Survivor Redemption Island

Did you catch the commercial this week promoting the new season of Survivor? It’s Boston Rob versus Russell! And I guffawed out loud at Jeff Probst’s observation, “I’m gonna need a bigger torch!”

Apparently, there’s a new twist to the game in this 22nd iteration:

On Survivor: Redemption Island, which premieres Feb. 16 on CBS, when a contestant is voted off, he or she won’t leave the game completely but go instead to Redemption Island, where he or she will face off against the next person voted off in a duel. The winner lives on to face the next arrival at Redemption Island until one person left standing has a chance to return to the game.

(Historic moment, peeps — that may be the first time in six years of blogging that I’ve ever quoted from People magazine!)

Boston Rob is on his, what, fourth or fifth season now, but I’m still looking forward to this. I still think Russell was robbed in Survivor Samoa and totally should have won the million bucks.

I’ve also heard that they’ve adapted the rules to give discretionary power to send someone directly home rather than keeping them around for the jury, after NaOnka and Kelly S quit Survivor Nicaragua. They should not have been allowed to stay as jury members, IMHO.

I just wish they’d move Survivor back to Thursday night where it belongs. After 10 years of habit, it’s messing with the flow of my week to have it on Wednesday nights!

Yay, Survivor is (almost) back!

Edited to add: oooh, and this one is also good. It’s from the CBS website, though, and you have to sit through a 20 second commercial (sigh) first.

Project 365: One month done!

This week on my 365 project, I took a lot of iPhone pictures. I found an app called Diptic that lets you create diptychs (two panels creating one picture) as well as triptychs and up to five-panel images.

33:365 Crayon dippy

34:365 Tree dippy

Another easy iPhone capture, this one via Instagram:

32:365 Key to my heart

This was an iPhone capture simply because it was the only camera I had with me at the time. Remember how cold it was last weekend? It was near -25C (-15F) on Saturday morning when I headed out to the gym, and I noticed that even though it was relatively clear, it was so cold that the ice crystals in the air formed a rainbow around the rising sun. Stellar!

30:365 Ice crystal rainbow at sunrise

One of my favourite groups on Flickr is the “Through the Viewfinder” group, and they had a thread discussing “topless TtV”: TtV shots that aren’t cropped to the viewfinder and with no contraption, so you can clearly see the entire bottom camera. I liked the idea, and this is the result. Photogenic Miss Katie, who, by the way, is still in fine health.

29:365 Topless TtV

Every year I buy a potted hyacinth from the grocery store. The smell as they come into bloom is delicious and fills the house with the sweet scent of spring just when it seems that winter will never end. And each year I plant the leftover bulb in the garden. I’d cultivated a half a dozen or so of them at the old house, and am looking forward to peppering the new garden with them!

Lucas couldn’t even wait for this one to bloom, so intent was he on sucking in the scent last weekend! This, by the way, was not so much staged as captured. I was shooting the backlit hyacinth when Lucas popped up to “help”. The pose and the vigour with which he sniffed were entirely his own! Don’t you just love that cowlick? It’s *always* standing on end like that!

31:365 Lucas loves flowers

And, the hyacinth a few days later as it came into bloom, taken through the viewfinder of my Duaflex. The frame is in very soft focus because I used a close-up filter on my Nikon lens so I could get in close and fill the frame.

35:365 Hello hyacinth TtV

Here’s my brain-teaser of the day for you. In TtV, the Nikon lens focuses on the viewfinder glass, which is on the top of the Duaflex. The Nikon lens also has a minimum focusing distance, meaning you have to be at least X distance from your subject before it can autofocus. Part of the reason I use a “contraption” is to ensure that minimum distance is kept while blocking out extraneous light.

But! If I get too close to the hyacinth flower with the *Duaflex*, the Nikon won’t autofocus. It wants me to have the Duaflex that minimum distance away from the subject as well as the minimum distance from the Nikon to the viewfinder.

Weird, eh? One of the many wonderful quirks of TtV. 🙂

Winter (and photo!) fun at Shiverfest

With five centimeters of fresh snow on the ground and temperatures near freezing, we couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful morning to enjoy Shiverfest, Manotick’s annual winter carnival. See?

Sleigh ride

Shiverfest horse

Simon pulling

Shiverfest mascot sledding

Tristan at Shiverfest

Shiverfest Lucas

Tristan and Simon at Shiverfest

My only regret is that the intense quad workout I decided to do at the gym might have been a poor choice to go with hauling Lucas half a mile to the tobogganing hill and back, not to mention dragging him back up after every trip down the hill. I can’t feel my legs anymore!

