*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

I thought this would be a good follow-up to the last post on Cookin' Grannies.

I'm all about cooking for yourself, and doing it as frugally as possible.

Here's a great site I found via digg today that aims to connect cookin' grannies from all over the world to share their granny recipes and spread their granny love across the globe. Just don't let it pinch your cheek.

Folks, I'd like to present to you, a fantastic article on the subject of why human society works the way it does, and why overall it's pretty crappy.

The first page is interesting (and funny) but mostly it's a setup for the second page which is totally rad (and hilarious).

My favourite part:

" Then, some time in the Third Century, French philosopher Pierre "Frenchy" LaFrench invented racism. This was a way of simplifying the too-complex-for-monkeys world by imagining all people of a certain race as being the same person, thinking they all have the same attitudes and mannerisms and tastes in food and clothes and music. It sort of works, as long as we think of that person as being a good person (those Asians are so hard-working and precise and well-mannered!) but when we start seeing them as being one, giant, gaping asshole (the French, ironically) our monkey happiness again breaks down."

TVs! As much as everyone loves their flat screen sets, they've always bugged me a bit. They're crazy expensive, their 'refresh' or 'response' rate is generally abysmal (certainly that's the case on anything affordable) and their colour-depth and contrast ratios aren't even really close to what's capable using old-skool tubes.

Until now.

This summer Pioneer will be releasing new [Plasma based?] designs which have 20000:1 contrast ratios, 80% deeper black levels, and some other electronic wizardry to make things even better. THIS is a television folks.

How in the hells is Elliot Smith releasing new records [amazon]? I'm pretty sure he committed a very violent suicide quite some time ago... Oh well... I'll probably try to track it down.

Also of note this week:

• Jimmy Rankin - Edge Of Day [amazon]
  
• Arcade Fire single
• Groove Armada - Soundboy Rock [amazon]
• Queens Of The Stone Age single
• The Sea And Cake - Everybody [amazon]
• Warren Zevon - Preludes [amazon]
• Carole King - Love Makes The World [amazon] (Mother's Day, anyone?)
  
• Air single
• new Rush (can you believe it?) [amazon]
  

Also don't forget to check out (Morgan turned me on to these) :

• new Feist! [amazon]
  
• new(ish) Sara Harmer [amazon]
  

And something else I found whoring around on iTunes:

• a tribute to John Allen Cameron!!
  

Here's a great little write-up about putting on great presentations. Worth a read for everyone, because everyone needs to do this kind of thing sometimes.

I personally never really have much of a problem actually doing presentations. These tips will certainly make my next presentation better.

I would include in this list, however, something about questions. The questions people ask after presentations are usually no good.

Either :

• they're asking something vaguely peripheral that they already know the answer to, in order to try to show you up
• or they ask about something you explicitly addressed in the presentation and you know for a fact that they were pulling lint out of their belly-button while you talked about it
• or they ask about something completely unrelated that doesn't have any business being discussed in the context of your talk
• the list goes on and on

As presenters we have a tendancy to say something like "Well, my research wasn't really about that issue, but I'd be happy to look it up and get back to you...." but I don't like this.

I think it's sheepish and it makes it seem like you've been defeated. You KNOW you're never really going to "get back" to them. It's especially bad because what you really wanted to say was something like "THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT YOU F-ING MORON!!" while you strangle him/her to death in front of everyone.

I think it's much more classy to say something along the lines of "I didn't look into that at all." possibly adding an uncaring/shrugging "Sorry".

If it's not too off topic, and you don't think the questioner is just a jack-ass trying to throw you off (ie: their question is genuine) (or if they /are/ a jack-ass but you're happy with your connection to the audience and you think you can embarrass him with your wit) then you might add a little "If I had to guess..." action, but make sure everyone knows you're talking out of your ass and try to make a joke about that.

It can help, at this point, to add something like "... but that doesn't really have anything to do with my talk.".

Most importantly, if someone asks you a question that you really and truly should know the answer to, but DON'T for whatever reason, don't try to make it up or bluff your way through it or resort to the aforementioned "I'll get back to you" tactic. Fess up to not knowing. As bad as it looks that you don't know something that you should, I think it looks worse if you try to hide it. It will really save your ass if you know of a publication that discusses the issue at hand that you can recommend. It's okay to admit what a good question it is, just try not to seem sneaky about not knowing the answer. Good jokes/wit will save your ass here too, but it's pretty tough for most people to rely on their wit, so stick with honesty.

Just my two cents!

Ahh, DigitialPhotographySchool, your advice is concise and clear and open-ended as always. Good job!

Taking candid photos is a great skill. I for one (many people feel this way, I think) have a really hard time making a smile look natural at all if I'm not actually laughing/smiling already, and I look stupid in most pictures. I ALWAYS look better in more candid shots when there's no one standing there saying "Smile!". But it's hard to take shots like that sometimes.

I like the advice in this article. A few I thought were esp effective:

• Telephoto : a good long range lens will get you out of someone's face and into the background, shielding you from the posing effect I mentioned above. I'm not a photographer, but I would think that this type of lens would be a necessary piece of equipment for any wedding/event photographer.
• Shooting people together : putting two people who are engaged in some activity/conversation or another into the same frame really does make them seem more real, and the picture more candid. Esp when you're shooting kids.
• Hi-jack the posing : taking pictures of people while someone else is trying to line up a posed shot! What a great idea! The subjects are all together, making it easy to get them all 1into the frame at once, but they're not looking at you at all and instead are focused on the other photographer. Sweet!

Just some things to think about for all you amateur photographers out there.

Disk Images are a concept a lot of people seem to have a hard time wrapping their head around at first.

I like to think of them as virtual CDs, because it helps me remember that they need to be inserted/mounted when you want to use them and ejected/unmounted when you're done. And if you want to keep something that's on them, you need to copy the item off the disk onto your hard drive.

Anyways, here's a good little tutorial on disk images courtesy of TheUnofficialAppleWeblog.com to help you all out.

GetRichSlowly has really been my buddy lately. Continuing on my theme of providing resources from teh interweb that I find to be 'good advice', here's a video series on financial literacy.

There's a few people in my life who have at one time or another have noted to me in their own way that they feel 'dumb' financially - they don't understand the stock market or savings or credit scores or whatever. This video series seems to be a great place to start (I learned a lot anyway - I've seen almost all of them).

For what it's worth, I've been following a few blogs that focus on issues of financial literacy lately that would be of interest to anyone interested in this topic:

• GetRichSlowly
• MoneyForTheRestOfUs (they have a great series of articles on travelling cheaply)
• WiseBread (I actually have found I don't like their articles/world view here much but it is on topic)
• BrazenCareerist (slightly less on topic, but still very interesting and related)