Ted's Blog

I finished my Ireland Gallery today, but I left off the panoramas I had created because they don’t shrink down to thumbnails very well. The new camera has a Stitch Assist mode that lets me take panoramas consisting of several pictures to give one wide picture. The assist mode just shows you the last picture so that you can overlap the current picture on it. Once you get home, you use Canon PhotoStitch to open all the pictures at once and have the software stitch them together.

It doesn’t work perfectly. If you don’t pan in a straight line, the horizon will be crooked. Worse, you get voids along the top and bottom of the picture and wind up cropping out a lot of the top and bottom of the picture as the software distorts pictures to make everything line up. Plus if one picture is a little too high and one is a little too low, you have a gap along the top or bottom. So you crop all of that out and end up with a wide picture.

The wide picture is hard to do anything with too. You can’t really print it and to see the full resolution, you have to scroll sideways on your computer screen. Still, I like the results in some cases. I took maybe ten or so panorama shots in Ireland and here are the best ones.

Continue reading “Panoramas”

I’m sitting in an internet cafe in Ireland. So far everything has gone really well. I was really tired from the overnight flight, but we’ve been seeing all kinds of stuff here in Dublin. Mom would be glad that I went to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells and the exhibit on scribing there.

We’re about to go on a trip to the Museum of History, so I have to get going.

See pictures!

http://mac.fiveforks.com/gallery/v/Ted/Ireland2008/

After horrible results in the first quarter of 2008, things got a lot better. A big part of this had to be going back and putting up my web pages on Speedfactory again. This caused some growth in traffic (still off from last year but holding steady at about 200 visitors a day), got most of my page rank back from Google, brought back my advertising deal, and seemed to cause a general increase in Amazon sales. For the quarter I had $2,700 in sales for commissions of $121.73. This is way off, but I didn’t re-post at Speedfactory until the end of May. The most popular thing is still the Maxell battery pack, with 19 sold. I also sold 7 Griffin TuneJuice 2’s, 7 PAC Sony-iPod adapters, and 5 Turbo Charge chargers. The most expensive thing sold were some Bose noise-canceling headphones. Other than a very weird book about exercise, the most unusual thing sold was a Magnum pepper mill for $31.

AdSense remained pretty anemic at less than $15 per month. Even though I deleted all of their ads off of the iPod battery pages in lieu of the new ads, revenue in June was still up a little bit from Dejumbler and iPod-Sony ads alone, perhaps because the higher page rank boosted the price of those ads.

Our office was located near the Capitol since the 1930’s. For unknown motivations, a decision was made to rent some space in Atlanta. After looking at several spots, an office building in Midtown was picked and I am on the 24th floor. My office (actually a cubicle) has a south facing window that lets me see all of downtown. I used the camera to take multi-part panorama and then some Canon software to stitch the 3 separate photos together on my computer. The picture below represents my view looking South down West Peachtree Street. In real life there is more detail. For instance, to the right of the Westin Peachtree Plaza there is a building with a V shape on it. Just to the left of that building there is a tiny spec in the picture on the horizon. That spec is the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport control tower.

Continue reading “New Office”