Sigh, my MacBook died today, which means that I have to edit stuff with my PC. I like using the PC and its big screen for photo work, but Windows is excruciating for anything else, like writing a blog post. Being forced to use Windows for something like this feels as satisfying as eating a fresh carrot without teeth, so I'll be sticking with simple posts until I get it fixed...

Anthony had a friend, Monet, over to play for a short time yesterday. (Monet was featured last year in this post.) They did "cooking play."

Along with the [...]

Our New-Year's trip to the Amami Islands in southern Japan consisted of two nights on the main Amami-Ooshima island, followed by two nights on the much smaller, much more sparsely-populated next island south, Kakeroma-jima (カケロマ島, the island outlined in blue on the second map of my initial post). The land area covers the size of a large city, but it has a population of only about 1,000.

We stayed at Horizon Club, a "pension" (bed and breakfast) near the eastern ferry port. (Horizon Club – ホライゾンクラブ: web site - blog)

The location consists of a small two-room lodge, and three [...]

Piglets are for Lightroom 1.x plugins only, and are not needed in Lightroom 2 or later.

The four export plugins for Adobe Lightroom that I've written – for uploading to Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web – are useful, I hope, and offer lots of options and ways for the user to configure how their images are processed. If I had more time and more skill, though, the plugins could do more. So much more.

For example, Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify Lightroom Export Plugin offers a lot of nice features that I wish my plugins offered, including:

Those who have been in Roppongi (an area of Tokyo) recently will likely have seen this outdoor light installation, and will realize that all the white lights mixed in with the blue above are really blue lights that were so bright that they "blew out" all the color channels on my camera's digital sensor, leaving only white.

For those not having seen it in person, let's just say that it was a really, really blue area.

Anthony served at Mass again today, and it's still so incredibly adorable that I just have to post some more pictures from his first time serving last week.

But a few seconds later, after noticing me looking his way...