rhymes with milk

Bike maintenance. Apparently when you clean bearings that were coated in gummy-bear consistency grease, they stop squeaking. Good to know.

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I downloaded Lightroom today. I had it a few years ago and didn’t like it then. But today I saw a how-to video on timelapses, and they used Lightroom to do batch edits. It was pretty slick so I figured I’d give it another try.

The interface border-lines on cluttered, but only because it packs a million and half features all onto one screen. There are so many on/off switches, hover states/actions, buttons, icons, pulldowns, sliders, and menus. It’s almost overwhelming.

Its features are mostly split into two main categories: photo organization & storage, and photo editing. Most of the extraneous organization features are lost on me, probably because I’m such a casual photographer and I don’t have massive archives of images that need organizing. I don’t ever need to change metadata, add keywords, color-code, or otherwise categorize my images. In the past, the only similar Bridge feature that I’ve used is the color coding to mark to-do’s and potential come-back-to’s. Though I have no use for the rest, I can definitely see their possible usefulness. Just not for me.

As for the editing, the power is incredible. I’m still learning how to coax the look I’m going for out of the program, but a learning-curve is to be expected. Again, the editing tools border-line on cluttered, and I think that’s due to them all being available at one time in a single really tall sidebar. Each section of editing tools does expand/collapse, but that only makes finding the right tool harder. At this point, I feel like Photoshop Camera Raw’s tabbed interface is much more user-friendly. But maybe I’m missing something in Lightroom. Perhaps in time I’ll find the advantage of its UI.

I only ever hear great things about it, so I’ll keep giving it a chance. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Two awesome things blew my mind today.

1. Cyclemeter, the iphone app, is awesome. Tangent: I’ve been opposed to buying apps since I got my phone. I think I realized why recently. The money isn’t paying for anything tangible. I’m not even getting a disk with the software installation on it. I rarely pay for anything I download, so the concept is foreign to me. But I’ve recently realized the irrationality in that. If I get use out of the app, it’s worth paying for. I buy myself lunch at least once per week, and after tip I rarely pay less than $10. This Cyclemeter GPS tracking app is incredible, robust, simple, and useful, and it only cost half as much as my weekly lunch. The question of whether or not it’s a worthy puchase is a no-brainer, and I now see that.
2. The Google Earth browser plugin is awesome. I’ve never seen much point in having a separate application on my computer for what I can basically already do online, but now I can actually do it online. The fact that I can now see the Taco Bell at Baseline and Broadway in 3D — all in browser — is priceless.

It’s pretty cool seeing the correlation between elevation gains and speed changes. Sometimes the speed seems to inexplicably swing without reason, but over a longish ride like this, a lot of data has to be crunched into a very small space. Naturally, some of the info gets lost in translation.

Ally and I rode our bikes through campus, and stopped on Farrand and threw around a frisbee like hippies. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.

Outside of Anabelle’s apartment after a Glee night. I rode my bike here (somewhere nearish Foothills and Arapahoe) from the disc golf course in south Boulder in 12 minutes, averaging 18 mph*, which I thought was quick.

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Murder might take place here.

* Shouldn’t that actually be m/h, or even mi/h, but definitely not mph? We don’t say that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 mps², right?

I took my bike’s brakes apart to clean them, crossing my fingers that I could put them back together. They save my life more than any other part of the bike, so it was pretty necessary that I restore proper function to them.

I think they still work…

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I took the dogs for a long walk, and Ally stayed home since she’s super sick with the streptococcus. I took pictures along the way and SMSed them back to her so that she follow us on our walk. It was the most excessive use of modern technology I’ve probably ever been a part of, but it was fun nonetheless. Also, any time I put AT&T’s resources to work makes me feel like I’m actually getting something for the ridiculous amount of money I pay them.

Here’s a thumbnail view of my walk.