An unprovoked attack on Comic Sans font

I was in a committee meeting of the boys’ school council recently, and one of the other members presented a letter of some import that would be going home with each child in the school on behalf of school council. It was a very serious letter with a significant call to action (we’re raising funds to equip each classroom with a SmartBoard), and the author finished his presentation by saying he was open to the committee’s comments on the content, the layout and ‘even the font.’ At which point I pulled my tongue out from between my teeth and said rather timidly, “Well, since you asked? I hate Comic Sans font.”

It’s true. I’m a font snob. I could spend a day or three simply poking around in free font download sites, leaving the children to run feral. Fonts are like the icing on a cupcake — they can make it exquisite or awful. My personal preference runs to classics like Times New Roman and clean sans serif fonts like the Helvetica you’re currently reading, but I’m also a fan of a well-constructed and playful handwriting font. You’d think that since it more or less intersects all of the foregoing, I’d be a bigger fan of Comic Sans — but I’m not. In fact, it pains me to do this, but in the name of objective reporting I have looked up the necessary coding to turn a part of this paragraph into said Comic Sans font. Are you loving it? I’m not, I have to turn it off now!

I don’t know why people use Comic Sans. To me, it’s the font equivalent of turning every statement into a question. It undermines your credibility. It’s the open-fly and lipstick-on-your-teeth of the font world. In my very humble opinion, you should graduate beyond Comic Sans about the time you stop dotting the letter i with a heart or a star. And apparently, I’m not the only one.

To his credit, my co-committee member took my comments in good humour. In fact, he laughed that I carried such a burden of distaste for Comic Sans. And just a few days later, he e-mailed me this article from the Globe and Mail, which claims that Comic Sans will “will improve your memory retention, help your kids do better in school and make your wife love you more.”

There you go. Different keystrokes for different folks. And for all of my sweet friends who now think that I think poorly of them because of their font choice I will concede that for personal e-mail, it’s not a bad font choice — but it’s not a good one, either.

That’s exactly the sentiment that infuses this long and geek-a-licious article that had me at its title: “Why you hate Comic Sans.” It moves through a designer’s analysis of the stroke and weight of the font, goes on for quite a while using terms like stroke modulation, aperture and anti-aliasing, and then moves on to the bit that really intrigued me — the history of Comic Sans.

His conclusion:

So, the story of Comic Sans is not that of a really terrible font, but rather of a mediocre font, used incorrectly on a massive scale. Windows 95 was the first operating system to really hit it big. Just as computers were starting to pop up in nearly every home in America, Windows 95 was finding itself installed on all of those computers, and with it, the font Comic Sans. So now, nearly every man, woman, child, and bake sale organizer find themselves armed with publishing power unlike civilization had ever seen; and few of them really had any design sense.

He also notes:

So, you see, Comic Sans is an archetypal enemy of the Graphic Designer. Its not only an unattractive font, but it also represents the invisible, evil force that is making the “print” designer less and less relevant. A natural reaction to being threatened is violence, and the hatred for Comic Sans is arguably violent.

A good old-fashioned smackdown between classically trained graphic designers and sixty million DIY publishers — how can you not love this stuff? (I have to admit, I have a vested interest in this one. In my day job, I’m a Web manager but Beloved is not only trained in graphic arts but a teacher of them as well. Apparently we’re the Hatfields and the McCoys of the digital world!)

So where do you fit on the continuum? Need a little help to find out? Take five minutes to take this clever and entertaining quiz from Pentagram: What Type Are You?

Apparently, I am Archer Hairline – emotional, understated, progressive and disciplined. I love it!

And you?

Edited to add:
props and bellows of laughter to @sproudfoot on twitter, who sent me the link to one of the most hilarious pieces I’ve ever read on the web, “Short Imagined Monologues: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole

It opens with this:

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

and ends with this:

I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery. Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.

And the middle bits are even funnier than that. Really, go read it!!

Would you, could you, eat human cheese?

You know what’s great about blogging? The network of friends who know me and my bloggy style well enough to send me links to really quirky articles like this one about — are you ready for it? — human cheese.

Yes, you read that right. People are taking human milk, mixing it with goat or cow milk, and turning it into cheese for human consumption.

