This past weekend our friends Anita & Srdjan were married in an absolutely beautiful ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, IL. Needless to say, the evening was simply outstanding and we're so happy for the newlyweds!

For photos and some stunning details, click through... And if you're reading this on Facebook, be sure to view the original post so you can see the fullsize images.

The blogosphere is abuzz and the tweets are flying about the House's historic vote to pass the health care reform bill. First, let me say that I'm very happy the bill passed, even though it isn't perfect. While my feelings shouldn't be a surprise, I did want to go a step further and share some of the many thoughtful reactions that I came across today.

While it's not St. Patrick's Day related, an Old Fashioned is still a tasty drink... I've been having mine with Templeton Rye lately, and it always comes out smooth and just sweet enough for my taste.

Last night I made a batch, but instead of following Templeton Rye's standard recipe like I usually do, I decided to mix things up a bit. Since I had some blood oranges and West Indian Orange Bitters (my new favorite bar ingredient) I skipped the orange wedge, cherry, and Angostura...

Hopefully I won't upset any old schoolers, but I preferred my version a bit better. The blood orange mash was sweet without being acidic, and it took the Templeton Rye very well — smooth, sweet, cold, and warm all at the same time. Perfect.

Last night Elena and I cooked up a nice Mexican feast at home: chicken enchiladas, Mexican rice, refried black beans, salsa verde, guacamole, and margaritas. Duh. Because we all know that you can't do Mex without margs!

Here's my personal favorite margarita recipe, adapted from the quality "Fresca" marg at Las Palmas in Bucktown / Wicker Park. I even included a photo for reference.

If you're interested in such things, by now you've probably seen the news that Apple released Aperture 3. Tons of new features, and it's finally a 64-bit app, so performance should be much improved. This past weekend I got the Aperture 3 (A3) demo up and running on my iMac, and loaded some D700 RAW images for testing.

First impressions: I love some of the new features, including the WB preset previews, image adjustment presets (and previews), and the responsiveness of the interface. I'm very excited about the photo book plug-ins from high-end album companies. I'm always on the lookout for ways to streamline my wedding/portrait workflow, and for tools that make it easier to create quality products for my photography clients. On that note, while I haven't used Faces or Places yet, I'm certainly interested these features for my own personal images. Bonus: The new LCD-like metadata view (shown on the right) is killer.

Facebook announced today that Facebook Chat now supports Jabber/XMPP, which means that it's possible to integrate pretty much any app or services that talks Jabber/XMPP with Facebook Chat. I use iChat myself for AIM and Google Talk instant messaging, and the requirement to use Facebook's web interface always turned me off to Facebook Chat. With that restriction lifted, I figured I'd toss Facebook Chat into the mix.

The setup was painless, you just have to know what credentials to use:

1. Add an account in iChat's Preferences window
2. Select "Jabber" from the "Account Type" dropdown
3. Enter facebookusername@chat.facebook.com as the "Account Name" where facebookusername is your Facebook username (i.e. the one that you set up in June 2009)
4. Enter your Facebook password
5. Expand the "Server Options" arrow, and enter the following info:
   Server: chat.facebook.com
   Port: 5222 (Uncheck the "Use SSL" box)
6. Hit done and you should connect without any issues
7. Optionally, you can go back into the iChat "Account Settings" and change the account description in iChat to be something useful like "Facebook"

If you haven't checked out Melody Gardot yet, you owe it to yourself to take a few minutes and give her music a listen. Her voice and style is absolutely amazing — so smooth and effortless...

Normally, I'd let the music stand on its own, but in Gardot's case, I'd be remiss not to mention her story. I won't go into all the details, but after a horrific accident in 2003, she turned to music as therapy. Singing and writing songs helped Gardot to rebuild the damaged neural pathways in her brain, and eventually led her to release three albums.

Last week's earthquake in Haiti left me feeling a bit helpless at first. So many people suffering, so far away... Of course, there were a lot of organizations that could use my money to help the people of Haiti: Red Cross, UNICEF, CARE, Mercy Corps, etc. Some are even using SMS (in the US) to make it easier:

• SMS text "HAITI" to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts
• SMS text "YELE" to 501501 to Donate $5 to Yele Haiti's Earthquake Relief efforts
• SMS text "GIVE10" to 20222 to donate $10 to Direct Relief

I personally jumped on the Google bandwagon, since they made it trivial to donate to UNICEF and CARE.

I'm with Coco by Mike Mitchell

Consumerist investigates Best Buy's "pre-optimization" scam (via Gruber):

Over the past year, a number of you have been telling us that, due to "pre-optimization" of computers, it's difficult -- sometimes impossible -- to walk into a Best Buy and leave with the advertised deal (in effect, you would be paying a $39.99 surcharge over the computer's advertised price). We decided to look into your complaints. We sent the Consumer Reports secret shoppers to 18 different Best Buys in 11 states, and one of our shoppers was denied the price advertised for a specific model because only pre-optimized computers were available. When the Consumer Reports engineers compared three "optimized" computers to ones with default factory settings, there was no performance improvement. In one case, an optimized laptop actually performed 32% worse than the factory model.

This is why I buy Macs. It's also why I never buy anything except PS3 games at Best Buy. Give me a break.

A lot of you have asked to be updated following Elena's jaw surgery on Wednesday.

First off, let me say "thank you" for all the support! Elena and I certainly appreciate it, and we feel so fortunate to have such a wonderful support network. While we're confident the surgery (and recovery) will go smoothly, your warm wishes are already making everything that much easier.

Now for the good stuff... I was going to send email/text updates on Wednesday, but as the number of recipients grew, I opted for a lazier approach. While it's a bit more impersonal, I'm going to post Twitter updates under my @stottsan account, using the hashtag #elenaupdates. That should make things easy to find. If you're a Facebook friend of mine, you won't have to do anything: my tweets are sync'd to my Facebook status.

So pick your favorite update channel, and stay tuned on Wednesday. I promise to post as often as I can. Thank you again for all of the support, and we know that your thoughts will be with us! Take care!

This weekend, we celebrated the arrival of a new family member: a new Apple 27" iMac Core i7!

I just wanted to take a minute and post my experiences with the machine, and what led up to the purchase of this hot new piece of tech. Thanks in advance to Jeff on the help and the idea to write this in the first place. Enjoy!

Damn, there are some great Black Friday deals @ Amazon this year...

Movies (DVD and Blu-ray)

Planet Earth on Blu-ray for $40?!?! That's 60% off... 2001: A Space Odyssey for less than $10?!?! I just bought both, done and done. There are a lot of other options, perfect for early holiday shopping.

I'm very excited to announce the launch of Andrew Stott Photography Products, specifically Holiday Cards!

These cards have been in development for quite some time. While services like Shutterfly offer some nice options, I've searched far and wide for the best designs and the highest quality materials. At this point, I'm confident that we've got some of the top cards out there. Want some details?

All cards are printed on high quality art paper using HP Indigo digital printing presses with real liquid ink — no inkjet prints on plain paper... Prices shown on the website are for packs of 25 cards with envelopes — if you would like more cards, just order multiple packs. UPS Ground shipping costs $10 per card design, and UPS 2-day Air is available for $15.

Slate Magazine recently asked readers to send in Google Suggest results for "less intelligent" versus "more intelligent" queries, like "how 2" vs "how might one." They posted the results this week, and they reveal a hell of a lot about our search habits.