It's been too long since I last posted an Odds & Ends.

Henri is a very amusing short spoof of French ennui.

Back in January, Emma and I were being repeatedly shocked by static electricity. We would inadvertently discharge by kissing or otherwise touching each other, or by touching laptops or faucets. Eventually, I realised that it was due to a combination of the microfiber upholstery on our new couch and the dry, unhumid air. We solved it by a combination of rubbing an anti-static dryer sheet (Bounce) on the couch and buying a humidifier. That led to a spate of jokes about the spark being gone.

It's started coming back again. I think it's time to fondle the couch with more Bounce.

The Bad Sex Awards are, perhaps, Britain's "most dreaded literary prize". Read about the 2007 Bad Sex nominees in the Guardian, with excerpts. The late Norman Mailer won posthumously

Ian Welsh makes a case that it's not your money, in rebuttal to anti-tax libertarians.

A few weeks ago I read that the last German veteran of World War I had died. Yesterday, I read that the last French veteran had just died.

Regarding the Spitzer prostitution scandal: normally, I would have given a Democratic politician the benefit of the doubt for a sex scandal. After all, unlike the Republicans—see Larry ‘wide stance’ Craig; David ‘Diaper’ Vitter (brother of my former professor at Brown, Jeff); Mark Foley, et al—Democratic politicians generally don't make a big deal of “family values”. Spitzer had done a good job of fighting corruption, but breaking up prostitution rings had also been one of his signature issues, as had prosecuting johns. The whole thing bespeaks such massive stupidity and hypocrisy that I say good riddance to him.

Several of us went to see Barack Obama at Key Arena last month (photos here), the day before the Washington state primary. The crowd more than filled Key Arena, with at least 20,000 in attendance. We ended up outside, as you can see from the photos, which actually served us well, as Obama stood outside and talked to the crowd for a few minutes before heading into the stadium. We got closer to him than we would have inside.

Anyway, John McCain spoke at the Westin Hotel that evening and only managed to half-fill the ballroom, which accommodates 800 people. In other words, the then-presumptive Republican nominee could only pull as many people as attended my caucus the next day. There are hundreds of thousands of Republicans within an hour's drive of Seattle, but only a few hundred of them could summon the enthusiasm to see their guy in person.

I thought our caucus went well. I helped the convener organize the whole event for eight precincts. As the Precinct Committee Officer (PCO) for SEA 11-1945, I chaired our precinct's caucus and was elected as a delegate for Obama, which means that I will be attending the 11th Legislative District and the King County conventions next month. I have no intention of trying to proceed further. I don't want to go to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August.

I recently learned about string pods and chain pods. In essence, they are pocket-sized monopods. You screw a six-foot string into the tripod socket of your camera, step on the other end of the string, and pull it taut. The tension on the string reduces camera shake.

My string pod tutorial shows how I made the string pod, as well as some before and after shots.

Before now, I used to try to find a handy surface or wall to brace the camera, when taking photos without flash. Often there isn't such a surface. I have a little 3-inch pocket tripod that I carry with me all the time, but I haven't used it much.

A Flick thread on low-light, no flash, hand-held photography makes several good suggestions. The best is to set the 2-second timer, which gives the camera a chance to stabilize after pressing the trigger.

Title: Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking
Author: Julieanne Kost
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: O'Reilly
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0596100833
Pages: 148
Keywords: photography, photoshop, creativity
Reading period: 30 December, 2006

Julieanne Kost, a Photoshop evangelist for Adobe, flies 200 days a year. For the last five years, she's been taking photos out of airplane windows.

This book is part pretty pictures, part a meditation on creativity, and part a Photoshop tutorial.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That must be why the word count is so low. In the first 120 pages, there are eight pages of text on creativity, and one page of text for each of the following seven chapters. The book concludes with twelve pages of text in an appendix on Imaging Techniques, a high-speed introduction to photo manipulation in Photoshop.

The rest of the book is pictures. Pictures of clouds, pictures of fields, of mountains, of the sea, pictures of sunrises and sunsets. Great photos, even if the subject matter is a little repetitive.

The appendix shows several examples of before-and-after shots, and she's worked some wonders, though you'd expect no less from a Photoshop Evangelist.

Ultimately, the book is unsatisfying. Both the creativity and the Photoshop sections are too cursory to be of much value. It is more successful as a book of photographs, but I would have appreciated more commentary on the photos themselves. Why choose this one? What caught her eye in the first place? The choices of composition and cropping. What worked, what didn't.

