Scott Bourne has started up two new blogs, Photofocus and mydl.me. Each are a blog/podcast combination and are a continued reflection of his passion for photography and technology.

Photofocus, focused squarely on photography, is the rebirth/spin-off of the former This Week In Photography blog, twipphoto.com. In a confusing array of business entanglement, the TWIP podcast was owned by Alex Lindsey and the TWIP blog was owned by Scott Bourne. They have now cleanly separated those two entities, with Scott rebranding the original TWIP blog Photofocus and Alex creating a new blog, twiplog.com, to support the ongoing TWIP podcast.

If you want the rich photography discussions, tips and insights that you’ve come to know and love from the original TWIP blog, you’re going to want to subscribe to Photofocus. It’s 100% Scott and all the goodness that comes with.

mydl.me, is an awesome URL for Managing Your Digital Life. It is the latest venture put forth by Scott Bourne and talks all about the increasingly large collection of digital assets we have today and how to manage them and avoid disaster. Make sure you subscribe to the mydl.me blog and also pick up the podcast on iTunes. They both promise to be good stuff.

Seems that webhost4life.com had made some changes to their application firewall that had the blog offline for an extended period of time. Couple that with me not doing much posting – I think November 2008 was the last post – I didn’t notice it until today.

Time to start fixing both of those problems.

I’ve been playing around with WordPress and would like to migrate casadehambone.com over from DasBlog. However, I also want to retain all of the content on casadehambone.com and, ideally, maintain the permalinks as well. Anyone have some recommendations or guidance for accomplish this?

The past few weeks here at Casa dé Hambone have seen some changes (for the better) that aren’t without

• We turned off for-fee television by putting our DirecTV account on a 6-month suspension
• We’ve not had any incoming television feed for nearly two weeks and don’t (yet) miss it
• I bought two ATSC tuners for my Media Center PC, but we took down the chimney today to which the antenna was mounted; doh!
• For the first time ever, The Wall Street Journal is being delivered
• I figure without television, we may as well subscribe to a good newspaper
• I really like The Morning Read from The Wall Street Journal as delivered by audible.com; I really wish The WSJ included this as a subscriber benefit
• I have switched to Comcast Business for my Internet and VoIP services, leaving Speakeasy after nearly 4 years
• My Caller ID now says Casa dé Hambone when I call people
• The installation was seamless and nothing in the hose missed a beat in the cut-over
• One of the strongest storms in recent history blew through the area two weeks back, leaving many in our neighborhood with between 4” and 3’ of water in their basements
• We were blessed that our flood control worked as promised
• I have a leaky gutter that seems to backup and results in a considerable leak into the basement … from the first floor floorboards and immediately above where I kept my computer and desk!
• My primary desktop and computer have relocated to the main floor in light of a leak uncovered by the above mentioned storm
• The new digs are reachable by the entire family, equating to more use and contention by all
• The new digs get way more sunlight and the breeze while I type this is wonderful
• We had a new cap poured and new flue pipes installed on our primary chimney, including new tuck pointing
• My now-empty plumbing chimney was deconstructed to below the roof line due to a 30 pound piece of mortar falling into the gangway between my neighbor’s house and mine
• New glass block windows were installed in all of the basement windows, replacing what had to be windows far older than I am
• We now have full ventilation in the basement … something we’ve never had and would have been quite beneficial back when we discovered what Hell must smell like
• I’m currently soliciting bids to put on a new roof and install new gutters
• This final point has become quite urgent given I now have a hole in my roof due to deconstructing the now-idle chimney
• Know any good roofers in Chicago?

Quite a bit to take place in less than two weeks. Surprisingly, we’re quite calm about it all. The last two major home improvement projects are new windows and a new front stoop. Maybe this time next year.

There some interesting detail behind some of the above bullets, each worth its own dedicated post. More to come.

If something isn't broke, don't fix it. But someone within live.com at Microsoft thinks that it would be "better" if we visited my.live.com for the personalized portal rather than www.live.com.

Did the person or team responsible for this stop to think that typing "live" in the address bar and pressing Ctrl+Enter drops you onto your personalized page? Well it doesn't any more. Instead, www.live.com renders a horribly designed, full-screen search UI and effectively hides the link to the personalized page in the last place you'd look ... the lower right-hand corner. Let's not even mention that the need for the graphic hides that personalized link off of the page if your browser window is too small.

