Just another WordPress site

Tag: pics/photos

  • flickr’d photo: from an airplane window



    DSCN3508, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    an old one, taken on a little piece of junk camera, but, it would have been nearly impossible to screw up these shots…
    this is one of many shots i took of a sunrise on a flight from albuquerque to l.a. – if you click on the pic it will take you to where you can see more of them… this shot is one of my favorites – i love the surreal feeling…

    meh, i just typed a bunch of stuff, deleted and started over and then again a couple times, so, i think i’ll stop trying and just let the photo do the talking 😛

    though i will add that, when i first took these photos, i dunno’ maybe three years ago, this was probably the most popular of all of them and no less than five people had this one as the wallpaper on their computer…

  • flickr’d photo: dad dying at home



    DSCI5464_1.jpg, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    since i brought up dad in the last pic, i wanted to show another that means a lot to me…

    that is cheryl, a nurse with hospice… hospice nurses are amazing people – dad didn’t like anyone much but he liked cheryl… she did so much to help him and take care of him in his last days… she and the other nurses (but especially her) did so much to help us…

    this pic was taken as discreetly as i could, trying to keep the camera semi-concealed, or at least not calling attention to it so i could get a genuine moment… i am shocked it came out as good as it did, but, focus, etc. is far from perfect… but, the moment is captured and that’s all that matters to me…

    i love the accidental composition of mom looking so concerned yet distant – evocative to me of helplessness or powerlessness – we often felt that way… just watching his life drain away and not in a hospital, surrounded by disconcerting devices and ominous terminology where you expect sickness, but here at home where he hangs all his hats, in his living room, in his favorite chair, the place he probably felt safest for many years… while home i’m sure is a more pleasant place to die, my point is one doesn’t associate home with death… i’m not coming up with the words to fully express what i mean, but if i could always SAY what i felt about what i see or experience, i doubt i would have the desire to do photography…

    so, just look at the picture again with all i said in mind…
    as i said, it’s one that means a lot to me…

  • flickr’d photo: dad’s last cigarette



    IMG_0306.JPG, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    this continues to be one that is very meaningful to me… the description on flickr is: “this is where i used to sit with my dad and smoke before he died… i haven’t had the heart to take his last cigarette butt out of his snuffer…”

  • flickr’d photo: old hands

    old hands

    old hands, originally uploaded by insidious_plots.

    ok, let’s see how this works…

    i love this pic and all but it needs some tweaking…
    we were in cloudcroft and got in the car and, in front of us was this old guy leaning against a post with his hands behind the post, as you can see… i scrambled for my cam and only got a couple shots before he moved and this one is the most acceptable…
    i really wish i’d had time to get better, but at least i got something…
    btw, i DID do some gimp work on this, but i seem to have lost that version 🙁

  • new pics

    those of you i stay i contact with know the new developments in my life lately, the rest of you can get in touch with me if you want to know…

    anyway, since it has been since may that i uploaded any pics, i quickly went through the last 5 or 6 months of photos and quickly grabbed some of my favorites… they are uploading as i write this… most are final, edited pics (see, i make prints these days and don’t upload as much) and some are just unfinished product… but, go have a look, i really love some of them in there and there are a few i am very proud of…
    and, btw, billy, christine, catherine, jennifer, and dana, there are pics of you in there…

    btw, i must once again apologize to those who get the email notification of changes to my site… that bug has once again started up that causes my blog to revert back to the default style and, every time that happens, it sends out an email… and then, it is sometimes days until i notice and fix it…

    anyway, i hope to hear from any and all of you, this is a lonely place…
    right now, email is best…

    as always, top right of the page under “my stuff” is the link to flickr, where the new pics are, and all my contact info is right above that…

  • photo page updated

    i had created that photo page a few months ago as a gateway to all my online photo collections and i have now updated it, with a bit more explanation and notes, as well as adding links to the collections i have on flickr…
    if you have never taken a look through my photos, this is a chance to have it be easier to get an overview of than ever…

    the link is always over there on the right in the sidebar, near the top, under “My Stuff” (it says “photos”), but, here is a direct link…

    and, in case you hadn’t noticed, my webcam is back online, now new and somewhat improved…

  • a couple site-related notes

    i know, i know, it seems impossible, but, i actually did a thing or two to the site…
    i noticed that i have had a blog for nearly four years now, in one form or another (and a non-blog site or two for a couple years before that, btw), and it got me thinking about it…

    so, for one, i finally fixed the chat box… after a year or so of my old flooble chatterbox thingy being expired (it was an externally hosted script), i finally installed my own – namely, SmileTAG, an ajax shoutbox gadget… i have gotten some good use out of it for the last year or so over on our local disc golf site, so, i finally added it here…
    since the old chatterbox expired, i lost every message ever left in it 🙁 so, you can try to make me feel a little better by leaving a note and letting me know you stopped by!

