Meanwhile, the gin allowed the mixologists to play extensively with sweet and savory flavors, as in the gazapacho-like Red and Yellow Snapper that started the meal. Herbal flavors were abundant. And all of it was beautiful.
Tales is a flurry of tasting rooms, fabulous meals, seminars and other events, a party where you can actually learn something. If you want to.
ARCHIVE PHOTO INSERTS FROM MOTALKO from Miklós Falvay on Vimeo.
I covered space for four years and was completely immersed in the shuttle program. I haven’t retained the level of detail I knew then, but it was a huge part of my life. I was awed by it, then dismayed after the heartbreaking Columbia accident, but always impressed by this technological colossus and the people who put it together. They’re the ones who have made history.
I’ve put together a tribute to the shuttle – a gallery of some of my favorite images. It’s not complete yet; I still have to upload all the high-res files and write detailed captions. But it helps me share that sense of wonder I still have when one of those shuttles aims for the stars. See the gallery
We’ve had much-needed rain this week in the form of daylong gully-washers. The National Weather Service in Melbourne recorded 2.48 inches of rain June 29, a record. The next day, it noted 1.29 inches. June had 5.9 inches, compared with 16.91 for the year overall – more than a third of the year’s rainfall, much of it in two days!
I’ve spent the better part of two days working on a multimedia slide show that will be played on a DVD at a memorial service. Unfortunately, the service is for a friend. I didn’t get emotional until the end of the project, when I added his name and the dates of his life. The photos are a celebration of his life, but somehow, the text made his passing more real. Tom Breen was a journalist’s journalist who traveled the world and lived a great life. He was a kind philosopher, an obsessive reporter, and a warrior for what he thought was right.
Amid the emotion and creativity, there’s also been not a little bit of technical frustration. I thought I’d share one thing I learned that might help Macheads like myself. I got a new Mac recently, running system 10.6, Snow Leopard. (What’s with the stupid cat names? Honestly, I can’t keep them straight.) I love having a new computer with lots of memory and hard drive space, but the upgraded system also means endless upgrades of software and new trials in attempting to make my old devices work with the new beast. I haven’t tried my old Nikon slide scanner yet, but from what I’ve heard, people are having mixed results. However, I learned that for my old Epson Perfection 1200 Photo, I was probably going to have to pay for scanning software. Epson’s would not install or load (though the driver did, which then had to be updated with Apple’s Software Update). Then I discovered that Apple’s Preview, which is commonly used for a quick look at photos and PDFs, actually works as scanning software, too. And it worked just fine. One hurdle gone.
I use Final Cut Pro for movie editing, but I thought I’d try iMovie for the slide show. It neatly fits your slides to a song and enables lots of interesting transitions, effects, control over timing, and titles. Unfortunately, iMovie ’11 also has its problems. It couldn’t “finalize project” because of a “heap zone” issue (documented by many but not solved in the Apple support forums). This is despite the ample memory and hard drive space on my computer. In addition, at startup, the program wants to update “Aperture Videos Event” (are there Microsoft people writing Mac software now? Is that English?) – in other words, it searches my already massive Aperture library for new stuff for several minutes. So I don’t foresee myself using iMovie all that much. I used to recommend iMovie heartily to anyone wanting to dabble in movie editing, especially because it comes free with Macs. Now, I’m not so sure.