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I usually get, say, one or two hits on a picture the day I post it. Sometimes none. And then the number slowly climbs as other people find it in Google searches or by looking in Flickr for things like Rapp and Rapp, or by browsing through from other photos in my list. That's cool. I like seeing what keeps getting more hits over time (oddly enough my shot of a small Spacewarp rollercoaster setup is one of my highest viewed pictures ever).

Bu then I have brief moments of knowing what real popularity is like, such as when moiracoon links to a couple of my pictures in the thrifthorror community and I see eighty hits in a day with plenty more to go!

Oh; and someone contacted me through Flickr about using one of my shots in a UP tourism brochure or something. Don't know if that will go anywhere, but they asked about the DPI of the original image so I sent them some info. That was kind of cool.

I've had a scratchy throat the last couple days, and woke up with nasty soreness today. I hate that. My thanks to the raccoon who went out and got me sore throat meds. I like Luden's Wild Cherry cough drops sooo much....

I wish I wasn't working today. At least most of the tickets I can do today are administrative stuff that don't require the phone.

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Moira just got back from a garage sale and presented me with this awesome find!

This gorgeous Art Deco inspired bust is a lamp! The light bulb screws in to a socket under the triangular crest on the back of the head. It came pre-equipped with one incandescent lamp; blue. Yeah.

It's plaster, I think . There's a chip on the underside of the crest, but you can't really tell from above. The wiring works just fine.

The first thing I thought of when I saw it was the hood ornament on the '49 Pontiac in Pontiac Moon.

I just love this lamp. It's going to have a prominent place in the computer room.





(Wow; I have, like, some serious cheekbones in this picture....)

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I feel all sorts of cruddy tonight. And you know, it's not any kind of serious congestion, or sneezing, or body-aches, or anything like that. It's just this damn sore throat. Having a sore throat drives me crazy!

So I've been using my time at home to play with Photoshop a bit. I picked out a pictures (The New York City police memorial) and applied some of the short tutorials over here at Ken Rockwell's website. Handy stuff there.

I posted three versions of the image to Flickr just for example.

Version 1: unedited except for resizing.

Version 2: edited with Irfanview, which is what I've been using for years 'cause I've been too lazy to learn Photoshop. I bumped saturation and contrast a little and sharpened it a bit.

Version 3: messed with in Photoshop. I set the bright/dark levels, played with color balance, rotated it to make the memorial wall vertical (though in retrospect, I can't honestly remember if it was vertical in real life; I'm thinking not) and then sharpened it. I'm not totally sure which of the last two I prefer, but I do love the warming effect I can get playing with colors and the fact that I can rotate things to make them square. Nifty.

The tweaks show best if you look at them full-size.

I may put some more New York photos up tonight. I may go to bed. Who knows?

I've also wasted time looking at some web pages that suck. Oh dear. Oh dear. There's even a fannish one that's mad the, somewhat dubious, grade: The Omaha Science-fiction and Fantasty Festival: OSFest. I'm sure it's a nice convention and all. I mean really, most of them are lots of fun. Maybe it's just being done by an old-school web master who designs websites by typing up the HTML in notepad. Like me. (Of course, there are much worse, and much funnier, ones listed too.)