*pause while you all wince and shift uncomfortably in your chair*

I know, major ick factor, right? Me too. Until you start to think about it. On a biological level, it’s way more weird that we drink the milk of other animals — really, cows are disgusting, slobbery, unpleasant animals, and goats give me the willies — so why do we shudder at the idea of consuming human milk? The Globe and Mail article gets right to the crux of it with a quote from Miriam Simun, who is offering her human milk cheese online. “Many people feel uncomfortable because they don’t know the woman, or what she is eating – but how often do you know the cows of your cheese, and what they are eating?”

It’s funny, a couple of years back I blogged about the Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar, an art installation in Toronto that welcomed passers-by to consume 3 oz of the breast milk of strangers, and my reaction at the time landed somewhere between distaste and disturbed. Maybe I’ve mellowed over the years, or maybe another year and a half of nursing softened me up, but I think this is a kind of neat idea.

But as much as I’m trying to be open-minded, I have to admit that this bit also made me squirm:

Ms. Sumin mixed the women’s milk with cow’s or goat’s milk, and offers several spirited reviews on her website: “This spreadable deliciousness is a human-goat blend, made from two wonderful milks. A playful Vermont mountain goat herd milk tangos with the milk of a sweet lawyer’s assistant who hails from Wisconsin and is excited to become part of what she considers a ‘more acceptable and personal’ cheese. Her mostly organic diet full of meat is rich in flavor and spices – and boy does it come through in this darling little cheese!”

Too much information, methinks. (Although I did snicker at the fact that the milk supplier was from Wisconsin. They really are cheese people out there, aren’t they?) I think I’d be open to the idea of cheese made from *my* milk, but — and please don’t take this personally — I think I’d pass on yours.

Of course, you know I wrote this whole post just so I could ask you: what do you think? Would you eat human cheese?

Come shiver in Manotick this weekend!

One of the many things I’m loving about Manotick is that there’s a community festival of some sort about every six weeks or so. This Friday and Saturday, it’s Shiverfest!

24:365 Skates

There’s all sorts of family fun, including a bonfire, public skating, a chili cook-off and even a photography contest. There’s a pancake breakfast followed by a special kids’ program featuring face painting, tattoos and a visit by a truck from Ottawa Fire Services at the Manotick Arena. Later in the day on Saturday, there’s a show by Dino’s Reptiles, and a late afternoon teeny-bopper dance. There’s also horse-drawn sleigh rides and tobogganing in the park. Doesn’t that sound like an awesome winter day?

For more information, including lots of specials from local vendors, see this Shiverfest pdf from the Manotick Village and Community Association.

Five reasons I’m looking forward to spring

Here in Ottawa, it’s the coldest day of the winter so far, and the mercury has clawed its way up to -24C. But the sun is brilliant, and it’s making me twitchy. Now that the days are starting to get incrementally longer, I can feel summer calling my name. Unfortunately, it’s still a long-distance call!

I’m especially excited about this spring because we’re in the new house. With the giant front porch and a patio that stretches the length of the back of the house and a full half acre of land, the house was made for celebrating the outdoors.

I’ve got big plans for that big patch of land, too. Here’s five things that I can’t wait to do come spring thaw:

1. A clothesline. I am ridiculously excited about the idea of stringing a line from one of our towering trees back to the house for laundry. A small part of my mind wonders if I my enthusiasm for an outdoor line won’t wither up and die after the first time I forget to bring things in before a shower, or the first time I find a bug in my underwear drawer, but for now I am delighted by the idea of having a clothesline.

2. A vegetable garden. There’s so much room, it’s just a matter of where to cut into the lawn to create a little hobby garden. I know myself well enough to restrain my impulse to make a 10m2 plot which will require hours of intensive maintenance and which will undoubtedly be neglected to death by mid-June. But I have been chatting the boys up about a tidy corner spot to grow some tomatoes, and cucumbers, and peppers, and sugar peas. Those are my big four for this year, and we’ll see where the rest takes us.

3. A new BBQ. I think we’re on our fourth or fifth cheapo BBQ in the last dozen years or so, and it’s rusting to pieces. The handle is askance and the element, which I replaced last summer, is looking a little sketchy again. I’ve got my eye (and my sale alert!) on a mid-level one at Crappy Tire. It’s *shiny*. 🙂 We haven’t BBQ’d anything since we moved in mid-October and I’m going through withdrawal!

175:365 BBQ night

4. A patio set. Our old deck wasn’t really big enough to support a full patio set, and Beloved isn’t overly keen about the idea of eating outside. However, now that we have so much more space (do you see a theme here?) I’m looking forward to creating a little outdoor living space. I’m thinking this year we might have to settle for a second-hand or garage-sale special this year, and maybe get a nice one in a couple of years’ time.

