BeMused

Driving home last night, I came upon a police checkpoint. This checkpoint was in my neighborhood, literally 400 yards from my house. They were doing a driver’s license check.

This bothers me. I feel like there’s no valid reason for me to have to show my license unless I’ve specifically broken the law. As I was not being pulled over for speeding or some other moving violation, I felt as if they had no right to ask me for my license. I asked before handing it over what the purpose was, and was simply told “To make sure you have a valid license.”

It seems too much like a bad movie when you see the KGB (or Nazi’s or some other facisct police state) asking to see your papers. “Prove you’re a citizen and you can be on your way. If you have nothing to worry about, you shouldn’t have a problem showing us your papers!”

Am I wrong to feel this way?

I’ve been following Ben Willmore on his blog for some time. He’s a photographer that has really experimented and perfected (if there is such a thing) the art of HDR Photography. He travels the country via a Prevost Bus and gives lectures, writes books, and creates DVDs. Quite frankly, I’m a bit jealous of his lifestyle.

He recently did a two part series on HDR at Pixel Perfect with Bert Monroy, who is an amazing digital photo-realist artist. In the video, he goes in to detail about how to create HDR images and the though processes behind it. Ben also introduces us to a Photoshop plug-in called Photomatrix that really lets you have complete control over the HDR process.

This is a great video series for someone (Krysta?) looking into expanding their photography skills and experimentation. The Wife and I were just lamenting last night on how our goals for this year (her to do more pottery, mine to do more photography) have fallen woe-fully short. Watching these videos gives me an itch to go out and shoot. Just gotta find (or make) the time!

And apparently I put way too many things (is that possible?) in parenthesis.

It’s no secret that I’m a Mac fanboy, and have been for several years. I use a Windows machine at work, and it gets the job done. I honestly have very few complaints about Windows boxen (assuming it’s not Vista. Don’t get me started on Vista). I think my biggest gripe is lack of aesthetics in your typical Windows computer.

Dell just might change that though. Their new Studio Hybrids are quite sexy.

I think any of these would be a compliment to any room of the house. Nice.

Assuming I can install XP or Linux on it.

Enough lollygagging.

I’ve been flipping back and forth over so many aspects of this journal/blog/site/what-have-you that it’s been nearly crippling me. So much so that for two months I’d think “well, I have this idea I want to write about in the journal, but geez, I still haven’t completed the new layout I have in mind, I have to update to WP 2.6, maybe I want to switch over to EE instead, but I also need to figure out if I want to focus on something specific, or if I want to continue the way it was…” blah blah blah. I’m my own worst enemy.

When it comes down to it, I’ve missed writing. Whatever I’ve decided to write about, I’ve been missing it. So while there will be some tweaks to the layout here and there, the text will still be up. It might be all skewed as I play around, but you all are used to that, right?

So again, welcome back me. This time I’m not going to close the curtain unless this show ceases production.