Дон Андре's blog/

I once found a nice program that allows one to analyze the metadata of all your photos. It then creates 4 graphs showing a histogram of focal length, shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I think especially the focal length histogram is interesting if you thinking about lenses. An analysis of 15,500 pictures that I've shot with the D80 showed that most of the photos were taken from ultra wideangle to about 65mm. The big bar at 50mm is because of my 50mm f/1.8 lens that I use for low light photography and when I think image quality is important. Generally I like the 50mm, but I think a wider one would be better, something like a 28 or 35mm which would be a true normal lens for the D80. Of course the histogram is biased to the lenses, but it was surprising to see that even with my 18-200 I mostly stayed at a wider focal length.

The program that can create these statistics is called ExposurePlot.

Yay, finally my new laptop arrived. When I ordered it on January 18th, Dell said I'd get it at or before February 20th. Luckily they finished it much earlier and it arrived in the mail yesterday.

Originally I'd have bought an Inspiron 1520 or 1525, but after I ordered one for my sister in December they took out the dedicated graphics card and only offered onboard solutions. Now I don't play games a lot anymore and there isn't that much of a need for a dedicated card, but the laptop wasn't that much cheaper either. I contacted a Dell employee through their Chat feature and wanted to ask him if they'd offer these models with a dedicated graphics card again. He didn't knew, but he offered me an XPS, which I declined (I don't like the look of them). Then he offered me a Vostro which was new to me. I was interested and it was exactly what I wanted. I had not known about Vostro before, because Dell markets this for Small and Home Office Users. You can order it as private person as well though. There's even a 14" widescreen version which was perfect because I wanted a little less bulky laptop as it travels around with me a lot and I'll never take anything but widescreen again.

So here it is and the tech specs read:
Vostro 1400
Intel Core2 Duo T7250 2.0Ghz
14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) TrueLife display with black case and 2.0MP camera
3072MB RAM
nvidia GeForce 8400M GS 128MB
160GB Shockproof HDD (7200RPM)
8x DVD +/- RW
Intel Wireless-N, Bluetooth and a SD/MMC - MS/Pro card reader
Microsoft Windows Vista Business

The last item was a bit irritating because I ordered it with Windows XP actually, at least I thought so. Nevertheless I think Vista isn't all that bad. It feels quick actually, but I could be biased by my old Pentium-M 1.86Ghz which didn't feel that fast anymore. So I'll stay with it for the moment.

So far I'm quite happy with this new laptop. I like the keyboard which is very quiet and has a nice soft feeling. I like the buttons below the touchpad which are also very quiet and don't make the loud clicking noises that my old laptop made. The black business look is also very professional, though the back of the display gets greasy a little too fast. Sound is pretty good too, not as good as my old Compaq which had JBL speakers, but I think better than my old Inspiron. The TrueLife display... well.... it's certainly better regarding contrast, but the horizontal angle is quite narrow. I think I like matte displays better, but they're much darker in comparison.

The only negative experiences so far has been with the DVD drive which is a totally cheap plastic unit that seems to break easily. The notebook seems to be very durable otherwise, except for the battery which doesn't sit that firmly in its place.
Regarding the keyboard, I always miss the arrow keys slightly. I guess this is because they sit at the very end of the laptop, whereas the 15.4" that I had before still had some space.

My old notebook will go to my grandpa who will be very happy to upgrade. He's 75 years old and learns how to operate a computer and sort the photos he makes. I would not have upgraded because my old one is just 2 years and it's still working great, but he wished for a better one and didn't want to buy a completely new one. Of course I'm not that altruistic and dual core fits me well right now as I'm often working and running programs in parallel.

Die Fastenzeit hat wieder begonnen und es scheint als wird sie wieder beliebter und häufiger angenommen. Laut einem kürzlich erschienen Artikel auf orf.at wollen alleine in Österreich 2 Millionen Menschen fasten wobei der Verzicht auf Alkohol und Süßes an oberster Stelle steht.

Ich habe letztes Jahr schon mitgemacht und bin auch heuer wieder dabei. Genau die zwei Bösewichte Alkohol und Süßes stehen auch wieder auf meiner Abschußliste! Allerdings versuche ich, anders als letztes Jahr, etwas mehr Nachhaltigkeit in die Aktion zu bringen. Also erlaube ich mir Schokolade mit einem Kakaoanteil von zumindest 70%. Angeblich soll diese Schokolade auch gesund sein und nicht die von der Alltagsschokolade bekannten Süchtigmacher enthalten. Bei Kaffee hab ich es schon geschafft vor ein ein paar Jahren von "viel Milch und viel Zucker" auf Schwarz und ohne Zucker umzusteigen, den Tee trinke ich auch schon einige Zeit ohne Zucker, alles eine Frage der Gewohnheit.

