Laurel's Debate Party success!

Not only is Laurel the hostess with the mostest, but she also won Debate Bingo! In fact, hers was the only card that scored a bingo at all, and only because someone finally said "France." I would have come in second thanks to a last-minute mention of "Stem Cell Research" but I was held back by the fact that I had "WMD" on my most-filled row, and they never said that exactly -- they always said "Weapons of mass destruction" ... oh well.

We may witness history tomorrow

Which is most likely tomorrow:

1. Ichiro will get the tying 257th and record-setting 258th hits while Laurel and I are at the Mariner's game
2. Mt. St. Helens will erupt
3. Both

Debate Bingo

Laurel wants to play "Debate Bingo" tonight ... you'll mark off words as each candidate says them. Toward that end, I created a webpage that will generate the cards. Just hit "refresh" and "print" to get a new one!

Debate Bingo

Bring on winter!

Laurel knitted me a new hat:

Learning to snap

Some photos from the class I'm taking at the Photographic Center Northwest. Homework due every week!

Fish eye for the knittin' guy (er ... gal)

Hardly staged at all.

Debate party

Laurel is organizing a "debate party" on Thursday ... some friends will come over and watch the Kerry/Bush debate with us.

Because Laurel is a left-leaning liberal, the good TV will be for the hippies, whereas the right-minded among us will be stuck with a small TV in the guest bedroom.

But as a libertarian (philosophically, not politically), I'll be mostly just watching these guys:

Laurel knits like a demon

We all have our hobbies! I (Dave) start a digital photography class tomorrow night at Photographic Center Northwest.

Spa Dave

Laurel comes home from Tennessee in a few hours, and from the looks of things, she's nearly too late:

Home

Mike has gone back to Texas and it is quiet in the Stewart household again. It sure was nice to see both of our "boys"!

Family portrait

From left: Mike, Grandpa, Dad, Grandma, Mum, Dave

The Passion of the Net

My Grandma, researching "The Passion of the Christ" with my laptop after viewing the DVD. She's a Cyber-GrandMum!

Archives work again!

Horray -- I finally figured out the problem with the Archive pages since moving to my new server. They should all be available now!

Holiday Out

You know you're in a great hotel when down the hall from your room you find not only a smoke-filled bar, but also one of those machines with the mechanical claw/crane that never quite catches on to the prizes in the bin. Well, I was able to snag this little guy, which my Mum decided to keep:

Mike

My brother has:

• Some musical talent
• A broken nose
• An Emmy

And he's single, LADIES!

Peanut butter Mocha? Why has no one else figured this out?

I'm sitting in the Tulsa airport at Java Dave's ... they have a peanut butter mocha here. Wow. Starbucks, how did you miss this???

Dave's home

I got a big surprise last night--Dave came home for a visit! I was totally shocked when the door bell rang and there he stood.

Format change

On my Dad's suggestion, I changed the formatting of the blog slightly so that the blogger's name appears after the title but before the post text. His complaint was that he always assumes I'm the one who is writing an entry, but with all the female guest bloggers, he sees something about "sports bras" or whatever and hopes it isn't ;-) .. so I did the move, and I like it, too!

Our house, in the middle of our street

I've just been (re)discovering Keyhole, an amazing mapping application that has very recent high-res photos of many places in the US and around the world. Here's our house from above:

He's half the man he used to be

Six Feet Under last night was pretty good.

The pitch

Four shots of a Mariner's pitcher winding up and letting fly!

Pictures reposted, average lowered

I removed one picture and lightened the rest. Since I did it as a batch, some of the pix that were already well-lit are now over-exposed, but this is better than the former general darkness. If you already saw the pictures, your browser might have them cached, so do a "super-refresh" (shiftkey-refresh).

Batting .180

Here are the pictures of the Mariners vs. Boston on September 11, 2004. These are the unedited shots that I figure I can eventually salvage into something nice ... 73 out of 406, not a great batting average, but probably decent for photography!

Don't forget the ISO

The problem with most of the shots I took at the basebal game was underexposure. Given the tricky lighting of a night game, plus the fast shutter speed necessary to capture sports action as well as combat camera shake when using a large zoom lens, I was forced to use a pretty wide-open aperture. Which was fine, because I wanted a shallow depth-of-field, usually. This led to many shots having a blurry subject due to bad focusing on my part, but also underexposure of the whole scene. I knew this was happening, and figured I could "fix it in post" ... the problem is that I didn't think until too late that I had another variable I could factor into the mix -- the ISO setting of the digital "film" ... I kept it at the lowest my camera would go (200) rather than bumping it up.

Blah, blah, blah ... so what that means is that I need to take longer to post my shots as I figure out a way to bump up the lighting levels in Photoshop.

That doesn't mean I didn't still get some decent shots, like this one of a vendor pushing his wares:

Take me out to the ballgame

Dave and I went to the Mariners/Red Sox game last night. The seats were great - 5th row. The game - not so much. The Mariner's lost spectacularly (as they did the night before). Still, going to a ballgame is always fun, and it looks like Dave got some really good pictures of the game. Maybe he will post them if we ask nicely.

Workin' the Wood

Here is my new setup:

I used to have my printer where the second monitor is, but I went to Home Depot and bought some wood and used my mad carpentry skills to build a new shelf, hence "workin' the wood" (what did you think it meant?)

Big is beautiful

This weekend, I got a new Apple 23" Cinema HD Display. The thing is incredible -- Apple really does it right as far as design, but the real deciding factor for me was their attention to how their products are displayed in the store. Folks at the store are usually clueless about Apple products (as Laurel often finds), but at least they set the displays up well. Of course, I would rather have bought a non-Apple product, but every monitor in the store was set up so poorly that I couldn't rationally purchase one. The Apple display was always 100% crisp because it was tweaked to look that way -- and I was able to mimic that same tweaking at home.

Welcome (to our new) home!

After spending the entire long weekend with no blog service, I've decided to move everything to a new server. It might be a while until all the stuff is working 100%, but please update your bookmarks to http://www.blogthevote.net/dstewart ... thanks!

Laser tag

I bought a laser pointer for some reason. Not sure why. But Laurel had the idea to put the camera on long exposure and then "paint" with the laser. Here's a trial run ...

Still shallow

Just to prove it's not all deep thoughts around here..... This month's Vogue is the size of a mid-sized city's phone book! Around 850 pages! Wow. And, I look like a drag queen (just to point out - this is Laurel, not Dave). I needed some cash at Bartell's and there's no ATM, just cash back on purchases. So I bought blue eyeshadow and liquid eyeliner.

Bad senator, worse doctor

I caught Bill Frist's speech at the RNC last night on the radio while I was driving. Now, I used to give him points because (1) he is from TN and (2) his brother operated on my father's heart. No more! He said that medicine's greatest weapon these days is prescription drugs. Not all the great stuff we know about preventative medicine, not advances in the study of genetics that allow people to make some more informed choices in their lives, but prescription medicines. In other words, the greatest weapon is that once people are already sick doctors can prolong their lives. This is not someone I would like caring for me. And his opinion is just indicative of people's constant looking for a quick fix. Feeling down? Take a pill. Don't want to watch your diet? Take a pill. Can't get it up? Take a pill. Is there a place for medicines? Yes. I'm particularly fond of the one that keeps my liver from imploding into a cirrhotic mess. However, I'm more impressed with the benefits I receive from the "free"* treatment of living a fairly healthy lifestyle of eating right and exercising. * (I, in fact, spend quite a bit of money on exercise-related endeavors, as Mr. Stewart can well attest.)