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This is my Arizona election season summed up in press passes. A collage of 2016 election season press passes. Now that they’re scanned in and the paper is about to be thrown out this is the first time I’ve looked at them all together. I’ve also noticed a few things that I didn’t see before. Ted Cruz didn’t even get his name on the pass. The Keep the Promise PAC took top billing.

It’s always fun to take a peek behind the curtain an see how things are done. Sometimes I forget to grab a shot of my setup, but I’m working on getting better about remembering. Last week I wrote a post that needed a combination of photos and screenshots. So I headed over to my in-house studio (actually the third bedroom that doesn’t have a renter right now) and set up under the window.

One of the neat things about Magna Studio EX (Clip Paint Studio EX if you buy the downloadable version) is it’s book making abilities. It shouldn’t be a surprise since the whole app revolves around making comics and comic books. The panel-based nature of comics also makes for a pretty neat layout tool for image heavy books or magazines. In my case, it’s also a substitute for Adobe InDesign. For the occasional layout jobs I have, it’s not worth another subscription on top of Lightroom+Photoshop.

Everyone has one of those time consuming projects that isn’t difficult but it’s still something that you keep putting off. I’ve been doing this with a photo scanning project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while now. It started when I wrote the article My Father’s Spaceship. I scanned a few pictures that he brought home from the job to show what an aerospace shop looked like in 1960s and 1970s.

A few weeks ago I bought this cable to connect my phone to my camera. So after a few uses it seems like a good time for a quick review. The bottom line is that it works, and other than a few camera related quirks it’s a good value at $30. As a bonus it can even be used to transfer photos from one iPhone to another. The cable Artisinal data transfer, every byte imported by hand.

Last month I took a trip to Southeastern Arizona. Other than a few trips to Tucson, it’s part of the state that I’ve never explored, and because of the elevation, it’s a little cooler than in Phoenix. The original plan was to visit the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum on the west side of Tucson, then visit Tombstone the next day. But with a late start leaving Phoenix we decided on seeing Tombstone first.

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is one of the largest attractions in Southern Arizona. I had never heard of it until I saw some pictures posted in a camera forum. After some quick research it seemed like a interesting place to see. One of the main draws is that all of the plants and animals are native to the area. It’s a great place to spend a morning, but plan on about three hours to see it all.

So this happened. The new upload to WordPress export option. Because this is a beta release, and I’m not doing a full review because feature will be added and bugs will get fixed. In the meantime, I do have a few observations. It pulled in the wrong display name (that’s from an unused locked blog) but otherwise works the same as my upload script except links open in the same window instead of a new one.

A featured image in a WordPress post is especially handy if you like to use Read More… links to keep the front page uncluttered. If there’s not a featured image, the post is just a headline and excerpt and any images that could attract a reader are buried “beneath the fold” as newspaper people like to say. Usually you can get away with just using an image from the inside the post as the feature.

Sometimes “over there” is much more interesting than what’s right in front of us. I’ve been guilty of that recently. I’ve spent countless hours looking at airline tickets and destinations with the end result being wasted time. It’s fun to idle away time thinking about exotic adventures in a far-away land. But the reality is much harsher. The three Fs (family obligations, finances, and free time) put a limit on just how much adventure we can dive into.