Photons Everywhere

I was asked by our Marketing department to take some photos of our Datacenter. I would love to share more photos but the environment is highly secured and don’t want to get in trouble

Some interesting shots were made though and faced some interesting challenges. The Server Racks are all pitch-black and the Floors are snow-white. Those drastic differences in light reflection made my light-meter go nuts. But I think I managed OK. I will definitely show some photos here if I get the OK from “upstairs”.

Matt shows in his latest video, something I should do more often – backing up your presets for Lightroom.

The problem I have is that when I decide to re-install my OS, I forget to backup those things so should probably put them into my synch.

Click here to watch the Video

One thing he did not mention though is for Vista users, the path is C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\

Matt from Lightroom Killertips published a new Preset today called "City Night Effects"

It is a nice preset like most available in three strength Light/Medium/Dark. On below photos I applied the Light preset which gave best results in my opinion.

A good one to keep….

Original Night Shot

After Preset was applied:

Mike Wong shows a LR feature I have not yet seen myself; being able to only expand one active panel in a sometimes cluttered world of LR panels.

www.ononesoftware.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/260

In a fairly recent post, I wrote how I took the plunge. By now I am sure most of you heard that the format war is over and Blue-Ray has won.

Well. What do I have now. A brick? A dust-catcher?

I do admit that I may have been to quick buying a next-gen DVD player. It was never 100% clear until recently who would win. At the very best I now have an upscaling DVD player. I own two whole HD-DVD’s, Godzilla that came with the player and "The Bourne Ultimatum". Toshiba/Microsoft obviously do not find it necessary to send me the five free DVD’s the promised in their coupon. At least so far I have not gotten them.

Since there will hardly be any new releases in HD-DVD, I will not go out and buy a Blue-Ray player. I can watch newish movies in HD via Cable and almost DVD-new movies in HD quality via XBox download. So for now at least back to good and proven DVD.

Since I have not blogged in a while, I figured why not just share some of my opinions about Bush’s new Budget for 2009.

He intends to spend $515.4 Billion (that is half a trillion) on Defense. This is more than the rest of the world combined. Ridiculous.
Now, will those $500B be enough? Probably not as the US will not pull out of Iraq that quickly, even if Democrats win the next election it will take some time.
I estimate the US to be spending between 600 and 700B at least for FY 2009.
The $515000000000 Budgeted (did I forget some 0’s?) is by the way a 75% increase compared to 2001 since W took office.

He says that his Budget will be balanced by 2012 which I think will never happen but he won’t be in office then so it is easily blamed on Hillary (assumptions here).

Now when I look over the other Budget PDF’s you can view at http://budget.gov it is interesting to see that many other Budget proposals have the work ‘Terrorism’ in there e.g. Healthcare has in it’s top-line ‘to fight influenza and bioterrorism’. So the little Healthcare budget there is might have to be shared with Defense after all.

At any rate – Since I started my new job last year I had to re-sign up with a new 401k provider. I opted to put a large bulk into foreign Stock and Bond as I don’t believe we are on the "up-wind" yet.