So I installed the first beta release of Internet Explorer 8 today just to check how things work and I’m affraid they don’t. Let me just say from the start that this isn’t anything remotely similar to a comprehensive review. I only wanted to check if my sites need any work before this thing goes into final release.

Most sites I’ve checked work just fine but as Murphy would have it… the most complicated one of my own doesn’t. I have no idea what goes wrong but that’s actually not the worst part of it. At first glance the site appears quite normal, no weird positioning, broken lines or silly stuff like that. I should be so lucky…nope. Instead of visible errors I have to deal with invisible ones. That in itself wouldn’t be much of a problem if the invisible part would be anything other than the navigation links. Yup, entire site navigation vanished into thin air and I have no idea why. Maybe it has something to do with floats and clearing, maybe it’s something else entirely. But I sure hope it’s only a rendering bug and not really my fault. It works fine in everything else from IE6 to FF3.

It also crashed (as in – this program has to close, send error report) when viewing this site (FERI @ Uni. MB), it has margin/padding problems with Hotmail and I had to hard reset my computer when I started to write this post in WordPress. That’s the short version of the problems I had untill now.

I’ll ignore the errors for now (since it is a beta version) but I sure hope I won’t end up worrying about yet another problematic browser that requires special attention. Other than that it looks ok ;)

Should professors intentionaly lie in class? Most definitely ;)

Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.
This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact.

Kai Chang – My favorite liar

Since I am an imperfect scholar and, even more certainly, a fallible human being, I will inevitably be making factual errors, drawing some unjustifiable conclusions, and perhaps passing along my opinions as facts. I should be very unhappy if you were unaware of these mistakes. To minimize that possibility, I am going to make you all honorary members of Accuracy in Academia. Your task is to make sure that none of my errors goes by unnoticed.

Neil Postman (quoted by Scott Berkun)

Guess I’ll have to come up with some convenient lies ;)

via Kottke

…I don’t think these came out that bad.

Petra was kind enough to stand in as a model for three (5 more applied but didn’t appear) high school seniors that came for the 4-5 hour intro studio photography and editing class. Other than running around, re-positioning the lights I (naturally) took some photos myself.

To be honest, I expected they’d have some prior knowledge about the basics of photography but as it turned out I had to make time for some exposure 101. You can imagine there’s only so much you can squeeze into a time frame we had. So I tried to be as clear and concise as possible with the exposure basics without going all quantum physics on them. I’m not entirely sure I succeeded though. I may have been carried away slightly… Afterall, these were 17-18 year old kids who could probably care less about physics (albeit simple enough) and just get on with shooting and hands-on training. I was caught a bit off-guard on that one but either way, I definitely have to rethink the approach if I’m ever doing anything similar again. If anything, I found out it’s not quite so easy to explain such basic stuff as relationship between shutter speed, F-stop and ISO, how/why DOF changes etc.

After we were done shooting (three rather simple two light + ambient setups) we tackled Photoshop. That was the easy bit though. I knew from previous experience that pretty much anyone can get a grasp of the basics in just an hour or two. From then on its just a matter of playing around and a lot of practice. There’s always google if any specific problems come up. And they can do that on their own.