Nick V. took a few photos and one awesome movie clip during my bachelor hike last month.  Check ’em out.

The wedding photos and reception photos are now online!  Don’t forget you can search through them for keywords or "tags" as they are called; we mainly just tagged these sets with the names of the people in the photos, but we did tag some of them as "funny" so check those out.  (And read the captions because sometimes the funny part isn’t obvious otherwise.)

Over the past couple weeks, Kim and I have been a little busy, what with getting married and going honeymooning and all that  : )

We have a lot of wedding photos to sort through, and we’ll be posting some of them on AnthonyAndKim.com soon.

Back here at the NoDivisions ranch, posting will be sporadically unavailable over the next week or so, as I’m doing some pretty serious code refactoring to make way for a couple new features.

In the meantime, my mom got her picture taken with Emeril Lagasse in Florida last week!!  She also has a few movie clips of him in the kitchen of one of his restaurants.  Go see!

About 10 days ago I posted about calebfoster.com, a website that I had just finished designing.  But it turned out that the next day, Caleb left for a trip to Switzerland, and took his server with him, so the website was offline.  It’s back up now, so go check it out -- for real this time.

I finally posted my photos of the city from on Mount Washington last week.  There are some pretty good ones of the city skyline and of Point State Park.

In unrelated news, I had to upgrade to a new version of Quicktime the other day to view a video clip, and I discovered that you can’t get Quicktime without iTunes anymore.  Product tying, anyone?  Microsoft gets buried in lawsuits for including -- horror of horrors -- a web browser with their operating system, yet Apple can force me to run iTunes all day long, when I don’t even own an MP3 player?

On the way home tonight as I drove across the Liberty Bridge, I saw a coal barge in the river.  They carry what look like open-topped railroad car containers full of coal, and they sit really low in the water.  The engine is in the back -- if it’s even attached at all, that is; I think the little boat just pushes the huge raft of coal-cars from behind.

It’s fairly common to see one of these barges during the day, but I’ve never seen one moving at night before.  It was really cool to see, because it was coming towards the bridge I was on, and it had two very bright spotlights on the top of the boat (at the rear of the whole operation) and they were shooting light forward, but not straight forward, rather off to the sides a little.  I guess the combination of its extremely slow speed and massive capacity and the lights beaming through the fog made it seem really neat.

I then saw two teenage girls walking down the dark street, and this is around 1 AM.  I thought that that doesn’t seem like a very good idea, but it’s actually fairly common around here.  I wondered about where Pittsburgh stands in those "safest cities" surveys that you hear about every once in a while.  And then I thought, releasing those surveys is actually pretty dumb, because what better way for a criminal to decide where to set up his operations than the cities whose citizens aren’t careful because their city is ranked very safe?

As I typed that last line, one of those freakish zillion-leggers zipped through my peripheral vision.  I smashed him to bits though, don’t worry.

On Saturday, Maria got a cute new kitten which she named Milo.  Sadly, Louie was just taken to the SPCA because he couldn’t stop going to the bathroom on the carpets  : (

Yesterday on the drive home, I took some sunset photos which I rather like.  And during that photo session I snapped my camera’s 10,000th photo.

And today, NoDivisions.com had its 100,000th visitor.  It was a Windows XP / IE6 user from the ISP gwi.net, who found my site by searching for netgear wg111 linux on Google.  He only stayed for one minute though, so it’s unlikely he’ll see this message to claim his prize  : )

Kim and I visited a charming place called Hells Hollow yesterday.  No, really.  And yes, the fact that there is no apostrophe does drive me crazy.

Kim’s current photo of the day is really neato and mystifying.  Yesterday’s is awesome too.  Come to think of it, so are these two sciencey ones.  And did I mention this one of the Pittsburgh skyline?

Maybe you should just go see all of ’em.  Warning, extremely cute pet photos are hiding behind that link!

Note: This should only be used at the telephoto end of a camera’s zoom range. If used at the wide-angle end, severe vignetting will occur. here is why your having the vignetting i have this lens on the cybershot DSC-S85 also but i dont have that problem

Kim is kicking my butt in the new posts department.  She’s doing daily photo posts now (i.e. one new photo per day) on her blog, and she also has a great set of photos from the picnic this weekend at my parents’ house.

Kim just added photos of a bike ride and a horseback ride to her website.  Of all the cool things we did in Colorado last month, these were two of my favorite.  The bike ride was so scenic, winding along and crossing over the Yampa river lots of times, and it was a beautiful, sunny, blue-skies day.  The horseback ride was great because I’d never ridden a horse before, and we saw some amazing views of mountains and endless fields and lush green valleys, with no civilization in sight.

My mom took this photo last year at my grandmom’s birthday party:

The photo set never made it onto her site, but I saw a print of this photo on her desk this weekend, and thought it was awesome.

WOO-HOO! I finally got a gravatar! Isn’t it precious?