    i also added my good friend chris dunn to my “twinners” links – which is the last category in the my links list – and i did a long overdue update to my “Apps I Can’t Live Without” list – which is the first category in my links list…

    also, i have been putting my flickr photostream to much more use and i may continue to do so… if you haven’t been to it lately, you will see i have added a lot of pics and made a few changes…

    i really do want to get caught up on all my photo albums, but, i may just go ahead and start posting current pics and not worry about posting past pics just yet… i don’t know… i spend so little time doing stuff like making albums and updating websites and such anymore… however, i did create a nice-ish page as a starting point for all the photos a while back… it even tells you if the pics are in an album or it is just a directory of files…

    anyway – are there any more updates coming?

    i have no idea… if there are, i will post about them…

    i would, for instance, like to get the webcam/screencast going again…

    we’ll see what happens…

  • feb pics posted and more new stuff

    ok, firstly, the pics from february are up…
    i did sort of a rush job, so, some should have been touched up, and i chose the wrong skin color scheme, so, it isn’t pretty, but, meh, at least they’re finally online…
    anyway, no autostitch pics from feb (march has a few to look forward to, though), but, there are a few webcam shots… also, this set finally has some pics of “Truman“, my new computer, so, everyone can see what i’ve been describing…
    enjoy…

    ok, next, since i get a lot of comments/questions about it, i would like to publicly let everyone know that my webcam sucks (hey, it was $15, you get watcha pay for)… it freezes up quite a bit, so, yes, when you view my webcam image, it might not be live… the program that uploads the images does just fine, so, it will have a current timestamp, but, it doesn’t realize the cam has frozen, so, it just keeps uploading the last image the cam provided before it froze…
    the way it usually works is that after a few hours, the cam just freezes… so, while i’m at work, or when i am out for the day, at some point or another, the cam stops giving new images, and i don’t fix it until i get home…
    BUT FOR THAT MATTER, keep in mind that, when i have it off, i have it set to just leave up the last image it took… i like that better than something that says “cam currently offline”… but, you can tell by the timestamp when i’ve done that…
    anyway, maybe i’ll buy a new cam soon… buuuuuuut, the cam software i use is a bit of a resource hog, so, sometimes i shut it down intentionally when i have several progs open at once… if anyone wants to recommend a lightweight cam app that has ftp, feel free to hit that comment link below and lemme’ know…

    and speaking of new progs, i am now playing around with SCWebCam and am lovin’ it…
    it does something a little different… it takes a snapshot of my monitors and uploads them… soooo, when you look at my sidebar over there, you will see a new image below the webcam thumb and that is a live shot of my computer monitors… click on it and i have a full page set up for it like my webcam page, with the chatterbox and everything… plus, the two pages are also now cross-linked to each other…
    since i am running two monitors and am letting the image be at 80% of actual size, it is pretty large… it may be a problem for those on dial-up… but, i have it auto-refreshing once a minute, so, that will hopefully be enough time for it to download completely…
    (oh, and, in case someone might point it out, yes, SCWebCam also provides webcam features, BUT, it doesn’t have a feature or two i love on ConquerCam, like the dynamic caption that i can change in seconds from a button in the system tray (it’s the blue text at the top of the webcam image)…)

    anyway, that’s it for now… oh, except that i was graciously donated a scanner by manuel, so, perhaps i will start uploading scans of photos from the old days…
    we’ll see…

  • January pics are up and A LOT of site-related stuff

    ok then, it’s what, the eighteenth of february?

    ah well…

    couple new things again this month…
    like last month, i have a folder of panoramic pics made with AutoStitch…
    this month, there is a new folder called “WebCam” and it has a very few notable moments caught on my cam… this will continue from here on out, assuming there are things worth posting and i actually hit that little ‘archive’ button on my cam when those moments happen…
    i have also done something that was much-needed and actually made thumbnails for the vids this time around…

    i think that is all there is to tell, right this way to the January 2006 pics…

    oh, btw, i am playing with the settings in JAlbum to figure out how complicated it would be to start posting my pics semi-live… see, it can generate an album and then, you can add more pics to it and it re-generates all the pages and such… then, i could just continually post pics throughout the month, rather than doing one huge batch every month… just not sure if that’s what i want to do or not…
    we’ll see…

    anyway, site news…

    first, briefly, i’ve changed the way the photos directories display and you can now read the full descriptions of all the folders… that’s awesome, take my word for it… sooner or later all the people who have complained in the past will see it and will no longer complain…

    secondly, since no one else is around to do it, i spend a lot of time cleaning up people’s computers, installing new software and such, and, on my usb swiss army knife i carry my “Christopher Pack” (if google and lifehacker can have one, so can i), so, this all inspired me to add a list of links to info about apps i cant live without… you’ll find said list on the sidebar, under Links, the list is called “Apps I Can’t Live Without”… now everyone can be as 1337 as me 😛
    ok, next, no, i never officially announced it in a post, but, yup, i gotta’ cheapy webcam here in my living room earlier this week… it’s on 24 hours a day, except when it’s not, refreshing every 10 seconds, unless i have it set for every 30 seconds 😛 😛 😛
    needless to say, there’s not much in the way of alwayses and nevers with it, but, it’s already been fun…
    it sits atop my monitor (erm, the primary monitor, the one on the coffee table) and shows me and everything behind me… of course, it’s often too dark to see much… some day i may just point it out the window for the cool view… in the webcam folder of this month’s pics, you can see an example of the view i have in mind… for now, i’ve been having too much fun waving to people and putting little “hello!” messages on it… it has a quick access dynamic caption feature, plus i have it set up to show my foreground window as well as what’s playing on winamp… man, from decade-long recluse to webcammer…
    anyway, over on the sidebar, under “My Stuff”, you’ll see a thumbnail image from it and you can click on it to get to the full webcam image view page thingy… also, i have inserted the chatterbox into it so people can leave comments and, boy have they… never had so many chatterbox comments in the three years or so i’ve had one…

