Yeah… since it’s been almost 2 years since being in Europe, and now that I have Lightroom, I really have no more excuses for not finishing with this photo set. Plus, I’ve got a free photo book coupon that I want to use for this trip, so time to get back to work.
I just loved this little interior courtyard in the castle.
I was importing a bunch of photos into Lightroom last night and ran across this one. After a couple minor corrections I’m loving it now.
So the big news in the tech world this week was… Newt Gingrich. Just kidding it was SOPA – a proposed piece of garbage legislation written people that don’t manage their own Facebook and Twitter accounts that, if enacted, could cause disastrous harm to innovation and the tech industry. This issue was so important that Wikipedia blacked itself out in protest, essentially making the source of reference unavailable for the millions that use it. So kicking off the Friday Five this week is…
#1 – Thank you. [Wikipedia]
The Wikipedia blackout is over — and you have spoken.
More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge. You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.
For us, this is not about money. It’s about knowledge. As a community of authors, editors, photographers, and programmers, we invite everyone to share and build upon our work.
Our mission is to empower and engage people to document the sum of all human knowledge, and to make it available to all humanity, in perpetuity. We care passionately about the rights of authors, because we are authors.
SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The Internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.
We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.
There’s also a “read more” page to find out more about the milestones of the blackout, and of course about the issue itself.
#2 – Megaupload Taken Down On Piracy Allegations [TechCrunch]
Popular file-hosting site Megaupload, probably known to our readers for a variety of reasons, has been taken down after the FBI charged some of its staff with copyright infringement and “conspiracy to commit racketeering.” Seven people have been charged, and four arrested (in New Zealand), and the site itself appears to be down as authorities around the world closed in on the site’s resources.
The day after the SOPA/PIPA protests, the FBI illustrates why we don’t need those bills by orchestrating an international takedown of a site that was a haven for piracy. The system works, and if you break the law, the law will come and take away all your toys.
#3 – Twitter Is Making A Gigantic Move (And Going To War With A Board Member) [Business Insider]
Twitter is slowly finding a way to curate its own massive fire hose of information.
Twitter has typically been a pure stream of information that’s gone uninterrupted. Thousands of tweets fly across the Internet in a given second — sometimes tens of thousands, depending if there’s a big event.
But just moments ago, Twitter announced it acquired Summify, a service that crunches Twitter and other social media sites and creates a personalized news digest based on that information.
I subscribe to the Summify service – it does a pretty impressive job of curating your social feeds and sending you highlights of things that are of interest to you. This is particularly useful if you’re not continuously plugged in to your networks scanning for the latest news, or if, you know, sleep. This acquisition should be making the future of the Twitterverse interesting to see how the integration works. Hopefully they do a better job than they did maiming Tweetdeck.
#4 – The Wired Q&A: ICANN President Rod Beckstrom on ‘the Biggest Change in DNS Since Dot-Com’ [Wired]
Beginning Wednesday, Jan. 12 — midnight UTC, to be exact — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) starts accepting applications for new, bespoke top level domains (TLDs). This will be the first time website owners (at least governments and businesses) will be able to request their own replacement for .com, .net and .org. Think .facebook, .losangeles and .lolcats.
The number of top level domains was originally restricted to give the internet user some idea of what kind of a site they were going to – .com for commercial, .edu for educational, .org for a nonprofit, etc. Of course, the vast majority of TLDs accessed in the U.S. are .com, which forces some institutions to register multiple so that unsuspecting folks don’t end up at the wrong site (remember that whole whitehouse.com debacle?).
Countries also have their own country-specific TLDs (.jp for Japan, .de for Germany, and the ever-spammy .ru for Russia), and then some companies, especially those URL shorteners, found they could get cute and repurpose, say, Libya’s TLD .ly to create sites like bit.ly, although one of the original domain “artists” was none other than del.icio.us, using the relatively unused TLD for the United States.
So the underlying question is, will all hell break loose now that anyone (with $185,000) can get their own top level domain? Not likely. People don’t rely on the TLD anymore to know where they’re going. In fact, with browser search integration, a lot of people don’t even realize they’re typing “amazon.com” into Google instead of the address bar. Search and social media will drive people to sites, so any new TLDs will just be a new kitschy advertising device.
#5 – Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL [Habitudes for Communicators]
Watch it. Then hang your head in shame at how many of these things we’ve all done.
I received a new camera for Christmas. While it is not fancy in any means like Derek’s is – no lenses, built in flash, fits in the palm of your hand – it is very nice and actually takes pretty good pictures. So I wanted to challenge myself to use it, learn about it and actually understand how to take better pictures with it. Therefore, my 365 project. I figure if I do actually use the camera every day to take at least a few pictures, I’m bound to learn something about the camera and how it works! And have a pretty nice photo diary of the year when I’m done!
