365 - The First Three Weeks

It has been three weeks and three days since I began my quest for a photo a day, for a year, and already, I have noticed how difficult it is to take a quality shot every day, especially when you often return from work after sunset. However, I have also started noticing all sorts of small details in my daily routine as I constantly search for interesting subjects and patterns of light for my daily photos. The way the light shines on the neighbors' hedges as I go for a run, the patterns of steel girders on a building in downtown Palo Alto, the way the sidewalk seems to subtly change shades depending on the color of reflected light from the buildings nearby--it's so easy now to get lost in a world of detail.

Here are my favorites from the first three weeks.

(Edit: the edges of a lot of these are cut off when viewed from the post. Click through to the album to see the full pictures.)

365 Photos

A little over a week ago, I decided to start my attempt at taking an interesting photograph a day, for a year. It's a little frightening to commit to this, considering that I have never failed to renege on a majority of my summer plans, but I hope that by doing this, and announcing to everyone that I'm doing this, I will, (1) have an excuse to take my camera to even more places than I am already--yes, I know it's hard to believe, but it's possible; (2) hopefully improve my photography, and practice thinking about the three D's of photography: destination, determination, deliberation; and (3) quickly run out of the easy things to photograph--the cats, the housies, the flowers, Big Sur--and will start having to think about using more unique subjects.

Every once a while, I'll post the highlights here.

And all the pictures can always be found at http://lekan.smugmug.com/Photography/365/

Refound Love...for Microsoft's Command Prompt

Almost all Windows power users use the command prompt from time to time. cmd.exe can execute precision commands, browse, and filter very efficiently if used correctly. However, for Unix users, the command prompt is just plain weak, prompting many to install Cygwin.

But just today, I discovered that cmd.exe has some awesome keyboard shortcuts. They have again made the daily experience of using Microsoft's command prompt bearable again. Even interesting.

Here's a summary of my discoveries:

F2: Pastes whatever is in the cmd buffer up until the character you type next, and advances the cursor there.

F3: Pastes the rest of the buffer from the buffer's cursor.

F4: Deletes from the current cursor to the specified character you type next.

F5: Copies the buffer to the command line.

F7: Displays a reverse-sorted, selectable history of recent commands.

F8: Super useful tool that displays a list of all commands you've typed that have a similar beginning to your current command. I actually wish Unix had something similar.

F9: Choose a command to run (from the list in the F7 list). This one is really useful if you have a sequence of commands that you run over and over again. You could write a batch script, but with this shortcut, you could just use the same combination of F9-x over and over again, where x is the number of commands in your sequence.

Let me know if you know any others!