Water

This is Shosone Falls, "Niagara of the West," near Twin Falls, ID. I was in the area for my sister-in-law's wedding last year. This a stitched panorama. It is available for up to full size viewing (6267 x 2321 pixels) and download at iStockphoto along with other views of the falls including rainbows.

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Blogger Bug

If you're reading this, you've come directly to this blog entry, you went to http://jiwhite.blogspot.com/index.html, or you're not using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 as your browser. For some reason, http://jiwhite.blogspot.com is prompting to save a file in my work browser today, but other browsers and different ways of linking to the content work correctly. I reported the issue in the Blogger Help Group about an hour ago, but I haven't gotten any responses. I've had difficulties creating new posts for Blogger in IE6 before and usually end up posting using Firefox, so this doesn't surprise me.

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Empty

I was just checking to see what the Photo Hunters theme would be for this coming Saturday when I realized that I had forgotten to post for last Saturday. Given that my husband and I are trying to have children and recently had a consultation with a Reproductive Endocrinologist, this image seems particularly appropriate for this week's theme. This is an HDR created from three photographs +-2EV taken at my sister-in-law's home in Twin Falls, Idaho, last year when we went to visit to attend her wedding. It's hard to believe that she's a grandmother and we're working on having our first child. My husband and I are both the youngest of our siblings and cousins. If we do manage to have a child, she or he will have cousins more than a generation older than they are.

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My New Phone

This is the first picture I took with my new phone of the store display of the model, XV6700. It doesn't show the cool slide out keyboard. It is a PDA/phone/camera with Bluetooth and wireless. Supposedly it gets 200 hours of standby time, so I should actually be able to use this phone on a regular basis without charging it everyday. The only drawback I've found so far is that the camera is only 1.3 megapixels, but it is mostly a phone and PDA, so that's not so bad. Awesome so far!

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Why Arizonans Don't Smile

As I was leaving work complaining of the grit in my teeth, a fellow employee summarized the rising dust storm succintly as, "why Arizonans don't smile."

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Bodyworlds 3

A few weeks ago I took advantage of discounted Bodyworlds tickets through work to go see the Gunther Von Hagen's Bodyworlds 3 exhibit at the Arizona Science Center with my husband. He was squeamish up front, but was glad that he went to see the exhibit. I grew up in a medical family, both of my parents are doctors as well as many of my cousins, so I had no trepidation with the content of the exhibit, plastinated human and animal bodies and body parts. I found all of the exhibits fascinating and tastefully done. Unfortunately, photography is not allowed inside, so I can't post my own interpretations of the sculptures. The exhibit is very informative on both normal and abnormal function of each system and particular parts, for example, comparing healthy and diseased smokers lungs. Many of the pieces are uniquely beautiful. I particularly enjoyed the pieces about the circulatory system. It took me a couple of hours to get through the entire exhibit listening to most of the audio guide. I would recommend this exhibit for all ages.

As the exhibit points out, death, especially human death, is something that most people are insulated from most of our lives. This is exhibit is an opportunity to both marvel at the human body in a uniquely anatomical way and to confront the death of the body. I'm considering donating my body to the Institute for Plastination (IfP). While I am partial to grave sites and mausoleums, my husband is clear in his wish to be cremated. My family's cemetary is in Peru. While I enjoy visiting that cemetary with my family when I am in Peru, I doubt that I will choose to have myself transported there after my death. I also believe that my body is just matter and that most of who I am and what I do will be quickly forgotten after I die. Plastination is one way of literally preserving myself and continuing to make a contribution after my death. For personal and practical reasons donating my body is a very compelling alternative for me.

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Flickr Mapping

Flickr has finally made mapping photographs available internally. After uploading a photo, click on the "Place this photo on a map" link. Use find a location to have the map go to an address, or click and drag the map until you have the location at which you want to put the photo. Drag the photo from the bottom bar to the location to pin the photograph to the location. Then, the original photograph page displays the city and state in which it was taken with a link back to the map. To control mapping for your Flickr account, including importing previously geotagged images and map privacy options, go to http://flickr.com/account/geo/. This is such a new feature that you must enter the URL. Geo options are not avialable from account settings, yet. The URL for importing geotagged info is incorrect on the main page. The correct URL is http://flickr.com/account/geo/import/.



Flickr maps is easy to use, but lacks some features. The geotags and other location indicators, i.e., city, state, and country, for the location are not added to the photo's tags as in other applications. The name locatons are not necessarily accurate and cannot be edited. For example, photos mapped to my house show as Ocotillo, not Chandler. Ocotillo is the subdivision I live in, but my address is in Chandler. Th map has trouble displaying photos all over the globe. I can see either my US photos and Peru photos by zooming in on the area in which I'm interested, but they don't show up at the same time. The help and bug topics for Flickr mapping have been locked, so this feature may have been placed back into development.

The locations are difficult to edit once placed. To change a location, pull up the map, find the photo you're interested in changing. Select "Edit photo", then "Location". The latitude and longitude are editable fields. The easiest way to edit the location, unless you know the exact latitude and longitude, is to delete the latitude and longitude entries and click save, then go back to the original photo page and start over. This feature is a step in the right direction, but still cumbersome compared to other geotagging methods.

You can find the photos I've put on the map at http://www.flickr.com/photos/janine-white/map/.

