If you are looking for custom calligraphy on the internet and especially in Colorado, you’ll want to check out Graceful Calligraphy by Katherine. She does amazingly great work - just check out the samples on her website! Katherine of Graceful Calligraphy is the best calligraphy artist to go to if you have a favorite poem or saying, wedding invitation envelopes, place cards, wedding invitations, baby announcements, or a gift for a special occasion that you would like to have written in custom, graceful, hand written calligraphy.
Graceful Calligraphy is a woman owned small business. While Katherine is well known for her superb artistic talent as a calligrapher, she is also a great Catholic and Christian who will provide you a great value and service for all of your calligraphy needs! You don’t have to take my word for it though, just check out her excellent client testimonials and reviews. International service is available.
Highly acclaimed fashion photographer Michael Belk has turned his lens to Jesus Christ to visually tell the tale of many of the gospel stories as set in modern times in his project, “Journeys With the Messiah“. I actually heard about this project during the pastor’s sermon at mass today, as he recalled the popular photo entitled “Quandary” which depicts today’s gospel reading with a man who has the best car, a beautiful wife, two kids and all the marks of “success” in our modern world - asking a 1st century Jesus what else must he do beyond keeping the commandments in order to inherit eternal life? Mark 10:21-22
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.
Today for the first time I met Kimberly, of Kimberly Fine Art Portraits in Baltimore/Owings Mills, MD and got a nice little tour of her newly remodeled (and massive) studio. I actually stopped by to look at an older camera she had for sale on craigslist, and after a little Canon-photographer bonding - we ended up talking photography for about an hour! She’s very socialable, experienced and was generous in giving me ideas and advice on how to improve my digital workflow, manage my memory cards, and keep organized once photography becomes a profession!
Kimberly Fine Art Portraiture
All the while, I was admiring her photographic work (ok - it’s “fine art” - truly) and working environment. With 30 years of photography experience, working with such icons as Monte Zucker and other notable photographers - her talent shows as she’s won numerous accolades and awards over the years. Do you remember those paintings of royalty that would hang in castles? That’s what Kimberly’s portraits look like - fine art! It was great to meet with her, and actually a few other photographers lately (Jenni - portrait/wedding photographer, Sean - “Alpine” wedding photography) all thanks to craigslist shopping encounters!
I noticed that the process to initialize a new hard drive on Windows Vista is not particularly intuitive - at least for a first time user - myself included! (I’ve just always used GNU/Linux, LiveCD or boot disk from the Win9X era.) However, in Windows 2000 and above, including Vista:
Launch the Computer Management: [Win]+[r] or simply [Win] and enter compmgmt.msc in the run/search box
Go to Storage -> Disk Management
Find the drive from the list (colored black if unformatted)
Right-click on the “Disk Label” on the left (displays the drive name and size, not the drive image) and select Initialize Disk
Then you can right-click on the drive image to Create New Simple Volume
I just noticed that Southwest airlines is now placing advertisements on their print-from-home boarding passes. =( I have two flights tomorrow morning, but instead of printing both passes on one page (which was standard in the past, also saving paper and the planet) the print preview now shows several ads after the first boarding pass and then the second boarding pass on another page. You’ll need to remove the ads and the page break to force the printout to print to two pages. Here’s the simple way to print out your boarding passes on one page:
1) Save the boarding pass webpage to your desktop.
(File -> Save Page As. Save as “Web page, complete”.)
2) Right click on the viewBoardingPass.htm file and open with Notepad
3) Scroll down to where you see the “- - - FOLD HERE - - -” line, then just below it: Remove the following advertisement and page break lines: Read the rest of this entry »
The other day I was scanning in multiple pages of a document into PDF format with my favorite image/scanning/multi-tool Irfanview and the Irfanview plugins. However, when I tried to merge all of the PDF page files into one single document using a, multitude, of pdf tools (except mergepdf.net because it was a sensitive document) but was unable to because there was an owner password created with the PDF randomly that I didn’t know about — so these tools wouldn’t let me merge the PDF files I created!
After some email correspondence with Irfan himself I just downloaded and installed the latest version 4.23 and found “New multipage images menu: Create Multipage PDF” in the release notes! And this worked wonderfully! Irfanview apparently completely ignored the random embedded password. It’s good to know that I can use Irfanview to merge the PDF files I created with Irfanview. =)
To do this, simply (from the help system): Click on the View Menu, point at Multipage images. A sub-menu opens with several options to click… including “Multipage PDF” and “Multipage TIF”. Then simply select your input files and the name of your ouput PDF file and you’re set! Much easier and simpler than the other PDF tool programs as well!
