Friday Faves are random things that we discovered, rediscovered or simply came out from under a rock and heard about recently. They are random, sometimes obscure, could be entertaining and may only be of interest to us but we thought we would share with our favorite peeps.
New Author to Checkout: New York Times best selling author Gail Carriger is a modern day steam-punk writer (click the link if you don’t know what steam-punk is…don’t feel bad I didn’t know until recently) and best known for writing the The Parasol Protectorate Series. Her books are set in Victorian England and add a comedic and romantic flare to vampires and werwolves. Gail is quite a character, we went to a book reading of her’s recently. Check her out for some fun, light reading.
Book Recommendation: While we are on a literary bent also check out the book Pride, Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, Jane Austen. Yes Jane Austen’s classic gets zombified in this literary twist. I always expected Mr. Darcy had a twisted back story ;).
Wines to Try: We had been dying to try out wines from local vintners Bob and Jim Varner (ok Patty had been dying to try to be clear). Varner wines are from the Santa Cruz mountains three of the Chardonnay’s specifically from Portola Valley just a hop skip and freeway from THE Hai. We enjoyed their 2007 Neely “Hidden Block” Pinot Noir with my Blue Cheese and Arugula Burgers and it was absolutely wonderful. Subtle hints of cherry, light bodied and a silky finish. Even the discriminating palette of non-Pinot fan nephew Scott liked it.
We also enjoyed a bottle of their award winning Foxglove Chardonnay (2009). This french style Chardonnay was light and refreshing with just enough body to hold up well to food. YUMMO!
Tech Treat: We finally got our invitation to music service Spotify and LOVE IT! The best way to describe it is iTunes meets Pandora. You can access your entire music library from anywhere and also have access to a boat load of music you don’t already own, streamed to your computer, mobile phone, iPad or whateva! This works really well for us as we share in iTunes music library and are not always that religious about syncing our phones, this way we both have access to the latest music. Plus I’m a bit of a music nut (to say the least) so it lets me try out tons of albums without having to buy them.
Oh and if you want to get a bit more music geeky try Spotify out with Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers software apps. “Eh?” you say. Well Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers allows to play music across your home network to a whole variety of devices. So for us we can stream music from our Macs to speakers throughout our house and outside, as well as to and from our iPhones and iPad. For in office cheap surround sound I play Spotify from my computer and use Airfoil to stream it to the iPad behind me and the iPhone to my side…sounds really good I must say.
Photo Experiment: We are still unsure about the whole HDR photo phenomenon. HDR stands for high dynamic imaging and in simplest terms is about taking the lightest and darkest elements of an image and manipulating and layering them to create a more realistic image or a more dramatic effect. iPhone’s have an HDR setting that let’s you improve the quality of a photo in non optimal lighting settings (too sunny, shady or dark). There are also tons of software applications that let you play with HDR effects. It can be used to create very cool techniques but our hesitation is that there are lots of HDR photographs floating around that feel a bit too Thomas Kinkaid-like for our taste (no offense to family members that like or have worked for Kinkaid ;)).
Tip: If you want to learn more about using HDR with your iPhone Gigaom has a good article about it.
I do like the Mac application Simply HDR as it has some default styles to play around with HDR on your library of photos but also gives you the control to fine tune the effects. It’s also very user friendly for photo novices like me :). Below is an example of HDR effects applied to a photo using Simply HDR.
Original
HDR Effects Applied
