Ben’s Blog

Sorry for the long hiatus. I will try to do better. One post a week, minimum. Seriously.

Luke went to the pediatrician for his four month checkup on Wednesday. He is now 17 lbs., 6 oz. and 26 inches long. That puts him in about the 80th percentile for weight and 90th percentile for length according to the CDC charts. Not bad. The doctor said he looked very healthy. We can start feeding him baby food in a week or two. That should be interesting.

Luke mastered rolling over several weeks ago. He now sleeps on his stomach most of the time. That worries us a little bit, but there’s not much you can do about it. He has started teething. I don’t think there will be any coming through real soon, but he’s drooling a lot and he puts everything he gets his hands on in his mouth. In the last week or so he was started playing with his feet. Anytime you lay him on his back he goes for his feet. He chews on them occasionally, but not too often. Also in the past week or so he’s started reaching for things. He’ll reach for his bottle, his burp cloth, toys, people, etc. He even held his own bottle for a little bit the other night. He can sit up a little bit, but he slumps over pretty quick. We’re working on that.

I have decided to use Zenfolio for Luke’s pictures, but I still don’t have any up there. Soon, I promise.

Cassie’s surgery went well. She is now resting with the help of some Benadryl. The Benadryl is to help with the itching from the morphine. Fun stuff.

Luckily her room here at the Mississippi Surgery Center has Wifi. We’ll be headed home first thing in the morning as soon as Cassie’s doctor does his rounds.

I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but we’ve been very busy between taking care of Luke and Cassie’s post-childbirth medical issues. There are a lot of afflictions that can pop up after childbirth, and Cassie has managed to have most of them. She’s been in the hospital twice (not counting childbirth) and numerous doctor’s offices. We had to drive down to Jackson to see a specialist on Friday. She’s feeling much better, but she’s going to have surgery in about three weeks. Nothing too serious, but we’re ready for things to get back to normal. Whatever that is when you have a newborn. :)

Luke is doing just fine. He’ll be 7 weeks, 2 days old in a couple of hours. We weighed him a few days ago, and he’s already gained over three and half pounds. He’s been grinning at nothing in particular since day one, but in the last few days he’s started smiling in response to us talking to him. One little smile can make up for a lot of things. :)

I’ve put some pictures of Luke up on Flickr. However, I’ve taken a lot that aren’t up there. My Flickr Pro account expired, and I’ve been exploring my options. Zenfolio and Smugmug both looked promising, but I haven’t been real pleased with anything I’ve seen so far. I’m going to try to make up my mind soon so I can put some more pictures up.

My copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrived yesterday. I’m on page 330 of 759. So far the “Hallows” haven’t even been mentioned. The book is definitely a page turner, but I feel like it could be moving a little faster. I’ve felt the same way about the last couple of books. If you’re like me, and it’s been two years since you’ve read the Half-Blood Prince, you might have a look at it’s Wikipedia page. You probably don’t want to read this page though. :)

Friday night, June 1st, at 11:08pm, Luke Benjamin Pharr entered the world. He weighed 7 lbs. 6 oz. and was 20 and 1/2 inches long. Both he and his mom are doing well. They were both discharged from the hospital Sunday afternoon after less than 48 hours.

I haven’t had a chance to go through all 142 pictures I took at the hospital, but I’ve posted a few that caught my eye (set, slideshow). More details and pictures to come as soon as I catch up on my sleep. :)

Cassie went back to the doctor yesterday. She had to see a different doctor because hers is out of town. They did some sort of (standard) stress test on Luke, and he passed with flying colors. I got a good recording of his heartbeat during the test. I’ll post it this afternoon if I get a chance.

Cassie hasn’t progressed any since her last visit, but the doctor said she’s already in good shape to be induced. If she hasn’t given birth by Monday morning, she’s going to be induced. We have to be at the hospital between 5:30 and 6:00am. The doctor said that if everything goes according to plan, Luke should arrive in the mid to late afternoon.

I got to hold Cassie’s cousin’s three day-old baby this past weekend. Now I’m even more exciting about Luke’s impending arrival. On the one hand I’d like him to be born in the next couple of days so I can spend the weekend plus my week off with him. On the other hand, it’d be nice to have one more weekend of normalcy. :) Good thing I have no choice in the matter.

The 13th Annual Oxford Double Decker Arts Festival was held on Saturday, April 28th. The festival takes its name from the double decker bus that was imported by Oxford in 1994. The bus was a big hit, so another one was imported a few years ago. They’re used for special events and entertaining visitors. A bit of history for you: Oxford, Mississippi was named after Oxford, England in the early 1800’s in an effort to convince the state legislature to build a University here. Obviously it worked. Thus, the buses kind of fit with the British theme.

I wandered around during the early afternoon and took a few pictures with my Fujifilm F31fd. I’ve posted 15 of them on Flickr. The slideshow is probably the best way to view them. Don’t miss the history in the description of one of the courthouse pictures.

This is the first set of pictures I’ve run through Lightroom. It saved a couple of them that were pretty badly underexposed. In the past I would’ve had to just throw them away. I think I’m getting better at separating the wheat from the chaff. I took over 100 photos and pared it down to these 15. Your comments are welcome. If you don’t have time to look at the entire set, I’ve posted four below.

Earlier in the week I mentioned that while I was enjoying Lightroom, I wasn’t thrilled with the results I got when I exported my images. The colors were different between the Lightroom preview and the exported JPEG viewed in Firefox or Windows Picture Viewer. The primary issue is that neither of those applications are color managed. (For more information on what that actually means, see Jeffrey Friedl’s tutorial I mentioned earlier.)