This is my favorite and perhaps the best youtube video ever! I can’t believe I’ve never shared it here before! This educational video eloquently defines what “Liberty” is in the political sense in a principled way that is so easy to comprehend that I think every child above 1st grade should see it. =) Hopefully this video gets you thinking and provides some principled stability to your reasoning on politics and justice. If you have any further insights and thoughts on it, please share. I hope you enjoy, and remember… love thy neighbor!
Today I tried my luck at making a custom javascript link based on the current date from the client side. There was one “gotcha” in testing it in firefox though, the traditional code like this didn’t work.
So I just had to write out the whole HREF tag in the javascript function. For more details see my Creating a Custom Javascript link wiki page.
Ok, it’s that time again… time for new years resolutions! I thought of a few the other day, and already I’ve been slacking on them. =( So hopefully by posting them online it will help keep me a little more honest and engaged in sticking to them! Here’s my “start” of my 2009 resolutions (may be updated):
I’ve had a pair of cracked audio CDs lying around now for the past couple of years from my old “Teach Yourself Norwegian” (great course btw!)… always wishing that eventually in time there might be a way to recover and play them. So after nearly 4 years since I last used them, I finally googled it and had some luck! Read the rest of this entry »
I’m trying to decide where I might travel to this next year in 2009… since I did so much traveling in 2007, I made a pact that I should only do international travel “every other year” so that I could afford the finances! In that year I graduated from NPS, drove across the entire country camping and sight-seeing along the way, then backpacked around Europe for 7 months seeing friends and new places — hitting 10 countries in all, then finally had a family vacation to Hawaii for Christmas and the New Year. So, that was an expensive year!
So far on the radar for 2009, I’ve got a friend inviting me to go to Iceland in March to admire the glaciers and take advantage of the good exchange rate, my study abroad in Norway group reunion planned for May in London, and another friend inviting me down to Honduras to volunteer with street children and practice my Spanish! Oh, if only I could afford to do them all!
I was just checking out facebook.com again today and got some happy birthday wishes recently. What was really impressive, was my friend and distant-family-member Rolf posted a group photo of my visit with Melissa and Tini last summer. It was really nice of him, and so I dug up my copy (I prefer the antique look) and wanted to post it to share. Eventually, these photos will make it to the wiesefam.org site when I get it rebuilt! =)
The Kimmeyer family now currently lives in the house and on the farm that once belonged to my great-great-great grandfather. They offered such warm hospitality, splendid company, and conveniently for us - all spoke English very well!
I just found from52to48withlove on del.icio.us, which visually speaks the message of unity in our country across political lines. We all make different judgments and have our opinions on what the most important problems are, how they should be addressed, and which candidate is best suited for the job. We have our differences, but we also have so much in common - love of our country.
The site talks mentions Red (Republican) and Blue (Democrat) states or voters, but I think left out us White (Libertarian, 3rd parties, independent…) voters! Oh well, in time they’ll see we really are in that “middle ground” and can truly bridge the polar opposites the Republicans and Democrats have come to represent. Candidates like Ron Paul attracted so many supporters from the across the entire spectrum of political affiliations, and I think, in time, the American people will get there too.
This is my favorite image, so cute, so beautiful and to the point!
Here are the Official MD 2008 Election Results. I was surprised to see that McCain beat Obama 2-1 in my own precinct, and beat Obama by 2.2% in my county of Anne Arundel. State-wide however, Obama won 61.1% to McCain’s 37.3%. Bob Barr turned up 0.4% in both Anne Arundel and on the whole state-wide.
The campaign for liberty is already looking ahead to the next election and trying to recruit precint leaders for as many areas as possible. Sign up at campaignforliberty.com.
This is a fairly late announcement I know, but after Ron Paul dropped out of the race months ago… I was just too distraught to look at the other 3rd party candidates much. I’ve finally been hearing more and more about Bob Barr though, and I think the guy he says he is “now” is pretty good… good enough to be President… and a much better pick than the offerings from the two main parties!
In general, he doesn’t have quite the impeccable voting track record or moral compass in his personal life as Ron Paul, but Bob Barr was a Republican Congressman who saw how bad the party had become after 9/11 with the big government neo-conservatives (thoughtlessly sacrificing liberty for the perception of safety and more government) and so he got out… and joined the Libertarian party in 2006. He is pro-life, pro-marriage, anti-war, wants to maximize civil liberty & states rights, minimize the federal government, knows a thing or two about international affairs and defense, and so all of these things sound like are a great mix for me.
