thedude.com

Really - we do.

Tres, Jim, Kelly and Jack suck down a few mai tais at Conga Lounge.

(Shot with the Canon G3 - still the best point-and-shoot digital camera that we know of.)

Woo-hoo! it’s System Administrator Appreciation Day, and my bosses remembered with a cake from Cold Stone Creamery. How sweet!

Thanks, Don and Karl. It’s great working with this group. :)

Proof that not all amazing photography comes from this planet. I had to visit the web site to be convinced that this image was genuine.

Another gorgeous panorama by my good friend Grant. I’m posting this at a rather high resolution so that you can see just what a nice image this is. The shots were taken with a Canon 20D and stitched with PhotoVista.

Friends of thedude will already know that he’s not terribly fond of small animals or children. Nevertheless, he found the mettle to immerse himself in a child-filled world for a couple of frightening hours - in a catholic church no less. Very scary stuff! It wasn’t easy, but the pictures of Shane and Tanya’s son’s baptism came out nice.

Inspired by the incredibly useful Before and After magazine, I decided to re-design a flyer for a friend. The old flyer seemed rather bland to me. It didn’t say enough about Chef Julie’s awesome cooking skills, and it placed her image at the bottom of the page, like an afterthought.

The new flyer adds a bit of color, includes a photo of actual food prepared by Chef Julie and places her in a more prominent position on the page. I like the new flyer design quite a bit more than the old one. I’m happy to report that Julie’s pleased with the results, too. :) What do you think?

Stay tuned for the latest flyer with Chef Julie’s new class schedule, and, hopefully, a new brochure!

There has been some talk lately of painting the exterior of our building. I’m very excited about the prospect - so excited that I climbed up on the construction site across the street and shot some images of the building specifically for visualization purposes.

My 12 millimeter lens was not quite wide enough to capture the entire building AND a section of the adjacent building for context, so the image you see above is actually TWO images which have been carefully combined into one. I used PhotoShop and it’s distort tool to fit the pieces together. Once that was done, I addded some fluffy German clouds, and masked off five different sections of the building so that different colors can be applied.

After three failed attempts to get them up, we finally did it. It wasn’t easy. We had to glue and screw a piece of wood to the crumbly concrete above the 12 foot window, then attach the mounting hardware to it.

Thanks very much to our friend Dave for the expert help! We could not have done it without you. (Believe me, we tried.)

This is cool! 417 front pages from the newspapers of 45 countries, updated daily - in glorius PDF. (requires Flash.)

Andrew’s stunning Virtual Playa continues to evolve. His incredible Flight Sim scenery already includes half of this year’s Burningman installations, as well as most of the major installations from past events. Burningman founders have finally taken notice and are working with Andrew on a major multimedia installation for Burningman 2005. More news soon!

Kelly and I decided to pick a few shots from our Europe trip and have them printed for the living room wall. So, I used PhotoShop and it’s amazing new Vanishing Point tool to throw together a mock-up of the wall for visualization purposes. This helped us choose the images and play with placement as well as determine the exact size they’d need to be printed.

The results are precisely what we expected. :)

I felt motivated this morning, so I mounted the camera in the back of the Jeep and captured this time-lapse video (10 meg QuickTime file) of my six mile commute to Affymetrix. I noticed on the drive home that the commute FROM work would probably be more interesting. I’ll try to shoot that tomorrow. :-)

Let’s see… that’s 1 frame per second x 15 frames per second playback speed, so time is accelerated 15 times. My 70 miles an hour is actually 70 x 15 = 1050 miles per hour. Not bad!