I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my site to the latest version of WordPress, but I did it a little differently… so if you see coding weirdness, please do let me know. The site itself will look pretty much the same as before, but the whole interface behind the curtain is laid out differently. It’s an improvement on the admin side (hurrah for one-step plugin updates!), with more features that largely don’t impact me while I’m still using my Gail-ized version of K2 Beta Two r167 (the current version is Release Candidate 3). At least one of my plugins has been updated to work better with 2.5, which hopefully means the other plugin writers will follow suit.

This is gobbledy-gook to most readers, yes, but cross your fingers this upgrade doesn’t break anything!

For any Wordpress users out there who would prefer to show their Flickr photo sets directly on their site instead of opening up a separate window, this may be for you. The plugin can be modified to accommodate whatever width you require.

Wordpress plugin by Kumara Sastry
PictoBrowser by Diego Bauducco & Co.

Now, all I need to figure out is how to customise the plugin to accept either sets or tags. Right now it’s defaulted to tags sets (oops — see comment below).

Here’s an example of how it looks using my Christmas ‘07 in Vancouver set. Just click on the main photo to advance to the next one, or click on the individual thumbnails to select.

I picked up my Christmas present from my brother today… and excellent timing, too, as I’m getting around to editing the Stanley Park Christmas train videos with the kids in Vancouver. There’s also a big digital pile of videos that haven’t been edited at all. And, of course, there are lots of Toronto Short Film Projects coming up!

For quick editing, I use the super-cheap and basic Quicktime Pro. If I want to use transitions and certain effects, I use iMovie but it’s sluggish and drives me bananas. It’s a bit of a last resort. For short film editing, I’ve been using Adobe Premiere Pro on our producer’s PC, but I’ve been told Premiere Pro isn’t going to be supported on the Mac so it’s not really an option anymore.

I went to the Apple store a week and a half ago and nearly bought this and Leopard — it’s a good thing I didn’t!

Here’s some trivia about FedEx I only learned last year, something I’ve never noticed before LarimdaME pointed it out to me when I was in New York City. We were taking photos at the rooftop garden of at 230 Fifth when we came down to the lobby where there was a drop-off box and he showed me that there’s (purposely) an arrow between the E and X. See?

I’ve been looking at that FedEx logo for donkeys years. I’m no good at those stare-hard-enough-and-see-a-deer pictures, so it’s no wonder I never saw that!

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. When I’m feeling badly, I build a website. This domain (gailatlarge.com) is now two years old, and I’ve just built another website.

I dunno, there’s something about wrestling with code that takes me out of myself. While everyone’s conversations sound like the parents in a Peanuts cartoon (wah wah wah), I’m trying to figure out how to modify lines of code.

As usual, I’ve been hacking up templates. It’s a work in progress, but this is how it looks right now:

http://vincentsushi.com/

Yes, I have some major tweaking to do.

This one’s called The Volcano. And it’s spelled right, unlike here. But you know, spelling doesn’t matter when food looks this good.

I’m getting ready to push off again, this time for Persian food, not sushi. There have been THREE attempts to try out The Pomegranate, but *ahem* a certain Persian guy who shall remain nameless hadn’t made reservations in time for our big group and I couldn’t make the third attempt after rescheduling because I was editing all Thursday evening. When I arrived home after midnight, I realised with a sinking feeling that I was due at the sushi restaurant at 8 o’clock to do the photoshoot! (Argh! I think I’m going to have to begin entering this stuff in iCalendar! With alarms!) Thankfully I was able to do it yesterday instead.

And speaking of editing, that’s what I did most of today (8:30-4:00!) while the snow blanketed the city. (8:30? What? I know — I can barely get to work for 9pm during the weekdays, just imagine how many times I hit the snooze button this morning.) One clear benefit with all this heavy-duty editing is that I’m learning Adobe Premiere Pro rather steadily, which enthuses my Inner Geek. I love learning new software — the more technical, the better.

Between the photo editing, film editing, and website building I’m doing lately, I’m keeping my appetite for geekery as well fed as my belly. Oh, and did I mention I made reservations right in the middle of a snowstorm due to dump on Toronto tonight? That’s one way to make sure you get a seat in a restaurant — pick a night when nobody wants to go out. We’re supposed to see a band that isn’t due to perform until around 11:00-11:30 — we’ll see if the weather interferes with the plans!

I watched a demo of video editing on a laptop computer projected onto a large screen this evening, to get a feel for the editing process I’ll be working through after our film gets shot. I’ve done small-scale video editing for my own clips that I put on my website, but I want to learn more advanced software with higher-end equipment. I’ll probably need to upgrade my computer if I want to install video editing software like Final Cut Pro, but in the meantime I’ll probably be editing with other people’s PCs.

