… for an important message. Ari of unemployed-ness is no longer unemployed. This is a very good thing as the government cheese will only last so long. It is also a not so good thing, because there are now more demands on my time other than just laying around thinking of things to take pictures of. I promise to post as often as possible, but that will probably be more like 2x/week instead of 5-6x/week. Be sure to add that RSS feed and you’ll always know when the new stuff is fresh!
Archive for the ‘Minutia’ Category
Mar
15
2009
Follow Me, Please?
Hello Reader,
I know that you devoutely set aribrownest.com to your start page in order to easily keep up with anything I might add, so for the most part, this post is fairly irrelevant. If, however, you were away from your computer – say the boss makes you set the company site as your homepage – you might want an easy way to keep up with aribrownest.com, right? Well do I have just the thing for you.
You might notice I’ve moved my RSS feed icon up to the top of the right column. See it up there? It’s orange and says “subscribe to my feed”. I know you know how RSS works already, but just in case you, for example, have been recently hit in the head, I’ll go over it again.
RSS (or “Real Simple Syndication”) is a technology that allows you to see any updates to my site without having to… you know… actually go to it. All major browsers have it built in. If you use Firefox, click the link and choose “subscribe now”. In Firefox this is called “Live Bookmarks” and looks like this – see how it looks like a bookmark with my most recent 10 posts in it?:
In Internet Explorer, it’s called a feed and lives next to the bookmarks. If you click the link and just keep pressing ok, you’ll end up seeing something like this:
Even better than Firefox and Internet Explorer, Google, Yahoo, and many others have special webpages that act as RSS readers. My favorite is Google Reader. Sign in, and add my feed! It’s the best way to know when there are updates to my site (and any of your other favorites) all in one place. All you have to do from Google Reader is press the “Subscribe” button and type in http://www.aribrownest.com/feed/. It’s easy – I swear! If you don’t get it, email me. I’ll even play tech support for you. Let me know how it goes!
Feb
23
2009
What Now?
Hey fearless reader – glad you’ve made it this far. When I started this blog, I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, but I’ve really enjoyed having an outlet for my photography and having a way to show it to folk like you. In any case, I’m curious what you think. Do you like exactly what I’m doing? Do you want more pictures? People? Places? Things? Technique? Photoshop? What do you like? What is it that you want!?! Anyway, if you would leave me a comment below, I’d really appreciate it. Anything at all. I promise to at least attempt to listen.
Feb
20
2009
Does This Look Funny To You?
Hey there loyal reader. Just need your help for a quick second. I look at this blog all the time and you collectively look at it… well… at least sometimes. In any case, I’m futzing around with things back here which will hopefully make things better. You might have noticed the EXIF Info (the stuff about how the camera took the picture like shutter speed, etc.) looks different. I did that. Here’s where you come in: it’s quite likely that in doing this, I’m gonna break something. Will you let me know if I do? blog at aribrownest dot com, or a comment here should do it!
Jan
21
2009
Posting, Interrupted
Hi All,
Thanks for reading this far – it means a lot to me that this site exists and that people bother to visit. In any case, just wanted you to know that posting will be light for the next 10 days (read: largely nonexistant) as I’ll be in Thailand. If nothing else, I hope to bring back some good shots, so assuming my camera isn’t stolen, you can see those in a couple weeks. Scroll down. Visit Panorama-orama. Read about some technique. I’ll be right back.
Jan
08
2009
Who Knew You Had To Clean These Things?
In most of my life, I’m a bit of a neat freak. Until my recent embrace of hobo-ism, my car was the one that people remarked on the cleanliness of while I was pulling out the vacuum. I just like straightening things up and putting things away. It’s cathartic or something. I’m the same way with my camera gear – my lenses and filters are always clean. Until now, however, I never cleaned the sensor on my camera. I figured it wasn’t that dirty (I don’t change lenses in the desert or anything) and if you make a mistake, not only will you have a broken camera, you’ll have a voided warranty. In any case, a photography newsletter I read just published a link to some instructions which included an easy way to see how much crap is on your sensor. Well guess what? Mine was filthy:
Hit the jump for the easy cleaning steps.
Dec
12
2008
Upgrades!
I’m sure you’ve been in the situation where someone gets really excited to tell you a story or joke and upon seeing the not-so-amused look on your face after telling it, they say “well…I guess you had to be there.” This post is kinda like that – it’s exciting to me, and you have to suffer through it.
I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 yesterday, which handily broke my favorite photo-posting plugin PhotoQ. Today they released an update which fixed my issues, but also fixed my biggest beef – the EXIF info (details of the camera setting when a picture was taken) from my camera wasn’t being read right, so I couldn’t automatically tell you all the things I wanted about the picture. Now that it’s fixed, you get to see things like ISO speed and aperture values that aren’t totally nonsensical. Hooray for progress!
Dec
05
2008
Hello? world?
So it’s come to this. After working on internet-related things for 12 years and not creating a blog, I’ve gone and created a blog. I had a good reason not to create a blog thusfar – I really have very little to say about anything truly unique and my own and anyone who wants to hear it probably has ample options for doing so. Two things have changed though. The first is I find myself in my own employ – or to put it another way, I find myself no longer being paid by anyone else, and as such I have some time on my hands. The second is that with that time I’m trying to take pictures again – something I’ve always loved. So that’s what I’ll do here – post some of my pictures for your persusal, compliments, disdain, etc. Maybe it takes, maybe it doesn’t – I’m going to give it a try.
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