As reading week comes to a close, my weblog has seen almost a complete overhaul for the better. Even those of you with RSS aggregators will have to step back into the web world, http://www.utools.ca/journal, to see the new design.

An upgrade to WordPress 1.5 got the party started. I’d like to send a big thanks and many kudos out to the WordPress development team. The back-end interface has been cleaned up significantly, and everything has an overall smoother feel to it. WP is amazing blog software, and 1.5 continues to rock more socks.

With the upgrade to 1.5 came a new default template, which I decided to go with instead of returning to the blue-green old days. The new template is called Kubrick presumably after Stanley Kubrick. It’s a nice, clean look that offers a lot of white space and isn’t too monochromatic. I added a new header image as well, which I’m rather pleased with.

The header image is a photo I took almost 3 years ago on Marion in the block west of the 7-11, where it’s still a one-way. The person with the camera and tripod is none other than Tim Dyck, one of my closest friends from high school. (We used to do a lot of night photography, but this one of Tim is quite possibly the best of the bunch.) I will admit to photoshopping the image to reduce the background distraction, but the photo was otherwise one single shot — no superimposing involved.

FInally, I added asides courtesy of Matt Mullenweg, one of the key WordPress developers. Matt uses asides on his site for various links he wants to share with the world, but I’m not sure what my plan is for these yet. I think they will likely be used as they already have been below to capture thoughts and links that are interesting but not worthy of an entire post. Only time will tell how this results.

So that’s where this blog is at for the moment. Please let me know what you think of the new layout (that’s what comments are for), and if anything doesn’t look right. I already know things look a bit funked up in IE6, but I’d rather you fix it instead of me (it’s a cop-out, I know).

I hope you continue to enjoy the same old ramblings in their stylish new digs.

Happy Valentine’s Day, (or VD, or MOSS [Members of the Opposite Sex Suck] day) everyone! The grass is probably just as green on this side of the fence, but the other side looks so much more lush — I really want to jump over.

I’ve been scanning some slides I shot back in the summer of 2002, that transitory period between high school and university where you generally have not a single long-term care in the world, and everything is going well considering you’ve just finished one of the larger chunks (temporally-speaking) of your academic career.

At this time, I’d recently been given a Canon A-1 by my grandmother as a birthday gift, and picked up a Canon Ft-b and some lenses to round out my kit. Photography was an amazing thing, I discovered, and I pursued it fairly heavily until school started again and it was time to get back to “real” work. At that point, things slowed down a bit but still continued, gradually grinding to a near-halt.

It was at the end of the summer that I had my first experience with slide film. I bought two rolls of Fujichrome Velvia as I joined Jason (a friend from junior high) at his cabin on Blindfold Lake in the Lake of the Woods. This was some AMAZING film. A little tough to work with (narrow exposure latitude and slow speed), but fine grain (ISO 50) and insane color saturation! Using this together with my classic, “manual-everything” equipment made completely of brass, steel and glass seemed to me to be the essence of photography.

I managed to produce some reasonably good photos, the best of which have been painstakingly scanned and added to the image gallery. (…look inside…)

Thumbs:

Now, despite all this, I’m feeling the urge to go digital after playing with a Digital Rebel much of last week. EOS 20D anyone?

Come support The Great Engineering Pi-Throw 2005 by buying Pies in University Centre and sending them to your friends, enemies and even professors! Pies cost just $5 and all proceeds will go to support CARE Canada in their work overseas.

Watch out — I’ve got a few people on my list already (and I expect I’ll be receiving at least one myself…)