It is cold out there! Just came in from the outside world (in good ole NYC) and it is definitely 20 degrees colder than when I left the house. Thankfully, I was only walking two blocks to watch Project Runway with my mom. I agree with the common consensus that this week's designs were not particularly inspirational.

Speaking of the cold, apparently it's good for your camera's sensor! Here's a quote from the article:

"Zodiac Light did an interesting experiment in which a Canon 350D was cooled, and the amount of noise measured. They found that cooling the sensor resulted in a 40% drop in the amount of noise."

I can't say I'd take my expensive camera and stick it in the freezer, but it's nice to know that when I've decided to freeze my fingers off taking a (cold) night shot, it'll most likely be less noisy.

Everytime I want something so bad that I want to scream "YES WANT," I will instead post something more or less intelligible to the blog with "covetables" in the title. Yes, I know that "covetables" isn't a word.

In college, I took a black and white photography class. I have to say, it was a ton of fun. I remember developing my own film with pride (I even developed my friend's black and white headshots). I also remember the chemicals -- stop, fixer, developer. Good times!

You can't write stuff like this. But if the past few days of my life were made into a sitcom episode, it would be called "The Billboard" -- or if it were an episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" this would be called "The One When Jen Takes a Photo of a Billboard."

It all began with a harmless coffee break. My co-workers and I walked up Broadway to Crumbs for some caffeination when we saw a strange billboard. The lovey-dovey couple on the billboard coupled with the quote "you are my soulmate forever" made us wonder. Since we are media people at first we thought, "this has to be some kind of marketing/pr move!"

When we saw the website that the banner linked to, we were most definitely sure it had to be some kind of marketing scheme. The website was a 90's era (meaning: bad) site consisting of a bunch of photos of the joyous couple and quite a few karaoke recordings we'll have to imagine they did together (who records their karaoke outings...?).

I found the whole thing funny and intriguing. And since I've resolved to carry my camera on me every day of the year, I decided to take a picture of it. If anything, I wanted to tell my sister about it because I thought she'd find it amusing. I put the picture in my Flickr photostream and didn't think much of it. I shared it with my Twitter friends, hoping someone would reveal that it was part of Match.com's new marketing strategy or something equally lame.

I was totally not prepared for what happened next. The guy on the billboard was a big exec -- president of Oracle (note: Oracle creates almost every database in use by major companies). And the girl he was canoodling with was his mistress. The whole story was plastered on the front page of the New York Post on Friday. I still don't know the full details. Truthfully, I don't think anyone does. But the facts are that someone took out the billboards to expose this situation and it worked.

Since then, I've been contacted by several media outlets because of that little photo I happened to post on Flickr. As you can imagine, the billboard has since been taken down. So far, my photo is being used by CNET, Gawker, Associated Press (that is an array of online national news outlets), CNNMoney.com and Women's Health Magazine online in their coverage of this story. It's been a bit of a whirlwind of activity for me!

Personally, my focus this year has been on building my photography skills and obtaining more photo gigs/selling more prints. I'm hoping this situation, while tragic for the folks involved, can at least have a positive ending by bringing some exposure to my work and also scaring straight the corporate fat cats who think they can get away with living a double life.

Yikes! What happened to this girl? Take a look at the link through to the People magazine cover. She looks like a completely different person.

I don't care for Heidi Montag or her celebrity but I think the author of the Glamour magazine post is correct in that she must be deeply disturbed to get so much plastic surgery done.

As a web developer, IE6 tends to be the bane of my existence. This t-shirt denounces it!

The power of Christ compels you!

I had no idea that counterfeit goods (you know, the fake Fendi and Coach bags you find on Canal Street in New York City) came with a world of terrible human rights abuses attached to them!

This is further proof that I just need to shell out the cash and buy really lovely expensive purses. I recently bought a beautiful LAMB bag (that's Gwen Stefani's line). It was a great deal at Century21 -- nearly 50% off! I still haven't quite found a bag that I can use to lug around my camera and extra lenses. I'm thinking the Coach Madison bag (in the, unfortunately, more expensive large size) would do the job. If and when said bag is in my hot little hands, I will certainly do a photo series of it!