Greg has apparently given up on blogging and moved his talent over to Flickr.

I’m trying to find a solution to this problem, but I’m just not happy with server-side resizes, whether it’s on flickr or with Gallery2 integrated into WordPress.

Compare these three versions of one of the waterdrop pictures:

The one resized by hand in Photoshop by yours truly:

The one resized automatically in Gallery2 on my own server, where at least I got to choose the image size (by the way, the URL rewrites are broken in my installation, I know that but I’ve already spent too much time on trying to fix it):

And lastly, the one on Flickr, which got resized to 500px wide (instead of my usual 700px):

Well, I happen to like the hand-made version better… and when I look at other people’s stuff on Flickr, it’s almost always soft, and it’s because of the resizes. You get to see the ‘medium’ size by default, and it’s almost never the version the photographer uploaded. That’s just fucked up.

The community looks great, altho I suspect it’s like anything, hard to get yourself heard over the noise. On the other hand, there is clearly something very frustrating with seeing last week’s pictures slide off the front page of the blog and into oblivion… so a gallery is clearly needed. I just haven’t found what I need yet… altho I will keep playing with both solutions for a while yet.

It was a windy Sunday, with gusts nearly knocking you over and chiuahuas flying off the end of their leashes, but we had seats at the Met for Cosi Fan Tutte and by golly, we would make it to curtain rise… assuming the curtain was still there.

We picked the one clueless New York cabbie and after some disastrous routing decisions on his part, we got to be those goofs everyone resents because they stumble on people’s toes and stick their fannies in people’s faces after the show has started.

For some strange reason, the director had decided to have all the action take place inside a giant view camera. As Mozart might have said: ‘Warum Nicht?‘… I took it as an excuse to take plenty of pictures during the performance. Only when people were clapping or laughing, I didn’t want to be lynched. Many shots are blurry, but this one is rather good. Click on it for the original.

Just in case my shutter noise and late arrival had driven our neighbors to murderous thoughts, I took it outside during the intermission and found Li’l Red Riding Hood running around that big black fountain in the middle of the plaza. Adding to my list of photographic crimes, I proceeded to take her picture without a model waiver form.

All in all, it was a good performance of what is not my favourite Opera, but more importantly it was fun to be out with the princess. Afterwards, we took a suicidal cab ride to 49th and first, for a quick (and huge) martini looking out over the city from the Beekman Hotel bar (Top of the Tower).

Funnily enough, the next suicidal cab ride was a lot less scary after a third of a liter of pure gin, and we made it just in time to the restaurant: i Trulli. The pasta was top notch but I was not moved by the Osso Bucco. Princess and the sommellier had a good time discussing Italian wines, and I just enjoyed seeing someone wear a black turtleneck and herringbone flannel pants over a thin frame with mutton chop sideburns and a day’s worth of beard… he looked like pictures of my dad from the 70′s. Only an Italian could make that combo work.

We took the PATH train back to the wrong side of the Hudson and slept like logs.

Bush Moves Toward Martial Law

Testosterone Tumbling in American Males

I’ve changed the smileys on Ban Sidhe. The old smiley plugin was broken and throwing up an error on every page.

1. You will now be able to insert them into your comments by clicking on them, from a list to the right of the text area.
2. We will temporarily use the ones from Kopete (for my linux geek cred), rather than Y!IM.
3. We will return to Y!IM smileys as soon as I tweak them to my heart’s content.

Here’s what the Kopete smileys look like:

Descartes represents, yo, yo!