No, now I must visit my.live.com for my personalized experience. To shorten the keystrokes, I can type "my.live" and press Ctrl+Enter, but it's a very unnatural act.

Please, get rid of my.live.com and bring back personalized live.com.

It's a rare treat when you find a podcast that is hosted by experts who come across as engaging,  knowledgeable and entertaining while managing to not sound arrogant. This Week in Photography (TWiP) is exactly that type of podcast.

Hosted by Alex Lindsay and Scott Bourne, TWiP manages to hit each and every week on topics of interest to beginning and intermediate photographers with a well-structured yet jovial roundtable style. Regulars on the show include Fred Johnson from Adobe and Ron Brinkmann, author of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. The four of these personalities combined do a fantastic job of delivering current photography-related news, demystifying complex topics and generally engaging in discussions that raise the photography intelligence quotient (PiQ - a term I'm claiming rights to right here, right now) of their audience with each and every episode.

TWiP also goes beyond your typical audio-only podcast to include screencasts and innovative use of the Apple AAC format for podcasting to include reference images for those equipped with video-capable iPods.

The TWiP podcast is also backed by an active blog, www.twipphoto.com, a flickr discussion group, a flickr contest group and a flickr critique group. The TWiP crew has managed to create a vibrant and friendly community in just a few short months - showing that there is huge interest in the subject and that they have a podcasting style that is appealing to the masses.

If photography interests you, I highly recommend you start listening to the TWiP weekly podcast and adding their blog to your list of feeds.

How do you take a creative picture with a point-n-shoot in a dark school gym packed with kids ages 4 to 14? How do you avoid taking the same snapshot of your kids that everyone else there is taking? You do it by taking the picture from a completely different perspective.

In this case, from the perspective of an ant.

Earlier today I was talking with my friend, Drew, about Brian F. Peterson's book Learning to See Creatively. One of the exercises Brian puts you through is to shoot the same subject with the same lens but from a variety of heights and distances. From your belly to your tip toes. From near and far. All so that you learn about looking at things from a different perspective. Armed with a different outlook on the world, you can take even a dull, mundane rock and make it look interesting by providing a totally different perspective when making the image.

This image was made tonight at my daughter's first ever Spring Dance. As she and her friends danced together in a circle, I thought it'd be cool to see what these tiny dancers looked like from the perspective of an ant. I place my Canon PowerShot SD500 on the ground, asked them to tighten up their circle and look at the camera. The result is this cute group of faces that I'll cherish forever.

So the next time you're looking for something a little different, consider what the world around you would look like to an ant passing by and capture it!

Why would you ever put a recordable DVD upside down into the DVD drive? To directly label a LightScribe disc, of course!

It may be intuitively obvious to some, but it definitely was not to me. I'm currently burning DVDs for the models that attended the March 1 Chicagoland Strobist Meetup and thought it would be nice to use LightScribe to etch one of their pictures on the front of the DVD. I've had a LightScribe-capable drive for a few years but have never actually used it in such a way.

After creating the label with Nero Cover Designer (a part of Nero 8 Ultra Edition), I began the LightScribe process and was greeted with the error "LightScribe disc information is not recognized. Please ensure that the disc is a LightScribe disc." I scratched my head and like all things with computers, tried the process three or four more times in hopes that something different would occur. Of course, the same thing happened over and over again despite me doing absolutely nothing different. That is the definition of insanity right? I may be in for a rough road ahead.

A quick Google search turned up this post on cdfreaks.com where the poster mentions his CD being inserted upside down in the drive. Huh? Upside down? However, after thinking about it for a few moments it made sense. When the disc is inserted right side up, it is written to on the bottom of the disc. Inserting the disc upside down would then result in the label of the disc being written. A quick flip of the disc and Nero Cover Designer was happy as a claim and nineteen minutes later out popped my first ever directly labeled LightScribe disc.

If you have a LightScribe-capable drive and want to get started with some high quality templates and free software, look no further than lightscribe.org. lightscribe.org provides drivers for Windows, OS X and Linux, software for direct labeling of LightScribe discs, pre-made templates and even quick how-to guides for some of the more popular commercial solutions out there.