    (btw, as of feb14, i have been back on the internet five years, here’s a little post from a couple years ago about it…)

    oh, almost forgot… huge thing here… i upgraded to WordPress 2.0 here a little while back and it has an import wizard… so, i thought and thought and thought and finally decided to do it, i imported ALL my posts from my old website… that caused me to jump to 170 posts, dating back to april ’03… you can see a month-by-month list on the sidebar under “Archives”, which is right under my webcam thumbnail image… i still need to add category tags to all of them and that is a big job… (my “uncategorized” category grew immensely when i did the import…)
    i wasn’t going to import the old posts and just leave the old site as sort of an old abandoned building to be explored by the venturous… i may still undo the import (if i can figure out how) and stick with that plan… BIIIIIIG difference between the christophercornelius.com website/life and the insidiousplots.com website/life and i have never thought it was a good idea to mix the two…

    ok, anyway, one last thing, as you will catch hints of in the pics, i now have a new computer… the old one died a horrible death… i have a bunch of new pics of it in the upcoming february batch, it is integrated into the home theater system, with dvd, optical digital audio, and everything… i’m lovin’ it, it is so much better than my last one… you can check out more info about it than you could ever care about, i have uploaded the main page of my belarc advisor profile of it, it is the big bold link under “My Stuff”, the very first link, it says “Truman”… you see, i named the computer “Truman”… that’s my dad’s middle name and my dad is the one who got me started in computers when i was 10… he also gave me most of the parts to build this computer and much technical support… THANKS, DAD!

    anyway, whew, what a long post, but, i think i’m done…

  • december pics, cool photo progs

    ok, so, the december pics are up…

    most of them are from the two weeks of resets… overnight work in abq/etc., santa fe, gallup, and farmington, me as the boss with between two and four temps as my crew on any given night… see, i had to take my cam to take pics of the bays when we finished them, so, i used it as an opportunity to take pics of work, something i never had pics of before… of course, this is not what i normally do for a living, but, meh…
    before i move on, let me point out that somehow, there are some mistakes in the chronology of pics… specifically, it has the pics taken at the bernalillo store dated dec22, when they are actually the night of the 15th/morning of the 16th… no idea how the heck that happened… that is the only error i noticed…
    anyway, a bunch of pics of me, jim, nicole, natalie, and robert doing triple resets in nine stores… that makes up most of this month’s collection (though, that includes some nice scenic stuff during the drives between gallup, farmington, and back home)… on that note, the last page of pics has a folder called “for work” and it is all the post-reset pics… i wanted to save them for future reference, they are not at all interesting, which is why they are at the end of the collection…

    however…
    the folder at the beginning of the collection is quite interesting, which brings me to the next stuff i wanted to cover, that being the two cool programs i have been using this month…

    on the first page of pics is a folder called “autostitch”… the last couple weeks i have been playing with this amazing new app called (as you may have guessed) AutoStitch…
    From the official website:

    Autostitch is the world’s first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).

    see the new image at the top of my webpages? that’s a panoramic view from my balcony of the mountains, created by AutoStitch… in the folder, i have quite a few test shots – sunrises, sunsets, many of my apt… so, be sure to look through those and, if it’s your thing, download the program and have as much fun as i’ve been having…
    i’m sure i’ll be posting many pics made with this app in the coming months… (um, and just to be clear, the pics i’ve made so far with it are nothing special, just trying it out… but, you’ll see the potential from the pics i posted…)
    and, btw, BIG THANKS to SuperDaveNM for posting about this program over on flickr!

    ok, also, now that i have been using Irfanview all month, i must say i highly recommend it… the quickest thing i can say about it is that so many pics i took this month, like every month, were absolutely hopeless… too dark, too blurry, too washed out, etc…. and, with this prog, i saved MANY of them… not to say that other programs can’t do this (feel free to let me know of better ones!), but, this is the first i have used and am loving it to death… it made a DRAMATIC impact on this month’s pics… the first two pics in the collection show a great example of a pic i would have, without any doubt, deleted, but thanks to irfanview it was made into a keeper… gamma correction, contrast, color saturation, many great settings to do some great photo manipulation… and it is even a very nice media viewer in general, i even downloaded a movie and watched it the other day and it ran much smoother than even winamp… it’s a “thousand and one uses” kinda’ program, for sure…

    ok, i think that’s about it… first i said i started using JAlbum and wanted to go back an “JAlbumize” all my past pics… well, now i want to go back and “Irfanviewize” many from the past and even see which ones could be “pano’d” by autostitch…

    until that far off day, you’ll have to settle for clicking here to see all the december pics…