Sky Tower Pictures

I recently went to New Zealand, one of the coolest things I did while there was go up the Sky Tower in Auckland. At first I thought it was going to be pretty lame, it's just another tall building, but the view up there is amazing. They have glass floors you can walk on, it took a lot of nerve, but eventually I was totally comfortable walking on them, check out the picture below. I took a lot of pictures up there, including nine I stitched into a panorama.

• Panorama @ 100% (4.6MB 15010x2160)*

* To view the whole panorama at 100% you will need six 30" monitors.

My trip pictures

I finally finished putting all the pictures from my trip to Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, and New York into web galleries. There are over a thousand pictures, unless you are extremely bored your best bet is to just look at My Favorites, if that is interesting enough check out the Top 200. I didn't delete any pictures, that means if I accidentally hit the shutter button and took a picture of the sidewalk, that picture is somewhere in the galleries. All of the pictures were taken with a Canon S70 at 3072x2304, mostly Raw, if for some reason you would like a high res version of a picture please let me know.
Image Galleries

Photoshop CS thumbnails are back!

If you installed Photoshop CS from scratch, not the case with an upgrade, you probably noticed something very disturbing. PSD's don't have thumbnail previews in Windows, not even in Photoshop's Open dialog! It turns out Adobe left out a DLL called psicon.dll do to crashes on some peoples systems. Well I for one find it extremely annoying not to have thumbnails in Windows, fortunately the solution is simple. Download psicon.dll and place it in  C:/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Shell. That's it, they are instantly back.
Thanks to notestips.com and dlldump.com.
Want thumbnails of Canon Raw files? Head here.

I'm in New York City

Here's a picture of a subway station at rush hour:

Here are pictures of the Gates in Central Park:

 

 

European Vacation

I recently got back from about a month in Europe, I hit Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam. I took over 700 pictures, and I plan on posting some, along with a little trip writeup. So look for it in the future...

Deathmatch coming to HL2 *UPDATED*

A post by Valve's Adrian Finol, on the steampowered.com forums, indicates Valve will be adding DM to HL2 soon.

Update: Half Life 2: Deathmatch in now available through Steam :)

Ahhhh, Half Life 2

I bought HL2 the day it came out, over a week ago, and I haven't even tried to play it yet. I did try Counter Strike: Source today, and it was pretty fun. The graphics were nice, but the game still seemed behind the times. No scope or iron sights on most of the weapons, just the cheesy zoom. No lean or prone. Not enough menu options, Valve could learn from Epic how to do menu options right. And I'm not a fan of buy systems for weapons, but CS:S is the most balanced buy system I've tried. CS:S is supposed to be the MP component of HL2, but HL2 does have its own MP code. You would normally have to use console commands to access it, but justbi0 combined some mods from other people into a nice package giving you menu options and a server browser. There are no servers listed, and the maps suck, but it's worth a shot. Find other HL2 mods at halflife2.filefront.com.