makumaro.net

Steering Off

The photo on its own is uninspiring, but I liked the placement of the objects in the frame. This was after getting off the balloon. For a few posts in a row I’ve not focused on food photos. Heh.

Ran it through Photomatix to get the HDR look. Bits of the sky have been overexposed, but the scene was challenging with the dynamic range, so this is a pretty good attempt at retrieving the colours from the background.

Reviewing some of my post editing, and have issue with the colour balance of some of the images, so I’m likely to delve into it a little more to get the exact styling I want.

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Decided to take a couple of days study leave for the exam. Suspected I was entitled to it, but never did ask until today. Heh, just need to let the brain loose for a night from studying. With the exam at the back of my mind, I can’t really think of much else. The house is settling soon and there was another flurry of documents being posted back and forth.

I just want a day when I don’t have to worry about what’s happening next.

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Need to do a little housekeeping on this blog. The Flickr plugin to display the photos at the bottom is broken. Probably something to do with how Flickr allows access to their APIs. The older posts with links to photos hosted on the previous host are also broken as I never uploaded those photos back to their original location. There’s also the issue of continuity as I don’t want to rely on Flickr forever to host my photos (might look into WordPress’s default media handling, but I was never quite impressed with it back then). I’d like something where I can just copy the entire folder from the host and transplant it without too much configuration issues. I’ll probably need more space and an idea on how I’m going to store the photos in a logical manner.

I’m also going to trim off the posts I did in the earlier years, circa 2004. It will probably be some editing, to keep the essence of the post but in something more inline with my current style of writing. I’m pretty sure that I’d react in horror at the thought had I conceived it a year or so ago.

Heh, these ideas for change always come when I have to study for an exam, although this is probably the first time I’ve resisted acting on any of my ideas. I don’t really want to get sidetracked now, with just a few more days to go, I’d like to be able to concentrate on my paper.

Number Six

I find that my taste profile for beers favour the darker ales, so when I picked up some White Rabbit to try (being a fan of other Little Creatures beers), I found it to be very good (in my opinion) and am currently a fan of it. It’s full of flavour with strong caramel notes to it. Always happy to pop open a bottle just to savour the refreshing taste.

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So it’s the big six for this blog now. 6 years since I’ve started it. Wrote a silly and worthless first post. Heh, it’s moved on to a new home without hiccup and all the better for it, considering the blistering speed at which I upload stuff to it via FTP. Would like to do a few more enhancements but this weekend already seems chock full of activities with Chinese New Year just around the corner.

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Took delivery of photos from Snapfish when they had their 9c per print offer. It’s a significant saving from the usual 15c, saving me about $10 for the 160 or so prints I made. Delivery charges were painful though, at $10, so it’s sort of like paying for 15c copies but free delivery.

Printed my pictures at the standard 4 x 6″. Only bad point to the photos were that the photo paper was on the thin and flimsy end, and would probably bend easily, unlike older film developed photos that had the postcard feel to it. Other than that, the pictures were great. Having a colour calibrated monitor really helps out here, as the pictures in my hand were exactly as they looked on my screen (well, from memory anyway, I didn’t compare them directly). Having a colour corrected monitor helps you to identify colour casts on pictures and fix them up (another side note that even with a calibrated monitor, you need a colour calibrated printer to go with it and my previous prints on the home printer were slightly off). Without colour correction, my monitor tends to be on the warm side, with white webpages imparting a slight yellow hue that you probably wouldn’t even take notice of. Images were sharp, and some colours a little too dark but mainly due to error on my part for overprocessing the images. They look fine on the screen but didn’t translate over to print.Your eyes can see more variation of colours than your screen can display, and the screen subsequently can display more colours than what you can print.

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My cousin has caught the grub growing bug and I transplanted some of her tomato plants (I hope they are what she thinks they are) that grew offshoot and have invaded into her chilli plant pot. Heh, will try my luck again with the coriander and parsley later on this year. Also have more experience with aphids, and when my friend (who is also trying out some herbs) brought it up, I knew exactly what she meant by white bugs covering the plant. Coincidentally enough my cousin is also experiencing the same problem now, and it does require some urgency to remove the bugs before they destroy your plant, as they have done so in my previous two attempts with growing coriander.

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Heh, just so many other fascinating things in life to keep me occupied, the only dull moments are when I can’t do it all quickly enough.

Coffee At Every Corner

Stopped using my knockbox to get rid of coffee pucks due to the warm weather. The coffee pucks (as a very fertile environment) become mouldy pretty quickly, so I resorted to just knocking them out on my tamping mat. I then started stacking them up to make space for more coffee pucks when I made coffee.

Getting the consistent 55 to 60ml from a double shot these days. I don’t drink nearly enough to practise my shots consistently to improve my skills. 500gm of beans can last me a good two weeks, serving just myself and Vyanne plus the occasional guest.

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Was at St Ali yesterday evening, seeing a latte art sort of smackdown. The barista community in Melbourne seems pretty close knit, and I recognised a few faces in the crowd as they were from the cafes I frequent. It was a pretty chill environment, and you start hearing people tossing technical coffee jargon around.

The amount of control you need to pour a triple rosetta into a cup requires surgical precision, meaning no jittery hands. The cup was poured by a Japanese barista from St Ali called Toshi, and he’s been there for quite a while now.

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Heh, this is definitely not my average rate of posting. It’s just that I’ve been tweaking my blog lately, so I’m more inclined to write stuff these days. A few more things to fix up and I’ll probably not touch it again until after my CPA paper.