Adobes Lightroom 2 beta broadens editing horizons | Underexposed - CNET News.com

CNET is reporting that the next version of Adobe Lightroom will give photogs greater editing capability within Lightroom. In the first version of Lightroom, if you needed to adjust a photo it was an all or nothing deal. All changes were global. We couldn’t adjust the light levels in just one part of the photo. In order to do that, we had to open the photo in Photoshop and mask it off and on and on. This was definitely do-able, but it was an extra step which slowed down the overall photo editing job.

The next version of Light room will allow you to use a brush and adjust portions of a photograph. That is extremely handy and will speed up the work flow markedly. Time is money and the faster you can edit, the more money you make.

I had skipped the first version of Lightroom, sticking to my CS2 workflow because it worked. I am going to take a harder look at Lightroom 2.0 when it comes out.

Finally there is a way to keep your online and offline calendar in sync. This is a big deal if you are like me and have had to enter calendar items manually in two places. What a drag. Google announced today that it has released a little tool that will check your Outlook calendar and synchronize it with your Google calendar. Hip hip hooray!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!

I have started using the new service from Google that allows you to “host” Google Apps on your domain. I started the process of getting it all hooked up on Thursday of this week and so far it has been pretty cool. It was pretty simple. I went to the Google Apps page and signed up. I filled out the online form and that was pretty much it. I had to post some HTML in a specific folder on my site, but doing that was trivially easy. The HTML let Google know with certainty that I was the owner of the domain.

The Killer Apps

Once you have Google Apps set up on your domain,iIt allows you to share a family calendar, or a shared calendar with all those using your domain which, right now, seems like the killer app. Keeping up with all the things your family is up to is a real chore, and having a simple powerful calendar that everyone shares for free is incredibly handy.

I set Megan up with an account, and she immediately filled the calendar up with all our family’s upcoming plans. Super handy.

In addition to a family calendar Google Apps also gives you Google docs. I haven’t found a killer use for this yet, but it allows you to create documents that are available for everyone in your family. I can see where this could be very handy for a business domain, but in the family world, it seems to be fairly limited in usefulness.

If that weren’t enough, it also includes a built in start page based on iGoogle. It lets you set up a personal start page with a ton of different widgets that connect you to the information you need. I don’t use a start page much now that I have started using Google reader to keep up with the news that I am interested in, but I still like it. All the users on your domain that you set up with Google Apps also get a start page of their own.

I was hoping that there would be the option of having a common iGoogle start page that everyone on the domain could use. It could be a great place to communicate, but so far I haven’t found that option if it exists.

My Email Dilemma

It also comes with integrated email which means that my MurDog.com email addresses can go through Google’s Gmail interface which is incredibly handy. Right now however, I can’t get that running. In order for it to work, you have to update the MX records on the DNS server to point towards Google’s mail servers. I know that is pretty technical, but it should be a pretty simple thing if you can get access to it. The Google site has great instructions that make it pretty simple to make the changes.

I have a problem. My hosting service provider, www.thehostgroup.com doesn’t give me access to the MX settings. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. It is enough for me to start thinking about finding better hosting for this site. Having a personal email address that leverages the power of Gmail is an exciting prospect. I have sent a message to my provider in hopes of getting this resolved, but so far I haven’t heard anything from them.

One of the bad parts of having a personal email address that I have to manage is spam. It is a huge problem. I turned off my personal email address years ago because of spam. If I could get this Google apps thing to work then I would have Google’s horsepower behind spam control. It would be a huge help.

If I can’t get the email thing resolved, I might have to look at another provider for my web site hosting.

MurDog.com is just a personal site, and I don’t get any revenue from it so low-cost hosting is a necessity. If I can find a provider that is inexpensive, and allows me to host this WordPress blog I might be interested in switching.

For now, I will wait and see what The Host Group does.

Other than that, it is a pretty cool option from Google that should only get better.

I have been able to do it for over two or three weeks now, but I am able to solve the Rubik’s cube.  What a deal.  I remember fooling around with these things as a child convinced that I would never be able to do it.  But, now I can.

I don’t know what spurred it, but sometime last year, I bought a Rubik’s cube on a whim.  They still sell them at Wal-Mart, believe it or not. Anyway, now they come with instructions. Fantastic.  The problem is that it takes a spatial genius to follow the instructions.  Even with the instructions, it took me around a month of noodling with it to finally do it once.

Once I had done it, I left it alone for over a year.  In the meantime, I received the 80’s edition of Trivial Pursuit.  That came packaged with another Rubik’s cube.  Now I had two, the one I had conquered finally and this one.  I got the second one out of its packaging feeling safe that I had at least one cube standing as a tribute to my Rubik’s prowess. My safety cube allowed me to play with the second one with reckless abandon.

The second cube also came with the instructions.  With those instructions, I set out to beat the cube for a second time.  After about a week of hard core twisting and turning, I finally got to the point where I could finish the cube as long as I had a copy of the instructions around…hardly impressive.

I found that I could memorize one of the steps each day.  The way I do it there are 6 steps, each of which get more complicated than the last. After roughly a week, I had all the steps mastered and now I can do it.

A co-worker of mine also go the bug and purchased a cube at the Walgreens one morning as he was checking out.  He watched the videos on www.rubiks.com to learn how to solve the cube.  You can go there and watch the videos, they are dizzying to say the least.  Now he can do the cube and he does it differently than me.  The next step is to learn his way of doing it.  From the looks of it, it is faster.

I just downloaded a Firefox plug-in (Add-on) called ScribeFire and I am testing it right now. My blog is a Wordpress blog, and it has a pretty good editing interface that comes part and parcel with the software that is installed on my server.

I have been using Wordpress for the last 4 months and have been completely happy with the interface, but today, I was looking at Leo LaPorte’s Wakoopa software feed, and it said that he was using MarsEdit, a blog editing software package for the Mac, and it got me to wondering if there is software available for Windows, and lo and behold, here is software that integrates right into my favorite browser, Firefox.

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