up w/ a not-so-interesting photo but was glad when i saw which one was the lucky tagged shot…
this is from the spring of 2005 and was taken by me in our frontyard in stamford, ct while i was playing fetch w/ our two dogs: teagan (2 y/o jack russell) and kirra (13 y/o lab mix) – a month after this shot kirra would pass suddenly from what amounted to organ failure due to old age, she was a great dog having come to us as a rescue @ 9 months old when we lived in socal, moved w/ us to texas and then on to connecticut – when we decided to bring teagan into our family as a puppy fresh off the boat from ireland, kirra welcomed her wholeheartedly and loved playing in the yard w/ her – that’s the story behind this photo…
as for my tags, picking folks who i think might enjoy this flickr fun & are bloggers
so i went riding without the dogs yesterday because it was raining real hard overnight and throughout the morning and then it switched to a drizzle which meant wet muddy trails and slippery conditions. i did my normal hill climb and ridge run loop. as i was coming up to the top of one ridge that now that leaves have fallen gave me a clear view of the switchback trail below and the swamp and ridge on other side of the valley. i stopped (which is where i took this shot) when i saw some movement which turned out to be a string of deer, three that i could clearly see walking along the far edge of the swamp below the ridge line. i’d be on that switchback below in a few minutes and was wondering if i’d catch up to them on the other side of the swamp but then i saw a large dog on the switchback immediately followed by two hikers. i headed off down the trail and by the time i passed the hikers and their dog the deers were long gone probably crested the other ridge and down into the other valley. there is a trail over in that valley but its the most technical trail in the park and not very fun when its wet and slippery since its hard enough when its dry. so a deer photo will have to wait for another day, i see them all the time this time of year…
service oriented architecture is considered a loose coupling of services that allow for diversified backends to be joined via a web service integration into a unified frontend – this in the past was primarily considered the domain of business practitioners – i am over simplifying it of course so apologies to all my fellow techies out there – with the advent of presence aggregation environments such as friendfeed and swurl, that allow any individual or group to integrate a large number of sites and services into a unifying frontend, the advent of a robust personal soa capability has arrived – yes, this sort of frontend aggregation via rss has been around via rssreaders and other sites for awhile (igoogle & my yahoo for example) but the simplicity, mass integration of diverse services and then the additional enhancement of community engagement functionality in the current environments is why i think they are so much more compelling than their predecessors – this is why i’ve started to think of this paradigm shift as a personal soa movement and why i stated in the title that i believe we are (as early adopters) at a point when where we post is irrelevant (i am ignoring those who monitize their blogs since this movement does seem to somewhat fracture their promotional traffic driving efforts – i don’t try to monitize anything i do online) and that we now have the luxury of choosing the best backend service for the task and then having it integrated upstream into our presence aggregation frontend (both for our utilization and for those that wish to subscribe to us once and get everything) – for me i like del.icio.us for bookmarking, flickr for photo sharing, typepad for my tech related blogging and wordpress for my personal blogging, etc… (you can see what services i’ve integrated via my friendfeed profile) – btw, i normally would do a tech focused post like this one on my other blog, but hey – its now irrelevant