Knowledge Is Power
A Weblog exploring the repository of all human knowledge
Digital Photography stuff
Sports Illustrated's digital workflow Good artilce on how they deal with the 1,028,000 digital photographs shot by staffers or freelancers under assignment.
Digital Photography in the Wilderness "What makes outdoor adventures fantastic experiences is precisely what makes digital photography challenging: there is no power grid readily accessible, the weight one can carry is very limited, and the environment is not exactly as electronics-friendly as in a fashion studio. "
Special Report: The Cameras Of PMA "Digital Photography is no longer special. It now is photography."
Far Side cartoons made real with Photoshop
Orchids
Since it's spring I thought this site could use some color. My new banner image and the images below this post were taken a few weeks back at Orchids by Hausermann in Villa Park Il. Even if you're not a flower person, seeing 4 acres of orchid greenhouses is worth the visit. They let you walk around and take pictures. These things aren't cheap houseplants though, I didn't see anything cheaper than $25, and those were tiny. 
Science Links
British soldiers trapped in Mexican underground cave Some cool cave pictures in the slideshow. Here's the BBC report on the story.
The five naked eye planets align. "This particular planetary grouping will quite possibly offer the best nighttime views until 2036 "
Scientists Report Evidence of Saltwater Pools on Mars
Web related stuff
auftn is offering some alternate knowledge to my recent list.
U.S. Internet Population Crosses 200M
China pulls the plug on blogs "Used by more than 15,000 people, Blogbus.com was closed "until further notice" on 11 March after a letter was posted on the site that was critical of the government. Another site, Blogcn.com, had its plug pulled three days later."
Will FBI Decide Internet Configuration ? "Civil liberties groups are calling this request "breathtaking," and that's no exaggeration. What's on the table here is not just the most wide-ranging surveillance capabilities in communications history, but also a fundamental attack on liberty itself "
Shouldn't you be voting?
That's if you're in Illinois.
ChicagoElections.com has the Ballot and Referenda (for Chicago) linked.
The Cook County Clerk's Office has polling place info, a page on how to vote and says that Primary registration figure are the highest ever.
The Illinois State Board of Elections page has links to other IL county commision pages, how to vote with other types of ballots used in IL, campaign finance info and more
If you're somewhere else and want to know how to vote smart, vote-smart.com is a good place to start.
Reading assignments
The latest A List Apart, with some neat tricks for a CSS rollovers and automatically zebra striping a table with javascript.
I'm making the transition from guru-level Quark operator to fumbling InDesign moron. Creating nested style sheets in InDesign There's lots more on InDesign at MacDesign
Adobe Photoshop CS: The new color replacment tool
Matching Colors in Photoshop or a simpler explanation Photoshop Tip: Match Colors for when your inserting parts of an image into another image.
While you can't actually read the images of the Octavo Collection online, you can page through them. PDF editons and hi-res facsimile are available for purchase. How else are you going to own a Gutenburg bible for $80?
More local weblog stuff
The Wiz's report on Kerry's visit to Chicago. "Finally, some unseen MC announced the Honorable Richard M. Daley, Mayor, and I lost it. I hopped. Like a girl at a New Kids on the Block concert. I was so excited."
Lay-c is reporting from Australia and Fiji. Are we jealous? No, not at all.
Chicago Snapshots, a Chicago photoblog I hadn't seen before
A few weblog related links
Google PageRank Lunacy "are you really prepared to commit yourself to the virtual desecration of someone's memorial site and bring pain to their loved ones to sell a ring tone? If so, then why not head out to your nearest cemetery with a can of spray paint and plaster your URL's on the tombstones. Your actions in the virtual world of the web are the same.
Bloggers: Not nearly as many as perceived? "What is so odd about this report is that it seems to imply that 2 to 7 percent of the online US adult population is small. If one considers that there are approximately 190 million adults in America and 58 percent of them are online, that means that there are between 2.2 and 7.7 million people keeping blogs. " That's Ars technica commenting on this CNN article - Study: Very few bloggers on Net.
A big long list of gardenblogs - my favorites - Garden of Dead Bugs, A carnivorous plant blog and Worms of Endearment "Part book tour diary, part earthworm love story "
A couple of Chicago bloggers got some local press this week Sourbob is featured in Blogs can make anyone an author and Mimi is the focus of Going blog wild. Both these writers never fail to crack us up, and they both deserve the attention and their upcoming book deals. Bastards. The man behind Me3dia is also mentioned and apparently helped quite a bit with that last article.
I can't help quoting sourbob from his last post: "You touch that button even one more time and I'm going to grab that bag of Sun Chips off the impulse buy rack and I'm going to shove it so far up your ass, you'll be able to name the flavor."
In other local blogger news, AKMA, our local expert on the subject, wrote a review of the Passion. Follow along with his blog for more on the topic. Particularly good is this post on Passion and Postmodernism.
Old News
Some stuff I missed
It's amazing how much you miss if you don't blog for awhile. Here's some stuff I've just caught up on.
List - a new collaborative weblog by some cool people who link to cool stuff.