Trotzdem wird es wieder, besonders am Anfang, schwer, wie mir gerade das mentale Bild einer Schokolade beweist auf die ich mich jetzt so unglaublich freuen würde.... hach...

Abnehmen steht mir dabei nicht im Sinn - natürlich schon auch, aber dazu möchte ich eher Sport betreiben als die Kilos wegzuhungern. Vielmehr ist es ganz angenehm ein paar der alltäglichen Laster über einen Zeitraum loszuwerden, zumindest am Ende wenn man es dann auch geschafft hat :-)
Ich erinnere mich noch als ich letztes Jahr ohne Schokolade auskam fühlte ich mich am Ende wirklich gut.... leider hat es nicht sehr lange gehalten, deshalb heuer der geplante Umstieg auf hochwertigere Schokoladen. Vielleicht entwickelt sich dadurch auch ein etwas feinerer Geschmack.

Eine andere sinnvolle Fastenmöglichkeit nennt sich Autofasten und bedeutet für die 40 Tage häufiger auf das Auto zu verzichten!

Für mich hat Fasten kaum religiöse Bedeutung, ich finde es einfach eine gute Idee.

I've never written about Windows Vista before. I've never tried Vista before, but it came installed on my laptop. I wasn't much friends with XP either and so why not try something new.

The first things that shocked me are the horrible black screen of DING!! when you want to access a function that requires admin rights (and a lot of them do). The whole screen goes to black and it comes back with one of those dialog boxes that you just click away and then it's okay (after going black again). I can understand why this is necessary, but it would be a lot less annoying if it wouldn't go to black all the time.

The first thing that I killed is the language toolbar, but okay that's the first thing that gets killed in XP as well. The first Vista thing that got kicked was the sidebar. Yeah sure, nice, plugins, clock, calendar, nice, yes, but...... who needs that? So the sidebar was the first Vista feature axed.

The first thing that left a more positive impression was the built-in search feature. Actually I kept a pretty tidy start menu on XP, set up custom folders with custom icons that I grouped my programs into. With Vista this isn't all necessary anymore, you just type the program's name in the search box and execute it... neat! Infact the "All programs" from the past is pretty useless, it sorts programs by name and puts folders at the end, there's no way I want to use it.

The first thing I added was the desktop toolbar. I love this toolbar and after deleting the useless show desktop link in the quick launch bar (you can do the same by pressing windows-d) it's my prefered way of accessing desktop icons. There's an even more useless 3D displaying of all windows you have button in the quicklaunch bar. That's so far the only thing that I've noticed from those great Aero features... and yes it's gone too. Apple at least has a keyboard shortcut for that (F11?). The transparent windows are also gone already. I actually liked how you can rearrange the windows in OS X, can't Aero do something like that?

But anyway now that you managed to read so far through all these firsts, I also had a few "couples" already: Crashes. Sometimes I click "Open" and explorer crashes. Sometimes I want to save something and explorer crashes. Right now I opened the vista menu and typed "Visua" in the search box and the explorer crashes. I've had Visual Studio crashes on adding existing files to a project, I've had so many that I begin to understand why Vista makes it look like a completely normal operation. How can you have so many explorer crashes with totally ordinary tasks?

And so yes that's my first daily WTF?! experience with Vista and another debut... hooray

I've been sick for the past week. Starting with this week I'm feeling a little better every day.

I guess I caught a bad cold. It was not serious, but quite strong. I can't remember the last time I was so sick that I had to stay several days in bed. I had cough and horrible teeth ache, I guess because of the cold. I couldn't sleep a whole night and was awake while I had all sorts of totally weird ideas flying around in my brain. It didn't make any sense, but to take me on an emotional rollercoaster. It felt as if I dreamt awake.

I fought the whole sickness down by staying in bed as much as possible, having a quiet time and several packs of first NeoCitran (paracetamol) and now Aspirin Complex (acetylsalicylic acid). Dona was really lovely all the time and cared for me as best as she could! (Do I really want to get healthy again?)

On the positive side, I discovered that Craig M. Tanner from the Radiant Vista has given a short critique to one of my pictures among several fine other ones. You can check out the video here (it's still online for just a couple of days). My picture is the 3rd.