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Drink

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Pet Food Recall

It sounds like Eddie and the cats may have gotten lucky. Associated Press reports that Menu Foods, a major manufacturer of "cuts and gravy" style pet food for dogs and cats, has initiated a recall of 60 million containers of wet pet food sold under various brands, including the Kroger Company, Safeway Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and PetSmart Inc. Some animals have been suffering from kidney failure and dying following ingesting the affected pet food. The root cause of the illness is unknown and under investigation at this time. We had been feeding Eddie Safeway canned dog food, which he gracefully shared with Zeus and Vixen, for several weeks until he recovered from three root canals. Thank goodness Eddie is back on dry food and showing no ill effects other than occasionally staring longingly at his bowl as if wondering why he's not getting the tasty food any more.

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Flickr Collections

Yeay! Flickr sets can now be organized into collections. With over 3000 photos in over 80 sets, this is the feature I've been asking for since I started using Flickr. From Organize > Your sets & collections you can create and organize collections. Collections can hold either sets or other collections up to five levels deep using a hierarchical structure. Each collection has a title, mosaic, and, optionally, a description. You can now also change your photos page layout to choose how to display photos and collections or sets.



The new collections feature is good, but not perfect. I had some technical difficulty organizing sets into collections. I occasionally had to refresh the page because a would become unselectable. Creating mosaics is flexible, but cumbersome. I just kept hitting randomize the collection mosaic until I found a mosaic for each collection that I like, but it took a while, and I wasn't able to drag and drop photos within the mosaic as expected. I don't understand why the collection mosaic isn't displayed on each collection page. Collections can't have comments the way that sets can. Some collection names display incorrently with an extra space in the name, as seen here. The technical details will probably be worked out in due time. I'm just happy to have the collections feature finally.

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Twitter

follow jiwhite at http://twitter.com

As I rest up at home, I've had some time to review the email newsletters I automatically file away. As I clicked through various links, I found my way to Twitter, a service to broadcast what you're doing right now by anything that consume RSS, include phones and browsers. Each entry in Twitter is a maximum of 140 characters. Twitter has been getting a lot of hype recently in the blogosphere, but I don't think that it will last. The posting trend is already showing signs of flattening out after a short exponential rise.



Twitter has technological problems from quick adoption, like being slow or unavailable, but those can be overcome. The biggest problem is that most of the content is drivel. The character limit generally allows for less than two sentences, even dropping subjects. I agree with Passionate that Twitter contributes to loss of focus and web1979 that Twitter won't last.

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Getting Healthy?

I'm sitting at home trying to get over bronchitis, my third bout with a respiratory infection since December. This one is by far the worst. I'm on my third antibiotic and a short course of steroids (methylprednisolone). I asked for levaquin and codeine cough syrup front when I first went to the doctor in Ireland, but apparently the don't have levaquin available there because I just got a blank stare and ccodiene cough syrup is available over the counter in Ireland. I started with amoxicillin, but just kept getting worse, including spiking a fever the next day. I went back worse than I started and got clarithromycin and 4 20 mg daily doses of prednisolone, which helped. The only side effect I had was a slight case of diarrhea. However, as I was finishing the seven day course of clarithromycin, I still had symptoms (with no help from having my codiene cough syrup confiscated in the airport on the way back because it didn't have a prescription label). Stateside, my regular fmaily doctor finally gave me a prescription for levaquin, which has always worked for me in the past, and a short course of methylprednisolone. I had to wait 2 days between clarithromycin and levaquin because the pharmacist said that there could be heart complications. He said clarithromycin has a 40 hour half-life. However, I used the drug interaction checker on drugstore.com and it didn't identify any interactions between clarithromycin and levaquin, although it did give about warnings about methylprednisolone. I'm also using cough syrup, Sudafed and Claritin as needed. Although I'm not a very allergic person, high particle counts can also trigger sinus issues for me, and air quality in the Phoenix area has not been great recently.

Am I the only person who loses weight by going on steroids? They're supposed to increase salt retention, leading to weight gain, but I'm losing a pound a day. The good news is that I need to lose weight. Hopefully, they're just doing their job stopping inflammatory processes. I hope that it's not a sign that the steroids are triggering diabetes, which can be very negative side effect of steroid use. Right now breathing properly is my highest priority and I am feeling progressively better.

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Architecture

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Salty

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Photoshop CS2 Creativity Training Tour

Yesterday I attended a Photoshop CS2 Creativity Training by Bert Monroy. He is an artist who creates photorealistic images from scratch in Photoshop for the movie industry and commercial applications. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for the entire training because I needed to take care of Eddie who had 3 root canals the night before and I needed to get ready to leave for New York and Ireland at the end of the week. This was one of the most amazing classes I have attended. Monroy is extremely experienced and has a great knack for making the creative process in Photoshop as quick and easy as possible. He not only showed amazing effects, he also demonstrated how to achieve them with minimal effort. The time savings from any one of the demonstrations pays for the cost of the seminar. Although a workbook was provided with the class, I also purchased both of his training DVDs to be able to review the material and get the rest that I missed. I also joined NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) in the vendor room and received a free book, The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers, and DVD, Photoshop CS2 Mastering Camera Raw, of my choice. So, I'm all full up on Photoshop training for a bit.

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