Random Frames

I have been out of the PC hardware race for a long time now; since I bought my Dell P133 way back in my days of living in the dorm. At present I have a decent Toshiba Satellite laptop (P4, low- 1.xGhz, 1/2GB shared memory, 40GB hard-drive)that I use at home. For what I use it for at home (surfing web, blog, personal finance, etc) its plenty of PC. I don’t game anymore hence the reason I settled for the shared memory to get the lower price.

But now I am getting the itch for a smaller more portable system. The present Toshiba rarely leave the desk it sits on at home. I want a laptop on the scale of the 12 inch Apple G4 (yeah I have looked at the Apple don’t anyone fall off their chair, especially Andy). But to be honest I am completely overwhelmed by the number of options out there on the market. I like Toshiba I have owned two of them and they have both been tanks, both in weight and reliability. I want something lighter with wireless so I can surf easily when traveling. I am going to finally get a cable modem at home and while I am doing that I will put a wireless hub at home.

The iBook is appealing simply because of the fact that I know I am going to get good hardware and there are less options to dig through. I do worry a little about converting over to the OS X and how my poor XP brain will cope with it.

So if I would love to here your suggesting for a highly portable laptop. If you have a good link to reviews and/or some info to help narrow the field of choices down I would greatly appreciate it. And you MAC users please try to sell me on the G4.

Thanks
Homis

I was happy to see that some people had more fun than me on Valentine’s Day. This was a massive pillow fight in San Francisco. That’s my friend Mischa there trying to defend himself. I love these pictures. You can see a lot more here. The feathers look so surreal in long exposure.

Aparently this was a real flash-mob event, organized through the internet and even Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia). The san fran Chronicle wrote a nice article about it.

Via Rob Galbraith’s website, here are a few links to blogs by photjournalists at the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy:

   John Lehmann of Canada’s Globe and Mail
   Scott Strazzante of the Chicago Tribune
   Scott Sady of the Reno Gazette-Journal

Use this thread to post any other interesting photos and blogs from the Winter Olympics that you come across.

A friend pointed out these pictures of the Chinese countryside to me, and I thought they might be appreciated here. I’m a sucker for the ones with reflections in the water, I have to say. It’s a tough choice, but I think the 14th one is my favorite. How about you?

I was very taken with some creative costumes and models Melinda stumbled across via livejournal. There’s animal costumes made from shoes and tights and sleepings bags, and there’s a page of animals made from pieces of assorted hardware. I’m quite tempted to use one of the animal ideas for this year’s halloween, but the best ones seem to all involve being stuck in an odd, uncomfortable position.

Ok, for the next week, let’s use the theme of Favorite Picture. Reach back into those libraries of yours and find your favorite picture that you have ever taken. It might be nice if you included a short blurb explaining why you like the picture so much and/or a short explanation of what the picture is.

Alternatively, if you choose, you could post a picture that someone else has taken.

Post when ready.

Seems a little dead around here. Though I would post this for amusement.

Enjoy -Homis

Ok, so I saw another link on BoingBoing to a photo gallery I thought people might be interested in.

Above is one of the pictures in the gallery. Now, what do you think you are looking at? It looks exactly like a scale model that someone created and painted realistically, right?

Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The pictures in the gallery are pictures taken from a helicopter of actual places (the above picture is of an aquaduct in Rome). He uses a tilt-shift lens to create that effect.

I’ve never heard of a tilt-shift lens before, but I looked them up, and kind of have an idea of what they do now. What I still can’t really figure out is, what is it that makes a picture of a model look like a picture of a model and not a picture of the real thing?

On BoingBoing, I caught a link to this site. The site has a bunch of pictures showing a home theater system that some guy turned into a huge set that looks very similar to the bridge of a Star Trek ship. It’s a little bit crazy. Cool… but crazy.

You can also view a 3-D tour of the room at this site (worked in Linux/Firefox).

Ok, I’ll start us off on this week’s theme, which is entries for The Mirror Project. The idea is to get some sort of self portrait using a reflective surface. Plenty of examples can be found on The Mirror Project’s website, and there are a bunch of other rules that they have as far as pictures that are posted.

The picture above is smaller than what I usually post, because I couldn’t find the original, and had to download the version that I had posted to The Mirror Project all those years ago. This weekend, I hope to do some shooting and come up with some more creative shots.

Anyway, the above picture shows a reflection of me and my camera on the elbow of the cold air intake in the engine compartment of my car. (And no, I couldn’t figure out a way to cram more prepositions into that sentence.)

As usual, if you have ideas for future themes we can use, please let me know.