James Finnigan : Christmas

Our uninvited Christmas tree(s)

jamesfinnigan — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 04:23:37 GMT

Well, there's a lot of story to the last couple days so I'm going to bite it off in pieces. Here's the story of our uninvited Christmas trees. Backstory to follow.

Here's tree #1 - but it's not our house. This is our neighbor's house - their cars were parked in front of the garage, so it was a bit of a near miss.

Fortunately, this tree went pretty quickly because the tree didn't have too much in the way of intertwining limbs and we had a few chainsaws (notice the cable box ripped out with the roots).

Here's tree #2 - and that's our fence. Well, it was anyway. This tree is actually made up of four main limbs that all got tangled together. We actually have a tree in there (totally demolished by the falling one).

The fence was shattered because the tree limbs fell from up here (next picture)

One of those main limbs smashed in the boat and hitch. The rest smashed our fence.

After a couple days of work, here's what it looked like:

We're glad that we only lost a fence, and we really appreciated the support of our friends and neighbors.

James & Colette

Will it blend? - Extreme Blending

jamesfinnigan — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 23:44:26 GMT

I know this is stupid - but I still can't resist sharing. What blender manufacturers do when they get bored...

Wii Damage

jamesfinnigan — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 23:30:00 GMT

The Wii is just cool - I have a lot of friends asking me if I can get them a discount on it and I have to explain to them that it's not a Microsoft product. But it clearly appeals to a whole new group of people - these are generally folks that have never talked to me about getting Microsoft products.

But there are risks... (in addition to that you might even get some exercise ).

While I have almost no interest in getting a PS3, I really do think I might enjoy a Wii. And I'm not alone. [update: fixed link]

OldNewThing - Raymond Chen's new Book

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 21:12:48 GMT

Okay, I changed my mind, I wrote a book after all

Back in 1993, I wrote that I'm doing this instead of writing a book. That was true then, but last year I decided to give this book thing another go, only to find that publishers generally aren't interested in this stuff any more.
...

Photo Album Publishing - Why print photos when you can print a book?

jamesfinnigan — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:02:00 GMT

Did you know that you can print custom books now? I can easily and cheaply create my own book with mypublisher. It's no quark (what most real publishers use), but it's cheap, easy and good enough. For what I want to do, it looks like the right level of flexibility. I love products like mypublisher and Windows DVD Maker that give me a professional look without too much trouble so I can share great memories, without giving up my life.

I was just in the process of putting together some interesting photo stuff when this caught my eye. I don't have any immediate plans to do something with it, but this seems like a great and inexpensive way to capture some great moments like our vacation to Europe in a way that doesn't involve a computer screen and that we can send to Grandparents and other folks who'd rather not have to sit at a computer to enjoy pictures of those that they love.

I really love the picture screensavers myself, but this is probably something that I'll use to put together a few photo albums of our own. We may even print off the blog that we share with our family members in book format.

Christmas Camera Shopping Technique and Recommendation

jamesfinnigan — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 07:59:13 GMT

I've been thinking about good point and click cameras lately, and I'm a big fan of the Ricoh Caplio R4. I've played with it myself, and enjoyed some great pictures of flowers from it. But I was recently looking at a report of the most popular cameras on flickr, and noticed that you could see pictures taken with the different cameras.

Because Flickr supports searching pictures taken by a particular camera, you can (as in the flowers link above) search for pictures of flowers taken by your camera. I recommend checking a few common scenarios like longexposure, indoor, etc and compare them with a nice DSLR (I currently use a Canon Rebel XT although I really need more lenses (hint, hint family :)) - longexposure, indoor).