Too bad.

10/29. In mid-October, I shaved off the goatee that I had sported since March, leaving me clean-shaven for the first time in a decade. I quickly got over that urge and let the beard start growing back.

This is me at the two-week stage: a self-portrait taken while experimenting with the new camera. It looks a little odd to me. I'm using this as the startup photo on the camera.

10/30. I go back and forth between Atlas's offices at Pioneer Square and the International District, and Smith Tower is a major landmark.

10/31. Once again, we got dozens and dozens of young callers at Halloween. I have a set of Halloween photos at Flickr.

11/01. This is taken from the roof of Atlas's office Occidental Square, looking at the building on the other side of the street.

11/02. Tres works in the group that I'm loaned out to, Atlas Publisher. He has a certain sartorial flair. He also turns out to be a friend of Sparky.

11/03. Occidental Square at dusk.

About six weeks ago, I read about Sparky's A Picture a Day project on his blog. He in turn had been inspired by Photojojo's Project 365.

Here's how it works, for me. I take at least one photo a day, every single day for a year. Every so often, I upload the photos to my Flickr site. If I get more than one worthwhile photo in a day, great, but one and only gets tagged potd (picture of the day).

Why? Apart from the reasons enumerated by Photojojo, here's what I get out of it.

First of all, fun. It adds a little spark to my day, to be always looking for photo ops.

Second, the constant practice makes me a better photographer.

Third, more photo editing and photo organization. Historically, I have been much better about taking photos than I have about organizing them and editing them. This should get me off my duff about going through the thousands of photos I've taken since I went digital in 2001, and posting the best of them.

Before I was inspired to start this project, I had been thinking about getting a small point-and-shoot, like the Casio Exilim. When my parents stayed with us and went to Hawaii with us a month before, I had played with my mother's Exilim and liked it. My father had also had me order another Exilim as a present for Michelle, and I had carried that around for a week.

I bought myself a Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 at CostCo. It's 10 megapixels, which I think is overkill, but even so, I can get more than 700 photos on to a 2GB card. It came with a leather carrying case, now a fulltime resident on my belt. I'm fairly happy with it, and I think I've got some good results from it. But judge for yourself.

I love my other camera, a Nikon D70 digital SLR, but it's far too bulky and heavy to carry with me all the time.

I finally uploaded the first 36 pictures to Flickr last night, after working on them for most of the weekend. It would have been sooner, but we spent 2.5 weeks in Ireland with wholly inadequate Internet access, and I was quite busy before then.

From now on, I hope to post new POTD pictures two or three times a week.

The next few posts will talk about those first 36 photos in more detail. I also intend to write up the workflow that I'm developing.

I noted at the beginning of July that my sister Michelle was to be married to David Bowles in Dublin in early November.

The wedding took place on Friday, November 10th. Emma and I arrived the afternoon before, half stumbling with tiredness. My brother, Mark, and his wife, Lizzy, had arrived from New York only hours earlier.

The ceremony took place at 1pm at St. Brigid's, a small, old Anglican church, on the outskirts of Stillorgan village, long since absorbed into the Dublin metropolitan area. It was very Ascendancy, with 19th century plaques about Fellow of the Royal College this and Brevet Colonel (Boer War) that.

The bride looked lovely, and I have the photos to prove it.

After the wedding, we all repaired to Barberstown Castle for the reception. There were, I think, 160 guests who partied late into the night. Emma and I gave up around 1:30, exhausted from the jet lag. My mother didn't get to bed until after 4am. Philip Bowles, David's father, who had been undergoing chemotherapy, was in fine form and stayed up nearly as late.

Emma and I had arranged to stay a second night at Barberstown Castle, and I ended up sleeping until 4pm on the Saturday, trying to sleep off the drink and the jetlag.

The following week, my mother and I went through the nearly 400 photos that she, Emma, David Reilly, and I had taken, and whittled it down to 74 representative ones. She badly wanted to send the photos to her friends around the world, so I set up a Picasa web album for her and uploaded them.

Mark set up a site for Michelle and David before the wedding, but it doesn't yet link to the photos.

For the last few months, every blog post that I've made has been accompanied by at least one image. Sometimes I already have an appropriate image. The rest of the time, I use whatever I could find after searching Google Images.

Earlier today, I came across 10 Tips for Google Image Search. I particularly like the Greasemonkey script which allows you to view the original image by clicking on the thumbnail.

I've up loaded my Halloween pictures to Flickr.