Thursday, November 5, 2009
Meaning
A great deal of fuss over nothing of importance.
Origin
This phrase is sometimes shortened just to 'much ado'. It is of course from Shakespeare's play - Much Ado About Nothing, 1599. He had used the word ado, which means business or activity, in an earlier play - Romeo and Juliet, 1592:
"Weele keepe no great adoe, a Friend or two."
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
And the winner is
INDIAN National Highway Department (Painting Division)
One summer day in France in 1826, Joseph Niepce took the world's first photograph. It's a photo of some farm buildings and the sky. It took an exposure time of 8 hours. Voila! It had to feel pretty incredible, like magic.
No one's exactly sure how he did this or what chemicals were used. All that's known for sure is that the photo is on an 8"x 6.5" pewter plate. It's so faint it has to be tilted in order for the light to catch it just right, to see it. The Getty Museum in California did two weeks of tests in 2003 in a joint project involving the Rochester Institute of Technology and France's Centre de Recherches sur la Conservation des Documents Graphiques (try saying thatthree times fast). Then it went back on display at the University of Texas in a new air tight case, where it's been on display since 1964. I'm not sure why we have it and the French don't, but "hah".
The current theory about how the photograph was taken is that Niepce coated the pewter plate with bitumen, a petroleum derivative sensitive to light. After it spent those 8 hours hardening, he washed the plate with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum. This dissolved the portions of the bitumen that didn't 'see' direct light, so didn't harden. Pretty damn clever. Niepce called his work a "heliograph," in a tribute to the power of the sun.
Article Source:World’s First Photo. Really?!!!!
No one's exactly sure how he did this or what chemicals were used. All that's known for sure is that the photo is on an 8"x 6.5" pewter plate. It's so faint it has to be tilted in order for the light to catch it just right, to see it. The Getty Museum in California did two weeks of tests in 2003 in a joint project involving the Rochester Institute of Technology and France's Centre de Recherches sur la Conservation des Documents Graphiques (try saying thatthree times fast). Then it went back on display at the University of Texas in a new air tight case, where it's been on display since 1964. I'm not sure why we have it and the French don't, but "hah".
The current theory about how the photograph was taken is that Niepce coated the pewter plate with bitumen, a petroleum derivative sensitive to light. After it spent those 8 hours hardening, he washed the plate with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum. This dissolved the portions of the bitumen that didn't 'see' direct light, so didn't harden. Pretty damn clever. Niepce called his work a "heliograph," in a tribute to the power of the sun.
Article Source:World’s First Photo. Really?!!!!
Monday, November 2, 2009
The My Recent Documents folder on the Windows XP Start menu displays a list of files and documents that you most recently used.
Removing the Recent Documents link from XP Start Menu
To remove the My Recent Documents folder from XP Start Menu, try this:
- Right-click Start, and then click Properties
- Click Customize
- Click the Advanced tab
- Under Recent documents, uncheck List my most recently opened documents
- Click OK, and then OK.
Equivalent registry value
- Open Registry Editor and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced
- Backup the key to a file. See Backing up.. article
- Set the value of Start_ShowRecentDocs accordingly.
Value of 0 - List my most recently opened documents is disabled
Value of 2 - List my most recently opened documents is enabled
Automate the above with REG file
Download this REG file sets Start_ShowRecentDocs registry value to 0
Undo REG file which sets Start_ShowRecentDocs registry value to 2 (default)
Different setting for the Windows Classic Start Menu
For the Classic Start Menu, set NoRecentDocsMenu to 1 in this key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer
NoRecentDocsMenu value may not exist by default. If so, create a new value of type REG_DWORD and set it's data to 1
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