The room I use as my office at home has a layout not good for much of anything but the bedroom it was designed to be, but space is always tight in Japan, so one makes do as best one can. In this case, my desk is "floating" (not up against a wall as I used to have it when I used a different room for my office) and faces a set of floor-to-ceiling closet doors. This unorthodox arrangement allows the rest of the room to be gainfully employed with bookshelves, exercise stuff, and a bigger-than-most-Japanese-houses La-Z-Boy we brought with [...]

View full post »

As someone who wants to share something new on my blog every day, the recent lack of posting bothers me, but as I've noted recently, I'm working on a fun project (that I'll write about soon, but be warned that its geeky nature will make it uninteresting to most people, sorry).

So, to fill in a spot on my blog calendar, here are some pretty flowers I snapped shots of at my in-law's place on New Year's day, not long after the shrine visit from my "When You Tempt Fate, Sometimes You Lose" post. My wife's brother's wife's mother gave [...]

View full post »

I've just pushed a major update to my Picasa Face-Data Import plugin for Adobe Lightroom so that it now uses new plugin features of Lightroom 3 to maintain real keywords for the names associated with images.

It's much less kludgy than the version for Lightroom 2, but using Picasa on images in your Lightroom catalog still comes with major caveats. See the plugin's page and last year's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" for more.

However, if you do use Picasa and Lightroom in tandem, this plugin makes for a reasonable way to import Picasa's face-recognition data to Lightroom.

View full post »

Collectively, Americans have a reputation for being a touch litigious (such as someone suing McDonald's because their hot coffee was hot, for example), but this article about a suit in Japan perhaps takes the cake:

Woman sues Google for displaying image of her hanging underwear in search results

Someone took a photo from a public place that included within its scene the publicly-visible view of her apartment building, including the publicly-visible view of the laundry she chose to hang outside on her balcony in full view of anyone walking by. This photo was then put up by someone on some [...]
View full post »

I've just published a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom, the JPEG Export Quality Tester that I mentioned in last summer's "An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings". The plugin allows you to quickly generate and inspect versions of an image at all the JPEG quality settings that Lightroom offers.

I'd written the plugin quite some time ago, but it took this long to polish it up enough to publish. It's got somewhat of a limited appeal, but hopefully someone will enjoy it.

It joins my 20+ other plugins on my Lightroom Goodies page.

View full post »