Did this work?

What it is!

Sorry for the lull around here lately.  I’ve moved to Pittsburgh and am quite busy with unpacking and getting appliances and job-hunting and myriad other such goodies.

I could say a lot about how cool it is here, and I probably will as time goes on.  For now though, I’ll just say that it’s a very un-citylike city.  It’s nothing at all like Philadelphia, for instance.  I suppose the main reason is that it’s tiny by comparison; it has only one-fifth the population and certainly looks very small and non-intimidating compared to Philly.

Pittsburgh does have a real-city skyline though, and so far that’s one of my favorite features.  It’s really cool to be on the south side of the Liberty Tunnel (oh yeah, the tunnels, another cool thing), where it’s very rural/suburban, and then drive through the tunnel to see the beautiful skyline towering directly in front of you.  And that’s doubly cool at night.  I hope to get some good photos of the city from up on Mount Washington soon.  (Mount Washington is a small town within Pittsburgh that has quite a bit of elevation, and it sits pretty much directly above center city with some great overlooks.)

In closing, let me just say that the abbreviation for Pittsburgh is "Pgh."  I think we can all agree that as far as abbreviations go, that’s about as unstoppable as it gets.

The new Armor For Sleep album is really good.  Check out this track from it.

Over the past few days I’ve taken a lot of photos:

Ducks and Fog on K-Milk Pond Clouds and Skies and Shiloh Treeline at Dusk

Finally, check out this awesome error I got from one of the ancient Mac OS9 systems at work:

"An unexpected error occurred, because an error of type -110 occurred."

Help!  I used to have a great photo app that you designed called (I think)  "Make Photo Webpage".  But my computer crashed, I had to wipe it clean and reload Windows from scratch and now I don’t have it any more - and it doesn’t seem to be on your website.  Is there any way you can tell me how to do it again?

Hello squirrel face  ( :

Anthony and I took some portraits and some photos of our soon-to-be home this weekend. It was really cool, because the couple renting the house was super helpful. They even told us what roads get really icy in the winter! We’re really excited, so I wanted to share the pictures. Anthony was going to post these photos on his own site, but I beat him to the punch. wahahahaha. I win. : )

I took a few dusk photos the other day.  I don’t know if my camera’s lens/CCD is really dirty or if I’m just less tolerant than I used to be but lately I’ve been really disappointed with all my sky photos, because of how grainy they are.  I see an amazing sky and jump in the car to go to my low horizon spot and take a bunch of photos and think "these are gonna be beautiful" and then I come home and hate them all.

Anyway... this set contains 11 of the 81 shots I took, and even these I don’t really like.  If only my camera would go down to ISO 50... or have noise-reduction circuitry...

Kim and I got engaged this weekend  ( :

Check out Kim’s post, my photos, and Kim’s photos (some photos overlap, but not all).

Image-editing programs can be so frustrating, and it seems that often the most frustrating things are the simplest.  When I can’t figure out how to do something or other, I look it up and it turns out that usually the solution was simple and I was trying too hard.  Anyway here are a few handy things to remember about GIMP.

To draw a straight line using a tool like the pencil, first click the starting point, then hold the shift key, and click the end point.

To draw a circle, use the oval-select tool.  Draw a selection, then click Edit, Stroke Selection.

To select shapes/regions from an image, use the Path tool.  Click on the border of the region you want to select and it’ll make a "node;" click again and it’ll make another connected to the first.  Do this until you have the shape/region fully enclosed -- if you want to connect the last node to the first, hold the control key and click the first node.  Then you can click Select, From Path to turn your path into a selection.  You can also save ("export") your path to a file.  And here’s one of those simple-but-nonobvious things: when you switch to another tool and your path’s nodes disappear, the way to get them to show up again is to switch back to the Path tool and then click around somewhere that you know a node is at (approximately).  This will make them all show up again.

To make the background transparent, you have to add a new layer, an "alpha" layer.  Just click Layer, Transparency, Add Alpha Channel.  Now when you use the eraser tool (or select an area then press Ctrl-k), it will erase to "transparent" instead of to the background color.  (Of course, only PNG and GIF images support transparency, or at least, they are the only popular formats that do.  JPEG and BMP do not.)

To remove red-eye from your photos, download the script from the bottom of this page and save it to your /home/user/.gimp-2.0/scripts/ directory.  Then it’ll show up in GIMP under Script-Fu, Selection, Red Eye.  All you need to do is select a small part of the red area inside the eye, then click that menu item, and it’ll do all the work for you.

After changing an image’s canvas size, you often need to click Layer, Layer to Image Size.  And if after doing some manipulation you find you can no longer draw on your image, you may need to do Select -> None, and/or Image -> Flatten Image.

There are a few more that aren’t coming to me right now, but if and when they do I will post them here.

Hey, nice head shot.  Do you hope to have one for everybody?