Sometimes it’s better to have a second look at the wording before translating a campaign name directly into a domain. Stripping out some blanks can easily create new and, above all, unwanted words.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this site of the European commission is blocked by some corporate firewalls:
http://ec.europa.eu/growthandjobs/
What did you read?
Rather than satisfying all your photographic needs, a newly purchased DSLR awakes even more desires for photo equipment and gadgets.
Especially lens decisions can lead to never ending discussions. Firstly I stayed with the default lens that came with my new CANON EOS 400D and thought I’ll wait, try and see what’s apropriate for my needs.
In that context I came over a fantastic post on Flickr comparing 3 lenses (EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6, EF 24mm f/2.8 and EF 50mm f/1.4) in quite different situations:
…
Low light outdoors – buildings:
17-85 too slow (even with IS). You’ll need a tripod. 24mm you can get away with dusk / dawn lighting, otherwise it’s tripod time. In dark city with lights it’s not fast enough. 50mm can get away with anything (at the expense of a softer picture). Winner 50mmLow light outdoors – People:
24mm distorts perspectice. Not fast enough for environmental portrait type pics. 17-85 – you will need a flash which may disturb the mood of the picture. (tripod isn’t good for spontaneous candid shots). Winner 50mm f1.4 Fast, right focal length.Low light indoors – The room:
24mm and 17-85 are not fast enough for low lighting (like churches). you will need a tripod. 50mm might be to long for small rooms but you will get a lot in the pic, but it may be a bit soft sometimes (from 1.4 to f2.0). Tie between 24mm and 50mm.Low light indoors – People:
Hands down winner = 50mm. It’s fast. You don’t need a flash. You will get that “mood lighting” (ie. candles) feel. Pictures will be soft, but it will just add to the mood.
…
I already had a closer look at the EF 50mm f/1.4 before, but after reading the post I’m pretty sure that this lens will be one of my next investments.
For the last few days I tried to buy an album at the iTunes Store. Usually before I purchase music I want to preview it. iTunes offers therefore 30 seconds song previews. The problem during the last days was, that the preview wasn’t working. It started playing, after 3 seconds the stream started rebuffering for about 15 seconds followed by another 3 seconds music and so on. Ok, so I thought I’ll preview it somewhere else, and recalled the online music shop Bleep. The last time I purchased something there, Bleep was a small business and had only a few indies listed.
Boy, has this shop grown! I found the album I was looking for immediatly at Bleep, and still better, yes, SO MUCH BETTER: for the same price I (legally) bought 320kbps clean mp3s WITHOUT that crappy FairPlay DRM!!!
So what do we learn: without the technical problems at iTunes I hardly would have found out that there is still music business online who trusts in their customers and sells music that plays everywhere, for sure.
Bleep is now my personal first choice for purchasing music online. I already saw some other albums there which I had an eye on at iTunes but waited with my purchase because the preview wasn’t working.
Update:
Seems that I’m not the only one having streaming problems in iTunes. According to this thread my ISP Chello is the one to blame, not the iTunes Store. If I were Apple I wouldn’t be happy about an ISP who is blocking a few hundred or maybe thousand potential customers…
With the release of API version 2.67 Google introduced the so called GMarkerManager class. It seems to be an easy way to control the amount of displayed markers in your Google Map, depending on zoom level and scale.
Apparently some good old basic cartographic knowledge is essential, even for the fast living Web 2.0.
Everybody is talking about Virtual Earth 3D and the only thing I get is this installation message. Why is my language not 3D compatible and what if I don’t care if there is no 3D data in my region available? I would be perfectly happy if I could explore New York in Virtual Earth 3D, even in English!
Guess I’ll depend on screenshot-postings for some more time to see what Virtual Earth 3D is about…
Drugstores here in Vienna started this week another anti-smoking campaign. Smokers who are willing to quit can go there, get some advice and nicotine in every form but cigarettes. It reminded me of how I quit smoking over a year ago now. I never really did believe in this nicotine-substitutes like patches, gums, sticks, etc., they just feed you with nicotine in a absolutely ridiculous way.
If I want nicotine, I smoke it! way cooler than patching my body or chewing gums all day long.
Ok, so one day I decided to quit smoking and this is how I succeeded:
As I could observe in my direct smoking neighborhood, it’s extremely important that an ex-smoker never ever touches a cigarette again. If you do so, you’re caught another time. It’s just a question of days, maybe weeks, until you’re up to your former tobacco consumption.
The tiny stick has overpowered and owns you again.
Ah and yes, the first 3 days you’re almost driving crazy. You need to get rid of some habits, like the cigarette after lunch, the cigarette accompanying your coffee, the cigarette you smoke while waiting for the bus, etc. Be prepared and make sure you can substitute your smoking habits. I read a book to distract me, Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, had it all the time in my pocket, and whenever I got the urge for a cigarette I started reading again.
It’s easy to quit, just a matter of willpower.
Usually, when it comes to usability and interface design, Apple enjoys a quite good reputation. Especially the smart and simple iPod design is just brilliant, close to the legendary one-button-system.
This week Apple updated Aperture, added, finally, support for my new camera and made a trial version available. So I got a copy and tried Aperture. Mainly because I wanted to compare it to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is available as public beta.
First off, I’m no professional photographer, just an amateur who is looking for a tool to manage his RAW images in the way iPhoto handles snapshots. I’m not going with iPhoto because it doesn’t take advantage of the RAW format, it converts and copies every RAW picture to another compressed image format. What I’m looking for is probably somewhere in between iPhoto and Lightroom/Aperture.
However, I tried Aperture, imported most of my RAW images and began adjusting, ordering, etc. Without the intention to slug anyone here, but Aperture gave me one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever had. We just didn’t like each other. I wasn’t able to find the most simple things like editing metadata or copy color adjustments from one picture to another (can I?) and Aperture gave me no hint where to look for it either.
Maybe Aperture is just not built for me and my MacBook in matters of usability, screen size and speed.
On the other hand, I had no trouble understanding the interface and concept of Lightroom. In my opinion it’s very clear, more intuitive, a lot snappier and runs overall with a better performance on my MacBook than Aperture.
Both applications seem to do their job well, just in different ways. For amateur photographers like me both products probably mean a feature overkill. If iPhoto would’ve a better RAW handling and slightly better color adjustment features, I would just stick with it.
Sofa Surfers are certainly this year’s best live act in Vienna. It’s just amazing how they perform their new album live. Must be something like the band-factor. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but I got the impression that they are still enjoying playing music together, at least it sounds like this.
Last night I had the camera in my pocket and grabbed a few scenes from the concert, well, the visuals, mainly:
[googlevideo 8905595815819637625]
Maybe I should read support documents more carefully, but I never would’ve expected a browser to break a GIS installation: after my glorious update to IE7, ArcToolbox wasn’t working any longer, as discussed here and patched here. Even though the site says that the patch is meant for IE7 betas, it solved my problem with the final (german) IE7 release.
A must have Firefox 2 extension for web developers: IE Tab lets you switch between IE and Firefox within a Firefox tab immediately. Have the Firefox interface and let IE render the page if you want. Great add-on!
Zotero, another new Firefox 2 extension, manages bookmarks like a bibliography. Seems very useful for extensive online researches.
The first freezing day means the end of biking season.
Today ends the pleasure of greeting Fiaker horses in the morning on the way to work, no more fun with arrogant Audi drivers on the road, and finally, the luxury of door-to-door travel time less than 25 minutes within the inner city districts is gone too.
So, hello crowded subway, hello angry looking morning people and hello cold winter waiting time, we’re going to spend the next few months together.