So last night we met up with Nat and Andrew and went to Floriade Nightfest.
I've never been before so I didn't know what to expect. I imagined more of a light show, with flowers being light up by coloured lights or fairy lights or something. So in that sense I was a little disappointed, as there wasn't really much of that. But there were some pretty things and we ended up staying til after 10pm.
Of course the first problem was getting in. The tickets said 6:30pm, so that's when we arrived. As did everyone else who had a ticket. So all these people started crowding around and it was all a bit unorganised cause people didn't know if there were two different queues for people with or without tickets or what. Took about twenty minutes to get through the gates. I think if we were going to do it again we'd turn up at 7pm and be done with it. But don't really think it was worth the $20 to do it again.
More photos after the jump...
This is where we've been tonight...
Too tired to sort photos tonight though.. tomorrow!!
I've never photographed lightning before. I didn't really succeed tonight either. Out of 150-odd photos, I only got two with lightning in them .. Of course it didn't help that most of the action was to the north of us, but our only really safe view is to the south. I was on the balcony for a while until a bolt 300m away changed my mind.. Of course I saw plenty of stuff either in between photos or while my camera was "processing" .. wonder if I can turn that off..
If anyone's interested I've put photos up for
Day 4 of our Japan trip.
If anyone's interested, I've uploaded photos for
Day 3 of our Japan trip
Another camera feature I've wanted in forever is a camera that does proper time-lapse. One you can setup on a tripod and have it take photos every x seconds for however long. How freaking cool would that be? Very tempted to get a little camera just for that reason. Anyone ever used one or have any recommendations?
Had the usual anime crowd over tonight.
First up we watched this odd episode of a show Stu has been watching. No idea what it's called :)
Then pizzas arrived and we watched this way cool dvd of our Japan photos that Stu put together with all these funky transitions and stuff.
Then a couple of episodes of Speed Grapher, and a couple of Abenobashi.
Finally some Mario Karting, which I actually won two rounds of! Pretty freaky!
So the weekend. Where was I?
Saturday (as usual) was mostly a cleaning/tidying/organising/shopping day.
Cooked a nomm roast pork and potato bake and had Julia and Paul over to enjoy it. They brought their PS3 and Queen Singstar over, but their PS3 wouldn't talk to our TV, so most disheartened about that. So watched Rockwiz instead. Dessert was a chocolate fondue with strawberries, banana, rockmelon, and biscuits to dip.
We were very full by the end of the night :)
Sunday was fairly quiet. Stu went out for a bit, which left me alone to tidy up, and then feel a bit down. Not really sure why. Maybe all the rain.
Sunday arvo I got NRMA to jump start my car. Really need to drive it more often. Every three or four weeks is just not enough. Took it for a drive out to Mitchell to dump some speakers, a (working) CRT monitor and a few bits and pieces. I decided it would be better to go late in the day rather than early. WISE DECISION! We were in and out of the place in about two minutes (whereas people who went early Saturday were waiting in traffic for an hour or more). The piles of CRTs (monitors, tvs) and computers were amazing. Would have been good to take some photos, but we were in and out so fast and I was driving so didn't have the chance. The guys were having fun throwing things around on the piles to smash them heh.
Geotagged just about all my Japan Day 2 photos, most of them to within a few metres of where they were taken.
And then it was Monday. It really felt like a Monday too :/ Got home, had dinner and watched a special on the Lockerbie bombing, and suddenly it's nearly 9:30 .. how??
And the interwebs is broked. So think will just go to bed and read some more of The Daily Coyote. .. Edit, internet is back. Posting, but then going to bed anyway.
Further to my pondering about
photo management, I was thinking I could maybe use Picasa locally to manage some of my more "miscellaneous" photos. I already have directories for "big" things, like holidays, weddings, various work photos etc. So I thought I'd expand on that a bit and do some broad categorisation of photos that are a bit more specific. And then what's leftover could be labelled/tagged/albumified/whatever.
So to that end I started going through my monthly directories of photos pulling out various bits and pieces.
While watching the last episode of season one of Monty Python. Only three to go :) (and later watched the pilot of Fringe - surprisingly with no ads!)
So I thought last night I'd give Picasa another go. I'd previously downloaded Picasa 2 and hated it, but hoped 3 might be better.
Not so much.
The primary reason for using it would be not only managing my ridiculous number of photos (approaching 100k), but geotagging and sharing holiday photos.
Well the first road block is a total lack of ability to create subfolders. There's a deal-breaker right there. Doing holidays in a flat-file structure like that would be utterly ridiculous. It's pretty clunky as a management interface for photos, I didn't find it all that user-friendly. Altho the geotagging worked quite nicely with Google Earth.
The amount of online storage for a free account is also pretty small - only a gigabyte. The Europe photos that I wanted to upload are 140mb. So that's 14% gone on one trip.
So I think I'll be sticking with
conspiracy for now (2gb used there :) ).
