Misadventures at 720nm

Among my little social circle, a circle that mostly consists of myself and those poor others who are so paralysed with the fear of my insane wrath that they dare not flee, my hated of The Gimp is legendary. No other program, to me, exemplifies just how frustratingly right and how wrong the open source community can get things.

The Right: Features, features, features

I’m currently experimenting with Gimp 2.7.1. with Ubuntu 10.4, and feature-wise I believe it can compete fairly with Adobe Photoshop in core tools: Sharpen, blur, clone, crop, resize, heal, selection (by colour, magic wand), layers and it’s own experimental content-aware fill equivalent in Resynthesizer. There are even a limited subset of editing actions (creating borders and fine-tuning selections) that I find to be easier in The Gimp. And blessed of blessed, the 2.7 beta builds and the coming 2.8 version will have a native single-window mode. Huzzah. No more relying upon a(n outdated and unsupported) third-party solution for me to get my single-window fix.

The Wrong: Adobe Photoshop

Oh snap.

I am a Photoshop user. If you’d believe it, I even have a certificate that says, in part, yes Mark, you officially know how to use Photoshop. My personal point of hatred with The Gimp has always been its GUI, it’s interface. The keyboard shortcuts were (to me, completely backwards). Imagine your first time moving from to Firefox to Google Chrome or Apple Safari. You sit down and discover that instead of Ctrl+t to open a new tab, it might be Ctrl+i. Select all might be Ctrl+y, not Ctrl+a. Etcetera. Your very first experience is to discover that the keyboard shortcuts are all completely different to what you know and understand. Some things aren’t even bound to the keyboard at all! Where are my palettes? My brushes? Our first experience with The Gimp has typically overwhelmingly negative.

In the pioneering spirit of a man who has little else to engage him, I have set out to really give The Gimp another try by turning on single-window mode and changing all of the keyboard bindings so as to bring it closer to Photoshop’s. I’m ungimping The Gimp. The results have been pretty good so far.

It’s usable. The team has come a huge way since I last really used The Gimp (2.2-ish?) in GUI, in utility and in tools.

Watch this space for a keymap.

As I said back in January, I am a fickle man. Here I am back with WordPress, back with my old blog again. The Pixelpost powering bhalash.com imploded on Friday afternoon after I updated my timezone. A trivial change completely wiped out all of my settings and broke the database. Piling this on top of all my other concerns with the CMS – concerns that can be effected by simply saying that Pixelpost is unpolished, limited, unstable and literally prone to break if you change anything – I made the snap decision to move back to WordPress. Beginning yesterday I made the effort to get bhalash.com back online and then dusted off my new domain – 720nm.com. My refusal to hard-code URLs in posts and my ability to simply drop a symlink between the relevant image folders let me very trivially import my old WordPress content. I will continue to keep newworldphotos.net and bhalash.com, and the content of the two sites, available for archival purposes.

Two big shoutouts: Tumblr2WordPress and PP2WP for allowing me to pull all my disparate sources back under one umbrella, although tomorrow looks to be spent editing about 100 posts by hand to add proper content, but that is better than working from scratch.

Unfortunately yesterday, Sunday, day 123 of my 365-day project was skipped due to all of this wrestling.

Finally, I’d like to thank everybody who follows my photographs for their forbearance and constant heckling over on Twitter.

I missed yesterday. I was at the bottom of a pit of depression and self-loathing, so the photography had to wait. A serious pit of depression and self-loathing. I was on the teetering verge of cutting myself out of an effort to feel something. #mang

Okay. Well, welcome to Gratuitous Contrast Week, a week of contrast taken to gratuitous levels! My opener is the underground car park at Galway City’s docks complex, behind the Harbour Hotel.

I apologize if anybody has reached newworldphotos.net in the last 72 hours and instead discovering the expected photo-y goodness were instead greeted by a nefarious 404 error. I was busily engaged in moving the domain and associated content from its old home at 1&1 in the U.S.A. to its new one at Digiweb in the Republic of Ireland. I guess you could say that my site has followed me home. :) During the transition period I took the time to update the back-end file structure of my images and their related posts. While I’ve tried to spot check the results my coverage hasn’t been 100%. If you should happen to spot anything please do not hesitate to email me.

Beyond the quiet implications of the change in legal jurisdiction, I now have a hosting and domain space that is wholly mine to play with. With my spring-cleaning finished I plan to enact some small photo changes to the blog and then launch into several new real-world photo projects.

Day 16: Sheer mundanity. Taken on December 10, 2009.

Day 15: It is now day 16. Taken on January 15, 2010.

It is now 1:04am on day sixteen and I have missed my first day. This is inexcusable – I spent most of today sitting in front of my computer working with photographs.

Day 15: Where all boats come to rest. Taken at Menlo Village on January 10, 2010.

This is my last photo from the snowy weekend, honest. The last few days have been so choc-full of drama that I