Going Aerial

Smashing Magazine has a collection of images taken from above and links to additional collections and tips for aerial photography.

There are a couple of tutorials over at Make Magazine’s web site for kite aerial photography, and photography on a pole. Both units use a similar yoke-mounted camera assembly that is controlled by servos. In fact, if you made the yoke once, you could probably use it for both applications.

Old Dogs/New Tricks Department

Jeff Duntemann gets Ubuntu. His Contrapositive Diary has now been moved over to a WordPress platform. I miss the old single page with the spiral-bound notebook illustration.

I’ve been working with MindManager for the Mac. This is available in version 8 for Windows, and version 7 for the Mac. Version 7 works fine; while not elaborate, it is quick to learn, and strikes me as an excellent example of “less is more”. More ideas for mind mapping are on Chuck Frey’s blog and he has a useful e-Book with lots of ideas. One suggestion from the book; when showing a mind map diagram to someone, don’t call it a “mind map”. My most elaborate map to date was the proposal outline of our NIH grant application discussed a couple posts ago.

Question of the Day: “Why is there no Visio for the Mac?” Or maybe a better way of asking the question, “What is the equivalent of Visio on the Mac?

Non-Technical Question of the Day: Watching the follies surrounding the confirmation of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, I have to ask, what is a guy who underpaid $34,000 in income tax using Turbo-Tax and doing his own taxes in the first place? Oh, and why did this happen to get resolved shortly before his nomination to the post of treasury secretary, even though the years when he didn’t pay were back in the first part of the decade? $34,000 is still a respectable salary in my neck of the woods… how much was the guy making in gross salary to be able to owe that much and then not pay it?