Story From A Favorite Book: “The Laying On of Hands”
A PRETTY young woman came in to the rabbi.
“Bless me, Rabbi!” she implored.
The rabbi spread his hands over her head and blessed her, but he took care not to touch her head while doing so.
“Why don’t you place your hands on my head?” she asked in surprise. “Blessings from a distance aren’t as fruitful as blessings from near.”
“How do you light the candles on Friday night?” asked the rabbi. “Do you recite the prayer with your hands touching the flame?”
“Of course not-I’d burn my hands!” answered the young woman.
“Believe me, it’s no different with me!” said the rabbi smiling. “Where I to lay my hands on your head, I might also burn them!”An excerpt from A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. Copyright 1948 by Crown Publishers. “The Laying On of Hands”, page 170.
The story immediately begins by describing the woman as simply “a pretty young woman”. The minds eye is left to decide what that may mean. By the end of the story after reading how prudently careful and modest the rabbi has to act towards her the young womans beauty is magnified a hundred fold with no need for further description.
First Magnolia Blooms Of 2010
Several days of March rain showers have coaxed the signs of wonderful color from the earth.
Up until this point what I thought were Dogwood trees are actually Magnolia trees. Behold, the first blooming Magnolia tree of the year.
Costa Rica Beach Panorama
Freehand panorama of a beach in Costa Rica. 20 images stitched in Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Stitching Images – The Panorama Begins
Ever since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics I’ve been enthralled with the freedom of 360 degree and wide aspect panoramic pictures. Apple had recently released QuickTime VR and used it to create 360 degree photos of the Atlanta Olympics. Viewing the photos across my dial-up modem was a chore but the reward of exploring the environment and choosing where to look made the task worth the effort. Instead of being captivate to the photographer’s intended target I was free to look in the other direction for a complete sense of the location. Apple was the first, as I recall, to pioneer this type of technology and make it available to the general public
Unfortunately I didn’t have a Mac and couldn’t generate content on my own. Later years I dabbled with PTgui and some other stitching software that came with a camera. The results were impressive but I wasn’t ready to invest in a high quality camera and the software to generate the images. The Panorama Tools project was interesting but between 2000 and 2002 the tools were too complex to bother using.
Over the past year my interest in panoramic pictures was refreshed by projects like GigaPan and Spherical Panoramas. It was possible for me to tinker with multi-picture stitched panoramic pictures from my point-and-shoot camera because Windows Vista and Windows 7 included a free panorama stitcher in Windows Live Photo Gallery. While on vacation I free handed 20 picture panorama from a beach in Costa Rica with my brother’s digital SLR camera. The results were amazing and I knew it was worth upgrading and buying the proper software.
The “Projects -> Photography” category is an ongoing blog of my adventures with stitched panoramic and 360 degree pictures.
Excel 2007 Insert Column Slowed by Google Desktop
On a spring afternoon a call came in from a very exasperated client. “Why is my excel coming to a crashing halt? Is 120,000+ rows too many in a spreadsheet? How come it keeps locking up!” He spoke with the unmistakable tone that indicated his computer was about to take flight from his second story window.
The sheet was only 17MB in size with about 120,000 rows, a few pivot tables, and no complex formulas. Every time he would insert a new empty column on the main sheet Excel would come to a screeching halt. After about 10 minutes the operation would complete. Turning off automatic calculations and starting excel with the /safe switch resulted in no change of behavior.
After some creative Google searches I came across a post about Google Desktop slowing down excel. With nothing to to lose Google Desktop was un-installed and miraculously the insert column took 1 second instead of 1o minutes!
Further examination revealed another blog posting that further explained the underlying problem.
Ironic, isn’t it? Searching Google revealed Google Desktop to be the culprit of the slow down.