5. A fire pit. One of the first pictures I saw of the house and yard, on the real estate website, included a view of the back yard where you could see one of those little backyard firepits, and I’d love to pick one up. I’m not sure if we’re far enough out of downtown to have one legally, but I’ve heard that as long as you put a grill on them and have a pack of hotdogs nearby, you can get away with calling it a cooking fire. I love the idea of a backyard fire pit for summer nights almost as much as I love our fireplace for winter nights! And mmmmm, the marshmallows!

So that’s what’s warming my cockles this cold January day. When you dream of the summer to come, what do you hope to do?

Project 365: Week 3

Maybe it’s the cold temperatures or maybe it’s the short days and low light, but I liked the idea of taking pictures a lot more than I liked actually taking pictures this past week. I wanted to take beautiful, thoughtful, meaningful pictures. I actually took, well, these.

I fear that I’m relying to heavily on the kitch factor in my iPhone pix, but I can’t resist the funky frames and effects to spice up pictures like this one of the setting sun through my living room blinds.

22:365 Sunset through the blinds

This was a concept picture that worked better in my head than in the camera. Possibly because I was trying to take it while also cooking dinner and moderating the bickering equivalent of World War III and also packing lunches for the next day, while not actually reading any of this book.

23:1000 Perfect winter evening

From toasty toes to frozen feet… it was c-c-c-c-c-o-l-d last Sunday when I took the big boys skating with friends at the rink around the corner, but even c-c-c-c-c-o-l-d-e-r when I plunked myself belly-down on the ice to try to get an interesting skate shot. I didn’t realize that I still had the aperture set at f22, so the motion blur was a kind of pleasant mistake!

24:365 Skates

Lucas and Katie were both pretty happy to help me by posing for this shot. I call it “one for you and one for me”.

25:365 One for you and one for me

So have I mentioned Lucas’s puzzle fixation? The child is not yet three, and he will sit and do one jigsaw puzzle after another. Not just the toddler puzzles either, but the 100 piece ones for 5 to 7 year olds. It’s quite endearing, until you have to clean the floors!

26:365 Puzzling

Homework time, through the viewfinder of my Duaflex.

27:365 Homework TtV

I found these berries out on one of my Manotick walkabouts. They must be inedible if the birds haven’t claimed them by now, but they looked good enough to photograph!

28:365 Winter berries

And speaking of Manotick walkabouts, I found this sign on the dam beside Watson’s Mill, and I chuckle every time I pass it. Who knew the peeps at Parks Canada has such a fun sense of humour? Worthless dam operating equipment, indeed!

21:365 Worthless dam operating equipment

So I have a question for those of you following my blog feed. You’ll notice that the daily picture now gets broadcast as well as any new blog posts. Is it picture overkill to have both?

Photography and post-processing

When I started my first 365 project back — hey, it was two years ago tomorrow! I didn’t realize that until I was half way through the sentence!! Ahem, anyway, when I started my first 365 back in January 2009, I posted almost every shot straight out of the camera (SOOC). I had it in my head that post-processing (that is, adjusting the exposure, white balance or even crop) was somehow making my photo less “true” to the original.

About two months into the project, I started using Photoshop and became a convert. In the spring of that year, I discovered The Pioneer Woman’s Photoshop actions, and became a veritable junkie. Over the course of six or so months, I figured out how to do a few things in Photoshop very well — adjustments like curves, white balance, and of course my beloved actions, which I ran on just about every picture. (In fact, looking back at some of those images, one might argue I could have used a lighter touch with some of those actions!) Other things, like cutting the head out of one picture and pasting it in to another, or the kind of magic worked by my friend Justin in pictures like this just escape me. (No really, go click on the link to see Justin’s picture, it’s worth it!!)

The only problem with Photoshop was that we were using a version supplied by Beloved’s employer, and he was uncomfortable with me using it for even semi-commercial purposes. When I started taking portraits and commissions, we decided we’d buy a copy of Photoshop Elements for me to use, and avoid any potential licensing conflicts.

Photoshop is a behemoth of a program. It does so much more than I was using it for. It’s also hugely expensive: currently Photoshop CS5 is $699US from the Adobe store. We picked up a copy of Elements 8, which is a much more practical and stripped-down version of Photoshop that does virtually everything I was using Photoshop for, at Costco for less than $100 last summer.

