More vacation shots

When, through repeated iteration the truth becomes self-obvious, I find myself in a position where I am forced to acknowledge something which I have always known; I am a lousy photographer. My quick estimate is that as few as 3-5% of the pictures I take ever make it past getting downloaded to my computer from the camera. They are all sitting there on my hard drive - once I copy them over from the memory card they never get deleted - but all except for the tiny handful that make it up to my Flickr page are just gathering digital dust.

Even the ones on Flickr seldom get there without some serious editing; some colour correction here, a straightened horizon there, and some selective cropping to remove the extraneous stuff that I couldn't bother to frame out of the picture when I was taking it. At one time the purist in me cringed at the thought of modifying anything before I posted it. Now nothing escapes the butcher knife before it goes up. I fear that my digital camera and Photoshop have made me lazy. My philosophy lately has been to go with quantity over quality. If I can shoot 100 quick pictures and salvage 5% of them through digital manipulation then why bother to try and compose the perfect shot every time?

On the other hand, is this any worse than when I was shooting film? Back then, I would shoot 60 shots instead of 250, and I would keep 20% of them instead of 5%.

Anyway, enough whinging - on with the pictures.

Before I get into position with my camera, the otters were being very playful and cute. Arguably they were still being cute in this shot, but in a more low-key "swimming around on our backs rather than wrestling and playing in the water" kind of way.


( More vacation shots behind the cut. )

[thud]

How to make Windows XP die in an ugly manner.

1) Make sure you get EDS to set up the two machines first, to ensure that they have as gimped a version of XP as possible.¹
2) Set up the desktop in the other city for remote access, and open up a remote desktop on that machine.
3) Set up your own desktop to accept remote connections.
4) Switch over to the desktop on the remote machine and remotely tell it to open a remote desktop on your local machine.
5)

I never actually got to step 5, because after step 4 the screen went black and the machine locked up so badly that I had to power it right off before it would reboot back into Windows.

¹ Bonus points if the machines spontaneously crash on their own every couple of weeks due to a serious memory leak, even when nobody is signed in.