Episode 19 of the FaithTools podcast is up and ready for download.
Mike, Van, Daniel, Brad and Colin talk about building credibility, decibel levels, volunteer appreciation ideas and more.
Archive for July, 2008
FaithTools Podcast Episode 19
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Thoughts on Fatherhood
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008Many of the fathers in our church started on the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight” (and related materials) recently.
A nugget found in chapter 2 gives us a pattern right from God the Father, showing how He talked to and about his Son. Found in Matthew 3:17, it shows us that God affirmed His love for His Son, and His approval (we may say “pride”) of His Son; “And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” The book encourages a father to observe skills in their son and tell him “you are good at _____.” I found myself heartily nodding my head to this insight, especially the affirmation aspects of it. So far good stuff!
Wall-E
Friday, July 11th, 2008I have young children, which means I need to pre-screen films before taking the kids to them. This time my wife and I were both able to go, together, which is rare. My first response is that Pixar has been successfully assimilated by Disney. They have passed the apex of their existence. It was only a matter of time, nobody is that good. There were the pop culture appeals to parents with Star Wars, Star Trek and 2001 Space Odyssey inferences, and for the geeks in the crowd (me) there was the biggest laugh getter – the Macintosh Quadra (AV series is my suspicion) startup chime when Wall•E re-charged, twice. I also have to assume that Wall-E’s resemblance to “Johnny-Five” (Number Five) in “Short Circuit” wasn’t a fluke. There are societal messages, some of which are well stated – “I didn’t know we had a pool!” Hello?! Disconnect your retina’s from the TV. I give them high marks for transporting you far away from the daily grind, it took me a few minutes to plant myself firmly back into reality after leaving the theater. It’s certainly safe for kids of all ages, question is if their attention will be held. We’ll probably rent it to answer that question, or maybe catch it on the B side.
Thoughts on Aperture vs. Lightroom
Thursday, July 10th, 2008I haven’t spent a ton of time with these applications, but after some productive use of them thought I’d offer these observations; both seem way too bloated and clumsy, really what I think would get the job done is just a more robust RAW import tool for Photoshop, designed to be just that – the front door to Photoshop. Being able to browse a group of photos that may have something in common i.e. hard-to-get white balance shot in fluorescent lighting or some other odd environment, where you want to be able to copy the settings from one and rapidly apply to all the others en masse is nice, but I don’t need [yet] another black hole to store my photos or even a database of previews of my photos in, I just need a robust RAW access point for Photoshop. But I think Lightroom wins here as far as easily dropping in images from a shoot, processing them and then just deleting them (source files included if you wish.) That’s close to a transparent front end for Photoshop.
As far as GUIs and such, Lightroom feels more like Elements than Photoshop – the interface kind of has that dumbed-down feel, too much navigation garb that gets in the way. But I’ll give it this; it will install and run on my [ancient] Mirrored-drive door G4, and with patience gets the job done whereas Aperture has to be hacked to even install and then performance is decidedly not.
Here is an image processed first with just Camera RAW in Photoshop CS, and lots of fiddling with layers and screening and such to lighten up the grass and trees in the foreground, 10 minutes worth at least (well, okay, 5 minutes.) Now compare that to about 1 minute in Lightroom and only a noise filter pass (Noise Ninja) in Photoshop.
Photoshop Camera RAW
Lightroom
Speaker Building Tool For OS X
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008I’ve never been so excited about Windows. The de-facto standard free speaker building (mainly woofer/subwoofer cabinet calculator) application, WinISD is only available for Windows. There is a free online version, but now with an Intel based Mac you can run WinISD on a MacTel for free using Darwine. This screen shot is a bit “Beauty and the Beast” as far as GUI’s, but it works!