The out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 workflow approver email notification no longer contains a link to the workflow task associated with the workflow item. While that’s ok if the approver is using Microsoft Office 2010 and the document is an Office document, if either of those are not the case then there is no easy way for the approver to get back to the task to approve or reject it. I went out in search of how to fix the OOTB workflow email and having to cull this information from a number of sources, I thought it would be helpful to have it all in one place.
Steps:
First, you’ll notice an out-of-the-box email references the “Open this task” button, but does not include the link to the SharePoint workflow task. This is fine if the document is a Microsoft Office document and the person approving it is using Office 2010, but there doesn’t work for other circumstances.
To adjust this, we need to open up the site and then workflow in SharePoint Designer. Note that in this case we are modifying the OOTB workflow itself, which will change it for all instances of the site collection. If you want to make a unique instance of this workflow, right click on the workflow and choose “Copy and Modify”.
Click Edit Workflow
Next, click on Approval.
Under “Customization” click Change the behavior of a single task.
Under the “When a Task is Pending” section, find the line that says “then Email task notification to Current Task:Assigned To” and click the underlined link.
The Define E-Mail Message window opens. Insert the highlighted text, select the text you wish to make a link, then click the Edit Hyperlink button.
In the Address field, click the … button, then click Add or Change Lookup, and choose “Current Task: Approval” as the Data source and “Form_URN” as the Field from source:
Click OK all the way back out of the dialog boxes, then Publish your workflow back to the server.
Start the workflow on a new document and you should get the modified email.
Click the link and it should take you directly to the task page!
It’s important to note that this is not the only location an email is defined. Overdue notices, for example, are defined elsewhere. You may need to make the same modification to multiple places in the workflow.
So… let’s quickly recap since it’s been a couple months since I posted anything. My PC finally died (which was really Amanda’s old PC because my last PC died first, and I just adopted hers). Got a new PC. Picked up a copy of Adobe Lightroom with my nonprofit discount because as it may be apparent, it takes me a long friggin’ time to post process all the photos I take. I have tons that I have yet to really even look at, much less post. I was using the painful process of shooting RAW, adjust and convert using Canon’s Digital Photo Pro, then tweak for web and style in Picasa. Stop laughing, professional photographers, I know. So, besides needing something to speed up the workflow, I badly needed some better tools, as while I’m often happy with the shots coming out of the camera, I’ve been disappointed in my ability to really do what I wanted to do with them in post.
Enter Lightroom.
So I actually spent a couple hours going through some of Adobe’s online tutorials to get some insight into how to really use the tool. Very helpful. I learned all sorts of things I would have never discovered on my own. Then I set off to adjust a photo of the Terminal that I love, but hated certain aspects of. Here it is:
Love the tone, hate the noise and the darkness of the Baggage Check arch. So, I tried out a multitude of Lightroom tweaks and got this:
I could easily fix the perspective distortion, the chromatic aberration and the luminance noise, perk up some of the darker areas, and easily add back in the lens’ vignetting after adjusting the cropping. Not bad for a first time shot at using Lightroom!
Next up… transferring it to Photoshop to remove that damn EXIT sign…
2011. What a year. It gave us our beautiful daughter Cambree. But it also made us say goodbye to too many good people, many before their time.
Anne Waligur
My Aunt Anne had a stroke in June of 2010. After that it was up and down, a true emotional roller coaster for everyone in the family, until her passing on July 12, 2011. At almost 82 years old I can’t say she “went before her time”, but when it is a close family member you always wish for more time. She was a loving soul, adopting her younger sister Linda’s son as her own after she passed. A Girl Scout leader, she was always singing camp songs and giving out good advice, much of which I still remember and try to teach my own girls. She sang in her church choir, was a docent at the Botanical Gardens and had many beloved friends. Her gift to me upon her death was the ruby ring her father gave to her for her 16th Birthday. She wore it every day of her life and I remember seeing it on her. She was my Aunt and I loved her very much. She will be missed this Holiday season.
Ryan Jones
Unfortunately, I did not know Ryan that well. He went to college with Derek and I met him a few times, usually at the yearly picnic – “Ocho”. He had health problems that ultimately landed him in a coma, which he was fighting, until his untimely passing this October. He was the fiddler for the Country group ‘Lo Cash Cowboys’. The one time spent with him at Ocho that I do remember was him playing acoustic guitar and everyone singing ‘Moxy Fruvous’ songs with him, laughing and having a great time. I honestly don’t even know if he knew my name, but he friended me on Facebook, probably because I am Derek’s wife. When someone so young, with his entire life ahead of him passes it really makes you stop and reevaluate your own time here on Earth. My thoughts and prayers are still with his family and friends, he was lost all too soon.
