señor taco’s travels

There is something strangely beautiful in this and utterly saddening photo set of the Canopus thermonuclear test in French Polynesia.

Images are a big part of my life. There’s work for sure. At home I don’t craft as much, but I take a fair number of photos. As a result there are two major things one does with photos, view them and modify them.

Let’s start with the latter first. Recently Gus Mueller of Flying Meat¹ released a new image editing app, Acorn. Acorn is fast, lightweight, and uncluttered. Sure, there will probably be times when the big grand-daddy of image editing will be needed, but as it stands I’m going to stick with Acorn whenever I can because it does most everything I want. I need to learn how to write plug-ins for Acorn and then I think it will be what I use almost exclusively.

As for the former, viewing images, OS X comes with a nice built-in tool in Preview. Possibly Quick Look in Leopard will be better, but I’m not there yet so I can’t say. For now I prefer all of my images to be previewed and opened with Xee. Xee is fast, lightweight, free, and supports more image formats than you can shake a stick at.²

While the icon for Xee is inspired a designer named Adam Betts has developed a replacement icon set for Xee that is quite beautiful. I’ve switched my home install of Xee over to it and I’ll hit my work install next week.

1. Yes, that is the company name, and he makes fantastic software↩
2. If you’re using The Unarchiver from the same person, Dag Ågren, then it can even look inside archives like Zip, Rar, and StuffIt. Trust me, even if you don’t use Xee you should use The Unarchiver. It’s simply brilliant↩

src="/SenorTaco/fotos/spider_leaf.jpg" alt="Spider in a leaf house" />

Photo by Dan Weeks

A spider nestled in a leaf house. Taken in a garden in Marin.

Photo by Dan Weeks

Joe sits by the fire while Polly watches from the couch (she’s in the
reflection, but on some monitors it might be too dark to see clearly. try
this image if so).

The LucasFilm holiday party last night was fun. Enjoy them all.

LucasFilm Holiday Party 2004

11 December 2004

Texas, December 2004

1-7 December 2004

Pixar — Incredibles Party

9 October 2004

30th Birthday — Las Vegas

21-23 May 2004

Yeah, so I finally got off my butt and worked out how I wanted to put
galleries of pictures up. I had an older method, but it was more complicated.
The newer method is better all around. So for now you can enjoy the first two
of many that I have to do.

Whitney House Halloween 2004
30 October 2004

Chris & Athena’s Wedding
22-27 September 2004

Future galleries will be available at
gallery.danimal.org. Enjoy.

Photo by Dan Weeks

Even the cherries…