The Goodman’s Blog: Lifelong Learning and Sharing

At the advice of many gurus, I decided to use WordPress instead of Blogger. However, I found the WP suppport forum and documentation quite confusing for a non-techie like myself. I searched for more information in the Internet and physical books.

I posted a few blogs initially, then stopped and continued my blogs at typepad. Then I got approved for Adsense at this orginal blogsite. I didn’t know how to put my Adsense code in my blogs and did a lot of trial-and-error before being successful only yesterday. I did it by going to my cPanel and file manager and then locating the WP theme and sidebar so that I could insert the code. And then I remembered having paid, three weeks ago, for access to a website that showed video tutorials of what I need to monetize my WP blogs.

It took an email from the website owner, asking me for a testimonial to jog my memory. I scolded myself for not having clicked on it sooner. 

His name is Fidens Felix. He showed me in a few minutes how I could have done the same thing by going to my WP admin panel, without having to go thru my cPanel.

The other thing I learned from him was how to configure permalinks so that the search engines could tag my posts more effectively.

Lastly I was able to download WP plug-ins and various articles and PLR’s.

All at a measly $7.00!

They had been dancing non-stop for an hour, during a videoshoot for a tourism promotion documentary in Bangkok. The police were kind enough to allow me to shoot close.

After playing back the image, I knew I had to do something to the background, as it was distracting attention from the two dancers. I used Gaussian blur. However, it was difficult to do the blurring properly, as I was using the mouse instead of a stylus and I was getting impatient doing it. So you’ll see parts where the blurring was not so good.

Lesson for amateurs: When doing photo-editing, be relaxed and don’t take it too seriously. It’s only a hobby, not a livelihood!

This Rembrandt tulip was taken at Keukenhof last spring. I used a zoom lens, at a focal length of 360 mm (at 35 mm film equivalent). Because it was a bright afternoon, I knew I could use a smaller aperture (f11) and a slower speed to keep the centre of attention sharp. As usual, I mounted my camera on a tripod to minimise camera shake.

I was not quite satisfied with the bare image. So I decided to create a digital frame, taking a colour sample from the dark purple section of the tulip bulb. The white background surrounding the photo made the entire scene look nicer, in my opinion.