The sad thing is, he’s just now recently come to a very stunning 180-degree turn around on some issues he’s held in the past (drug war, abortion, personal/religious restrictions, others)… and has historically dramatically shifted his views. =( However, now he is very much in favor of considering the harm reduction principle and leaving many of these failed policy decisions to the states, avoiding a “one-size-fits-all” federal solution.
Quick facts: He’s 59, born in Iowa, traveled the world with military father who was trained in engineering, attended high school in Tehran Iran, worked at the CIA as an analyst for 8 years, started a law practice in Georgia, has degree in International Affairs, is married to his 3rd wife, regrets voting for the Patriot Act and voting to authorize the Iraq War.
Ultimately, this vote is about CHANGE, about CHANGING the TWO PARTY system we have, and restoring the conservative platform to the Republican party which the NeoCons have stolen! This vote is a vote for our CONSTITUTION, for limited government, for LIBERTY… or in the words of William Wallace (Braveheart) “FREEEEEEDDOOOOMMM!”.
This is why I support:
If you haven’t read it before, see Stallman’s essay The Right to Read, it’s not just about software — when your own data and documents require said software to be accessed.
I just missed the first camera club meetings of the new year for both Bowie-Crofton and Anne Arundel, however I saw that Doug Bruns presented at the AACC and so I checked out his website. I was impressed! I particularly enjoyed his project on 100 Gentlemen of Baltimore, where he took both photos and brief stories about the life of some of those living on the streets of Baltimore. The photos are also available for sale in a hard cover book for those interested. This project lures me for perhaps the same reasons, my desire to understand and possibly help those around me who are in need.
Two homeless men died of exposure on a major street in downtown Baltimore late November, 2005. This project was born after reading of their deaths in The Baltimore Sun. Initially, the project arose out of curiosity: “What is it like to sleep on a sidewalk, to not have a shower or a toilet?†After meeting a few of these men, however, it became my mission to understand something of the life of the homeless and to attempt to represent the face of homelessness. This book is the result of my attempt to answer that question.
I just stumbled upon The World Race, an 11-month 11-country journey for Christian young adults to spread their love of God through Jesus Christ our Savior to those who most desperately need Him and His Love in our world. Now, does that sound like an adventure or what? For the soul, spirit, mind and body! Just read some of the WR blogs and you’ll see, this is a great program and I’m glad to see them using blogs to share the experience widely.
As an alternative, if you’re interested in a shorter trip, consider Adventures in Missions as a start. I would have loved to have done that, to re-energize my Christian faith and feel great for actually “doing something” to help those in need in our world. Melissa and I actually looked into doing “volunteer vacations” during summer 2007… but we had so many places and people we wanted to visit that we just didn’t have the time. A great Catholic friend of mine, Laura Long (aka dovekeeper) has actually spent well over a year in Honduras, throughout multiple trips, helping the street children with the ProNino foundation. Here is a video she made about it in preparation for her 2007 stay.
Ok, when I first learned about full-frame DSLRs, only Canon had them at the time (pre-fall 2007): the 1Ds mk2 (1D series) and 5D. While the 1D has been in the $7000 price range, the 5D has hovered just under the $3000 price range for a “professional” level DSLR. Unfortunately, the 5D was released in 2005 and had become quite “out of date” with the latest 1Ds, 30D, 40D, 400D and 450D… many of these being “lower end” DLSRs but having more advanced digital features such as 3″ LCD, live view and automatic sensor dust removal. In the mean time, Nikon had released full-frame DSLRs that competitively beat the 5D in it’s price range (live view, video, 24k ISO)… so except for the 1D models, I thought the bar had now swung in favor of Nikon having the best “affordable” DSLRs…
Well, now finally after much anticipation… the 5D mk2 has been unveiled - and with it - I think the favor has clearly swung back to Canon. The 5Dmk2 is set for release in November 2008, but just check out how impressive this camera is!
So, while it’s certainly not in my budget now… someday, oh yes someday, she (the 5D mk2) will be mine! =)
Edit: 9/13/2008 Updated the links to point to the new video hosting site on smugmug. 11/2008 Also the old Canon link works as well, Canon is not hosting the video again. =)
Graceful Calligraphy is a woman owned small business. While Katherine is well known for her superb artistic talent as a calligrapher, she is also a great Catholic and Christian who will provide you a great value and service for all of your calligraphy needs! You don’t have to take my word for it though, just check out her excellent client testimonials and reviews. International service is available.