Ed McGrath
Ed’s passing is still very fresh, he has only been gone two weeks today. He was a member of our choir at church. Sang Bass with Derek and my Dad. We were not close friends, but he was so kind, thoughtful and fun to be around. It gets personal, even if you are not “close” with a person, when you sing together. There is something about being in a choir (as I am sure it is with any musical group) that pulls people closer together. You are using a part of yourself that is very personal. When you work so hard on making this music together with your voice, it binds you to those other people. It is a shared experience that is unmatched. Therefore, when one voice is missing, after working so hard on a piece, it is felt very deeply. At the Funeral four our friend Ed, I did not cry. I was very sad, but he was not supposed to be singing that day, with us. I cried a lot the day before, on Sunday, when he SHOULD have been there, signing the songs he had worked so hard to make beautiful with us. On that day, and this weekend as well, his voice was missing and it SHOULD have been there with us. I am constantly praying for his family, that God may give them peace during this time.
All in all, I am really hoping that 2012 will not have as many goodbye’s in it. But I guess these are my three for now. Rest In Eternal Peace, all of you. You are missed in many ways.
So the short version is: this Mama cat who hangs around our house had babies underneath our wood pile at the end of September. I was feeding her and she got to trusting me, so when I left our garage door open one day she moved her kittens inside.
I contacted and am fostering them for Buffalo Paws and Claws for the next few weeks until they are old enough to go to PetCo to be adopted out. UNLESS someone out there is looking for a kitten to adopt!
There are 4 in all, 5 weeks old. Three male, one female. Two males are grey with stripes, one male is calico like Mama and so is the female. They are adorable and their pics should be up soon at Buffalo Paws and Claws website (Dawn was here last night and gave them all their de-wormer, flea meds and clipped their claws). Mama is also going to be adopted out, but she’ll be waiting a bit longer than her kittens. She is only maybe 2 years old and SUCH a sweetheart, even called her kittens over to me and sat on my lap so they’d know I was OK!
If you think you might be interested, either e-mail me, or contact Buffalo Paws and Claws directly and let them know you want one of “Amanda Punaro’s Cats”. If you need to be pursuaded by cuteness and soft fur, e-mail meand let me know when you want to come by to take a look at them for yourself! I would really rather them be adopted out from here than have to go through the stress of being put in cages and in PetCo, which can be scary. We will have them here, as I said, for the next two weeks if anyone is interested in coming by to take a look.
Thanks!
My Mom gave me this photo recently, so since I’m not dressing up this year, here’s a blast from my past. Costume sponsored by Federal Meats.
It was a great week for Buffalo. The National Trust preservation conference has wrapped, and I’m admittedly still coming down from the “conference high” (the condition where you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid for a week and reality has yet to set in again) but that doesn’t change the fact that this conference will have a lasting effect on the image of Buffalo.
Here’s how I see it – yes, Buffalo has its problems. But we’re not the only city that has problems. We have great people, but we’re not the only city that has great people. So what really distinguishes Buffalo? What makes Buffalo Buffalo? Location. And History. In one word – Place. Our history is instantiated by the buildings we create and the monuments we construct. Our location is defined not only by geography, but proximity to other population centers.
So what makes Buffalo Buffalo? We’re located on one of the largest freshwater lakes in the country. We’re on a heavily trafficked international border and a short enough distance from the largest city in Canada. And because Buffalo was a major city in the early years of the United States, we have a lot of history and a lot of notable buildings that were created while that history was happening. Our default action should be to save those buildings whenever possible.
Why? These buildings are part of the city’s identity. The more we lose, the less unique we become. Buffalo needs every advantage it can get to regain it’s place as an burgeoning economic center, and having a strong identity is a major advantage. Our social, commercial, and industrial heritage should be part of that, because it’s already here, and it is “For Real”. We don’t need to fabricate an identity, we already have one. We’re international, we have great natural resources, and we have history. All we have to do is leverage what we have and build on it.
That’s not saying that there aren’t other problems that need to be fixed, or that preservation alone is going to save Buffalo. But why not start there? Historic rehabilitation creates coveted construction and highly skilled craftsman jobs. Those are actual green jobs, because you’re not sending entire buildings to the landfill and replacing them with the disposable crap that many buildings are made from today. And this type of preservation is tested, proven, quantifiable economic development.
What we need now is to convince our elected officials that this is the way of our future. Preservation projects, especially the large-scale ones, require the cooperation of city, county, state, and federal representatives. In our fractured political climate, this may be the biggest challenge, even moreso than finding the money to complete the projects. Without their help in setting and dictating the vision, every new project is open for debate and petty bickering, and valuable time is lost.
In one conference session last week being given by a German man responsible for helping to establish Europe’s Industrial Heritage route, “People in Europe no longer question whether preservation is worthwhile, it’s already been proven and is accepted. The demand to live in places with rich heritage sites exceeds the supply.” We have the supply here in Buffalo and it’s our responsibility to not squander that. In other places in the world, things like this are being built:
And the people there aren’t even laughing at the idea. They’re embracing it. A lot of people came to town last week that see the potential that Buffalo has that a lot of people here refuse to acknowledge. That’s a Place that they’d like to come back to, and a Place that we should be proud to call home.
