ode to spelling checker

This lovely piece deserves to remain forever fresh on the internet.

Ode to the Spell Checker.

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Arthur On Gnome

.. I don't know who to credit for this one

goodbye koalas

I read in a recent article in the Australian that the Koala population in south east Queensland has declined some 40%. Politicians seem to be distressed by this. According to that article "It is believed there are less than 20,000 koalas now in the wild in southeast Queensland."

and that some recognition of this being related to urban development

"The State Government will also work with local governments to draft a new local law for development approvals to ensure dogs and koalas are kept apart, with suggestions including kennelling dogs at night, new fencing regulations and no dog provisions in new estates."

Some years ago (around 1995) back in South East Queensland people united against a road development in areas of Koala habitat and at the election ousted the government supporting it.

Its lovely to see such concern for the environment (although it seems likely that some motivation may have come from opportunistic politics).

But soon after that the area seems to have been heavily developed by urban sprawl (perhaps more habitat destroying and threatening than the roads).

Ironically the Koalas would probably be alive today if the road had gone through.

No one seems to want to alter the nature of urban development, despite general agreement that its both costly and increasingly difficult to provide infrastructure to these sprawling urban areas.
So while roads are not allowed to threaten the Koala population that relentless urban development is. So areas just around where I live which were once like this:



are bull dozed over and turned into this:




There are certainly other models of development than this, which if we are to live in the area and not destroy the very reasons we find it beautiful need to be explored.

This will require planning and community involvement. I hope that this can happen so that we don't have to say good bye to both the Koalas and the natural beauty of the region.

Please go visit the Koala Foundation and give Deborah Tabart a hand!

economic fallout

I'm no Economist but,

it seems that consumer confidence (aka willingness to spend more than you earn) is down in the wake of the financial crisis. It seems also that this is in turn hurting the economy (the lack of spending that is).

So, what would have happened if all the people advocating "sustainable development" (people like me) had been listened to? I mean if people did things like:

• rode their bicycle to work instead of using the car for 4km
• their kids rode their bicycles to school (instead of being dropped off in v8 and v6 fuel using cars non-town cars like Commodores, Falcons, Pajeros, Range Rovers ...)
• people didn't buy the latest in fad fashions for no reason
  
• we bought products which were built to last (like my grandmothers singer sewing machine) rather than buying another GMC power drill for $15 because the last one burnt out too
• we made our cars truly repairable (rather than $50,000 items which depreciate to $3000 items in a few years and we then don't see the logic in replacing a spare part for $700 {which in all honesty is probably worth $15} so we ditch the car)
• we followed our grand parents advices and didn't get into debt, invested our savings and bought wisely

I'm guessing that the "recovery" would probably take even longer.

Well if you did like the above you'll be in a good position to take advantage of the current crisis and pick up some bargains in stock market "fire sales" of quality but presently undervalued stocks (banks come to mind).

I think that if we had all followed this way then most of the "economic" growth which has bubbled and burst would not have happened, and that we'd be moving along comfortably but with out making anywhere near as much mess as we presently are.

So perhaps we'd have avoided this boom / bust cycle in the first place?

Sure, we might not have all the fancy stuff we have now, but just how crucial are your latest Telemark skis and Garmont boots to your happiness anyway? I'm still using 6 year old computing to write this essay and (since its not running the latest hottest bloat ware) its working fine thank you very much. {faster in fact than my friends newest thing with Vista holding it back}. I still use a film camera as well as a compact digital camera (which cost nearly $1000 when it was new in 2001).

Why? Well because I already had a 35mm camera (which still makes quite good images thank you very much) and I bought the compact to make my "snapshots" an easier thing and because I often email or need to send images quickly. In all honesty my 2001 5MPixel Coolpix camera is still way overkill for email and WWW needs and ultimately needs to be rescaled (like who wants to see just the corner of the image?). If I take "nice shots" which I want to print (like below) I'll still use film.




Perhaps the $1000 seems high but perhaps that's its real value when its not being "supported" by a rapid-turn-over consumer pays for on-the-fly research with subscribing to a new model every year one? Besides, how much would it cost (even now with DSLR cameras being dirt cheap compared to their real prices) to move my film outfit to comparable digital? Many more thousands.

but as has been said many times ... if history repeats itself so often what does this say about humanity's ability to learn? We're pretty stupid if you ask me.

tone mapping for the lazy photographer

I don't mind the look of HDRI, but then it is often a look not something which seems natural (although that depends on the artist). HDRI properly needs at least 2 spaced exposures of the same scene. This can be a problem, as it requires a tripod to best ensure that the camera doesn't move between shots and even then the subject can move between shots (like clouds) introducing annoying artifacts.

But those issues aside tone mapping tools which come with products like photomatix are very handy tools for the lazy Photoshop photographer, expecially because you only need one exposure. Think of it as a quick version of the sort of "dodge and burn" that a professional dark room worker would have done for your negative in the past.

So for example on a trip to India I (fortunatly) took most the images using RAW capture on my camera, I did this thinking that RAW is my negative and as processing software improves I'll be able to benefit from these advances and process my images better (than if I'd only kept JPG). Take this image:


A quick run through tone mapping improves the look well beyond what I could do without some hours of fiddling in a photo editor like Photoshop. At first glance it seems like its just been brightened, but it goes beyond that ... the clouds are no brighter and look at the shadow details in the area under the trees to the right, and the colours it can pull out in the crowd up on the left near the Taj itself.


Its stunning isn't it! So, if you didn't already have enough reasons to set your camera on RAW, then here's just one more :-)

I'll put another example below just to leave you with the idea. But try it, it'll help you pull more out of some of your RAW images with less effort.