pictures

tl;dr: ~600 GB photo library, took ~3 weeks to migrate, some things are awesome (access to all my photos everywhere, on any device), some things less so (faces don't get synced, no loupe, no five-star rating system, no pro-level editing/batch workflows). All-in-all, I wish Apple didn't ditch Aperture... but it's not the end of the world moving to Photos.

There are many, many photographers who were disappointed Apple decided to discontinue Aperture development. Aperture was by far my favorite tool for both organizing and manipulating RAW photos taken with my DSLRs. It was fast, it had tons of great organizational features, and was highly adaptable.

My wife and I needed an extra dresser to keep up with the growing family (third baby is on the way in a few months!), and since we would rather buy things that last—but not buy new if we can save a bundle of money—we bought a used wood dresser on Craigslist:

First lesson: always inspect every last bit of furniture before loading it up and hauling it away! Most of the rails were in not-great condition, and the guides on the drawers weren't in great shape either:

We decided to make the best of the situation and make as good a repair as possible, resulting in much improved (like new!) rails:

I forgot to post here, after posting to different social networks—when NASA's Juno orbiter was placed in Jupiter's orbit, it just so happened to coincide with my family's Sunday night crêpe tradition (see how to make gluten/dairy/egg-free crepes, or how to make normal crepes).

So what did I do? I used some peanut butter, cream cheese, and nutella to try to depict a tasty food version of Jupiter:

A Jupiter crepe in honor of Juno's mission milestone today

The banana is for scale.

When I originally built the Raspberry Pi Dramble 6-node Pi cluster in 2014 (for testing Ansible with bare metal hardware on the cheap), I compiled all the code, notes, etc. into a GitHub repository. In 2015, I decided to take it a step further, and I started hosting www.pidramble.com on the cluster, in my basement office!

Just wanted to post a whimsical image I captured while preparing for one of my presentations having to do with Raspberry Pis at this year's php[tek]:

The banana is for scale.

During last week's record-breaking snowstorm in St. Louis, I was not motivated to brave the 10+ inches of snow and -20 (and lower) temperatures to get pictures outside of the comfort of my climate-controlled home. I did, however, snap some pictures of birds eating from the feeders in my backyard, which my wife wisely filled the day before the storm.

For a while, there was only one small bird eating from the sunflower seed feeder (there were a bunch of goldfinches on the thistle feeder):

I'm not quite sure if this is a sparrow or finch, as the colors and contrast were affected quite a bit by the volume of snow falling between my lens and the feeder! This picture is retouched with a ton of extra contrast after the fact.

Whatever the bird, he was quite persistent!

This weekend, I'm down in Springfield, MO, photographing the Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America youth conference (which is on its second weekend—more than 6,000 teens participate in this event!).

I'll be posting my pictures in near-real-time to Flickr (on stlyouth's photostream — here's a link to all the pictures from the weekend), and I'll hopefully have time to do a writeup on the gear I'm using—two Nikon bodies (including a rented D7100!), two Eye-Fi cards, and a 4G hotspot.

Here are two of my favorite shots from the tonight (Eucharistic Adoration is always a highlight):

I recently read a very good interview with Jason Fried on The Great Discontent, and one of the answers towards the end of the interview struck me:

The other advice is to focus on one thing. I see a lot of entrepreneurs build something and then move onto the next thing and the next thing and the next. Building something is only step one. It’s not that hard to put something out there. Building on top of that to maintain and improve it is actually the harder thing to do. Anyone can release something, but it’s much harder to polish and refine it over time once it’s out there.

I admit I've been tempted by this same thing many times—trying out new idea after new idea, leaving the old to gather cobwebs in a closet. Lately I've been refocusing on some of my older, mildly successful projects, like my Hosted Apache Solr service and Server Check.in (they're not that old compared to other mature services, but they're old for me).

This year's Transitional Deacon Ordination Mass took place last Saturday, May 4 (May the 4th be with you! And with your spirit.).

I was privileged to be able to take photos for this year's transitional deacons, even more so since I will be unable to attend the Priesthood Ordination Mass this year (due to my attendance at DrupalCon Portland), and was happy to see many of my seminarian friends become deacons—one step closer to their journey towards the priesthood.

You can view the entire set of photos on Flickr: 2013 Transitional Deacon Ordination.

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