CTO does not stand just for Chief Technology Officer

I have always considered the use of gels fanciful (just as I consider the use of lens filters fanciful with the exception of the UV filter and, possibly, a polarizer).  But it has gradually sunk in — through listening to podcasts, reading up and, mainly, trying futilely to correct white balance on many indoor shots — why some gels are extremely useful, perhaps necessary.

First among these is CTO: "correct to orange" or, as some would have it, "color temperature orange".

When shooting indoors with regular incandescent (tungsten) lights lighting the interior — well, they have been regular so far, but they have now been outlawed — and the strobe lighting the subject, you want to gel the strobe (flash) with a CTO gel. It will make the white light coming out of the strobe orange. Consequently, everything in your shot — both your subject and the interior lit with the overhead lighting — will have an orange tint. You then correct white balance in Lightroom, Photoshop or what have you. Done.

The alternative would be to cover all incandescent lights with a CTB ("correct to blue") gel. Then their orange light (we may not realize it's orange, but the camera's sensor does) would turn white and the interior in the shot you take with a flash will lose the ugly yellowish tint that you always struggle with in white balance correction ("If I correct the wall to white, how come the face turns blue?")

The problem with this latter approach is that you will have a considerably larger gel, perhaps several, a stepladder and a bunch of tape or clams to secure gels to every lightbulb in the room.  

While with the CTO gel, you only need one, it's small, and it may even come with a handy holder that affixes it to the flash.

(I actually learned this over a year ago, but never finished the draft of this post.)  

Fly-tipping is British for dumping waste illegally

According to Wikipedia 

The term is derived from the verb tip, meaning "to throw out of a vehicle" and on the fly, meaning "on the wing" — to throw away carelessly or casually.

Too bad, because I had it figured out as "leaving garbage as tips for flies".
And how did I find out about fly-tipping? There is a website FixMyStreet, which invites you to

Report, view, or discuss local problems
(like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)

And how, again, how did I stumble upon that whistle-blowing (or else tattletale) site? Glad you asked.
It was mentioned in a weekly Community Update for the OpenStreetMap project. And if you don't know about, or participate in, the OpenStreetMap phenomenon, then you are seriously missing out on the major crowdsourced, worldwide, volunteer cartography movement of our times.

While the UK-only FixMyStreet uses some klutzy map watermarked "Ministry of JUSTICE", the announcement deals more specifically with the newly inaugurated Norwegian version called, naturally, FiksGataMi. And that one uses the beautifully rendered OpenStreetMap.

The idea behind both FixMyStreet and OpenStreetMap is exactly the same: directing the energy of civic-minded individuals towards improve the surrounding world for everyone. OpenStreetMap does it virtually, by letting anyone detail or correct the map of the area they live in or are well familiar with. FixMyStreet aims to do it quite literally: by allowing citizens to drop little local "bug reports" onto the map, which are immediately routed to the appropriate municipal authorities.

Here's a representative list of what bugs the Brits who visited the site in the last few hours:

• Nuisance Alarm
• Waste soil dumping
• Speeding problem
• Rodent infestation
• Run down car park

In all, over 100,000 problems have been reported in the UK since the site launched three years ago. 3,171 of them were fixed in the past 30 days.

Calling Response.End() throws a ThreadAbortException. Always.

...So don't Try to Catch it.

If you do catch it, don't log the error.

If you log it, don't worry about it.

Here's the background and some workarounds.  I briefly tried using HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest as suggested, but it does not stop execution on the page the way Response.End() does.

"Malaria mosquitoes" do not carry malaria, do not bite people and are not mosquitoes

Some privacy please?
Originally uploaded by J-Fish

I can't tell you how many of these poor creatures my family members and I have destroyed over the years. Granted, we never saw them bite, but the look alone was enough to fill our simple souls with fear and disgust. "Malaria mosquito! — someone would shout, — Kill it!"
Here's the fact.
While there is such thing as a "malaria mosquito", these crane flies are not them. True, they look like oversized, poorly assembled models of mosquitoes, but on closer inspection they lack the crucial body part: the penetrating proboscis.

Marc Ecko is greatly overlooked, by me

This "for real" StarWars Boba Fett's hoodie, which I happened upon thanks to the Wired's annual wish list, alone would be enough to firmly put Marc Ecko's wares in the "cool" column in my ledger.

Navigating around the site made me seriously consider springing for some of his more work-friendly products.

2009 sucked, according to photographers

The New York Times' 2009: The Year in Pictures
A lot of good photography here, but by the time the viewer gets through June and reaches July, the cumulative negative impact becomes overwhelming.

There is a reset button underneath the garbage disposal

If a disposal becomes stuck and makes a humming noise to tell you it's stuck, and you don't shut it off right away, and all of a sudden the humming noise stops, and the disposal does not turn on anymore after you have unstuck it (by turning the screw in the center of the bottom using a special wrench that came with it and you were lucky not to lose it), chances are the red reset button has popped - as a built-in circuit breaker.

I have already gone through the agony of checking the circuit breakers, electric outlets and the yellow pages once before, and I eventually learned the same simple trick. But not having started this blog back then, I forgot the lesson and had to relearn it the hard way.

Source: About.com