I’m too tired to write a long, coherent post tonight. I worked late today and got home pretty much exhausted.

I’ve started using Adobe’s new Lightroom yesterday to postprocess my photos, and I like it more than Bridge/Camera Raw. It has a ton more options, not only for developing RAW files, but also features that I’d normally only find in Photoshop, like red eye removal and a really good healing brush. And the crop tool is much easier to use than the one in Camera Raw. Another benefit is that it can also work with JPG files, so I don’t have to open those in Photoshop for editing. That’s a huge plus, because I can do it all in a single application. So this means I get to open Photoshop a lot less these days, which is great, given how slowly it opens on my machine. Say, Lightroom opens up lightning fast compared to Bridge! And oh yeah, it does automatic conversion to DNG, whereas this was a manual operation in Camera Raw. That’s cool for me, since DNG’s turn out to be about 50-60% of the size of my regular RAW files. That means I need about half the storage. I’ll that that any day and run with it. I’ve got enough gizmos and wires on and under my desk.

I’m annoyed with Costco for changing their return policy. It basically does away with any serious differentiation between them and other retail chains. I wrote them an email to complain, and they responded that they have a new concierge service that offers tech support for the higher-priced items, and they also extend the manufacturer’s warranty to 2 years, but still, I miss their wonderful (and now defunct) return policy. Yes, I can understand that cheesy people would return used items and eat away at their profit margins, but I don’t do that stuff, and I really liked the extra peace of mind that their old return policy provided me for items like cameras, electronics and appliances.

You may notice (or not) that the Technorati buttons and links are gone from my site, except for one little unobtrusive link in the sidebar. I took them off today. Technorati’s pretty much been useless to me. It’s driven no traffic to my site according to my stats, and they’ve also managed to decrease my site rank with their latest “tweaks”. I don’t like that. And on top of it all, my site has been loading slower lately because it had to wait for their graphics and JavaScript to load. My browser would sit there for seconds on end, with “waiting for technorati…” in the status bar.

Talking about slow load times, I also took off the Twitter status box from the sidebar. Twitter’s been up and down more times than an elevator lately, and they’ve been another reason my site has been slow to load. It would take forever to bring up the little Twitter status message at times, and I had enough of that. So if you want to see what I’ve been twittering about lately, just bookmark my Twitter page or subscribe to my uni-feed. Or you could also create an account at Twitter and add me to your friends…

Say, this post is pretty long after all!