To answer somebody’s question to me yesterday, these short films may or may not be made public, it depends largely on how they turn out and what the film group decides to do with them. Who knows, if they’re good enough maybe they’ll attract a buyer and get distributed or possibly turn into a commercial of some kind. It’s unlikely you’ll see me in a film, though, as I’m happy to leave the acting to others — I’d much rather write, shoot, or edit a film than be in front of the camera. Editing is incredibly painstaking and not many people enjoy it or have the patience for it, but once I’m involved I’m truly engrossed and lose all track of time. I’m here to learn through trial-and-error, practice, and getting to know the process inside and out. I think it’ll be a great winter activity! Shoot outside in the elements! (I do that, anyway.)

Speaking of commercial, a rep at a stock photography company contacted me through Flickr to see if I’d be interested in contributing my images for commission. I’d normally ignore this sort of email as a form of marketing, but she actually linked directly to five of my photos, so it wasn’t merely a targeted mass emailing. I’d looked into this fairly recently on another site, but my camera’s resolution didn’t meet their requirements for minimum image sizes. This particular site has a lower minimum resolution with a wider price scale, so maybe it’s time to revisit the stock image revenue stream idea.

Halloween 2007 was the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, the… the… [insert superlative here]…

It started off with the Breakfast of Champions, a diet-smashing fundraiser at work for The United Way — a bake sale.

Coffee cake, three decorated cookies, and French toast with maple syrup! The mouse truffle was the pièce de résistance! My body went into sugar shock by 10:00.

Bake sales at work are (pun alert!) DEADLY.

Saw some interesting Halloween costumes today, starting with a pumpkin head wearing a black cape walking down the street this morning. It was a real hollowed-out pumpkin, too! Then there were the rather large furry creatures on the subway:

The panda even did a little pole dance. You know, as pandas do.

There was some major geeking out at the Eaton Centre Apple store, too. We shamelessly monopolized the attention of an Apple store employee until his shift was over. But oh boy, I should’ve known better than to go in there and play with the new iPod Touch. I couldn’t stop touching it! Although, come to think of it, the Apple staff are probably accustomed to wiping drool off the devices.

But to my utter jaw-dropping surprise, I became the proud owner of my very own iPod Touch, thanks to the generosity of the Mac addict who introduced me to this brand in the first place… you know who you are! I am ever so grateful, because now I can wi-fi my way around the world without having to drag my PowerBook through airport security and squeeze it onto tiny airline food trays while the person in front of me reclines into my face.

It’s the perfect travel companion!!

I took some photos last night to experiment with colour profiles and white balance to nail this neverending problem with trying to match the colours between my computer and what gets uploaded to Flickr.

This is not bad, between Firefox and Safari. A screen capture with Firefox on the left and Safari on the right.

How does this look on your computer? I’m using an entirely different method of colour management. Is the red pepper red and the cilantro green? Are the colours washed out? (Sorry Mace, I know you don’t like cilantro and you’re red-green challenged…!)

Just when I think I have it licked, something like this shows up.

I calibrated my screen a while ago to match the colours I see in the Flickr uploads, because I want to know that what I’m uploading is matching how I manage colours in Adobe Photoshop CS2. It seems a little counterintuitive because it’s the monitor colours that also affect what I see uploaded to Flickr — chicken and egg, egg and chicken — but the point of this exercise is to get the colours as close to a match as I can.

It seems to be something that rears its coloured head every six months or so.

This has got to be the most glaring example of the mismatch I’m talking about, a photo I shot this afternoon in RAW after brunch (didn’t take a photo this time, but it was a Buddha Bowl at Juice For Life, similar to this) on my way home.

This is a screen capture of what it looks like to me, in PS (click on the pic to see the discussion in Flickr):

This is what it looked like uploaded to Flickr — completely desaturated! [Note: if you're using Safari it won't look desaturated.]

I thought something had happened to my Adobe colour profile, but I checked the profiles of previous uploads and they’re the same. Nothing’s changed, except I converted the JPG from RAW and maybe the mismatch lies in the conversion. Argh, I’m going to make dinner and see if food helps me find a solution.

I’m at Keflavik Airport, waiting for my Halifax flight to board. I always take the window seat, and sometimes it pays off: I nabbed some great aerial shots of Vatnajökull — the largest glacier in Europe — on the east side of Iceland during the flight from Paris. It’s a beautiful clear day and the visibility is incredible, but ARGH!

I packed both USB cables in the checked baggage!! I never do stuff like that, there’s always one with me. Except right now. Oh well.