My Requirements Are Simple…

Rachel asks, Google answers:

Brian needs to workout!
- someone needs an editor. “workout” is not a verb.

Contribute to the “Brian Needs a New Mac” Fund
- if I may speak candidly, you all have been a little lax in this area.

Brian needs food, badly
- Well, yeah.

Brian needs to communicate more effectively and stop being negative.
- How about I “start being more positive” instead? “…be the change you wish to see in the world,” oh, anonymous reviewer.

(Brian needs to fill in details)
- I’ll get to this later.

Brian needs to combine two or more site links
- Sheesh, I can knock this one out right now! How about this and this?

Brian needs to use the SMTP container and not the IP …
- Can’t see how I missed *that* one…

Brian needs to be glorified beyond recognition and be allowed to cheat so he wins
- Ahem.

Brian needs money
- See #2, above, my good and generous friends.

In light of his past outbursts, Brian needs to guard against responding emotionally to a volatile situation.
- WTF?

When the Cat’s Away…

…the mice have to chase each other around or they’ll grow fat sitting on the couch watching Mythbusters and eating peanut butter sandwiches all day.

Jennifer has been away for a few days, so it’s been me just me and the boys around here.

My goodness, that woman does a whole lot of stuff around here for us.

This is not at all news to me, but, even so … wow.

Them takers is quick

That last post about the photography class was taken and appeared on Technorati - linked to the site that took it - almost immediately. What a buncha maroons.

I’m using the same tags on this post to see if they do it again. It could be fun to remotely control their site…

If you’re reading this somewhere other than beanquest.wordpress.com, please understand I didn’t put it there.

Photography Class

I found a blog called Strobist a while back. It’s done by a guy called David, who’s a photographer for the Baltimore Sun. It’s called “Strobist” after “strobes” (which I, in my childlike innocence, once called “flashes”), and he gives great information on how to use off-camera lighting to help you create better pictures.

Now, I don’t know if you know this, but my undergrad degree is in lighting design for the stage, so there’s some crossover. But, it turns out, the crossover is limited to theory, and not practice. Because for stage lighting, you light the entire area with huge lights, throwing continuous, colored beams from a long way off. For photography lighting, you light just the subject, and from very close, and for tiny fractions of a second. And most often with “white” light.

So, his practical advice has been wonderful and very .. uh .. practical. I’m getting pictures of my family that I’d call “portraits” now, and not “snapshots.”

Anyhow - I mention this here because he’s starting up a lighting class next month. It’s free and online, with assignments posted to his blog, and participants’ photographs posted to Flickr for evaluation and comparison.

If you’d like to play along, just go ahead. There’s no signup form and no fee, and both David and his commenters have proven to be awfully friendly and helpful in the time I’ve been reading them.

I plan to follow it, and do as much as I can fit in.