Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Size Matters


I have a bunch of photos that I've taken printed and framed in my house. A lot of them are decent, some better than hours. But anytime someone visits they are inevitably drawn to the largest photo in the house (50"x17"), and they *always* say they like that one best. It's a good picture, maybe my best, but it's not so much better than the others to earn the disproportianate amount of praise, but it gets it.

Size does matter.

So in that vein I had my first *digital* picture professionally enlarged and printed at 20"x30", which is standard poster size. I really though it would be pixelated at that size - it should have been given the limited amount of data an 8MP camera captures. But amazingly it wasn't pixelated at all. I even commented on it to the folks in the shop and they agreed with me that I could have gone even bigger, maybe 24x36. That's AWESOME! The picture looks pretty cool, too. It's a bit more stark than some of my other pictures, but looks pretty cool.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Go Stillers!

It's true that I rarely find time to watch or pay attention to sports anymore, even my beloved Duke Blue Devils. It just takes so much time to watch a game, and I have too many things going at once to take so many hours out on a regular basis. Tivo is a big, help, of course. And it also makes it a lot less interesting for me with fewer local Blue Devils or Stiller fans in the area anymore to watch the games with; I'm not one to watch games alone much.

All that aside, I am salivating at the chance to watch the 'Burgh pick up another Superbowl win. GO STILLERS!!! Now, where did I put my Terrible Towel?

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Playing with pictures


I printed out a ton of photos this past weekend. What a blast! I printed them all at about 12x18 inches... LARGE! Size really does matter, at least in prints. They look spectacular! Now I just have to matte and frame them.

How many #1 priorities can you have?

I saw a slide in a presentation today that made me laugh. The title said something like "#1 Priority". In the body of the slide were 8 bullet points.

I see this happen all the time at work where there are multiple "#1" priorities. It's really impossible to have more than 1. You can work on more than one thing at a time, but when push comes to shove, something is the top priority. And frankly, you shouldn't work on too many things at once. You get less done overall, even though you *feel* like you're doing more. It's very dangerous.

Of course, I'm really bad at this myself, especially at home. Recently I was installing track lights, a project that had been taking a few days, and I had a set of shelves waiting out in the garage to do, and I was printing/matting pictures. There was no way I was going to get through it all, but I was still tempted to buy another set of lights to install in the garage. I didn't, but I was tempted.