Another issue is that my monitor wasn’t calibrated, so I ordered a copy of Colorvision Spyder2express. In a comment on my last post, Jeffrey says this is just as likely to hurt the color matching as to help it. Thankfully, in my case, it did help it. I can no longer differentiate between the Lightroom preview and an exported JPEG viewed in Firefox or Windows Picture Viewer. Here is the example photo I used earlier:

If your monitor is calibrated and you’re viewing it in a color managed application, it probably looks something like I intended it to. Otherwise, all bets are off. :) This is a photo from the Double Decker Festival last month. I’ll be posting some more soon. This particular one was pretty badly underexposed. I was able to save it with Lightroom.

Even if monitor calibration hadn’t helped, it’s always a good idea to have your monitor calibrated when editing images. I’ll never be able to control what my images look like in non-color managed applications, but at least I can control what they should look like. It does give me some amount of control.

While I still recommend Lightroom, I can’t really recommend it without some sort of monitor calibration package. I have no complaints about Spyder2express, and it’s only $60. Yes, there are better ones out there, but they cost a lot more. I’ll probably buy one of them some day, but for now I’m happy with Spyder2express.

I’ve been looking for a software project to do on my own time, and this experience may have pointed me toward one. Firefox should have some level of color management. However, I’m not sure where I’d even start, and it’s not something I want to get into right now with a baby on the way. Maybe in a couple of months.

Cassie and I were married on May 25, 2002, or exactly five years ago today. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. Since then we’ve both earned two degrees and lived at four different locations in Oxford. (After this last move we promised each other we wouldn’t move again until we leave Oxford.)

Yes, we got married before either of us had finished our Bachelor’s degree. It was in between my Junior and Senior years and her Sophomore and Junior years. It worked out well for us, but it’s not something I recommend for most couples. For whatever reason my GPA skyrocketed after we got married. Come to think of it, I haven’t made anything other than an “A” since we got married. Talk about a good luck charm. :)

Unfortunately, we don’t have anything spectacular planned for our fifth anniversary. I suppose we’ve been too focused on Luke. I halfway expected to be in the hospital (or already home) today. I imagine we’ll find a nice place to eat and use the long weekend to rest up before the little guy gets here.

We share our anniversary with some interesting historical events. For instance, the Constitutional Convention was convened today in 1787, John T. Scopes was indicted of teaching evolution in a Tennessee classroom in 1925, Babe Ruth hit his last home run in 1935 (his record stood for 39 years), JFK announced his goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” in 1961, and the original Star Wars movie was released in only 32 theaters in 1977. Today is also Towel Day, a tribute to Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Cassie originally had an appointment for Tuesday, but her doctor was out, so it was postponed until today. The good news is that she has progressed a little bit. The bad news is that her doctor is going out of town for over a week, starting in the morning. He gave her the choice of being induced today or trying to wait until he gets back. She decided to wait.

She has another appointment for Wednesday (with another doctor). If she hasn’t had Luke by Monday, June 4th, her doctor will induce her. However, she’s due on Tuesday, May 29th, so we expect she’ll have Luke before then.

Cassie’s first cousin, Mandy, gave birth to her little boy, Braxton, in Tuscumbia, Alabama today. She wasn’t actually due until June 4th, but her doctor decided to induce her this morning. If Cassie had decided to be induced today, their grandmother would have become a great-grandmother twice in one day.

I got my copy of Adobe Lightroom a couple of weeks ago, and I’m quite enjoying it (academic license, $94.95). The amount of tweaking you can do to images is amazing, especially with the RAW files from my Rebel XTi. I definitely made the right decision about getting Lightroom instead of Photoshop CS3. At this point Photoshop would just have too many options for me. Plus, Lightroom has lots of nice DAM (Digital Asset Management) features that Photoshop doesn’t. I’m sure I will want to get Photoshop CS3 at some point (perhaps around Christmas?), but right now I’m happy with Lightroom.

There is one small problem. I can tweak images to look exactly like I want them to in Lightroom, but then I have to export them to JPEGs. On my monitor at least, there is a notable color shift between the Lightroom preview and the exported JPEG viewed in Firefox or Windows Picture Viewer. Here’s an example:

The first one is a screenshot of the Lightroom preview. The second one is a scaled down version of the exported JPEG. On my monitor (and my monitor at work) there is an obvious color shift. Depending on the calibration of your monitor and the browser you’re using, these images may look completely different to you. If I import the exported JPEG back into Lightroom, the two look identical.

All of this led me to investigate the wonderful world of color management. Jeffrey Friedl has a good color management tutorial on his blog. It’s seven pages long, but the first three tell you most of what you need to know. Jeffrey is the author of O’Reilly’s Mastering Regular Expressions. I starting reading his blog a couple of months ago, but I missed his tutorial because he posted last year.

As it turns out, neither Firefox, nor IE, nor Windows Picture Viewer is color managed. Lightroom is, of course. The sRGB color space is supposed to render correctly in non-color managed applications. I knew this, and was exporting using sRGB, but the color shift was definitely there. ProPhoto RGB is the working color space for Lightroom, and there are definitely some colors in ProPhoto RGB that sRGB can’t display, but I don’t think that, by itself, accounts for the color shift.

I posted to a couple of forums, and the most viable explanation is that my monitor is miscalibrated. I’m not completely convinced, but I have ordered ColorVision Spyder2 Express. Hopefully it will solve my problem. If it doesn’t, well, I needed to have my monitor calibrated anyway. It should be here tomorrow, so we’ll find out soon.