Random Brain Dump

We were looking at the photo books we made recently in bed last night, when I casually (honest!) mentioned to Suzanne about Canon releasing a new full-frame camera. I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a full-frame awhile, but these babies cost an arm & a leg. So, I was describing the camera to her (with no ulterior motives, of course! ;), when Suzanne said

I don’t care how much it costs, just buy whatever it takes to get good pictures. These photo books are worth it!

Alright, I’m blogging this as proof. Got a license to kill… our budget, baby!

As employees here at Shutterfly, we get to make some of the company photo-related products as freebies. These past two weeks, Suzanne & I have been busy making photo books.

We got the first two this week. Oh my… they are simply amazing products. Suzanne & I are thrilled with them. The printing is National Geographic quality. The background is simply gorgeous (the icons on our web site don’t do them justice at all). The book binding is great. Quality is top-notch (I’m not claiming this just because I’m an employee). These are coffee-table quality books!

It’s a great way to breath new life to photos that normally sit on your hard drive as idle bits. It’s such a more fun and liberating way to organize and make prints. A photo book like these instantly elevate the sentimental values in your photographs. I believe we found the best method for presentation. No more stuffing 4×6’s into a shoe box or a clunky photo album. I highly recommend you checking out Shutterfly’s photo books.

Most of all, the photo books really give me great satisfaction because it really showcases the photos that I took myself!

One thing I like about Chrome is that it’s fast and light. It starts up fast and performs zippier than Firefox. The memory footprint is about 1/3 to half of that uses by Firefox as the screen shot below shows. Both where running with a single tab opened. Not surprising since I have a few of Firefox plugins installed. Firefox started out as a light version of Mozilla, but has gotten fattened up a bit over the years. I’d like to think the bloat is for richer features and extensible plugins. It’s still my browser of choice, but I am finding that I’m firing up Chrome more & more when I want some quick surfing.

I found out this morning that Ensemble Studios is closing down after 12 years. They make the RTS series that I played for years: Age of Empires. I knew it wouldn’t bode well when I found that Microsoft bought them over… What a shame!

Even at an early age, Allison exhibited stubbornness. She was born in 2003, the year of the goat/ram in lunar calendar. So we sometimes try to explain her stubbornness by attributing her as “stubborn as a goat”, an old saying.

So I was working on my photo book last night when Katelyn and Allison both came running and screaming into the computer room. Katelyn was especially upset and started swinging her arm out of frustration. Though not intentionally, she hit Allison. I promptly sent her to the corner. Intentionally or not, she violated rule #1 “no hitting.”

Later on, I sat down with both to understand what went on. Katelyn claimed Allison started it all by snatching a toy Katelyn was still playing with, without asking. I gave Allison a stern look and I can see her immediate panic in her eyes. Seeing the attention has shifted to her, she quickly sprung up for damage control.

Rex: “Allison, did you grab Katelyn’s toy without asking?”

Allison: “Daddy, but I’m learning…”

Rex: “But you know it’s not nice to grab things without asking!”

Allison: “But I’m learning…”

Rex: “You know it’s not nice, but why did you do it?”

Allison: “But Daddy, I’m the year of the goat! Remember?”

Priceless…