Also around that time, I downloaded the free beta of Adobe Lightroom 3.0 and once I got the hang of it, I never looked back. The beta ended in June of last year, and I had to buy my own copy. I love Lightroom! I love my presets, I love the ease of use, and I love the interface. Playing with pictures in Lightroom is one of my very favourite things to do, and post-processing has become as much fun as actually taking the pictures themselves. The only time I open Photoshop anymore is for my TtV pictures, because there are a few actions that I like that I haven’t been able to replicate in Lightroom.

I know a lot of you are doing your own 365 project right now (I love that so many of you are, in fact!) and even if you’re fairly new to photography, I’m betting that if you stick with it, eventually you’re going to start thinking about buying some post-processing software. If you do, I can’t say enough good things about Lightroom. Having said that, here’s two things you MUST know: first, you can download a free trial of Lightroom to check it out. And even better, Adobe offers smashing educational discounts on all its software for students and teachers. The full price on Lightroom is $299US, but you can get it for $89US with the educational discount. It’s *so* worth it, and all you need is to submit a copy of your student or faculty card (or, ahem, your dependent student’s student card — hint, hint. What, your five year old doesn’t need to learn post-processing with his ABCs?)

So, are you guys interested in chatting more about Lightroom and stuff like that here? So many blogs are already doing a much better job than I ever could with Lightroom tips and tutorials and presets, but now that I’ve re-engaged the photo-obsessed part of my brain, I’m looking for more creative outlets! And if you’ve got other non-Adobe suggestions for post processing, please share them!

(Nope, this is not a sponsored post – I’m just in love with Adobe’s products.)

Some thoughts on comments and comment spam

I‘ve been thinking about comments lately. It was Delurking Day the other day, and I got an interesting e-mail from a reader. She asked me why bloggers think comments are so important. She noted that we as site owners can plainly see the traffic, so why do we want people to comment?

I thought it was a good question, and I’ve had more time to think about it since I answered her. So, here’s my expanded answer, in case you were wondering the same thing! When I blog, I open up my life and my perspective for your entertainment. When you comment, you return the favour. Sure, I can see that someone from Nepean clicked over to my site on January 18 from OttawaStart.com, and I can tell that they found the content fairly engaging if that person then clicked on my ‘about me’ page and my archives and spent 15 minutes reading. (I love it when I see that!) But most of the time, all I see is a click in and a click out and I wonder — did you find what you were looking for? Were you entertained? Were you disappointed? Will you be back? What did you think?

And I wonder about YOU. Who are you and why are you here? Are you a mom or a dad looking for things to do in Ottawa with your kids? Are you a photo junkie, a government hack like me, a student? Are you looking for information about kids’ birthday parties in Ottawa or retractable beer handles or the reliability of google maps or TtV photography? (All of those are search hits from the last four hours, by the way!) Comments let me know what you like and what you don’t like, which influences what I write and post to a certain extent. Comments are good!

So when are comments bad? This is something that has come up a few times in various forms in my blogging career, but I don’t see a lot of discussion about this. When does a comment become comment spam? Most comment spam is obvious, and askimet and other spam filters do a good job of filtering most of the obvious spam out of the comment box. But what about when a real person is commenting with a rather obvious agenda of attracting eyeballs to his or her own site? I actually called someone on this once, when it got to be too obvious and I was feeling particularly feisty. That conversation did not end well, let me tell you!

And what about when people use the comment box for advertising? This is a sticky one for me, especially on really popular posts of mine, like the “40 free or almost free activities” post or the mom’s guide to birthday parties. People have commented something like, “Great post! I also offer XYZ service that I think your readers would really like! Come visit my site at XYZ.com!” To me, that’s free advertising at my expense, and I bristle at that. I’ve also deleted quite a few pitches posted as comments on my “about me” or “contact me” page. Pitches should be private and e-mailed, IMHO, and give me the opportunity to share and endorse or not as I see fit.

But am I being too sensitive about this? Should I allow this space to become a bulletin board for services? I mean, there’s no real harm done to me, unless that person would have otherwise paid for ad space — which I know they would not have done. So am I overreacting to delete advertising or pitches masquerading as comments?

As always, I welcome your comments! What do you think about the grey area between commenting and using the comment box to promote yourself or your service? Would you differentiate between a PR or ad firm using the comments to advertise versus a small business? Do comments-as-spam bother you as a reader? How do you deal with it on your blog? I’d love to hear your thoughts!